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| October 18, 2004
Section: LOCAL NEWS PHILADELPHIA & ITS SUBURBS Edition: CITY-D Page: B01 Geographic heart? Not Center City, or City Hall, or ... Murray Dubin INQUIRER STAFF WRITER |
| So where is that elusive center? It sounds like a simple question, but it is not. "I don't know," said City Councilman Frank Rizzo. "I'll guess Germantown." Councilman James F. Kenney wasn't sure, but he thought it was on the Temple University campus, perhaps at the bell tower. "I should know this," said Councilman Michael A. Nutter. "For a political person, you feel like a jackass not knowing this." He guessed Broad Street just north of Allegheny Avenue. His Council colleague Brian J. O'Neill thought it might be the Fox Street exit of the Schuylkill Expressway. They're all wrong, though Nutter is close. What makes the answer difficult is that Philadelphia, as marvelous as some may think it to be, is misshapen, with one large, muscular extremity extending out to the north and east, and a smaller, pudgier arm reaching out to the north and west. Add a big land foot stomping south and a couple of rivers hemming the city in. The result? An oddly shaped bastion of brotherly love. So we are not looking for an easily found equidistant point of a circle or square. But the skewed and uneven have midpoints, too, and in this 130-square-mile city that geographic locus is . . . Sixth and Erie. "Needless to say, I'm surprised," said Carmen Williams, who has worked at the Wachovia Bank at 601 Erie for more than 16 years. "I'm stunned," said Darlene Lomax-Garrett, principal of Taylor Elementary School at Randolph and Erie, less than a half-block from Sixth Street. It was as if someone had just told her about high-jumping hippopotamuses. "There's nothing about this location that would suggest we are at the center of the city," she said. "My brain is working now. Maybe we can use this in our geography lessons in second grade." No one should get too terribly excited, said Bruce Rader, the city plans officer for the Streets Department. "The geographic center of the city has no special significance, other than it exists," he said. There were no plans, he added, for a plaque marking the spot. A 1940s issue of the The Inquirer quoted a city engineer saying Sixth and Erie was the city's center in response to a reader question. Rader agreed, and assumes that there is a mathematical way of proving it, "but it's beyond me." Instead, last week he used a method he learned in junior high. He cut out a map of the city and pasted it on cardboard. Then he cut the cardboard to match the city's shape. He drew a red dot where Sixth and Erie is, punched a hole in the map's edge near Franklin Mills and then let it hang loose from a stretched-out paper clip. Then he attached a weighted string to the paper clip and let it hang. It passed through the red dot. "Assuming everything weighs the same, the center of gravity of the map is also the geographic center," said Rader, who is secretary of the city's Board of Surveyors. He warned that his punched holes and inexact cutting might skew things a little. Then he added a hole on the map's edge in Chestnut Hill and another on an edge near City Avenue. Each time he turned the map and moved the string to a new hole, the weighted string passed through Sixth and Erie. "I guess this is surprising to people because we call Center City the center of the city, and it's not," Rader said. The city's center is a wide, not-very-memorable intersection with a bank, a paint store, an auto tags store, and an Ecuadoran and Colombian restaurant on its corners. It is in the Seventh Councilmanic District, the realm of Councilman Richard T. Mariano. He, too, was asked where the center of the city was, and he, too, was stumped. "It's my house," he said. "Just ask my wife." Mariano isn't far off. He lives just two miles from Sixth and Erie. Contact staff writer Murray Dubin at 215-854-2797 or mdubin@phillynews.com. |
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Illustration:PHOTO TOM GRALISH / Inquirer Staff Photographer Bruce Rader shows how to use a weighted string to find the geographical center of the city. He is the city plans officer for the Streets Department. He said there also should be a mathematical way of proving it, "but it's beyond me." This is it - the epicenter of Philadelphia - Sixth Street and Erie Avenue. That's news even to some of the people who work near there. TOM GRALISH / Inquirer Staff Photographer A bicyclist and a pedestrian cross the intersection of Erie Avenue and Sixth Street, probably unaware that it is the city's exact center. |
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Copyright (c) 2004 The Philadelphia Inquirer |