A day in Manayunk, where the walls talk and the conversation was about feeding people
Harry Hayman had not been to Manayunk in a while, walked it properly, and ended up talking about who cooks Philadelphia's food.
Somebody painted the words welcome to Manayunk onto a wall, one letter at a time, each on its own square of muted colour. Harry Hayman photographed it at the start of a day he had been putting off for longer than he meant to, and the wall turned out to set the tone for everything that followed.
Why Harry Hayman had not been in a while
Manayunk sits on the Schuylkill in the north west of the city, built up a hill so steep the streets stack above each other, with a canal at the bottom and a main street that has been the centre of the neighbourhood since it was a mill town. The name comes from a Lenape word meaning roughly the place to drink.
It is also a neighbourhood most Philadelphians file under handled. They went a lot in their twenties, they know what it is, they stopped going. Harry Hayman put it plainly: it had been a minute.
That habit is worth examining, because it applies to most of the city. People form a picture of a neighbourhood at one point in their life and then stop updating it, which means a place can change completely while everybody who does not live there carries the old version around. The only fix is going back and looking.
What the walls say
The first thing that registers on a walk through is how much of the neighbourhood is painted.
There is a wall carrying the words hey you in enormous white block letters on charcoal, ringed with white daisies. There is the welcome lettering. Under a bridge there is a large mural in a hard edged cubist style, all blues and reds and browns, a clock face and a chair and a figure broken into planes, framed by a border of small painted tiles, signed in the top corner.
None of it is subtle and none of it is trying to be. The point of a wall painted at that scale is that a person on the far side of the street reads it without meaning to. Hey you is a two word instruction to look up, and it works on everybody who walks past, which is a fairly efficient piece of public art.
Philadelphia has more of this than almost any American city, and the ordinary version of it is more interesting than the famous version. Nobody comes to Manayunk for the murals. They are just there, doing their job on the way to somewhere else.
The iron works with a cafe in it
Halfway along, a brass sign on a brick wall reads Artesano Iron Works.
Behind it is a business that started as an ironworks, making furniture and architectural metalwork, and has since grown into something broader. Inside, a wrought iron console table with a glass top holds ceramic vessels against a lit blue panel, which is a showroom rather than a workshop, and both things are true of the operation at once.
The cafe came later. The business’s own account is that the pandemic pushed them into opening one, and the result is a cafe and plant shop attached to an iron works and a gallery, which is not a combination anybody would design on paper.
That is the pattern worth noticing in a neighbourhood like this. Businesses that survive twenty years rarely survive by doing the same thing for twenty years. They survive by being willing to become a slightly different business when the situation demands it, and the ones that will not do that are the ones that disappear quietly between visits.
The conversation, which was about food
The reason Harry Hayman was in Manayunk was not the walls. It was a conversation over coffee about who cooks the food this city eats.
Philly Cooks for Philly is built on a question that sounds administrative and is not. A great deal of the food served in Philadelphia’s institutions, its schools and shelters and programmes, is produced somewhere else and trucked in. The initiative’s argument is that the same food could be cooked here, by people who live here, in a way that also trains the next set of kitchen workers.
ImpactPHL, which works on directing capital towards enterprises that produce social returns alongside financial ones, has tracked the effort as it has developed. A longer piece on the model sets out the reshaping of the city’s food economy that it is aiming at.
The idea maps onto everything Harry Hayman argues about food systems. A meal is not only a meal. It is a purchase order, and a purchase order is a decision about which economy gets the money. Feeding people badly with food from four states away and feeding people well with food cooked locally cost roughly the same. One of them also produces jobs, training and a supply chain.
Why that conversation belongs in a neighbourhood post
It would be easy to treat the murals and the food economy as two unrelated halves of a day. They are the same subject seen from different heights.
A neighbourhood is a set of decisions about where money goes. Somebody paid for the wall to be painted. Somebody decided a metalwork business could support a cafe. Somebody is arguing that institutional food budgets should buy from kitchens inside the city rather than outside it. Each of those is small on its own and the accumulation of them is what a place actually is.
The version of civic conversation that happens at conference height talks about strategies and ecosystems. The version that happens at street height is a person deciding whether to open on a Tuesday. Harry Hayman’s consistent position is that the second one is where the outcomes are decided and the first one is where they get discussed.
The day in the life framing
He floated a way of holding the whole thing together, and it is a good one. Call it a day in the life. One long day, a lot of ground, several conversations that do not obviously connect until you lay them side by side. He even offered the Beatles’ A Day in the Life as the soundtrack, which is a song assembled out of unrelated fragments that turn out to belong together.
That framing does something useful and slightly unfashionable. It shows the work rather than the result. Most of what makes a city better is not an announcement. It is somebody spending a Tuesday driving between neighbourhoods, having conversations that may not lead anywhere, in places they have not visited in a while.
Go back to the neighbourhood you think you know
The recommendation is simple enough that it barely needs stating, and people still do not do it.
Pick the Philadelphia neighbourhood you last formed an opinion about ten years ago. Go for an afternoon. Walk the main street rather than driving through it. Look up at the walls, go into the business you always assumed you understood, and find out whether the version of it in your head is still accurate.
It usually is not, and that is the good news.