I've never heard of anyone refer to 12th and Spruce or anywhere in Center City as a demilitarized zone. Out of curiosity PhillyNova, are you from Northern Virginia? If so that would explain a lot. I lived in DC during the height of it's blight and my SUV driving suburbanite friends used to give me so much s*it for living in the District and not in NoVa. They're also the same genre of people who've sapped up all the real estate and turned DC into a bland xerox of what it used to be selling itself on Disney-esque Americana rather than the seedy do-anything town it once was. Same thing happened in New York, in Chicago, and now Philadelphia.

I'm all for progress but when urban newbies move into a city they can't expect to dispose of all the brothels, low rent apartments, vagrants, and ashtrays. That's part of city living, that's part of life, and our urban environments are a microcosm of our society - vagrants, drug dealers, smokers, and people who will not agree with everything you say.

City living is understanding that, knowing you cannot control your environment and everyone around you, knowing you can't just go back to your McMansion and pretend the world doesn't exist - because it is in your face all the time. That is the appeal of city life, that is why people choose urban over suburban.

If you think that 12th and Spruce - charming as real urbanites think it is - is actually a demilitarized zone, than you don't belong in the city. Disney USA is just across the river in New Jersey. It's in Delaware, it's Northern VA and Suburban MD. There are plenty of places for that mentality.

They may tear down the Spruce Parker someday and phallically erect some condo complex to compensate for these shortcomings, but you're not gonna get rid of the grit. Even places that have been transformed into giant shopping malls and amusements parks like NYC and DC, cities that have learned to sell themselves on what they used to be rather than what they are, can't get rid of the grit.

Places like the Spruce Parker and the notorious watering holes, dumpy little diners, they might close but they're still here. They either relocate or are reinvented as something new.

There will always be poor people, there will always be sick people, vagrants, people selling sex and people buying sex, and in any city the size of Philadelphia, there will constantly be a market for and a place for all of these things. You can either embrace the excitment of the bizarre patchwork of urbanity, or leave. Cities belong to the eccentric and those who thrive on the unknown. Predictibility belongs in the suburbs.

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The idealistic are no longer concerned with influencing public opinion and creating a free world of responsible and ethical social choices, but rather imposing opinion through legislation, mandating these ethics, and outlawing choice in what the loudest sample finds offensive.

Ban the Bans. It's a slippery slope between Idealism and Fascism.

DCinPhilly, well said...