Phillyville Reader, vol. 8 - Street People are Scary; Why Doesn't Philly Just Send Them to the Bronx?

The Manhattan Institute: Julie Vitullo-Martin continues her unsolicited campaign of Philly bashing. Showing the academic vigor of a scorned sorority girl, she knits together a bunch of petty, unsubstantiated insults with the skill of your average East Hampton gossip columnist.

What is wrong with this woman? If it is possible to libel an entire city, I submit she has done precisely that. She seems particularly fearful concerned with Philadelphia's homeless problem, who she refers to as "street people."

How Dickensian of her.

While were on the literary tip, I hope some "street person" gets all "Morlock" on her ass and eats her.

For all my Morlock readers out there, she is pictured at right. Get at it.

Seriously, this old hag is the worst type of New Yorker - the kind that like to believe that NYC is coterminous with the island of Manhattan. She lives in her ivory tower on the Upper Westside of Manhattan and looks out upon a gleaming city cleansed by Giuliani's campaign to drive the homeless to the outer boroughs.

And if you won't take my word for it, consider her choice of words. She writes:

What's more, in some pre-Giuliani way, the quality-of-life issues that seem to accompany more serious crime—including belligerent panhandling, litter, and vandalism—give Philadelphia a neglected air. The vacant, undeveloped, fenced-in property that traps trash, and the disproportionate number of massive, concrete parking garages make this sensation worse. Neighborhoods that are well cared for, like Society Hill, emerge like oases when one arrives from a dilapidated area. The BID's clean-up patrol, manning small sanitation vehicles, miraculously transforms Center City's streets from filthy to clean—though on a windy day the trash was back by sundown, undoing the day's Sisyphean work.

"Pre-Giuliani" because down here in Philly we have yet to embark upon a systematic campaign to drive all of our problems across some river. That and down here in Philly, we don't have the East River and the Hudson to stop old hags like her from accidentally driving from an oasis (Manhattan) to a dilapidated area (the Bronx/Queens/Brooklyn/Staten Island).