Art Project Asks People to Stay Up All Night in Philadelphia

“Dusk ‘til Dawn” explores the contours and implications of a 24-hour city.

A collage in the control room of a newspaper printing plant (All photos by Malcolm Burnley)

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It’s a Thursday night in November and a party bus pulls up to the curb at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — four hours after closing time. The bus is carrying a boatload of chilled Red Bull (sans vodka); it’s decked out with strobe laser lights, a stripper’s pole and flatscreen TVs. Waiting to board, at the base of the museum’s famous “Rocky steps,” is an entourage that’s 15-deep; we won’t return for another 10 hours. By the time we do, bleary-eyed, we’ll have paid homage to an iconic diner, hunted for Civil War ghosts at Fort Mifflin along the Delaware River, and petted a three-banded armadillo — all before sunrise.

This eclectic overnight adventure (9:30 p.m. till 8 a.m.) is partly the brainchild of Sarah Biellmer, the assistant director of Temple Contemporary art gallery. Her free, one-time-only expedition is intended to explore a simple question: What are the contours and implications of a 24-hour city? A dozen students from Temple and the Tyler School of Art, a few professors, and yes, one journalist, join her aptly named “Dusk ’til Dawn” tour.

The City of Brotherly Love has long been derided as a 9-to-5 town whose best round-the-clock options involve either cheesesteaks or Wawa. In a push toward becoming a 24-hour city, Philadelphia recently joined New York and Chicago in offering late-night subway service. Ridership ballooned by 50 percent during the weekend intervals in the initial months of a pilot program, despite an additional cost of $34,000 per day for SEPTA, the region’s public transit agency. The public applause was loud, and polling showed overwhelming demand to extend the program beyond 2014, with the majority preferring 24/7 subways, instead of 24/2. Although Philadelphia is not a 24-hour mecca like Cairo or Madrid, it’s nudging closer, and “Dusk ’til Dawn” peers into its off-peak culture.

Philadelphia Zoo educator Bradley holds a three-banded armadillo.

As we arrive at our first stop, the Philadelphia Zoo, a bespectacled design student remarks, “If I get to hold a sloth, it would be the highlight of my life.” Inside the gates, we’re greeted by a boyish after-hours tour guide, Bradley, who energetically defies his own circadian rhythms. “Who knows which animal walks the grounds during the day?” he asks, before aiming his blue-tinted flashlight up a four-story tree. (The color blue is invisible for many animals.) An ostentation of shiny cerulean peacocks illume in the dark while they’re slumbering on branches. “Peacocks come from India, so this is a strategy to avoid being eaten by tigers,” Bradley explains.

Not all species have adapted well to darkness, although we are shown plenty of nocturnal animals that have: prehensile-tailed porcupines, maned wolves (their pee smells like marijuana) and even the bald eagle. But humans, for one, remain predisposed to resting at night and working during the day. Studies show that late-night workers are more prone to cancer, diabetes and depression because of their hourly schedules. The giraffe, perhaps the strangest insomniac of the zoo’s 2,000-animal collection, is accustomed to sleeping only one hour per night because it’s scared of crashing down like timber while sleeping upright. The point is, we’re not all conditioned to be night owls.

The “Dusk ‘til Dawn” party bus (at 9:45 p.m.)

Back on the bus, we snack on Insomnia cookies while Michael Stanton, an architect and scholar — one of the professors in tow — gives a Powerpoint presentation about the European concept of flaneur. Flaneur is the 19th-century word for anyone who passionately meanders through urban streets without any utilitarian purpose (today we call them millennials). “The city asks you not to pay attention, not to recognize who’s pulling the levers and releasing the clouds of colored smoke,” Stanton lectures, in a reference to the Wizard of Oz. And tonight, we will pursue an overnight version, he says, by “delicately lifting that curtain and investigating the exposed flesh of the 24-hour city.”

From the natural to the industrial, we trek to the printing press of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News in suburban Conshohocken at about 2 a.m. On view everywhere is automation that has decreased employment at the plant in recent years — conveyor belts zipping papers from room to room; giant cylinders pumping out pages independently; aluminum plates that are reusable and replaced with ease. There’s a half-vacant warehouse room where hundreds of one-ton rolls of newsprint are stored. The emptiness is made worse by the large corridors of machinery that sit idle even during high production, on account of the shrunken size of print readership of late. “I’d give the lifespan another 10 to 15 years,” says one longtime plant worker who provided a tour of the facilities. In more ways than one, this printing press is a graveyard-type job.

The latest edition of Philadelphia news runs on an overhead conveyor belt at Schuylkill Print Works.

Soldiers and convicts slept at Fort Mifflin during the Civil and Revolutionary wars.

Running behind schedule, we make a stop at Fort Mifflin — an active base during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars now located near Philadelphia’s airport — for an abbreviated ghost tour (we see no apparitions). We skip a scheduled visit to a wholesale-produce facility in South Philadelphia. Before our final stop at Wissahickon Park in northern Philly, where we’ll witness a member of the National Audubon Society spotting owls, our group traverses to Little Pete’s in Center City for coffee and a snack.

Juxtaposed at this cash-only diner are the signs of a round-the-clock urban center: the corner-booth drunk; the cakes behind the counter that all but disappear by 4:30 a.m.; a man fueling up for work on a turkey hoagie for breakfast. If Philadelphia is a bona fide 24-hour city, Little Pete’s would be a stalwart. But in October, the owner of Little Pete’s announced that an incoming luxury hotel will force the diner to close by the end of next year, ending its 35-year run. Local writers have lamented the announcement, bemoaning all that will be lost in Center City along with that greasy spoon. Implicit in those preemptive obituaries is the sense that along with the diner, so will go some of the city’s late-night vibrancy. Although “Dusk ‘til Dawn” found pockets of the city that never stop, it took a party bus and a lot of determination to reach them.

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Malcolm was a Next City 2015 equitable cities fellow, and is a contributing writer for the Fuller Project for International Reporting, a nonprofit journalism outlet that reports on issues affecting women. He’s also a contributing writer to POLITICO magazine, Philadelphia magazine, WHYY and other publications. He reports primarily on criminal injustice, urban solution and politics from his home city of Philadelphia.

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Tags: philadelphia

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