Irish Tenors – "Off to Philadelphia" (2004)

But the tears will surely blind me

For the friends I leave behind me

When I'm off to Philadelphia in the morning

After I graduated from law school in 1977, I moved to Washington, DC, and went to work for the federal government.

Fourteen years later, I got an opportunity to become the general counsel for a direct-response marketing company located in the DC suburbs.  I was almost 40 years old at the time, and I knew that this might be my last chance to wean myself from the government t**t and get an honest job.  So I accepted the offer and said goodbye to my government colleagues.

Federal buildings in downtown Washington

After a year at my new job, our Chairman and CEO fired some people and moved everyone else to the corporation’s Philadelphia office.  

I wasn’t crazy about moving to Philadelphia.  I had never spent any time there, and I knew no one who lived there other than my co-workers.  But I had three small kids and a mortgage payment, so I sucked it up and made the best of the situation.

*     *     *     *     *

I’m sure that my employer was the only New York Stock Exchange-listed enterprise to ever have its corporate headquarters in Philadelphia’s Manayunk neighborhood.   

Manayunk was an old working-class neighborhood that hugged the northern bank of the Schuykill River.  A dam and canal had been built in Manayunk in the early 1800s, and the water power produced by the dam attracted a number of textile mills and other factories.  

By the time I moved there, the neighborhood was beginning to gentrify a bit.  But it had a long way to go.

Manayunk’s Main Street today

Eventually a number of trendy restaurants would open in Manayunk’s 19th-century buildings.  But when I worked there, there were few places to eat other than sandwich shops and pizzerias.

The only Manayunk business that I regularly patronized was a used record and CD store.  (I had purchased my first CD player only a couple of years earlier, and there was really no reason to buy new CDs instead of used ones.)  

Manayunk had a public library, which I visited weekly.  I remember checking out the first several  volumes of Sue Grafton’s “alphabet” series from that library.  I read the 25th and final book in that series – Y is for Yesterday – earlier this year, shortly after Grafton’s death.

*     *     *     *     *

Philadelphia is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from my home in the Maryland suburbs of DC – much too far for daily commuting.  So I drove to my office every Monday morning and returned to my home each Friday.

During the week, I lived in a furnished one-bedroom apartment in a large, modern, and anonymous building that was a relatively short distance from Manayunk:

My home away from home

What did I do after work?  I listened to the used CDs I bought in Manayunk, read books from the Manayunk library, and watched HBO (which was included in my monthly rent) – The Larry Sanders Show was my favorite.

I have all 90 episodes of that show on DVD, and started re-watching them a couple of years ago.  It’s still the funniest TV comedy I’ve ever seen:

I also tried to write short stories – most of which were heavily autobiographical in nature.  (I didn’t get very far with most of them.  I was writing them by hand on yellow legal pads, and it’s extremely difficult to do revisions when you write that way – so I would usually give up when the first draft wasn’t all that I hoped for.)

It was while I was living in Philadelphia that I started cooking salmon for dinner three or four times a week.  It’s 25-plus years later, and I’m still doing that.

*     *     *     *     *

It didn’t take long to figure out that the company I was working for was a pretty iffy proposition.  I stopped looking for a house in the Philadelphia suburbs to move my family to, and started looking for a job back in Washington instead.

My Philadelphia episode lasted about two years.  I came away from it with some stock options, which I promptly cashed in.  I would have made quite a bit more money if I had waited longer to exercise them – the stock shot up from $3 a share in the fall of 1994 (a few months after I left) to $20 a share in early 1996.

A Manayunk Canal towpath mural

If I had held on to my shares that long, I probably would have held on to them even longer in hopes that the stock would continue to climb.  But the stock was at $5 a share by the end of 1996, and slid to $1.25 by June 1998.

I didn’t pay much attention to all the financial hoops that the company jumped through in an attempt to stay alive.  Everyone I had known there was long gone by then, and I think the company essentially disappeared by 2000.

*     *     *     *     *

In 2001 or 2002, I took my daughters and a couple of their high-school friends to Philly for a weekend of sightseeing.  One night, we had dinner at a restaurant in Manayunk, which had become quite chichi.  

That was my last visit to Manayunk (or to Philadelphia) until last week, when I decided to spend two days riding some of the 300 miles of bike trails in southeastern Pennsylvania.  (If all goes well, that trail network will eventually grow to 750 miles.)

After rides on the Perkiomen Trail and the Chester Valley Trail, I drove to Conshohocken for a ride on the Schuylkill River Trail (which will someday run the entire 140-mile length of the Schuylkill River). 

If I had ridden northwest on the trail, I would have been in Valley Forge National Historical Park in less than an hour.  But I went southeast in the direction of Manayunk and downtown Philadelphia instead.

The trail is paved from Conshohocken until just after you enter the Philadelphia city limits.  At that point, you’re directed on to the Manayunk Canal towpath, which is very much unpaved.  After you pass Flat Rock Dam, you ride through an old industrial neighborhood into Manayunk.

The Schuylkill River Trail didn’t exist back in 1992, but I did ride along the Manayunk Canal once a week or so on my first real bicycle – a Haro Omega hybrid with 21 speeds and grip shifters – which I purchased just after I left my government job.  

My 25-year-old Mongoose mountain bike

A couple of years later I bought a Mongoose mountain bike that I still ride from a Delaware bike store.  I passed through Delaware on my weekly commutes, and tried to do as much shopping there as I could because there was no state sales tax there.

*     *     *     *     *

The Manayunk Bridge used to carry trains across the Schuylkill river.  I t was closed in 1986, but reopened recently for use by bikers and pedestrians:

After I passed under the Manayunk Bridge, I turned off the towpath – which had become too narrow for two bikes to pass – and rode along Main Street instead.

Main Street Music in Manayunk today

The first store I saw was Main Street Music, which I thought might have been where I bought all those used CDs when I worked in Manayunk.  I went inside and struck up a conversation with Pat, the owner, who told me the store had opened the year before I started working there.

I told him I remembered the store being much smaller.  He said the old location had been much smaller, but that they had moved up to the street to a larger store several years ago.

Across Main Street from Main Street Music was the U. S. Hotel Bar & Grill, where I would occasionally eat lunch.  I don’t know where the “Hotel” in the name comes from – there’s no sign of a hotel anywhere:

It was happy hour, and they had some decent beers available, so I went inside and sat at the bar.  I waited about five minutes for a bartender to appear, but one never did, so I left.

Here’s 4360 Main Street – the site of our corporate headquarters:

Today the ground floor of the building is occupied by a fancy coffee shop and a hair salon.  

After a quick stop at Manayunk Brewing, I got back on my bike and rode back to Conshohocken.

On the way out of Philadelphia, you best believe I stopped for a cheesesteak:

*     *     *     *     *

It’s an odd feeling to return to a place where you once lived after many years of absence.

In 1999, I returned to Houston for a college reunion.  I hadn’t been back in over two decades, and the emotions I felt when I walked around my college campus and drove through the neighborhoods where I lived, ate, drank, and watched movies was almost overwhelming. 

My time in Philadelphia was a relatively brief interlude – only two years – and it didn’t represent as crucial a time in my life as my college years were.

But walking my bike down Manayunk’s Main Street was like turning the clock back 25 years. 

True dat.

And while the memories from 25 years ago were powerful, what hit me hardest was the realization of how much time had passed.

I worked in Manayunk in the June of my life.  But summer was long gone when I returned – it was September . . . possibly even October.

Possibly even December.

*     *     *     *     *

A Night to Remember is the title of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the sinking of the Titanic.  

The 1958 movie of the same name was the most expensive movie ever made in the UK up to that time.  It’s considered by historians to be the most accurate movie ever made about what happened on the Titanic the night it sank – certainly more accurate that the 1997 American blockbuster.  

“Off to Philadelphia” is a traditional Irish song that was sung in A Night to Remember by the Irish immigrants who were traveling in steerage.

Here are some fun facts about the Titanic:  

– Of the 434 female passengers and crew traveling on the Titanic, 75% survived.  But only 19% of the 1680 male passengers and crew on the Titanic lived.

– Poor female passengers had a much higher mortality rate than wealthier women.  If you were a female passenger traveling in first or second class, you had a 93% chance of surviving the sinking of the ship.  But only 49% of the female third-class passengers lived.

– If you were male, it didn’t matter much how rich you were when the Titanic went down: 20% of the males in first and second class and 16% of the males traveling in third class survived.

Click here to listen to the Irish Tenors’ 2004 recording of “Off to Philadelphia.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: