Philly's "Merry Go Round"

[+ azdr0710]

recent good-natured joking between @Charlie and @nycman about the "Merry Go Round" in Philadelphia compelled me, being a geography and history nut, to "deep dive" the topic......found this funny, very short, easy read on an unusual early effort by neighbors and the city to curtail cruising in Rittenhouse.....

The Curious Case of Rittenhouse’s “No Gay Cruising” Sign

WWW.PHILLYMAG.COM

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A forgotten-but-not-gone reminder of the time the city tried to stop men looking for other men.

 

as of two years after the article was published, the sign still is in place (Google Street View, Nov., 2019):

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9476689,-75.1763897,3a,75y,161.81h,87.23t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sXN7OxF7Y9MIOhE5juuqOkw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?authuser=0&entry=ttu

 

[+ Charlie]

The Merry-Go-Round was more of a street cruising area than a hustling area. I lived very nearby, and my route walking home from the bars at night took me through the Merry-Go-Round, but I knew several straight people who lived on the 2000 blocks of Delancey and Spruce Streets, so I would never have tried to hustle there. For my daytime hustling experiment, I used City Hall courtyard, where both hustlers and johns could always claim that they were waiting for someone with whom they had business at City Hall.

[+ Pensant]

“Common Pleas Court judge Ramy Djerassi grew up, like me, on the 2000 block of Delancey. He recalls things differently. “This is a very liberal community,” he insists. “No one was telling gay people not to cruise.” The real problem was traffic: “People just wanted to sleep at night. The cruising was an imposition.”

“And the sign at the corner of 21st and Delancey remains as a vestige of community-sanctioned, institutionalized homophobia.”

[Jason Dutch]

In some ways, wild to think of Rittenhouse as the kind of park that can provide space to deviance for long enough that pleasure sparks… but I’ve also totally picked up there in a random street cruising kind of way