Burning Love

City Paper staff writer and Philadelphia native Tom Namako put the post-World Series riots like this: “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.” For a few hours, I could get it. Brad Lidge’s winning pitch was the spark to a powder keg that’s been filled for the past 20 years. Fans had every reason to congest Broad Street by the thousands, climb on top of signposts, shout from the top of newsstands and spray champagne on anyone in close proximity. It was the one night when a drunken bro standing through the sunroof of a car would whoop at me and I would actually whoop back.

But the sight of my deformed bike outside Dirty Frank’s on 13th and Pine streets was the big comedown from two hours of an anarchic high. That’s when I stopped “getting it.”

The bike was locked to the railing of a house, not in the middle of the road, and yet you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that a car had run it over. How the back of the frame became so bent confounds me.

This was in one of the lower-key areas of the city’s collective celebration Wednesday night. It was only four blocks away that more spectacular destruction was taking place. My only means of transportation were gone, with SEPTA closed for the night and Broad Street shut down. On my way across Broad, riot police were clearing out the area. A few of them pushed a kid on the ground, and when I stopped to watch, one firmly pushed me and told me to get the hell out.

“Excuse me?” I said to him.

“Don’t,” my friend Steve said to me. “They’re just sick of this.”

It wasn’t until I got west of Broad that I realized exactly what they were sick of: The streets seemed post-apocalyptic. Nearly every news kiosk was overturned, and strewn City Papers and Philadelphia Weeklys concealed the gray of the sidewalk. You couldn’t walk 20 yards without crunching shards of broken beer bottles under your feet. Occasionally, the bright orange of a small fire would catch my eye.

The most serious fire ignited at 16th and Walnut. As I walked by, someone lit the heaping bags of trash, and I turned around to stomp it out with my feet and yelled at the arsonist, who responded by grabbing my knit hat and throwing it onto the nascent flames. By the time the police arrived, it had effloresced into something too large to extinguish with feet. Spectators surrounded it and snapped pictures with their camera phones.

I walked up Broad to the site of an uprooted stoplight laying on the ground with its wires exposed. It wasn’t the first. On my way to 7-Eleven, I passed at least three more stoplights that had been ripped out of the ground, the lights broken out of the yellow caves. And 7-Eleven — the last late-night supplier of tobacco for smokers across the world — had closed to prevent looting.

No matter where I went, hoots and hollers carried down the streets. I had to think that this was no longer anymore about the Phillies winning than it was about an excuse for primal mob aggression. I had seen the aftermath, but I realized that there was more I hadn’t seen: overturned cars and store lootings slightly southward. Is this really how people react to good news?

The sideways kiosks provided for good makeshift benches. I sat down and smoked, and a man with a backwards 1979 Phillies hat came up to me and asked me if I was OK. I told him I was fine, I just hated seeing the city in such disrepair. I wondered aloud how much of the revenue Philadelphia earned from the World Series was lost in one fell, raucous swoop.

“You gotta understand,” the man started, “they’ve been waiting for this for years. It’s been 100 total sports seasons since Philly’s won a championship. They’re just happy to finally see it.” I asked why happiness translated into the destruction of property. The man shrugged.

I don’t get it.