Philadelphia, Meet Your Future

FOLLOWING THE MOVIE at the International House, Ruth and Joey and I head over to the North Star club in Fairmount, for some DJs and a rock band Sweeney's hyped on Philebrity. Here, the crowd is decidedly more Diesel jeans and Stella Artois. But there is some overlap from the previous event. Like the girl with the pigtails and the Port-A-Bar, and her boyfriend with the sideburns, who now are sitting at our table and who I've just been told are actually Kendra Gaeta and Laris Kreslins, both in their early 30s, both transplants from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the brains behind movetophilly.com, the campaign that offers personal tours of Philly to encourage young, smart people like us to move here and that was featured in the now famous — or infamous — New York Times piece "Philadelphia Story: The Next Borough." Kreslins is the founder and publisher of the well-respected free arts and culture magazine Arthur, and he and his girlfriend are apparently a Big Fucking Deal around Philly at the moment. Another Philly scenester at the table, Ryan Creed — who a minute ago was plotting out loud how to exploit his one degree of separation from Nate Berkus, Oprah Winfrey's decorator — tells me: You're right now sitting at the center of Philadelphia top-shelf, A-list hipster power. I laugh — and then realize he's mostly serious.

In short order the conversation moves to what it seems it's always swimming around — New York, or more specifically Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or more specifically Philadelphia vis-à-vis New York and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As it turns out, just to prove how small and incestuous this town is, also sitting with us — along with Dryw Scully, a DJ and the music promotions coordinator for Urban Outfitters, and a girl from WHYY — is Jessica Pressler, the former Weekly writer who actually penned the Times's sixth-borough story (and now writes for this magazine). She tells us that the sixth-borough analogy — the story said Philadelphians sometimes refer to their city, often self-deprecatingly, as the sixth borough, which generated a fair amount of annoyance both here and in New York — was something she used to explain to New Yorkers quickly and easily how Philly's been changing. (In an e-mail interview with Philebrity during the initial brouhaha, she wrote, "It's kind of like when you give a dog a pill — you wrap it in something you know they like, such as cheese.") Joey, finished with his shot of Jäger and sipping another drink, for the most part defends Pressler and the story — he tells me that "for once, the trending actually sort of has stuff to back it up" — which doesn't really surprise me.

Because Joey Sweeney's not just a hipster, or at least not your stereotypical I'm-too-cool-to-give-a-shit-and-by-the-way-are-these-jeans-too-tight? hipster. Joey's also an advocate, for himself of course — for his own image and his own power — but also for Philadelphia, for the cultural and economic changes happening in this city, something he sees as necessary for its future.

There's a strange cognitive dissonance that Sweeney carries around. The up-from-­nothing guy who fuels his frothy annoyance at the uncool powers that be has, it turns out, an interesting relationship with those powers. He lives on the edge — almost ­literally — of his old neighborhood, in that Bart Blatstein "artists' loft" in a former manufacturing facility, just down the street from the rubble that is the remains of the Schmidt's brewery at 2nd and Girard, just blocks from where he grew up, with signs of gentrification — of change — all around.