Vacancies are very few.Īt night the numerous bars and dance clubs spill onto the sidewalk, and a beery exuberance hangs in the air.
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Storefronts are filled with boutiques, gay bars, brunch spots, and the odd sex shop. Pedestrians hurry up and down Walnut and Spruce streets, while those with the luxury of time hang out, smoke cigarettes, and eat slices on the quiet cobblestones of Camac Street. Today, the Gayborhood is one of the neighborhoods that makes Center City great. It has majorly turned around in the last 10 years.” – Bob Skiba, archivist, William Way LGBT Community Center If you remember, until 2004 13th Street was not very nice. “Before it was called the Gayborhood it was not really a neighborhood. Former Philadelphia City Paper editor David Warner remembers that before the term Gayborhood came along, “13th Street had an identity, it just wasn’t a particularly good one.” The area was one of the last to host Center City strip clubs, straight and gay, before the industry was almost entirely removed to the Delaware River front. Drugs and sex were sold on the corners as recently as the middle of the 21st Century’s first decade.
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Like many mid-20th century LGBT communities the Gayborhood emerged from Philly’s red light district. There is a strong argument that the appellation, which is now commonly applied as a descriptor to everywhere from Chelsea to West Hollywood, actually originated in the City of Brotherly Love.īefore the moniker’s invention, the area now known as the Gayborhood didn’t have a recognized name. If any LGBT community gets to be called the Gayborhood, it's right that it be in Philadelphia. Photo courtesy/Bob Skiba, William Way LGBT Community Center INSPIRED BY MR. ” (It’s perhaps worth noting that Chicago’s neighborhood is also remarkably up front: Boystown.) “Ten years after Chicago put up the rainbow pylons, Philly became the second city in the world to do that. “I have not heard ‘gayborhood’ as an official name anywhere else besides Philadelphia,” says Amin Ghaziani, professor of sociology and author of the 2014 book There Goes the Gayborhood?, which analyzes the decline of LGBT neighborhoods in the face of gentrification. By the time the community had grown powerful enough to claim an official moniker, American big city culture was ready for an unequivocally-titled LGBT neighborhood – even in historically conservative Philadelphia. Perhaps that significant lag time between the emergence of LGBT institutions and the neighborhood’s official designation accounts for the directness of its name. (In a recent essay in n+1 magazine’s book City By City, Chanelle Benz refers to the area circa- 1999 as “the Fruit Loop.”) Before then it was known as a “gay ghetto,” in the words of Bob Skiba, archivist for the William Way LGBT Community Center. (The bookstore Giovanni’s Room had opened a few years earlier.) But the neighborhood between Walnut and Pine, Juniper and 11th Street didn’t adopt its current name until the mid-to-late 1990s. This month marks the 40-year anniversary of the first gay community center to open in Philadelphia, a significant moment in the emergence of institutions openly meant to cater to the community. And that stuck." – David Warner, first gay editor of City Paper I wrote the headline and just stole it from Mr. “For me it wasn’t a conscious attempt to coin a phrase, it was just a fun pun. But no, Philly had apparently decided to apply its notoriously blunt nature to the name of its queer neighborhood, too. At first I thought everyone was joking, or just applying the common nomenclature of gayborhood (lower case g) that was by then being widely applied to many urban LGBT neighborhoods. In Philadelphia, on the other hand, it's just called the Gayborhood. All of these were proudly queer neighborhoods: I met my editor at The Stranger in a bar adorned with floor-to-ceiling images of naked men and bathrooms earmarked for “boys” or “men.”īut you wouldn’t know these were LGBT-oriented communities by looking at a map.
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I’d just come from a brief tenure on the West Coast, where I’d visited the Castro, San Diego’s Hillcrest, and lived on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. When I first moved to Philadelphia in 2010, I was struck by the starkly descriptive name of Philadelphia’s LGBT neighborhood.