Great article about Tastykake in Philadelphia magazine. (I’m a month late to the story. This blog is like six months late to being reanimated. Expect more - I’m done with school.) After recounting what seems to be a typical Philly tale of a political insider taking over a dying legacy business that’s not so much a business as it is a dumping ground for city money, the author muses on the consequences:
Tastykake is a creature of the business world it inhabits, a world where a weak private sector doesn’t typically lead the public sector, but rather depends on it for subsidies and aid.
“In Philadelphia, it’s very much who you know, and not how good your ideas are,” says Stephen Van Dyck, the former CEO of MariTrans Shipping. After 25 years in Philadelphia, Van Dyck grew so frustrated with the city’s business culture — and the stream of public funding he saw going to private enterprise in the form of cash for stadiums, Delaware River dredging and the effort to keep shipbuilding alive at the Navy Yard — that he relocated his firm from Market Street to Tampa in 1999.
It’s like we feel bad for those companies — ones with the right connections, at any rate — unfortunate enough to be headquartered here (Comcast excluded). They are so weak, so fragile, and there are so few of them that, even in dire financial times, virtually no objections were raised when Pizzi asked for a little public assistance. And it is, after all, Tastykake we’re talking about.
The Gen-Xers also discovered the cities; they’re buying in a proper way. The Millennials are the ones we’re talking about. And they love cities desperately. And they’re loving them to death.
This Gawker comment hits on something:
As someone who doesn’t live in New York, I’m continually amazed by how much of living in New York seems to be about Living in New York. So, when you’re done Working in New York and Organic Grocery Shopping in New York on the way back to your Neighborhood As Signifier That’s The New Previous Neighborhood, when do you find time to just, well, just…be in New York and clip your toenails and make toast and subtly fart? Say what you will about the concrete slabs of Toronto, I still manage to find moments where it’s not about an obsessively documented narrative of Living in Toronto.
Man, is it tempting to pun off of Seoul. It is so alluring.
It will be difficult to resist when I head there on Friday, for work. Luckily I’m going with S, who speaks Korean. When pronounced properly, Seoul does not lend itself to puns. And anyway, the concept of a “soul,” such as it is, is most likely not a cognate across Korean and English.
A travel feature I wrote for Nylon Guys is now on newsstands. (It’s the May 2010 issue.) My girlfriend, Sharon Kim, took the photographs. Click through to enlarge.
