West Philly Porchfest: The Battle for Car-Free Streets and Community Celebration

Cars and festival attendees competing for space in 2023. How is this safer than closing the street?

I first found myself in West Philadelphia in 2019 during Porchfest, an annual music festival that exists because approximately two square miles of Philadelphians collectively decide it should. And so it does, whether the city grants the annually requested street closures or not.

In 2019, almost every other street was closed to motorized traffic, lined with rehomed cones and handmade signs stretching from one end of the intersection to the other to communicate the closure. Free from cars, the streets welcomed sprinklers, grills and bouncy castles. Swarms of kids muraled the asphalt with chalk while musicians crooned from the hallmark wooden porches of West Philly’s twin Victorian homes.

Of course, it’s impossible to tell whether all of the streets I walked on officially received the green light to close to traffic, or if some had assumed the risk, hoping the cops wouldn’t remember which stretch of Cedar Avenue had the right to divert traffic. Nevertheless, I spent 10 hours roaming the streets, not once checking for a car sneaking up behind me.

Fourteen months later, I relocated to the epicenter of Porchfest. I didn’t know anyone in West Philly when I moved here, but Porchfest was enough evidence for me that this part of town had just the right blend of chaos and care to be a good fit.

Porchfest is known as a DIY Festival, but a volunteer organization technically oversees it. They’re responsible for providing the beautiful t-shirts that pepper the crowds, keeping the website up-to-date, and a host of other invisible efforts that help keep the festival running smoothly year after year. Yet, you don’t feel their presence whatsoever. Any coordination between hosts (those offering their porches) and performers (those performing on said porches) is done independently, sometimes through the mediation of a Facebook group but mostly through text.

One of the festival’s principal volunteers, Joe Devitas, described it well in the Philadelphia Sun:

“People talk about it like it’s a singular event,” he said. “It’s 130 different events and everyone is responsible for their own.” In fact, Devitas says more than 130 porches were transformed into entertainment venues, 305 different groups performed and tens of thousands of people pounded the pavement in search of a show.

To give an example of how Porchfest operates, this year I ran into a friend outside of a bar in April and he asked if my band had a porch yet. We didn’t. A beer later, we agreed to play on his. In the weeks following, he launched a group chat so that all of the performers could crowdsource equipment and coordinate set times ahead of the big day. Multiply this by over a hundred, and that’s how the first Saturday in June has drawn crowds of thousands from as far as the West Coast.

Betting Against Porchfest

In the days leading up to Porchfest 2023, Facebook was abuzz with locals announcing that their street closure and block party permits were denied. For many, the reason cited was simply “danger,” with no further elaboration. Some speculated that a recent shooting in the area might’ve cost them the permit, while others highlighted the irony of “danger” being cited when danger would, in fact, be created by keeping streets open to traffic during the neighborhood’s largest outdoor festival.

With no apparent appeal process and a justification so vague it would’ve discouraged most appealing anyway, many of my neighbors surrendered their block party plans. Even the tactical types seemed reluctant that year, fearing retribution.

In the end, Porchfest still happened. A couple of streets closed to motorized traffic, but the difference between 2023 and years prior was stark. Kids who were expecting to run through makeshift sprinklers instead spent the day glued to mom’s hip as she squeezed between parked cars to avoid incoming traffic. Spectators, headbanging to their favorite local bands, were periodically — and, for the most part, politely — nudged by bumpers. Conversely, when drivers and dancers weren’t forced to mingle, it was eerily quiet. Given the inescapable cacophony I’d grown to expect from previous years, this was surreal.

With that said, it was still a blast. Truthfully, nothing could sully the euphoria that typifies that first Saturday in June, but the city's unwillingness to issue a couple of permits for a few hours definitely came close.

In denying permits en masse, what the city ultimately did was lay the groundwork for a tragedy. The message sent to West Philadelphia — especially to zip code 19143 — was one of confrontation, rather than cooperation. Worse yet, the move drove a wedge between the city’s institutions and the public: With most of the fun unsanctioned, who do you feel safe calling when someone does get hurt?

This summer, Philadelphians were fully prepared to be denied permits again. Many were. They went ahead and closed their streets anyway. I watched someone collect plastic barrels from a nearby stagnant construction project to use as a buffer on his own block. “We have kids running here. I don’t want them to get hit.”

Others planted bouncy castles, sprinklers and lounge chairs, mentally preparing themselves for a face-off with the cops or whatever agency would feel emboldened to rain on the parade, should it come to that. Of course, some block permits were granted, seemingly without issue. It was a gamble.

Porchfest showcases the best of Philadelphia and Philadelphians. The city should embrace that. Instead, it seems to bet against it.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

The refusal to grant permits, close streets to traffic and tacitly endorse Porchfest reminds me of an axis I first encountered in the writings of Chris Arnade: trust vs regulation. In short, Arnade travels the world and blogs about it, offering insights into how the built environment and laws of a given city either enrich or impoverish our experience of it. In his essay "Why the US can’t have nice things," he refers to the U.S. as a high-regulation/low-trust society. The consequences of this are mediocre bus shelters, lack of public amenities like bathrooms or benches, and, I’d add, Philadelphia’s response to Porchfest.

“In every other variation (low regulation/high trust, high regulation/high trust, low regulation/low trust), you get either larger public works without fear of vandalism or misuse ... [or] you get natural ad hoc bottom-up solutions,” he writes. In Quito, Ecuador, a lower-regulation society, he observed that riders will fashion a bus shelter out of whatever is available without fear of its removal. “If there is a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, without natural shade around, riders will do something like rig an umbrella to a pole, or throw some old seats under a tree,” he illustrates. “In the US those will be dismantled within days.”

Arnade alleges that Istanbul, Turkey, is also a low-regulation society, but, in contrast to Quito, it exhibits high trust. Therefore, the city can “build nice things” without fear of misuse while still allowing the messy bottom-up processes that give the city its charm. “The result is Istanbul is flourishing, both in material and non-material ways,” he adds.

It’s worth mentioning that Porchfest was hardly the only time this summer when residents weren’t granted street closures; it was simply the largest concentration of rejections in a single day. Plenty of smaller block parties were denied in the following weeks, sporting similarly vague excuses. This was especially true in some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. And so, like with Porchfest, many speculated that neighborhood crime rates were the culprit. It felt as if poverty disqualified the community from having a little fun, as if the neighborhood didn’t deserve to enjoy a hot summer day because of its reputation.

Whose Streets?

Besides being emblematic of a high-regulation/low-trust society, the permit refusals illustrated an unwillingness to reimagine our streets as anything other than thoroughfares. For example, it didn’t take long for commenters on social media to suggest that streets should remain open to steady traffic during Porchfest in the event of an emergency. Nevermind that the city’s grid system makes diverting traffic very intuitive, or that the presence of other cars on the road is more likely to delay an emergency vehicle than a malleable crowd of concertgoers, or that, ironically, most emergency calls nowadays are in response to traffic violence in the first place.

These are merely excuses for maintaining a status quo that prioritizes our streets as places for vehicle storage and movement. Block parties are hardly the only example. Philadelphia also sabotaged its beloved outdoor dining program that, at its height, saw 800 streeteries and half a dozen street closures. Now, only a fraction of them remain, and even those that survived the streetery blitz are plagued by micromanagement and fees. As Philadelphia restaurateur Mike Strauss wrote when the city issued its death blow to outdoor dining in 2023, “Our city chose illegal parking over its vibrant dining scene.”

The appetite for more people-oriented space is there wherever you look. What little outdoor seating still exists is perennially occupied, even when ample indoor seating is available. The city’s hottest commercial corridors — like Sansom and 13th Street — are begging to be closed to motorized traffic. Any marginally sunny day packs the Schuylkill River Trail, the award-winning waterfront walkway that seems to grow in popularity every week. Every city park is bursting with activities, from basketball tournaments in Francisville Playground to ad hoc open mics in Clark Park.

It’s no surprise that Philadelphians want to bring some of the fun closer to home, even if it's only for a few hours on a hot summer day. The city can grant its residents that relief. All it has to do is say yes.

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