Dan McQuade Got Philly Like No One Else

Philadelphia writer Dan McQuade, who died this week, in photos over the years

Nobody understood Philadelphia, and Philadelphians, like Dan McQuade, who died this week at 43.

I had the pleasure and indeed the honor of being Dan’s primary editor for most of his time on staff at Philadelphia magazine, and it’s no exaggeration that phillymag.com wouldn’t be what it is today without him. Dan came on board as this website was evolving from a scrappy collection of subject-specific blogs to one of the city’s go-to news sources. And his voice, knowledge and spirit were a main driver of that evolution.

Dan wrote so many stories, so many great stories, and I’ll tell you about them, and about how I remember Dan. But first I want to tell you about “Philadelphianess.”

Back when the small band of writers and editors who inhabited the cubicle trenches of 1818 Market Street in the late days of 2013 were boot-strapping this website, we came up with categories for the kinds of stories that our readers seemed most drawn to.

Those categories were:

“Scoops” — short riffs on the headlines of the day.

“Bad Behavior” — stories about Philadelphians up to no good.

“Takes” — clicky, contrarian rants on hot topics.

And then there was the category we called, simply, “Philadelphianess” — those stories about the tics and quirks and peculiarities that make Philadelphians Philadelphians. Why we talk the way we talk. Why we call that long sandwich a hoagie. Why we park down the middle of Broad Street. Why a windowless downtown bunker mall meant so much to us.

Dan McQuade was the master of the Philadelphianess story. If you can think of a Philly eccentricity, Dan’s written the definitive take on it. Without Dan’s voice, Philly Mag wouldn’t be Philly Mag. And, I’d argue, Philadelphia wouldn’t quite be Philadelphia.

I was a grudging admirer of Dan’s long before I ever met him or got to edit him. I started my career at the Philadelphia City Paper alt-weekly and Dan’s blog, “Philadelphia Will Do,” was the city blog for the rival Philadelphia Weekly. Just the very name of the blog was exquisite, a line from a W.C. Fields movie that landed right where Philly’s inferiority complex intersects with the Philly shrug. And Dan’s voice, even back then, was sharp. Incisive. Witty. Hilarious but rarely snarky.

A few years on, when I came on board at Philly Mag to head up the digital news operation and Dan was a weekly freelance contributor, I jumped at the chance to bring him on staff. First, he was tasked with writing the quick-hit news pieces the internet circa 2014 demanded, but not long after he began to write the kind of pieces that became so unique to him.

While he was known early on as a blogger, Dan was so many things. He was a meticulous reporter. A gifted essayist. A galaxy-brained historian. An unwavering moral compass. Dan McQuade stories revealed a deep knowledge of and an unwavering passion for Philadelphia. It was as if he’d consumed every article, book, movie and television show ever written about Philly — and never forgotten one of them.

He could whip up a richly sourced story on Wawa’s hoagie culture, the Philadelphia accent, parking on the Broad Street median, trick-or-treating, Traffic Court and the cultural legacy of Allen Iverson’s “Practice” rant, sourcing from academic papers and Twitter, historical records and Gawker.

Dan was a native of the then-burgeoning world of social media, and he drew on this to inform his writing. He had a knack for what would take off online, using a deft mix of words and visuals. And he was responsible for some of this website’s biggest barnburners.

In September 2013, he published a story that did more online traffic than we’d ever seen before by crafting a scene-by-scene analysis of the training montage from Rocky II and then plotting how far Rocky would have run had he run them all in sequence. Interspersed with screen grabs, GIFs and an embedded map, Dan estimated that Rocky would have run more than a marathon, 30.61 miles, nearly 50K.

The story went bonkers on the internet for weeks. And then would go bonkers all over again months and weeks later as new pockets of readers discovered it. And the piece took on a life of its own, namely an annual Rocky 50K run that’s happened every December since. It was a perfect encapsulation of Dan’s personality that he always seemed tickled that his “very silly blog” inspired the Rebecca Barber-organized free-to-all run, and got irked when some company swooped in and tried to stage a paid version of what she’s always offered for free.

A year later, in October 2014, Dan happened to be at the Trocadero for a Hannibal Buress comedy set when he recorded Buress’s bit about Bill Cosby’s then-all-but-forgotten sexual assault allegations. It was material Buress had been doing on stage for some time, but doing it in Philadelphia, Cosby’s hometown, hit differently. When Dan wrote about it for Philly Mag (and included the video clip), it went viral. The story brought the Cosby allegations back to the fore, starting a chain of events that led to more women speaking out and Cosby’s eventual fall from grace. Dan never sought the spotlight for his role in things, once telling the Inquirer, “I didn’t spend any time on this. I just recorded a comedy bit and then wrote about it the following day, and it’s like my most-read story of the year.”

Beyond his innate, new-media sense of what “worked” on the internet, Dan was an incredible writer, reporter and human being. My longtime colleague Victor Fiorillo confided in me last night that Dan “was one of the most unique and creative journalists I had ever met. I was rarely jealous of what another Philly journalist would do, but then Dan would step in with these wild gets and takes and I would grunt ‘McQuade’ the same way that Seinfeld would say ‘Newman.’”

Dan’s 2015 piece on the fall of Donald Trump’s Atlantic City casino empire is a must-read:

Donald Trump likes to brag that he made a lot of money in Atlantic City and got out before things went sour. Like professional wrestling, though, that’s mostly an act.

His analysis of the outfit John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty wore when he was raided by the FBI was an instant classic:

The news that Philly power broker John Dougherty’s house was raided by federal agents this morning came as a surprise, but his outfit was pretty much par for the course for Philadelphia.

Johnny Doc was in khaki shorts, a white button-front shirt (with the top two buttons undone), loafers and a 76ers hat. It’s like he gave the media a comment on the FBI raid without saying a word: “Trust the process!”

His take on Halloween’s supremacy:

There’s so much pressure to have a good time on New Year’s Eve. Christmas and Thanksgiving can lead to family arguments. The only expectation for Halloween is to laugh in the face of the macabre, the spooky and the scary.

On reports that the Philly accent was fading:

Yes, Philly, we’re starting to sound more like New York and Boston. I know. It’s enough to make you want to get off the pavement and run screaming through the shtreets.

He had so many great turns of phrase, so many wonderful things to say. His annual pilgrimages to the t-shirt shops of the Wildwood boardwalk should be studied by cultural anthropologists. Even just a scroll through his author page to read his often–hilarious headlines is time well spent.

But while Dan was known for his wit, he also had great depth.

He could write eloquently about sports and politics, culture and crime, education and public policy. As Philadelphia’s opioid crisis surged, he was a staunch advocate of supervised injection sites and adamant that treating people struggling with addiction as criminals was the wrong approach.

I never got to know Dan as well as I’d wished. It was one of those tricky editor/writer things. But after he left Philly Mag and was thriving at Defector, we’d exchange texts from time to time. Sometimes about story ideas. Sometimes about being dads. Sometimes just reminiscing about our time in the Philly Mag trenches.

In 2015, this magazine started publishing “longform” web pieces — 1,500 words or so — for a short-lived Sunday digital magazine and Dan said he wanted to write a remembrance of Center City’s Gallery mall as it prepared to shutter. What he turned in was an exhaustively researched, deeply personal 3,500-word history of the retail behemoth interspersed with his own memories there growing up. Not only was it wildly popular online, but it was the rare (for us, anyway) web piece that later ran in the print magazine.

“I think about your Gallery story all the time,” I texted him two Januarys ago after the mag wrote about an exhibit of bootleg Eagles shirts he’d curated.

“My favorite thing I’ve ever written,” he replied. “And I think I wrote it in like one frantic night.”

The closing paragraph for that story remains one of the most poignant things I’ve ever read about this town:

The Gallery is the great failure that wasn’t actually a failure. While it didn’t become the downtown attraction envisioned by planners, it was a public space that people from all walks of the city used every day. There aren’t too many places like this in a segregated city like Philadelphia. Whatever the future is for The Gallery, here’s guessing it won’t be the same. R.I.P.

Nobody understood Philadelphia like Dan McQuade.  Whatever the future is, Philly won’t be the same without him. I feel for his wife, his son, and the considerably large contingent of Philadelphians whose lives he touched.