30th street station is pretty huge. Massive congestion, very little parking.

Market street is definitely down town. You won't see much crime as long as you stay on Market and other main streets, but you won't find any parking either unless you want to pay $30.00/day or chance the PPA towing you away the first time your meter hits zero. Getting the car back after that is not a pleasant experience. Congestion is prevalent all throughout this area. Getting into or out of town during the busy hours in a car is a trying experience.

There has been a serial rapist on the loose downtown for a couple years now too. (though they may have caught him at some point and i just missed the headline)

It really would be hard for me to imagine many places WORSE to live than here. If i was you i would not consider it for a minute if for no other reason than the weather sucks year round.


I have never in my life heard anyone refer to the people of Philly as "lovely." As a whole the people in Philly are what you would call stone cold rude and would probably be a severe culture shock to a westerners senses...LOL.
Especially the civil servants.

An upside, if you can call it that, is that the cops don't really care about anything inside the city...though outside some of the small departments do a good impersonation of over-zealous tyrants.

PS: The roads suck here, and there are very, very few roads worthy of spirited driving on. Most are quite a distance from the city and are not long anyway, we have absolutely no paralell to the roads you're used to here.

There are a lot of tracks around here, but few suitable for a road car. They're either ovals or drag strips for the most part. I think you'd have to go to NY or Virginia for a road course.

LOL

Joisey, Nah, you don't want to live in New Joisey.

Put a pencil on the map, point on Philly, head south on I-95 and voila! 20 mins you are in DE, 40 mins you are in MD. A lot of people who work in philly live south on I-95.

I have to agree with m21sniper about the pot holes, some are big enough you'd need a snorkle during a rain storm.

Don't do it!

Stay away from NJ too, unless you have tons of $$$ to dump on taxes and like to live in the most densely populated state in the us. NJ claims 7 of the top 10 spots for highest income and property taxes and it's getting worse by the day.

N.J. claims 7 of top 10 counties for highest property taxes in nation
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/12/nj_counties_rank_in_top_10_hig.html

NO! NO! NO!

Best,
Tom
(Former Resident)

East & Midwest move to the west easy

West move to the Midwest or east Hellish, I have done it, never again!

Really think it through, I went east for 3X the money it was like doing time. I could not assimilate.

Angela,

The website www.city-data.com is terrific for comparing various cites. The forums on the site also contain a wealth of information. It's like the "Pelican Parts" of finding information on cites. The suburbs in PA & NJ are very nice with good schools and you can take a train to downtown Philly.

I probably should have emphasized the bad roads part of the equation more. They're hideous.

SOME of the suburbs are very nice. Some are actually just extentions of the ghetto.

Philadelphia proper has a black majority and if you're not used to dealing with the attitudes of big city East coast blacks it can definitely shock your senses if you're interacting with "regular people". For instance if she worked in a big bldg and went to a food court just ordering food and observing the customer service of some of the wonderful employees would be a rude shock.

Some of the surrounding smaller cities/burroughs like Chester and parts of Bristol are even worse than Philly itself. Going to Chester is like stepping into a 3rd world country. In fact if there was such a thing as a 4th world country, Chester would be on that list. LOL.

But there are nice burbs in this area, if you have the coin to live in them. My old man lives in Huntingdon Valley, and it's gorgeous. Half a mil there will get you a hell of a lot of house on a nice little chunk of land. And the school there is really good. The weather still sucks though, and there's still nowhere to test a car like her 911 when she gets the urge, at least nowhere comparable to where she lives.

Did i mention that the weather sucks?

One more thing...in the horrible crash of the Hindenburg (in New Jersey) the commentator was really saying, "Oh, the humidity, oh the humidity".

Summers and Butters, nope.

while it would be cool to welcome you to the delaware valley, don't do it.
too many cons - in every sense of the word

They boo Santa. How bad can it be!!

90% plus humidity is the norm from June to August. I forgot about the early no good AC 911 condition. That would not be a happy marriage, her 911 would be a spring/fall car only around here, and her drives would consist of plodding around in single lane 35 mph traffic unless she went way outside the suburban sprawl zones.

PS: Funny line Seahawk. :)

Well, I guess I’ll be just about the only one here to speak up for living in Philly although I moved to NJ via NYC about 30 years ago, so what do I know. I do get back to visit family & friends often though and lived about an hour north in Hunterdon County, NJ on the Delaware River for 15 years. An absolutely beautiful area and coming from where you are, you might like Bucks County, PA. Someone suggested going down 95 to Delaware and that is an option. The Brandywine area is as nice as Bucks, maybe even nicer..they have roads you can do some Sunday stretching on, but you will have to go out a ways toward the west.
Yes, Philadelphia probably doesn’t rate up there from where you are coming but it does have some major history and culture. It has the oldest theater in the country (Walnut St Theater), one of the best orchestras in the world and they play in one of two of the best designed buildings in the world; the Academy of Music and the Kimball Center. Ok, I’m not going any where near the sports teams that is definitely not a safe topic to bring up.
Philadelphia is a small town for as large as it is geographically. It’s far cheaper to live there than in DC or NYC. If you don’t have kids I would consider living in town. Screw having a car you don’t need it most of the time. If you really need a car you can rent a space either in a private yard or within an apartment building; plenty of buildings offer spaces. As for locations in center city, around Jefferson Hospital is nice; ‘Society Hill’ is drop dead gorgeous with all the brownstones and is the ‘old section’ of town built in the 1700 to 1800s. Queens Village is to and is about as old, if you can get by the name it is a nice area to. It borders on Little Italy and the market there is great and quite an experience (meant that in a nice way). Market Street also has the reading Terminal market which has everything from coffee to BVDs. Two other areas in town that are nice is Rittenhouse Square and out by the Art Museum.
There are several nice suburbs with train service, but like everywhere on the East Coast, there is NO PARKING ANYWHERE NEAR ANY STATION! Don’t even bother looking, it doesn’t exist! Swarthmore, Media, Newtown Square, Devon, Paoli, Haverford, Bryn Myr, Villanova, to mention just a few. Did anyone mention colleges, Philadelphia has probably the most per square mile of any city any where. Some are almost 300 years old like Uof P; some of the top museums in the country, the Uof P Museum rivals the British Museum, they have a planetarium Ben Franklin started, there must be close to 75 more museums to chose from, there is even an Edgar Allen Poe Museum. I could go on, but the point is, contrary to what people think who maybe have never lived in Philadelphia for any length of time, it’s far from being a dump and it’s been my experience nice people live there just like they do in the town you are living in now. You may scratch your head at some of the politics, but life does seem to go on in spite of them. I vote try it, you might just find you like it more than you thought you would!
Good luck!

don't listen to him, he's a giant's fan

I had a 6'5" Black monster try and kill me in society hill once when i was sitting on a GF's front step waiting for her to get home from work.

That area is NOT safe.

I also am not a fan of the "lovely brownstone" or cobblestone streets. They suck to drive on, and the streets are super narrow and traffic absolutely crawls. And there's no parking. And rent THERE is insanely high, more than double what it costs in the NE, which IMO is a potentially much nicer section.

The only place IN Philly i would reccomend is Crestmont Farms.

Can you take a bicycle on the train? I did that a bit when I was working in Virginia. Grab the bike and get on the train - I think the only let you take bikes on weekends, but I can't remember for sure.

I've been to the Reading Market, my company's building is really close to it. I've never had a Philly Cheesesteak sandwich. It's a terrible thing to eat that goes down FABULOUSLY - LOL!!! I think you should probably only eat one or two of those in your lifetime though. At that place, you could probably buy something representing every ethnic food group on the planet.

I think, career wise, it might be a good idea for me to give this at least a temporary try. I can make a lot of positive changes if I do this even for a short time (positive for the company). But clearly, there are alot of drawbacks.... Higher cost of living, higher taxes, and my fun quotient goes way way down. :(

So: On the plus side: Good move career wise, tickets for Phillys games (a perk), museums, etc.

Negative side: Expensive, high taxes, mean people, nasty roads, icky weather.

Dang. That's not sounding so good, is it?

angela

Live in Delaware.

On your days off you head south to the Delaware seashore. You take your Porsche down Route 1 and blow the doors off the tourist heading the same direction.

Its great fun.

I've never spent much time in Delaware, but i know there's no sales tax on a lot of stuff there (or wasn't for a long time, is that still the case?), it's great for shoppers.

If you do end up around here let me know and i'll take you and your husband to the place that has the absolute best Philly cheese steaks in the entire known world. LOL.

No bikes on the trains during rush hour, off peak you can bring them. Doesn't sound like you need the bike in the city anyway.

I used to ride the R5 from Doylestown an hour and 12 minutes each way. The SEPTA train experience isn't all that bad. Once or twice a year you will run into that nightmare commute for whatever reason, a downed wire, wet leaves on the tracks, you name it. But 99% of the time they do an OK job, the trains could be a little cleaner. Everything in Philly could stand to be a little cleaner. In my direction there is ample parking, other places aren't as good.

If you like sports, I don't think you'll find a place more passionate than Philly. Yeah they did boo Santa and throw snowballs at him, but there is a hefty backstory to the reasons. Also I'd bet that 99.9% of people that know the story couldn't tell you what decade it happened in. It was 1968 if you want to know. If you want to see some jerks, just go down to the ballpark when the mets are in town.

Philadelphia has great upscale restraunts from Le Bec Fin to dive places like Byrnes Tavern for wings and crabs in Port Richmond (not the nicest part of the city). It really is an experience to get out and explore the area and all it has to offer.

I saw you mountian biked in another thread. For city riding fairmont park has some pretty decent trails. I'd ride with a partner for safetys sake. I have riden there solo. True I am male, but at 170lbs I'm not scaring many thugs away. My fiancee coaches a womens collegiate track and cross country team that runs there once or twice a week in the fall, and has never had a problem. That said there have been women that were being attacked at night on the paved portion of the trail in the East Falls area. It was happening about once a year, I do think they caught him though. Valley Forge also has some great running trails.

Road biking is pretty big in the area. Philadelphia has a great road race in early June every year. Manayunk, a nicer section of the city, turns into a day long party for the event. They come through town 10 times, each time climbing a very steep, although short, hill nicknamed the wall. It is one of my favorite events all year.

If your husband needs to find a job when he gets here you might want to look into that beforehand. I don't get the feeling that the area has many potential good jobs avaliable. I have heard Philadelphia has more Lawyers per capita than anywhere else so maybe he'll be in luck if that is what he does.

To sum it up, I've live essentially 1/2 my life here and 1/2 in South Western Colorado. I'd leave here and move to Colorado in a nano second. At the same time though I am not depressed that I am here. There really are some great things about the area.

Sniper spill the beans on your choice for the best cheese steaks. After spending a couple years in the Roxborough Manayunk area I became a big fan of Dalessandro's. I hear it is under new ownership though, and I haven't been back in a while.

Brother it is a closely guarded secret but if you like i'll take ya there in person. ;)

They have won best in city more than once though, if you want a hint.

Port Richmond is not really bad, its just inner city middle class, and pretty much all white. Mostly Polish. It's just depressing to look at or live in because it is so grey and tight. The narrow streets, row homes, jammed packed streets with parked cars. It just gives you such a closed in feeling.
Friend of mine foolishly brought his pretty californian wife back from the USMC with him when he discharged and bought a house in Port Richmond. She made it instantly clear that he was out of his flipping mind if he thought she was going to live in that dump.
They were back on a plane to Cali within a month and he has not been back since.

Fairmount park is nice, but there are muggings and stuff there. Same for Penny Pack, which is actually much, much larger (though they recently found some dead slaughtered animals killed there in some kind of bizarre ass ritual). I used to horseback ride back in there all through my 20s when my family had a nice stable of quarter horses. I was actually a pretty decent rider, my sister was a phenomenal rider and rode exclusively bare back. I used to get some pretty good action with the local girls by riding down Bustelton ave or other major thoroughfares on my favorite horse. It's not something you see every day but is still perfectly legal.

Asking a cute girl at a bus stop if she wants a ride home on your horse is a surefire way to make a new friend. :p

The gun laws here are also permissive, you can get a carry permit in a heart beat, and there are a couple decent ranges, though the closest rifle range is way outside the city and is only 100 yards.

The murder rate is obscene. We have lost 9 cops to criminals in the last 2 years i think. Every night on the news it's murder rape arson death death death.

All in all this is just not a place i would ever reccomend to anyone.