GoNWPhilly

Northwest Philadelphia is filled with countless memories for me, so when I got an RFP from a coalition of 7 neighborhoods to build a website and marketing campaign for the area I called my favorite person to work with Emily Catalano and asked if we could pull it off within their non-profit budget. We both agreed yes but barely, but we knew the opportunity to work together would make it not feel like work and we went for it, and then of course added the challenge of an insane timeline in order to launch in time for Small Business Saturday to showcase all of the great retail in the area, and because we're kind of crazy. If you’d like to check out our just-launched website, go to www.gonwphilly.com. I hope you enjoy reading about the businesses and neighborhoods as much as we enjoyed writing about them and that it makes you want to get up there for a day and check it out for the first time or revisit an old haunt. But if you really want to know why I was personally so excited about this, keep reading!

I went to Beaver College (now Arcadia, cue the jokes) and got my first 2 apartments in Mt Airy, the second one my first time ever living alone and on a street with a huge drug dealer house on the corner, I pretty much had to throw my dad out when he moved me in cause he refused to leave me there. Different times in Mt. Airy!

Those first couple of years after school are a precarious and exciting and nerve wracking time in any young person’s life, and mine was no different. It was also a broke time, despite having 3 jobs and my own business, so Cin Cin in Chestnut Hill was the special occasion restaurant my mom or grandparents would take me to when they visited during those late-teen to early adult years. I can still remember the awe of my first time experiencing the mix of Asian and French flavors, still two of my faves, and I could literally taste it in my mouth when I walked by on our tour for the website. Shoot, now I’m hungry.

Speaking of food, I had my first real waitressing job at Fiesta Pizza, smack dab in the heart of Chestnut Hill and still owned and run by the same feisty Greek family, where women who’d spent their lives bringing families and high school kids pizza and milkshakes, and sharing laughs with the retired regular morning crowd who helped with the difficulty of being away from my grandpa for the first extended time really ever, taught me so much more than just how to use shorthand to take orders in less than my 7-8 minute communications-major college version - it was a lesson a young woman who grew up in the country desperately needed during her first days of city living. I’m grateful for their patience and kindness and it’s probably still one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had, which I realize everyone seems to say about those early-in-life jobs. I also had the good fortune to visit Greece one summer while I worked there and can still remember sharing a cap full of the Tsipouro (or moonshine as we’d call it in the states) that I smuggled in from the pizza maker’s home island in my backpack, both with tears in our eyes, his from nostalgia and mine from politely trying to drink rubbing alcohol at 8am.

I met my friend Elisa who I went on that trip to Greece with through one of my other cadre of young-twenties jobs, the TLA Video. Unfortunately it’s gone the way of most video stores but back then it was still renting VHS tapes and bursting at the seams with indie and artsy and foreign language films and for a couple of years there I was as big a movie geek as anyone I knew. I also earned my way up the “corporate” ladder to get the title Porn Queen (manager just didn’t really fit for that one) on my shelf at work, which would pave the way for learning much more than I probably cared to know about a whole lot of customers. Elisa was also my weekly Wissahickon walking buddy and, always dieting, we’d do a fast walk on the low flat side or a more rigorous hike on the hilly bike trail and then go pig out up on the Hill. She’s a professional and accomplished food and fiction writer now and everytime I read about how to roast the perfect chicken in the Inquirer I think of our walks and talks and all the growing up we still had to do but didn’t yet realize.

Around the same time my best friend from college got her first apartment in Manayunk, which was where all the cool kids went for live music and cold beers and the occasional cigar, probably a little more raucously than we should have but those were different days for the ‘yunk. The drummer in my favorite band eventually bought the Grape Room and while Bob n Barbs is usually about as far as I go for live music on the weekend, it’s comforting to know that a spot that was so key when I owned my first business booking indie acts at colleges, and that helped solidify one of my first post-college social circles because of our shared love of the music, is still kicking.

And of course no story about my time in NW Philly would be complete without a mention of McMenamin’s. As retail and service workers, like so many of us in our early twenties were, Monday night was our Friday. This was before they had a kitchen and you could still see G Love play in the back, but it was a blast and took away some of the home/college sickness so many of us experience when living on our own for the first time. I stopped in recently to try some food because I was shocked they even had food and heard it was amazing, and it is, and the owner PJ greeted me just as warmly as when I was a regular.

But these places and memories are really what this whole area is about. People live and work and eat and shop and hike here forever because whether you’re here for an afternoon, a weekend, a year or a lifetime it just feels like home. And so it was such a great pleasure and honor to get to work with Emily to build this website and write this content to help showcase an area I still hold so dear. Many thanks to her and all of the kick ass corridor managers and CDC folks there for giving us this opportunity! And as we’re just getting started and there is lots more to come, don’t forget to follow us on social media: @gonwphilly