At seven in the morning Carl crouches beneath the intersection of 16th and JFK, picks up his guitar and plays the blues. There's already a steady trickle of people walking by, carrying briefcases and looking straight ahead. By 7:30 the waves of commuters come steadily, every five or 10 minutes, but have pretty much dissipated an hour later. One guy gives Carl the thumbs-up every day as he passes, and a train conductor often stops and listens for a minute if he has time.
Sometimes Carl's mind slips out of the station completely, absorbed in the strings, the fingers, the vibrations. Then, as if shaken, he'll look up a bit, glance slowly left and then right, and look down again, avoiding eye contact. Usually his black cowboy hat and glasses shadow his narrow face, anyway.
Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority's Suburban Station, by far the largest and busiest of the three Center City train stations, is Philadelphia's underground hub, with 100,000 commuters passing through daily, according to a SEPTA employee. Commuters don't seem to examine the station too closely, and Carl blends in to its monotony. Like everything else in Suburban Station, he looks filmed in dust: his black buttoned-down shirt with colorful images of beer bottles his tan pants, and the army green plaid vest he sits on.
Sitting like a crumpled lunch bag against the wall, he exudes filth, and his guitar is battered, partly held together with duct tape, long strings frizzing out by the tuning keys. But it still plays well, and as Carl giddily strums an Elmore James tune the riffs in the upper register bounce off the low beige ceiling and round the corner past the McDonalds, all the way to the florist, caressing the pointed edges of columns and shuffling the dead air.
Sometimes he's got competition. Around the corner from Carl's usual spot might be a ragtag a capella trio singing "Tears on my Pillow." Or in the tunnel by the trolleys a homeless woman occasionally plays songs like "Let Us Break Bread Together" on the trombone. But Carl is the most reliable of these few underground performers, and admits he'll even be there on Christmas. On top of his trodden black guitar case lays a handwritten cardboard sign reading, "Hardest Working Man In Street Music."
Carl says he likes being in touch with the underground. "You meet people. I mean, the musicians, we usually stick to ourselves. Although there was this one really talented violinist who I liked a lot. He was older but really youthful. We were thinking of playing together sometime, but then he left, I guess because he was getting gigs."
Carl's words are laced with the musty smell of smoke and a faint whiff of rarely washed clothes. Even though he only makes about $40 a day, he says, he likes knowing that he's giving something back.
Carl sings loudly, his voice straining, scratching, as if he's both musician and actor. His long fingers glide up and down the strings.
"You love him a little more, when you should love him less
Why pick up behind him and take his mess
'Cause when things go wrong, wrong with you
It hurts me too."
Two folded dollar bills and a couple of quarters sit in the guitar case, with nothing else joining them during the entire song. Most people who walk by don't turn toward Carl, pretending to prefer the sight of the ugly bright pink wall opposite him. Even if the commuters don't acknowledge him, he acknowledges them. After a few weeks, they've probably heard his repertoire, so he tries to play something new, feeling that he owes it to them. In the middle of the day, he usually goes to the library to look at sheet music, songs that he practices while performing underground.
Even during the course of one song the whole gamut passes by: a pair of gossipy college girls, a mother pulling her daughter's hand, dusty construction workers, a wizened old woman. One graying black man sways as he shuffles by, and a young woman says she followed the sound of the music from the other side of the station.
"I mean, look at this place, you know," Carl says, motioning with his guitar to the deserted tunnel. "I just figure at least I'm giving this station some music."
Philadelphia fell victim to unlucky planning. A hundred years ago, while New York City was building its many subways, Philadelphians used a thriving above -- ground trolley system and had only one subway line, on Market Street, until the second was built beneath Broad Street in the '20s. But cars and buses rendered trolleys obsolete, and only the subway-surface trolleys now exist. There is little diversity in the subways. Unlike the bus, whose makeup of passengers is mixed, the underground transit system is almost exclusively poor.
Randy Kennedy, the former "Tunnel Vision" columnist for the New York Times, used to detail that city's subway culture.
"There are those who spend their days and nights on [the subway] because it is more pleasant and less dangerous than where they live, others because it is where they live. And there are those who ride it because it comes with a captive audience, making it a highly effective place to sing songs, sell batteries and save souls ... New Yorkers also use the subway as reading room," he wrote in a column.
The culture Kennedy describes is a diverse one, where a homeless man may doze next to a woman in Calvin Klein. What semblance of subway culture remains in Philadelphia may soon disappear altogether. Impending service cuts and fare hikes will discourage more riders and drain the tunnels of what little foot traffic now passes through them.
Stretching four and a half square blocks, Suburban Station is part of Penn Center, the area to the west of City Hall that is like an underground village. Between the Post Office and the jail is a barbershop, the Dollar Store, Dunkin' Donuts, Happy Shoe Shine, and The Hair Center -- among 40 other stores.
Nine skyscrapers are linked to Suburban Station. There's often a stark contrast between the dinginess of the station and the polished marble interior of the office buildings. Some buildings own the retail space beneath them while others don't. Even the City of Philadelphia owns portions of Suburban Station, like the 16th and 17th Street corridors.
Philadelphia's subway corridors distinguish themselves from other cities by being completely devoid of advertisements. No one would see them. Halogen lights flicker slowly, spotting the dull white walls. The tunnels aren't remarkably dirty, just dull and old, with grime thickly cluttered in every corner.
Commerce Street supplies this underground village, running roughly beneath JFK Boulevard between 16th and 19th streets. It's completely hidden, and there's no through traffic or sidewalks, although illegally parked cars lend it a sense of normalcy.
Penn Center was intended to be vibrant. Developed in the '50s, what now seems like a hodgepodge of constructions actually represents a revolutionary concept in city planning by Philadelphian Edmund Bacon. It is the realization of a design scheme based on "simultaneous movement systems," the different paths along which city-dwellers move.
Bacon envisioned a garden and a fountain in an open-air subway concourse, according to his book Design of Cities. Bacon wanted to integrate the street and below-street levels, a concept that works well in the lobbies of the Penn Center office buildings, whose large windows have views of City Hall.
But it is dull concrete, not gardens, that first impresses the traveler coming in to Penn Center. The garden greeting the subway commuter is rectangular, with concrete benches, a few shrubs, a wide fountain, and a view of both the baroque City Hall and the tunnels beneath it. The underground and the street are not so much integrated as sharply contrasting, and few would opt to travel in the corridors instead of on the sidewalk. Instead of forging simultaneous movement systems, some travelers maintain that Bacon created a downtown wasteland.
A dusty black boombox is tuned to Oldies 950, playing "Everlasting Love." John whistles and slaps a white towel on the barber chair: "Ohhkay I think you're ready. That's as good as it gets." His customer nods when he looks in the mirror at the back of his head and stands up: "I'll see ya next time sir."
The ceiling is low and spotted with water stains, the walls are paneled with blond faux wood, and the room is brightly lit. Ten clunky metal chairs with footrests and turquoise cushions circle the room, alternated with 12 miniature beige sinks and the occasional small blue foot stool. In the middle of the room are two rows of brown chairs with their backs to each other and a small rickety table stacked with the Daily News and USA Today.
When one of the barbers isn't working he's sitting at the table, glancing at the paper or looking out the window into the corridor that leads to the SEPTA offices. Some people wave as they go by, others stop at the little window where Mara sells lotto tickets. There's not much foot traffic because the 18th Street entrance is closed for construction.
"Ahhhh this construction," Vince says, throwing his arms up. "Two years ago it start, and now it go two more years. Nothing. SEPTA, poooh! Terrible."
He misses the busyness of the family shop in Italy, which was on the main street of the town.
Underneath JFK Boulevard between 17th and 18th streets, Vince's Barbershop is tucked in a corner, easy to miss. But from the other end of the corridor its bright lights and swirling red and white classic barbershop poles represent permanence in the impersonal and transient world of a train station. The barbershop has been open for almost 40 years, and two of the five barbers have been there that long. Vince sees no reason to go somewhere new after 20 years.
"When you change, you have to meet new people. This is good. It's nice here."
And for Vince, there's something special about working in an actual barbershop -- a dying, but once common presence in subway stations. Even above ground, few barbershops can stay open now, because the rents in the city are so high and the price of a haircut so low.
The barbershop is a little more isolated now than it was 10 years ago, before the Sheraton Hotel above it closed. The two were initially linked, and the hotel used to send guests down. Now customers are mainly businessmen in the Penn Center buildings, or SEPTA personnel and police officers. The regular customers come in every few weeks or months. Some have been coming for 10 or 15 years.
A short man in a gray wool suit silently pushes open the door to the barbershop, and waves to Andrea, the Albanian barber, who springs up and goes to his chair in the far corner of the room. He opens the red and white striped apron and drops it on the man, then slowly starts to cut his light brown hair.
Giuseppe, also from Italy, has been leaning against the wall reading the paper. On top of his rough, dark skin he's got big square glasses that hide his large chin and rounded nose. Another suit walks in, and John cuts his hair in 10 minutes. $17. Then he motions to a cop, who's been waiting.
They talk about the election, and how glad they are that at least the ads are over.
"Like that one where she called the other one, I think her name was Melissa Brown, they call her the Queen of Sleaze," says the cop, Bruce. "And I was with my daughter, and you don't want your kids listening to that. You gotta draw the line somewhere."
Four seats over, Vince is finishing cutting the few hairs on the head of a sagged-face older man. They don't talk, but Vince whistles or sings, even over the commercials. The piles of hair build around his chair.
"You're 16. You're beautiful. And you're mine."
He folds the apron and places it on the armrest as the man leaves.
When Giuseppe finishes Bruce's shave, the cop looks relieved.
"All I know is if I walk outta here with two ears in place I had a good day."
Giuseppe holds up the mirror. "You'll notice he shows me the back of my head before he gives me my glasses." Bruce pays and picks up a Dollar Dollar lotto on the way out.
Before the lunch rush, the barbershop slows down a little, and the men hang around. It's noon and they've already been working for five hours, but they'll be out at 3:30 p.m. Some of them page through the newspaper. Bill, another barber, paces with his hands in his pockets, sometimes stopping to gaze into the empty corridor outside. Except for the radio, the place is silent, sighing between the bursts of laughs and chatter that mark the busy moments. Vince goes to the window and looks at the corridor.
"Nobody there." He shrugs.
