At the southeastern edge of Temple University’s campus lies Cecil B. Moore Plaza, a sunken square where rectangular bricks slabs of gray-white square tiles are divided by red brick strips. Built in 1983, it was completed right as the post-war dream finally died and the cold smile of Reagan cast its gleam upon post-industrial America. It was supposed to lend some class to the adjacent subway station, newly renovated with great glass windows to bring glorious sunbeams into the squalid cavern below. It didn’t really work, of course: Temple couldn’t force-gentrify North Philly until its coffers were sufficiently swollen with out-of-state tuition and donations from now-wealthy graduates of this hardscrabble little commuter school. Yet the plaza and station remain, the last holdouts of Great Society liberalism even as the Paley Library comes down and Beury Hall nears demolition.
The station remains as ratty as ever, the sunbeams only serving to highlight the grime below. The plaza, however, has assumed a new role as a mecca for local skaters. Day and night, they race past one another, moving in their own invisible lanes clear to themselves but not officially marked. Whether in the blazing noontime heat or the twilight gloom, the long rolling drone of skateboards gliding across the plaza remains constant. The traffic on Cecil B. Moore Avenue thunders — dirt bikes snarling, car tires squealing, buses wheezing as they kneel — and the drone still cuts through.
Then sometimes, the skaters will cease for a minute. The drone disappears and there are no yelps of pain from those thrown from their wheeled wooden bronco. As if by some unknown cosmic law, the traffic also ceases; the aforementioned dirt bikes and cars and buses are a million miles away, banished to some hidden underground highway where they silently glide beneath the earth. You’re in the middle of the sixth-largest city in America on a campus with tens of thousands of students and you could hear a pin drop. The wind rustles the alleys of plane trees. Maybe a small giggle or odd little comment is heard; the air is pungent with marijuana, after all. Otherwise, all is still for a few brief moments, moments when you suddenly hear how loud your voice was. You feel guilty for that loud voice; you’re so terrified of being silent for even a second that you bellow over man and God and nature and your own crowded brain. That moment of silence feels like an ineffable gift of divine grace.
The skaters begin again, circling on their paths endlessly, falling, getting back up, and jumping through the air, sometimes to cheers but mostly to indifference. The benches are crowded with observers, most getting stoned off their gourds; the skateboard-drones rattle slowly in their addled brains. You could watch the skaters do their thing for hours, smashing their bodies every which way but into each other. Once, a skater walked up to you and amidst his poser hypebeast blather referred to this place as “the fish tank.” Yes, how appropriate. Fish in a tank circle one another in the exact same invisible lanes, getting within spitting distance and then pulling back. They are fascinating to watch, moving constantly lest the water stops flowing past their gills and they die. The skaters must also remain in motion, achieving a delirious inner peace like Sufi whirling dervishes.
The crowds thicken as the sun dips below the horizon. The air fills with chatter and weed smoke and laughter emanating from throngs of people dressed in baggy jeans and band t-shirts and cargo shorts and black stockings. From afar, we all look like we’re going nowhere fast, avoiding the harshness of contemporary life on this plaza built in a different dying era. Together, though we may not know one another, we form a silent family. We are connected by who we’re not, the last bulwarks against the optimized, perfect world of sanded-down edges and digitally-enforced paranoia. We see the last rays of our epoch’s sun and figure we might as well enjoy the flaring red light. We’re all in the fish tank, and we’re all moving — even while we’re sitting — because if the water doesn’t flow past our gills we will die.