52nd and Market. What it is: an El stop, closed most weekends; a business corridor, hampered by SEPTA's delayed construction; the center of the former "Main Street" of West Philadelphia; the corner where politicians start off their campaigns to show they're "of the people"; the center of two police districts; my neighborhood.
What it's called: the most dangerous corner in Philadelphia; the "ghetto"; a wasteland; beyond gentrification.
This page is an attempt to separate what it is (to the people who live here) from what it's called (to the people who label it, write about it, avoid it). Ethnographic in premise, it's about collecting the stories, through image, text and testimony, that are the life of the assemblage, the paste of the collage, the truth of the place.
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