Philadelphia That Actually Works

The Fairmount Running Club meets Tuesdays at 6:30am, year-round. There is no signup and no clipboard. Five to twenty people show up on a given morning, some of them training for a race, some of them like me just trying to get the miles in before the day starts.

At the start somebody climbs onto a low wall, asks who is new, and explains the route. The first thing that person says is that nobody gets left behind. Any one of them can do it, so when the regular who usually does cannot make it, somebody else does, and the run happens. The route goes out through the park, past the zoo, and along the river. In the winter they run in the dark with headlamps. In the summer they stop at the top of the hill near the museum and complain about the humidity.

There is a statue at the bottom of the hill. If you get there a few minutes late, somebody will be standing at it, and they will wait for you.

Once a week I run past the zoo before 7am, which is before it opens. I do not go in. (I have a toddler and a zoo visit is a whole production.) What I see is the grounds and the strollers parked outside. The place looks like it works.

The zoo is the one I cannot place. I do not know if it is city-owned or private or some hybrid, and honestly it does not matter to me. What matters is that it is there and it is maintained.

I run the Schuylkill River Trail several times a week, usually solo, sometimes with the club on Tuesday mornings. It is clean and it is wide, and there are always people on it. Runners, dog walkers, cyclists, people walking to work. The view is the river and the skyline. Some mornings there is a heron standing in the shallows like he is posing for a photo.

What I notice is that nobody is complaining about it. Nobody is talking about how the trail needs more funding, or how the drainage is failing, or how the contract was awarded to the wrong vendor. It just works. People use it. It does the thing.

In the summer, when it breaks ninety, I take my son to the wading pool at Sister Cities, which is fifteen minutes from the house. It is a square, and a thin stream runs into it from the hill behind the park, so the water is about an inch deep at the edge and a foot and a half in the middle.

The hill is the second attraction. Kids climb it, over the rocks or up the stepping stones, and there is a net bridge at the top where you can stand or lie down. I went there for two years before I climbed the hill. The net bridge was right there the whole time.

The pool is free and it is open to anyone who shows up, which is the entire access policy. My son goes in barefoot in a blue swimsuit with sharks on it and wades until the water is above his knees, and then stops, because it is cold and he is hot. A hot day plus water plus other small children is something worth getting excited about. He is correct.

I moved to Philadelphia in 2022 and spent the first year figuring out which parts of it worked and which did not. I do not know why any of them work. I do not go inside the zoo and I could not tell you who maintains the trail.

The running club I can explain, because I am in it. Five to twenty people at 6:30 on a Tuesday, and any one of them can take the wall and explain the route. It has not failed once in four years.