Another Round of Cool Places

I'm not really an art guy, but there are three pieces that have ever really hit me: the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre, the Great Wave off Kanagawa, and The Gates of Hell by Rodin.

I'm lucky that the Rodin is here because it's only a fifteen minute walk from where I live. I walk past it almost daily and stop to look maybe twice a month. I first saw it almost twenty years ago when I won a small scholarship to work at a tiny museum in rural France during college, and I spent a weekend in Paris hitting the big museums (the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre). Gates of Hell hit different. Hard to explain.

It's massive, dark, and overwhelming, and looking at it doesn't make me feel anything specific, not happy or sad or whatever. It just sits with you. I've walked by it dozens of times and it still does something. I never needed to understand it. It's just the one piece of art I've actually gone back to.

Headhouse Shambles

There's these covered archways on 2nd and South that everyone's just calls the Headhouse Shambles. It's a farmers market on Saturdays, or it was, I haven't checked recently. But the covered part exists year round, this weird covered walkway in the middle of South Street chaos that really shouldn't work. Every time I walk through, it's cool in a way I can't explain. Not everything needs a reason.

City Hall Courtyard

There's a courtyard in the middle of City Hall that you can approach from all four cardinal directions under the arches. When you walk through and the space opens up, it feels like walking into a cathedral. Scale is wrong for that (too small), but the architecture does it.

It's not empty or quiet though (there's always people crossing through at all hours), tourists looking around and locals trying to shave five minutes off their walk. I've definitely been both the tourist and the local rushing through.

Academy of Natural Sciences

I never saw real fossils as a kid. So taking my son to the Academy and having that giant T. rex just be there when you walk in, it's absurd in a good way. You can't prepare a five-year-old for something that big. I think I went back three times.

There's also these full fish dinosaurs (I don't know what they're actually called) suspended in the air on the top floor. They hang from the ceiling. That shouldn't be as cool as it is, but it is.

This reminds me of this book series I read as a kid, Dinosaur Detectives. I only ever read book three, something about a Raptor's claw that turned out to be faked. I never read the other ones. Not relevant to anything, just popped into my head standing there.

https://nickjain.com/blog/cool-places-in-philly-4