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 The lead story in this week’s edition of The Weekly Press, the Center City newsweekly, is about how SEPTA’s service is poor, its stations aren’t well-designed, it’s messy and so forth. I know: Stop the presses and all that.
The author, Richard Carreño, has a Wikipedia entry about him — “Holy shit!,” I said, when I found it — that notes he used to be from London. (Hence all the comparisons to the Tube.)
The article’s a little weird, though, and not just for the mysterious “move over Inga Saffron?” line halfway through it. Let’s take a look at some of the earlier paragraphs:
Everyone has a pet SEPTA horror story. How about the Hooverville-like encampments by bums in some Center City subway-surface (Green Line) stops? The malodorous wafting of urine stain that pervades the Broad Street (Orange Line) subway? The pimped-up, teenaged thugs who harass fellow passengers on the El (Blue Line) each school day? Police? Forgetaboutit.
A female Center City friend, who works at Penn, tells me that there isn’t a day that goes by that she doesn’t get the heebie jeebies when at Penn’s Green Line station. That’s the stop, as thousands of commuters know, inhabited by Penn’s version of Quasimodo, an unfortunate who has all the good looks of his doppelganger from Notre Dame, as well as being blessed with the laser-like visual acuity of Charlie Manson.
Ha ha! Isn’t making fun of the homeless fun! I can’t wait until his next article comparing wheelchair-bound people to characters from Beauty and the Beast.
SEPTA Fie! Semper infidelis [Weekly Press]
Richard Carreño [Wikipedia]
Photo by surplusparts
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