How Paul Levy Created Center City

A Center City District worker

I had imagined that Levy, when walking about town, mentally superimposed a series of carefully photoshopped renderings over those patches of the urban landscape not yet up to his standards, with parks and young professionals and happy families and teal-jacketed Center City District officers everywhere.

And perhaps sometimes he does. But on this late-October afternoon, with the wind blowing ginkgo leaves around his feet, Levy seems to see only ghosts.

Levy is a good talker. Actually, he’s an exceptional talker. But he doesn’t easily open up about himself. So I’ve asked him to walk around a familiar stretch of the city with me, hoping it will shake loose some self-reflection. Levy takes me through the greenways of Society Hill, those lovely but little-used passages that were created by the wrecking ball of Ed Bacon—another molder of cities with a complicated legacy (and a complicated relationship with Levy). We pass the block where Levy lives today, in a gracious 1824 rowhome with his wife, Carrie Rickey, the former Inquirer movie critic, and the younger of his two daughters, whom Levy is now assisting in her college search.

He guides me to 4th Street and recalls the trolleys that used to rattle past the centuries-old rowhomes, a scene he found so picturesque when visiting Philadelphia in 1976 that it helped convince him to move to the city. He made the leap with no job and no prospects. “You could do those kind of things back then,” Levy says. The morning of our stroll, he had bicycled through some of the city’s less photogenic sections, beneath the Walt Whitman bridge, and over to the stadiums—one of his usual routes. At 66, Levy is fit and a bit frumpy, prone to wearing scuffed shoes and worn suits, which contributes to a vibe that’s more professorial than professional.

We walk further south, to the 200 block of Queen Street, outside Levy’s first home in Philadelphia. There, he tells me about the Indonesian sailors who used to walk up from the port to buy surplus blue jeans at a nearby warehouse. He points to a property across the street—now a parking lot for adjacent condos—and says it once held stacks of cemetery headstones, and before that, the dead bodies that couldn’t fit in the morgue during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Next door is St. Philip Neri Church, epicenter of the anti-Irish nativist riots of 1844, which killed more than a dozen people. “It happened right here,” he says. I ask Levy: How the hell do you know all this? “Part and parcel of me is looking at a place not only in its contemporary setting, but where did it come from? What did it used to be?” he says.

This preoccupation with the past is perhaps a bit surprising in a figure as famously foresighted as Levy. But the man is a historian by both training and temperament. He attended Lafayette College, then did graduate work at Columbia University, where he studied Albert Camus and Heinrich Heine, the radical 19th-century German poet, empathizing with how both men struggled to balance the life of the mind with an urgent calling to engage in the public sphere. “I felt an absolute sense of responsibility to be engaged,” he says.

Like a lot of people who came of age in the Northeast during the 1960s and 1970s, Levy had witnessed the devolution of big-city America. The speed of the decay both troubled and fascinated him. He was born in Newark, and lived there until his family joined the early wave of suburbanizers in 1955, when his “very authoritarian” dad—an attorney and a former infantry commander—bought a home in Mountainside, New Jersey, with a VA mortgage. Levy saw the impact of the Newark riots while working a maintenance job in nearby Hillside the summer of ’67, and witnessed New York’s descent in the 1970s firsthand while at Columbia and teaching at a pair of rough public schools. “I grew up watching cities go down,” he says.

For a time, the urban degradation proved too much for Levy. He must have mentioned how filthy the subway windows were to me three times in different conversations. In 1972, he bolted for an idyllic hamlet in the Catskills and idled away four years working on his dissertation and running a house-painting business. Eventually, though, Levy felt the city calling him back.

He tells me that as a kid, he used to study old photographs of places he knew, like Newark or New York in the 1800s. “In a weird way, I found it kind of liberating,” he says. He would look at the photos and think: What is today, wasn’t always. It only follows, Levy figured, that “what is today doesn’t always have to be.” Long before the millennials, the bike lanes and the brewpubs, Levy felt in his bones that cities could change not just for the worse, but for the better.