Where to send a 20-year-old?
Hello. My daughter will turn 20 on our first day in Philadelphia. For her birthday, all she wants is to visit your beautiful city so she can keep working on her plan to get the hell out of her Georgia hometown.
Her main goal is to spend our trip walking around the following neighborhoods to see if she might like to live there: Passyunk, Fairmont, Brewerytown.
She was advised to check out these neighborhoods by a no-nonsense Italian man who is native to Philly and was a techno DJ there in the early '90s, but who now delivers chips and crackers to grocery stores in NE Georgia. He does seem very trustworthy, but maybe things have changed up there.
My daughter is very ambitious about the music and art she makes, and is willing to live and work hard to fund these efforts. She will have a roommate, and their budget is about $1200 max for a 1br. She likes to see and be around people who are not all the same as her or each other and is undeterred by grit and filth. Her planning for this trip has mainly consisted of asking online aquaintances if they know anyone in Philadelphia who will be hosting punk/EDM things in their basements while she's there.
My questions are, can we easily walk all around in these areas to get the lay of the land, or is it like, "today we'll head out to Fairmont, tomorrow we'll tackle Passyunk, better pack some beef jerky"? How long would it take to walk from the far edge of East Passyunk to the far edge of Fairmont? How long would it take to walk from Kingsessing to Olney? That will help me understand the scale of things there. EDIT: We're not going to do this, but knowing whether it would take 2 hours or 12 hours will help me get my head around distances. Where I come from, this would take days!
Are the neighborhoods mentioned places she might like? Are there other ones she should check out? She likes a neighborly feel over a scenester kind of place. I feel like Spruce Hill is worth a look, but I don't know why. Neither of us has ever been to Philadelphia before.
Finally, is there a site or place where she could find music events of all sorts that are fairly homemade? Should she just look on telephone poles when she gets there? If she were visiting where we live now and wanted similar I'd refer her to this, so you can get an idea of the kind of production values she's looking for:
Thanks very much for any advice you have. If you come down our way we'll be glad to do the same. We are looking so forward to meeting your city.