7th Street Memory Box

Away from the well-known business districts of the Ninth Street Market and East Passyunk Avenue is a business strip of a different sort. As was the case throughout many of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, the area anchored by the intersection of Seventh and Wolf Streets was once full of neighborhood stores. The shops here catered especially to South Philadelphia’s Jewish community. Now, these business have long been closed, and the Jewish community dispersed throughout the city and suburbs. But echoes of the past remain in signs on shuttered shop fronts and in living memory within institutions such as the Stiffel Senior Center. But the neighborhood’s future is also in evidence: the area is a growing center for Philly’s Cambodian community. Seventh Street is now dotted with shops that sell vibrant traditional clothing and rent videos in Khmer and both a former church and a former synagogue have become part of a Buddhist temple complex.

Photographer RA Friedman uses vintage photographic techniques and defunct processing techniques to give his work both an illusion of antiquity and a tactile connection to the past. With 7th Street Memory Box, Friedman took his work—usually seen in a gallery setting—and devised a method to display it in a public and interactive way that references the past by borrowing old technology.

The zoetrope is a machine that was invented in 1834. Used as an early animation device, it creates an illusion of motion through the rapid rotation of multiple images mounted inside a drum. A zoetrope can be almost as simple as a pinwheel—a ring made of paper and stuck on a stick—or as elaborate as the linear zoetropes that have been constructed inside subway tunnels in cities throughout the country. 7th Street Memory Box is the height of a telephone booth and constructed of steel, with a four foot tall drum rotated by a hand crank.

During Journeys South, 7th Street Memory Box visited the Stiffel Center and other locations in South Philadelphia and spent its Saturdays at Capitolo Playground, located at the “cheesesteak nexus” of Ninth Street and East Passyunk Avenue. Attracted by its unique appearance, passersby would pause for a moment in their daily business and experience the satisfaction of turning the crank and setting in motion portraits of Stiffel Center members. As the steel drum spun, the faces of these South Philadelphia elders moved and spiraled within a panorama of their changing neighborhood.

About Journeys South

Community-based public artists often ask themselves how they can best represent the history and spirit of the communities with whom they work. How can they create with integrity and yet understand that they may not be the true owners of the finished art? The rightful owners of these works of art are not anonymous: they are the children who walk by the site on the way to school, they are the members of local churches, they run the corner stores, and they are elders who have lived in the same house for forty years. They are the activists, block captains, and ordinary citizens who feel connected to and synonymous with the fabric of the community. They provide the spark that makes our work possible and the content that gives it shape.

Journeys South is not about the history of political figures, medaled heroes, artists or entertainers—many of which have been depicted on murals south of South Street. Rather, it is a series of projects that excavate and elevate the experience and memories of living South Philadelphians to tell the history of a community that has welcomed many, resisted the settlement of some, but which has evolved ways to accommodate newcomers who would leave their distinctive marks on the streets, homes, shops and public institutions of Philadelphia’s original working class community, and shape its particular and changing character.

Journeys South does not add to the inventory of large scale paintings on walls. Its title is less a destination than a direction. It seeks a different experience of public art—one which requires greater engagement on the part of the viewer who is asked to “journey” through time and space to connect ideas and images. In the course of planning discussions, project advisor Helen Shannon of the Museum Studies Department at the University of the Arts talked about the importance of the interstitial: of the things in between the projects that help us make connections. While she intended to point out the need to connect the individual works of art, it became clear that these works of art are themselves connectors to each other and the larger body of murals and other expressions of South Philadelphia’s cultural heritage.

With such a richly layered immigrant history, and the attendant changing areas of contested territories and values, the inquiry into developing Journeys South would have to honor the live geology of these communities and delve deeply into the lives and institutions that supported their settlement and contributions to life in South Philadelphia. Using the networks that had been created over years in previous projects, and support that came from a planning grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Heritage Philadelphia Program, Mural Arts staff convened a group of advisors—artists, business people, community organizers and residents. Over the course of several months, this group would explore the territory and help develop an approach both to history in South Philadelphia and to what it meant to make sense the community’s long and often invisible changes.

The seven artists creating each part of Journeys South, five of whom were born and raised and/or currently reside in South Philadelphia, worked with community members, historians, and folklorists to gain a deeper understanding of the culture and history of South Philadelphia’s legendary neighborhoods.

Journeys South comprised four projects: 7th Street Memory Box, Neighbor Ballads, Start Here and Different Paths, One Market. These four temporary works of public art were on exhibition from April – June 2011 at various locations along South 9th Street and East Passyunk Avenue, bordered by Christian Street to the north and West Moore Street to the south.

Location Note: This temporary project is no longer on view at this location.