Berta and I went to IndyHall’s movie night on Saturday to hang out in the city and to watch the first of the two films in the double-feature, “Office Space”. We got to talk to a few of the folks down there, both some people we knew and some people we met for the first time.
The event was sponsored by Philly Car Share, which is an interesting organization that offers shared vehicles to city-dwellers. You basically make a reservation, and you get a car for a few hours. It’s kind of like renting, I suppose, but it’s a more comfortable plan. The cars are where you might need them to be, parked in nearby lots, rather than centrally at a rental place. And they have all different kinds of cars, so if you needed a trunk or a van, they’ve got that, or for a night out on the town, a convertible or BMW is obtainable. Neat idea for folks that live downtown, especially.
We don’t have much use for the service, since we’d have to drive our own cars to anywhere where a carshare car would be waiting, and that doesn’t make much sense. In talking to people who have more use for these services, I discovered an interesting distinction of what is “city” and “suburb”, and it was amusing to me to see how the line moves depending on which side of it you primarily dwell.
We were chatting about getting a suburban meeting together of people who work at home or independently in general, which is part of the idea behind IndyHall. The trick with suburbanites, I think, is getting in contact with them. We’re all so into our little worlds, we don’t often realize what’s going on outside of our own neighborhoods. This is strange to say considering the differences I was going to portray between suburban life and urban life.
In any case, the idea of where to hold one of these meetings arose. Suburban to me means “where I live”, and if I had to draw a line where the city ends and where “not the city” begins, it would be somewhere between King of Prussia and the Zoo. If you’re not familiar with the area, neither of those places are really anywhere near the city proper. This distinction is interesting to me because on Saturday we met people who define the line differently.
Living on the other side of my line, folks define the city limits as “not paying the city wage tax”, which I’m sure is a significant distinction to draw, but I don’t think it’s very realistic from a social point of view. I think it’s more a matter of whether it’s easier to get into the city (where you pay the wage tax) to do significant daily things, or it’s easier to stay near home. Or perhaps the frequency of doing those things.
For me, once or twice a month into the city is plenty. Actually, I could (and have) go for quite a while never venturing near the city. So I feel suburban. Nonetheless, there are indicators that I’m still suburban and not rural, like the fact that the regional rail comes out this far. And that my major news still comes from city stations, and when they report the traffic, they talk about major roads that are near me.
For people who live in the city, my area has a few too many trees. There are horses down the street that are unsaddled, much less attached to handsome cabs. I have to drive to get, well, anywhere.
It’s interesting to me what magnetic force the city - both Philadelphia and your nearest city - have on the dwellers outside of its boundaries. Where people draw the line also interests me, especially when taking into consideration which side they’re on, and how that affects their reasoning. And I also wonder at what point a person considers himself “rural” – perhaps when the lure of the city is simply a curiosity except when called to federal jury duty?
