Suburbia Comes To Manayunk

Shortly before noon today, as I was coaxing my tightfisted muse to grant me inspiration for one more column, my wife called and invited me to join her for lunch in Manayunk. Anne had spent the morning there visiting a client, and I jumped at the chance to flee the oppressive blankness of my computer screen. (A blank computer screen grows distinctly oppressive after about forty-five minutes.) Manayunk would jolt my jaded mind to action. Yes, a dose of Manayunk was precisely what I needed. 

If you’ve never heard of Manayunk, you’re in good company. Few souls beyond the outermost orbits of Philadelphia know about it. The name Manayunk gives the impression of a fat, sloppy sandwich stuffed with unwholesome meat and red sauce and an overabundance of sauteed peppers and onions. Or it could be the Native American word for New Jersey. It’s not a pretty name. But in fact, Manayunk is Philadelphia’s most congenial pleasure district. If Philadelphia were Paris, Manayunk would be its Montmartre. A nineteenth-century mill town swallowed up long ago by the expanding city, Manayunk plunges recklessly from lofty hills down a labyrinth of narrow streets to the Schuylkill River below. Stone church spires still dominate the old skyline, and blocks of antique row houses cling to the steeply pitched hillsides.

The ramshackle beauty of Manayunk attracted a colony of minor artists nearly a century ago. Today the district still exudes a bracing whiff of bohemian charm -- enough to entice the more adventurous sort of yuppies to the drop-dead-trendy restaurants and quirky shops that line Main Street. There they flock to eat trendy foods and drink trendy drinks, to watch and be watched by the right sort of good-looking trendy people. Then they go home to Center City or wherever it is they came from. They don’t live in Manayunk. The upper streets still belong to the old-time working class, many of them descendants of the original mill workers. The yuppies stick to Main Street.

Anne and I live just over the hill and across the park from Manayunk, so I hopped into my car and reached Main Street within ten minutes. It was a brilliant Manayunk noon; I quickly hiked past the exuberant shops and breathed the youthful air, then ducked into Jake’s, the fashionable eating house where Anne had asked me to join her. I had never been to Jake’s before. Its culinary offerings notched an enviable 27 in my Zagat Guide, so it had to be good. The interior walls were cleverly painted to resemble cushiony fabric; you knew immediately that individuals of finely tuned contemporary urban sensibilities ran this place. I sat with my back to the dining hall and began a pleasant lunch with Anne. (I ordered the barbecued salmon with yam fries; I was relieved that Jake’s seemed to offer real food as opposed to various forms of mousse as entrees.) At this early lunch hour, we had the place almost to ourselves.

Before long, I became aware that the table behind me had filled up. The voices were exclusively female, with the cheery, chatty sound of female lunch conversation. I didn’t listen at first, preoccupied as I was with my salmon and fries. But then the conversation began to pierce through my indifference barrier. First I noticed that the voices didn’t sound like those of your typical downtown-chic professional women. We have plenty of those in Philadelphia, and I’m accustomed to their measured cadences. No, these voices surprised me with a refreshing hint of the commonplace, of the unabashedly mundane. It was a sound I had missed since I moved here from Allentown last year. The voices droned and drawled with the luxurious ease of happy materialists... I began to overhear actual snippets of conversation, though I found it impossible to distinguish one speaker from another. The women talked of travel plans with their families, compared prices, inquired about frequent flyer miles and meal tickets. One shared news about a sleepover party for her daughter; one mentioned a visit from her mother. There was more talk of prices, of shopping, of vacations and kids and husbands. I was listening to the voice of old-time suburbia, speaking as if with one droning voice. Right here in the coolest restaurant in too-cool Manayunk! It sounded so much like a late-night TV parody that I began to chuckle in spite of myself. How I wish I could have written it all down on a notepad! I think Anne was amused less by the overheard conversation than by my unsuccessful efforts to stifle my mirth.

I quickly cast a glance behind me. These were YOUNG women, in their thirties at most, but they sounded like members of our parents’ generation. And you know, I began to like them for sounding that way. I liked the idea that suburbia wasn’t a fleeting state of mind peculiar to the generation that fought World War II. I liked it that these youngish women were also squarish -- that they’d continue to uphold the banner of suburbia into the next generation. Was their conversation conventional and flat and uninspired? Sure it was. But it was also unpretentious, good-natured and honest. No dueling ironies, no mock-insults, no ‘Duh!’s to be heard among them.

I wonder how it is that some of us cling to our sensible suburban past as readily as some of us drift into urban chic. To aspire to be edgy seems more ambitious than to aspire to be conventional, at least on the face of it. But so many young urbanites are edgy (and edgy in the same way) that edginess has lost its edge. It's the old story of conforming to nonconformity. 

Suburbanites never make a pretense of nonconformity. They gravitate to the mundane because that's the timeless wisdom of hardworking people engaged in raising families and maintaining property. I suppose most of us, edgy or not, simply behave in a manner designed to win the approval of our peers. But I can’t take away from the real achievements and virtues of the suburbanites, even if my cynical side inclined me to chuckle today at lunch in Manayunk.

Cynic's Pick of the Week

Responding to unfounded accusations that they knew about the September 11 attacks in advance, the Bush administration has now gone to the other extreme: the Prez, VP and other officials have been warning us nearly every day, it seems, that we could be annihilated by terrorist attacks any moment now. Nice way to start the summer.