Moon over West Philly

Pitch black when I ventured outside this morning, to the point where the stars were bright and the moon hung low over the horizon in the west.

E & I ran the Acme loop. It was something we both kind of fell into doing without discussing what course to run. I had wanted to go shorter but went along with this. Weather was chillier, the wind made my arms cold as it blew against us.

Only striking thing about this morning's run was how several buildings, regular fixtures (literally) on this route were in various stages of getting torn down. This included a building that had been a corner bar, where the door was perpetually open and I remember peeking in on the run on several occasions. Another was a house on 4900 block of Larchwood, a perfectly good house on a well lived in block until it was gutted by fire. Now there is an unsightly gap in the row.

This is the next step of urban decay (the maturation phase?) where the old abandoned (and sometimes not) buildings finally start collapsing and are helped along by efforts to clear them out. Sofar, at least in West Philly, its one here and one there, not more than a trickle and not enough to do anything but leave ever increasing numbers of small lots. But I suspect at some point this will gain a momentum to where swaths of buildings will have been cleared and whole blocks will be empty lots. Then, somewhere down the line, they get rebuilt. I hear Detroit is in the flattened block stage, and some say it is being reclaimed by prairie. Then of course there is New Orleans, where this process has been sharply accelerated, to the point where its wait and see what emerges from the flattened neighborhoods.

And now I better cut off these musings and get ready for work. Oh yeah, 8 in 65:34.