You're now holding our twenty-first issue. This will be the last Philadelphia Independent you'll see for awhile, and maybe the last one for good. Why? The reason is simple: We need a break. We may start up again one day, and if we do, we promise our second volume will be even better than our first. But the first volume may turn out to be it for the Independent, in which case we ask only that you keep a place for us, in your desk or on your shelf.

The first issue of The Philadelphia Independent's first volume began with the words “Put down this newspaper and look around. The city lives.” What followed was a brief manifesto for a so-called “...

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The first time I encountered an artichoke was at the Italian Market on a trip with the Girl Scouts. I was ten years old; we were shopping for an international dinner. After I moved to the neighborhood myself, when my son was still in a stroller, he would see the piles of artichokes and cry for them as if they were lollipops. “Artichoke! Artichoke!” An artichoke looks like a prehistoric rose. It's the color of army fatigues. Each of its petals is tipped with a needle-thin thorn. It must be eaten with great tact, nibbled and sucked at the base of its pulpy leaves. Eventually, you will be rewarded with its heart, mellow and succulent. An articho...

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Advice: Don't let your wife get in the car with Gino. Don't let Gino take your wife shopping for a gift. You're flying to Milwaukee. One thousand miles away. Midwest Express flight 382. Most assuredly, Gino will attempt to contact your wife. It's a hurdle. Be strong. Be smart. Be safe.

[By the way, in flight, should you request 7-Up and they ask if is Slice okay, don't freak out. It's economic reasons. They save money and thus so do we. Remember that. We have guys who go apeshit. Dramatize it. We're trying to clear them out. Get rid of them. Complainers, we feel, bring us down. In a heap.]

But listen. The Gino thi...

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My great Ninth Street moment occurred one morning on my way to open my store. I was coming from my apartment on Tenth. As I came within earshot, a roaring cheer arose. It's an uplifting feeling to hear this sound. I pretended it was in my honor. As I walked closer, I saw Sly Stallone. He was in his sweats and stocking cap, his Rocky regalia. He ran past me. Studio goons were barking directions at the mob lining the sidewalks. A gaggle of breathless girls followed him, panting and squealing. I had happened upon the shooting of Rocky IV or V or VI. The Italian Stallion was down here to glorify and be glorified, to squeeze the last buck from his...

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When Jacques Barzun wrote in 1954 that, “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better know baseball,” few Americans could have disagreed. As Michael MacCambridge writes in his new history of the NFL, America's Game:

To say that baseball was the number one sport in America at the end of World War II is to imply a hierarchy where none existed. Baseball towered over the sporting landscape like a colossus, the unquestioned National Pastime, the only game that mattered. Most fans had come to accept baseball's primacy as something immutable, as much a part of the natural order of things as air and water.

And wh...

HIDALGO, Mexico—For a few months of 2003, no fashion-conscious young man dared venture out of his loft apartment without a mesh-backed, foam-billed “trucker hat” on his shaggy head. Born in the suburbs and educated at the finest schools, these urban cowboys hungered for the authenticities of the rural life they had never led. Many paired their new mesh caps with rodeo belt buckles, western-style shirts, and cans of working-class beer, perfecting, it seemed, the art of ironic style.

When the trend grew stale, the hipsters gave away their hats to charity, and the charities auctioned them to private used clothing dealers, and the dealers sol...

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Professional Color, a photographic services lab, had occupied an unassuming white brick building at the corner of Seventh and Ranstead streets, since May of 1957. With their knowledgeable staff, consistent film processing and devotion to customer service, the lab—known to its customers as Pro-Color—had built up a small but loyal following among Philadelphia's professional photographers.

Just before Christmas, Pro-Color's owner Charles P. Mills Jr., known to most as ‘Bud', wrote his customers a short letter. “It is with great distress and sadness that I write to tell you that Pro-Color will cease operations on December 30th,” the letter sai...

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BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Peter Napolitano is one of the most colorful bartenders in all of New York City. He is a man with a galloping passion for ideas, a consummate folk philosopher who will bend your ears for as long as you care to allow. Peter, or Pete, as he is more often called, tends bar at Melody Lanes, a vintage bowling alley located in the Greenwood Heights section of Brooklyn. He has been doing so for the last thirteen years. Though he claims to have never read a book, he can often be found chatting animatedly behind the bar about the fundamentals of super string theory or the writings of Joseph Campbell. “I got a great book collection,” he ...

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PARKSIDE, Phila.—The scene could almost be the meeting of any residents association on any October evening.

At the front of the second floor sanctuary of Christ Community Baptist Church, an architect is clicking through colorful renderings of a building he's hoping to build, droning on about shrubbery and the inevitable question of parking. The pews are filled with seventy or so residents. Some shift in their seats, anxious to get their say in. Others are taking notes, or glancing at two handouts. The first is an agenda from Philadelphia Public Schools, a fuzzy-lettered sheet of goldenrod paper that looks as though it's fresh off the ditto...

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Toward the end of the past election season, it became fashionable to imagine that the electorate was choosing between belief and empiricism, or faith and reason, or even theocracy and secularism. To be sure, the incumbent's religious conversion seemed to operate in him as a kind of unshakable moral confidence. He and his apostles offered critics a crusader's zeal, immune to contrary evidence or ill results and intolerant of doubt, complication, or dissent. And as we know, his followers seemed to buy that zeal. Confidence has a powerful allure. To cast the recent phase of the American experiment, however, as a grudge match between the “faith-...

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