Northern Liberties

When in Northern Liberties for brunch (Honey's! Goodness--and, it turns out, I ate the same thing I did last time!), we wandered around the neighborhood for a while. I love all of the murals--people even paint their picket fences in Northern Liberties.

 

You can't quite tell, but the green lump is a turtle, presumably crossing a finish line. 

Here's Girard College, which is, counterintutively, a high school, an enlightenment high school at that. The building is very grand but I think it's lacking something, either some decoration on the pediment or some windows or something.

We ended up in Fairmount, where there happened to be a community street fair. This woman was working on pottery on the sidewalk. Another man was leading, on the banjo, a group of enthusiastically tambourining children and their parents (well, the parents were enthusiastic--the children were half-way into it). So many times Philadelphia feels like it's straight out of Portlandia.

This morning at brunch I also felt like I had slid into Portlandia when the waitress asked the young man in a bow tie at the next table if he wanted coffee and he replied in a calm voice that implied a slight disdain for someone who was so unhealthy as to drink something so harsh and almost violent, "Maybe I'll have some hot tea."