The microcinema series lighting up Penn Treaty Park at dusk

The screen was already glowing before the sky finished going from blue to black, an inflatable rectangle the size of a garage door lit up pale yellow with hand drawn leaves and the words SPRING AND SUMMER SCREENINGS stenciled across the middle. A DJ two folding tables over had a slipmat spinning under his hand with the words GREAT CIRCLES lettered around the rim, and behind him a toddler gate meant to fence in a two year old was being used as an obstacle course by four kids with no interest in movies yet. People around here call me Harry Hayman, and on a lawn like that one I am exactly what everyone else in a camp chair is: a person with nowhere better to be on a Saturday evening in Fishtown. Penn Treaty Park does this most weekends from May through September, and it still surprises me how much a stretch of grass on the Delaware River can hold.

What a microcinema actually is, and what The Secret Handshake does with one

A microcinema is the smallest unit of movie culture that still counts as an institution. No marquee, no concession stand, sometimes nothing more than a projector, a wall, and somebody with opinions about what belongs on that wall. Philadelphia has more of these than most people realize. Broad Street Review counted ten Philadelphia film clubs that have opened since the pandemic, most of them run by volunteers who book films nobody else is booking and charge little or nothing to see them.

The Secret Handshake is one of the newer ones, and its regular home is The Head and The Hand, an independent bookstore and small press on Frankford Avenue in Fishtown founded by Nic Esposito. Inside that shop, Secret Handshake runs unexpected double features built around a shared theme, a Hitchcock paired with a Dario Argento, a Christmas classic paired with something considerably less cozy. My brother Ben is one of the people building it, night by night, in a room that seats maybe forty people if everyone squeezes.

What was on the lawn at Penn Treaty Park is a bigger, freer version of the same instinct. The series is called Penn Treaty Pictures, and Wooder Ice covered this year’s lineup: fifteen free screenings running from May through September, organized by a group called Reel Nomadic, opening with Fritz Lang’s M and working through titles like Point Break, 12 Monkeys, and The Warriors before the season wraps in late September. Reel Nomadic brings out DJs, local vendors, and a rotating cast of Philadelphia microcinemas to curate the nights, and this year that cast includes Secret Handshake alongside VHS Club and Sights and Sounds. Nobody buys a ticket. Everybody just shows up with a blanket.

The ground the blankets were sitting on

An obelisk stands in that park, easy to miss once it gets dark, placed there by the Penn Society in 1827 roughly where a great elm once grew. Under that elm, according to a story that has outlived every attempt to fact check it, William Penn met with the Lenape leader Tamanend and the two sides agreed to live at peace. The obelisk itself carries the traditional date of 1682. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia is more careful about it, noting that Penn’s schedule in 1682 is well documented and leaves little room for the meeting, and that a June 1683 treaty is the more likely candidate for whatever actually happened at Shackamaxon. No document survives from either side. What survives is a wampum belt, a Benjamin West painting from 1771 that nobody alive in 1683 could have posed for, and a park.

The elm itself fell in a storm in 1810. The city bought the land in the early 1890s, according to Friends of Penn Treaty Park, folding a former lumber yard into what was then Fairmount Park. A William Penn statue by the sculptor Frank Gaylord went up during a 1987 rededication, per the park’s own record on Wikipedia, and the wooden sign at the park entrance still reads Fairmount Park Commission even though the agency that runs the park today is Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, a merger that happened back in 2010 and apparently never made it to the sign shop. The city keeps investing here anyway. A rebuilt playground reopened a few years ago with new equipment and restored sculpture, a small thing to set next to a seventeenth century peace treaty except that it is the same idea in a different decade: somebody deciding this particular stretch of riverbank is worth the money.

Fishtown before anyone screened a movie on its lawn

Fishtown got its name from exactly what it sounds like. Early residents were fishermen, and according to Fishtown’s own history, they controlled the fishing rights to both banks of the Delaware River, from Cape May up to the falls at Trenton, with the name showing up in a local paper called The Tickler as early as 1808. Before it became Penn Treaty Park, that exact plot of ground held the Fairman family mansion, one more owner in a long line the land has had. By the nineteenth century the waterfront had turned industrial: shipyards, mills, and rowhouses full of German, Polish, and Irish families who worked them, the kind of neighborhood that Visit Philadelphia now sells as art, food, and nightlife without always saying what came before it.

None of that industrial history is visible from a blanket on the Penn Treaty Park lawn on a Saturday night, except that it is, in the way a neighborhood’s economy always leaves a shape behind even after the industry leaves. The warehouses and rowhouses that once housed dockworkers now house bookstores and small presses, The Head and The Hand among them, a few blocks up Frankford Avenue from the park. A neighborhood built by people who worked a river for a living is now home to people who screen movies beside the same river for free. That is not a small coincidence. It is what happens when the economic reason for a place changes and the place itself, somehow, does not.

There is a banner behind that inflatable screen, and I stood close enough to read it twice. It says PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY, and under a small pressed seal it reads GRAY BRADLEY HAYMAN FAMILY FUND, SUPPORTING FREE OUTDOOR CINEMA IN PHILADELPHIA. That is my brother Brad’s name on that banner, and Ben’s fingerprints on the programming a few feet in front of it. I did not plan for both of my brothers to show up on the same patch of grass in the same evening, but that is what happened: one building the thing, one helping give it room to exist.

I have managed SOUTH, a restaurant and jazz club a few miles south of that park, for years now, so I know something about what it takes to keep a room open for people who want to hear music or watch something together. Rent. Insurance. Somebody who shows up early to set the chairs out and stays late to fold them back up. None of that shows up on a banner or a screen. What shows up is the movie, the DJ, the kids running through the fence panels, the family that brought a cooler of strawberry drinks and stayed for the whole thing. Everything underneath that is the part nobody claps for, and it is also the part that decides whether there is a screening next Saturday at all.

The other rooms in the city doing the same thing

Penn Treaty Park is one lawn on one river, but the instinct behind it is running all over Philadelphia right now. Jay Schwartz has been doing something similar since 1992 under the name The Secret Cinema, a different, longer running microcinema that screens obscure and neglected films off actual film prints in whatever room in the city will have him that month, no fixed address required. Lightbox Film Center, based at International House near Penn’s campus, has been running repertory, documentary, and experimental programming since the 1970s and became its own independent organization in recent years. BlackStar Film Festival, founded in 2012, brings films by Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers to venues across Center City every August and has grown into one of the more respected festivals of its kind in the country. The Philadelphia Film Society runs the larger, more traditional end of the same ecosystem, producing the Philadelphia Film Festival every fall and a year round slate of repertory programming downtown.

A piece in 34th Street Magazine on Philadelphia’s independent film scene argued that these small organizations are protecting what it called third spaces, rooms where a film can still do something streaming cannot, which is put a room full of strangers in front of the same screen at the same time. I read that after I got home from Penn Treaty Park, and it named something I had felt without having words for it while I was still sitting on the grass. A lawn, a bookstore, a basement, a converted theater. It is the same argument made in a dozen different rooms across this city: that watching something together, in a specific place, with people you did not arrive with, is worth keeping even when it would be cheaper and easier not to.

What it costs to keep a screen lit on a lawn for free

By the time the actual movie started, the sky over the park had gone fully dark and the Ben Franklin Bridge across the river was lit up gold against it, cars crossing in both directions the whole time the opening credits ran. Somebody’s dog got loose from a leash and ran a full loop around the picnic tables before anyone caught her. The DJ had switched off his mixer and was sitting on a cooler by then, watching the screen like everyone else.

Reel Nomadic has more Saturdays left on the calendar before the Penn Treaty Pictures season ends in late September, and Secret Handshake will keep running its own nights inside The Head and The Hand well past that, into the winter if the last few years are any guide. What I kept turning over on the drive home is a smaller question than any of that: how many other patches of grass in this city are one banner, one projector, and one family willing to put their name on a fund away from becoming exactly this. Philadelphia is not short on lawns by the water. It has never really been short on people who love film enough to run the projector themselves. What it runs short on, more often than either of those, is somebody deciding a specific stretch of grass is worth the electric bill.