Watts Street, Gerardo Belfiore (lithograph).

I saw it in the library and I knew it rang a bell although I couldn't place it. Wasn't Watts some sort of famous place in New York? Weren't there riots there or something? What was Watts to Philadelphia? I couldn't remember, but I took a picture of the lithograph and stored it for later.

I looked at the picture again, and could almost place the tiny shacks, the ramshackle street with useless poles stuck up on the sidewalk. In the lithograph there is something with wheels at the end of the street, but that couldn't be a car. Could it?

I'm trying to figure out where this place is and I type Watts Street into Google, to see how long it stretches, to see what my options are.

Watts is a broken street, it turns out. Since it's completely useless, it's been obliterated near the epicenter of the City. The map doesn't even register the part of Watts that I stood on a few weeks ago, close to the convention center. It wants to put me either at Diamond Street, well into North Philly, or at Oregon Avenue, South Philly heartland.

I look at both, thinking maybe I'll see the scene that is traceable to the etching. I start north. I can't believe that google has a ground view of this excuse for an alleyway. It's typical North Philadelphia green, lush in the only way North Philadelphia can be, overgrown, unvisited, the wild broken through the broken down city. I go a few blocks, and the street widens out a bit. There's plenty of low-lying houses that look like the second generation of the shacks pictured in the lithograph, but what about those industrial buildings that separate Watts Street from your average residential shanty town? I can't find them.

Then I go to the part of Watts that starts by Oregon, and I see more little houses, and they look inhabited, they seem more representative of the neighborhood that I can discern in the lithograph. But still, no factories, nothing of power like there is in that depression- era photo.

It came to me obviously, blocks from my home. Watts is right next to Broad Street, I discovered trying to make my way home one afternoon, sketchily, walking up to where I shouldn't be walking, running into the construction for the new and expanded Convention center, imploded buildings, temporary fencing. Watts is one of those tiny streets that no one can park on, that's made for carriage, a tentative capillary running parallel to Broad street.

I want to go back to the spot I walked around. I keep prodding google past it's first directives, zooming where it says there is no street, until finally my walk snaps into focus.

Watts Street is dying in the lithograph, but is it dead today? The picture almost makes sense. I still walk around there, I'll keep looking. Is that building there and hiding? Is my memory patching the unpatchable, or is have I found as much as I can hope of the city's ghost?

In seventh grade I rode the train through North Philadelphia every day, twice. I got on the train in the dark and watched the sunrise over North Philadelphia. One morning, near Temple, in the middle of one abandoned building where the wall had peeled away for view from the tracks, there was one line of colorful clothing waving on a middle floor. I saw it for ten seconds and have been looking ever since. Every time I ride that train, I still look.

--Moira Moody