The first wireless city! Everyone connected to the Internet! Civic leaders and the media, including this magazine, believed wi-fi would be the centerpiece of Philadelphia’s return to greatness. What went wrong?

By Dan P. Lee

IT WAS DIANAH Neff who would do this. With short hair that fluctuated between chestnut and burgundy, and a penchant for boxy, sometimes loud clothing, Neff was the highest - paid member of John Street’s cabinet, at $193,800 a year; she had come to Philadelphia in 2001 from California following a national search. As the chief information officer for the city of Palo Alto, Neff had spearheaded the creation of the first city government website in the country. Street’s administration would soon be mired in the pay-to-play scandal, and he would desperately need a legacy-defining initiative. The mayor found one that was eye-popping: Philadelphia would become the first large city in the world to create a citywide wireless Internet network, allowing anyone in any part of its 135 square miles — including the staggering 55 percent of its residents without Internet access — to click a button and connect to the World Wide Web. This was Neff’s ­career-defining idea; she told the mayor it could be done, and he believed her.

“It will have a huge impact on the perception of Philadelphia as a 21st-century city and a progressive place,” Street said, a sentiment he and Neff would echo for years. And it would prove prescient, as the plan was quickly co-opted into a larger, international storyline then taking shape: that Philadelphia was, as the world’s most widely read travel magazine was about to anoint us — singling out the then-nascent wireless program as evidence — no less than America’s Next Great City.

Of course, Wireless Philadelphia hasn’t happened, and despite city government noise about sticking with the plan, it won’t, at least not in any incarnation remotely redolent of what was first promised. Which is probably why Dianah Neff is nowhere to be found, and why John Street’s legacy is squarely centered on corruption.

The failure is clear: Almost a year after Street left office, the wireless network remains incomplete and underutilized. The company hired by the city to make it happen has fled town and cancelled its paltry 6,000 customers’ accounts. Cities around the world that had planned to emulate the “Philadelphia model” have either given up or changed directions. And the architects of a recently announced 11th-hour plan to save the network have had to concede a central reality known from the start but somehow missed — or ignored — by journalists and everyone else eager to perpetuate the inspiring story of Philadelphia’s rebirth: that the technology at the backbone of it all was and remains incompatible with the notion of “wiring” an entire municipal landscape indoors and out. Worst of all, all these years later, the plan’s original selling point—bridging the so-called “digital divide” and getting all of Philadelphia online — seems as quixotic and unlikely as ever.

There is, at least, a harsh object lesson to be taken from what went wrong. Not only did the Street administration swallow the Neff-driven initiative hook, line and sinker, but so did most of the rest of us. Why?

Read the rest of Power: Whiffing on Wi-Fi

Photograph by Clint Blowers, from the October 2008 issue of Philadelphia.

You may know Kat Dennings as the brat on Sex and the City who hired Samantha to publicize her bat mitzvah, or as the smart-ass daughter of Steve Carell’s girlfriend in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. At just 22, Dennings — whose real last name is Litwack — has been labeled the Next Big Thing by every magazine that says things like that. Exit Interview has no idea if Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, her comedy opening today, will be a hit. But based on her witty charm and self-deprecating tales of a traumatic half-day at Friends’ Central and the absurdities of Hollywood, we hope those mags are right.

Where did you grow up?
Bryn Mawr, but I basically grew up in the woods. There were deer on my lawn. It was totally awesome. That’s why I’m so socially weird.

I’ve read that your mom is a poet. What does your dad do?
My dad’s a molecular pharmacologist. [laughs]

I love that stories about you mention your poet mom and how you were homeschooled and all this artsy stuff, but your dad was a scientist.
People used to tell me that my dad was the king of pharmacology. I deduced in my little-girl head that I was the princess of biochemistry, and I felt extremely superior. [laughs]

Ever attend a traditional school?
I spent one half-day at Friends Central, and it almost broke my spirit forever.

Did you get stuffed in a locker? Victimized by a bathroom swirlie gang?
I was yelled at. People made fun of my outfit. I filled out some questionnaire and realized I spelled “friend” wrong. That was a word I mastered, eventually. I remember feeling so stupid, and I thought, fuck this. I’m going back to the woods.

Read the rest of “Exit Interview: Kat Dennings,” from the October issue of Philadelphia.

Photo by K.C. Bailey/Playlist

Jim Beasley Sr., a legendary, boot-stomping Philadelphia Lawyer, left his firm in the hands of his ne’er-do-well son. But now Beasley Jr.’s quiet approach is not only winning big cases, but signaling a new era in the city’s courtrooms

By Steve Volk

WHILE HIS OLD man worked, the Kid usually spent the day screwing up. He skipped school. He chewed tobacco in the back of class. He learned Spanish like a knucklehead, retaining little more than that cállate means “shut up.” His path seemed set from the time he was 12 years old. He was forced to repeat the seventh grade and was asked to leave Penn Charter in 10th.

Meanwhile, the old man was a legend, humping cases as a plaintiff’s attorney in city courtrooms. He won multimillion-­dollar verdicts with regularity. And he did it with a Spartan’s dedication to combat. While the Kid complained about serving 45 hours of ­summer-school detention for being a no-account fuckup, the Legend put in 45 hours by Thursday afternoon. Then he kept right on working. He outshone opposing attorneys, wrestled control of the courtroom away from presiding judges, and ran roughshod to victories.

The Philadelphia Lawyer is a hoary cliché now. But it has been invoked as a compliment and a pejorative, a means of describing an intellectual strong man who twists not metal, but facts. Whatever. A Philadelphia Lawyer is suspect until he’s needed. Then, he’s your best friend. And the Legend was the ultimate Philadelphia Lawyer.

The Legend was so great, he excelled even at recreation. He raced cars. He jammed himself into the tight little barrel of a World War II fighter plane. He cheated death, pinwheeling through tight corkscrew spirals like a Top Gun pilot. But his performance suffered at home. When the Kid finished last in his first motocross race, the Legend said, “What’s the matter with you? I won all my races!”

The Legend was lying. Right to his son’s face. But the Kid wouldn’t learn that until years later. So instead he figured that somehow, everything had gone wrong. Somehow he was born a loser to a father who always won. And when the Legend’s headlights hit the front window, long after dinner each weekday night, his children fled before he could reach the front door. Two daughters and the boy bounded up the stairs rather than see their dad — tired, ­inebriated, and always on the lookout for someone or something to criticize.

In his mid-20s, though, the Kid did something that might have seemed unthinkable to the boy he once was. He decided to become a trial attorney. “Don’t,” the Legend warned him. “People will always compare you to me.”

The Legend was right. But miraculously, so was the boy. The courtroom is where he belongs. And watching him work now, as a man bearing the legacy of the Philadelphia Lawyer, is an opportunity to see how the nature of being a lawyer in this town has changed.

Read the rest of The Legacy

Photograph by Shea Roggio, from the October 2008 issue of Philadelphia.

What, you thought it would be easy opening a little French bistro?

By April White

IT TOOK DAYS to achieve exactly the right color for the walls. First painting, then sponging, from the overpriced new wood floor to the sound-absorbing pressed-tin ceilings, only to discover that this shade of yellow was just too yellow, not at all the mellow, tobacco-stained shade chef Peter Woolsey remembered from the bistros of France. So Peter, who would much rather be in his kitchen, got back up on the ladder and washed the walls in wood stain, mimicking the decades of cigarette smoke the restaurant will never see. “This is what a bistro looks like,” the Philadelphia-born chef declared, finally, just a week before the planned July opening of Bistrot La Minette.

Lipgloss-red banquettes line the room, drawing your eye to the open kitchen, still in disarray as construction workers finish running gas lines. Behind marble-topped tables, the restaurant’s 12-person staff takes notes on the opening-day menu. Peter, with his chunky black glasses and permanent five o’clock shadow, details each dish, noting the ingredients, the cooking techniques, the variations available to vegetarians, vegans, and people with picky palates. The 30-year-old chef holds his four-month-old son Jules on his lap, bouncing him to the rhythm of the French menu titles he pronounces fluidly: coquilles St. Jacques aux endives braisées, oeuf en meurette, quenelles natures à la sauce financière.

His wife, French-born photographer Peggy Baud, gently corrects him, making a sharper K sound: “Quenelles.” Peggy is here to teach French to the $4.25-an-hour waitstaff. Or at least enough French to continue the Parisian illusion conjured by the Ricard-stamped serving plates, the dainty dessert spoons above each place setting, and the sign by the door: Ici, les vins sont fins et la cuisine soignée. “Here, the wines are fine and the kitchen cared for.”

That doesn’t seem like a tall order, but the process of opening a restaurant in Philadelphia is inevitably long and costly, one that tries your patience and then, when you have no patience left, tries it again. The 21-month-long story of the opening of Bistrot La Minette is the story of each of the region’s 8,000 restaurants — and probably of most of the restaurants that have opened anywhere, ever. The details may differ, but the pileup of delays and discouragements, of compromises and surprises, those are the tale of every aspiring restaurateur.

But that’s no comfort to Peter. One week before La Minette’s opening night, there’s still no electricity.

Read the rest of The Making of a Philly Restaurant 2008

Photograph by Ryan Donnell, from the October 2008 issue of Philadelphia.

So that’s what he was up to.

After an unexpected overture last fall from U.S. Rep. Bob Brady spurred him to contemplate a run for Congress, Philadelphia magazine editor Larry Platt spent three months getting yelled at by a crazed but brilliant political consultant, touching friends, acquaintances and friends of acquaintances for pledges of cash, and wondering just what the hell he’d gotten himself into.

Platt’s piece about the lows and lowers of his abortive political career, from the October issue of GQ, has just been posted online. It starts at a watershed moment, but one that didn’t go quite the way Platt was hoping:

As he approached, he was actually biting his lower lip. Just like on TV, I remember thinking. When Bill Clinton was up in my face, I extended my hand; we shook as his eyes darted out over my shoulder, surveying the room. We turned to face the photographer.

“Mr. President, I’m thinking of running for Congress in the Sixth District here,” I said as the photographer snapped away. This was it: my moment of inspiration, my chance to pick the brain of the greatest politician of my generation. For the past three months, I’d been a magazine editor turned all-but-declared candidate for Congress, yet lately I’d become increasingly aware of a burning ball of tension in my gut. That’s not figurative; all day, every day, I had this tightness in my stomach. Was it fear? Second thoughts about running? Or was it something deeper? I couldn’t be sure. But I was hoping that, upon meeting Bill Clinton at this fund-raiser last December, he’d say something so inspiring, so Clintonian, that my doubts about running would be forever quelled.

“That is a great bag,” he said again, and now he was on a roll. He couldn’t stop talking about the freakin’ bag. “Come on over here and get your picture taken with that bag. That is a terrific bag.”

“Larry Platt for Congress.” Not

Photo by Brian Finke/GQ

Jane Golden built the Mural Arts Program into one of the city’s proudest achievements, a testament to the power of art to transform neighborhoods. Then a painting proposed for Rittenhouse Square ruffled the feathers of the city’s elite — and all hell broke loose

By John Marchese

THE WARS THAT are fought around Rittenhouse Square are usually quite civil.

Occasionally, a perfect apartment in one of the best buildings will become available and provoke a skirmish of bidding by rival buyers. The Ladies Who Donate will sometimes engage in some sharp-elbowed jockeying for chairmanship of the proper charity event. And, of course, the opening of Stephen Starr’s Frenchified Parc this July forced tout le monde to tussle not just for a good table, but for any table.

So it was a little surprising when word started spreading of a bitter fight over the fate of a dowdy little wall on a cute little side street just off the Square. Tempers began flaring in June, around the time of the signature annual soiree of the Rittenhouse set, the Ball on the Square, where nasty whispers mingled with Eddie Bruce’s cocktail music and Georges Perrier’s canapés. Not long after, a shouting match erupted inside the earnest Ethical Society, pitting neighbors in the city’s most exclusive precinct against one another. Some think the fight is simply the latest manifestation of the always-simmering conflict between Old Money and New, the battle lines drawn in the sands of taste and propriety, fought at close quarters with charges of crassness hurled against a return volley alleging elitism. “This is just insanity,” says one prominent Rittenhouse resident who was at the Ethical Society brouhaha but didn’t want his name in print. “These people are crazy. I’m not looking to get into a fight. All the people on either side have had such a crazy, emotional response. I can’t even talk to my wife about it.”

The “it” in question is a painting, a big painting — a mural that would cover the two-story side wall of an art gallery bordering what is now a 40-space parking lot run by Joe Zuritsky’s Parkway Corporation. The lot sits on a tiny block known as Rittenhouse Street, which runs east to west between 17th and 18th streets. A lot of people agree with Zuritsky’s own evaluation of the aesthetic value of the spot right now: “It’s an ugly wall behind an ugly parking lot.”

It was when someone tried to make that wall look nicer that things really got ugly. The crazy, emotional argument started after attorney Paul Rosen — whose most recent high-profile client was Alycia Lane, in her battle against CBS 3 — announced that he was planning to cover Zuritsky’s blank wall with a realistic, allegorical painting depicting “Justice,” and the role of civil attorneys like himself in its noble pursuit. The artwork would be paid for by a foundation funded by Rosen’s law firm, Spector Gadon & Rosen, PC, to help encourage positive depictions of lawyers. The actual painting would be created under the auspices of the world-renowned Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and its much-lauded and beloved director, Jane Golden.

So an ugly wall gets covered with a pretty painting about Justice. Who could argue with that?

Read the rest of Brawl on the Square.

Illustration by Robin Eley, from the October 2008 issue of Philadelphia.

The first generation of Philly women who “opted out” in order to stay home with their kids is now ready for what’s next. Trouble is, opting back in can be pretty scary when you aren’t even sure who you are anymore

By Vicki Glembocki

THEIR KIDS ARE in school. Their husbands are at work. It’s 10 o’clock on a Friday morning, and these women have nothing they need to do.

Sure, they could be playing tennis. Or organizing the silent auction for the Lower Merion High fund-raiser. Or calling their friends to meet them in a few hours for lunch at Du Jour in Haverford. They aren’t, though.

They’re doing yoga.

But this isn’t their mamas’ yoga. This is serious, sweating, handstanding yoga. This is guy-playing-the-drums-and-­chanting yoga. And the nine women — most in their late 40s — practicing at Jai Yoga on Montgomery Avenue in Narberth aren’t resting in child’s pose. No, they’re bending and twisting and inhaling deep into their abdomens, trying to quiet their troubled minds as they face the front of the dimly lit, caramel-colored studio where two red, glowing Buddhas hang on the wall, staring back at them.

It’s no surprise that they’re thin and coiffed and pedicured, or that they’re sporting ginormous diamond rings, and outfits by the high-end line Beyond Yoga (with its odd but appropriate slogan “I Am Beyond”) that they probably purchased in the boutique downstairs, along with their VitaminWater. Many of them are, after all, stay-at-home-moms on the Main Line, and have been for the past 10 years. Or 15 years. Or 20 years.

They haven’t always been stay-at-home moms, though. They used to be career women, with big degrees and big-paying jobs, 120 percent committed and on their way up. But when kids came along, they decided to give it all up to stay home and raise their families, 120 percent committed to that. Now the kids are pretty much raised, and these women are the only members of their families who are really at home anymore. They’ve become, instead, wait-at-home moms — waiting for the kids to come back from school or soccer practice or their friends’ houses, waiting to cook dinner, waiting to help with college applications, waiting to remind them it’s time to go to bed. Waiting, in essence, to be useful.

They knew this moment was coming — they just didn’t expect it to be such a blow. In fact, a lot of them were looking forward to it, to all the time they’d have to themselves. And they did everything they could think of — planned vacations, joined boards, took watercolor classes, baked for every bake sale they could find. But it wasn’t enough. They weren’t feeling fulfilled. They weren’t feeling like they were contributing. They were starting to feel bored, yes. But they were also starting to feel something they never anticipated back when they decided to stay home with their kids — they were feeling meaningless.

Which is why they’re here, doing yoga on a Friday morning in a room that’s far too warm and has a sign outside it reading, “Quiet voices please, spiritual awakenings in process.” This is why, after class, one student asks if she can jot down the passage the instructor read today from the best-selling book The Secret (and, incidentally, this is probably why The Secret is a best-seller): “Decide what you want to be, do, and have, think the thoughts of it, emit the frequency, and your vision will become your life.”

Read the rest of The Existential Crisis of the Wait-at-Home Mom

Photo by Jonathan Pushnik, from the October 2008 issue of Philadelphia.

More bad news from 400 North Broad Street — but just how bad is a point of contention. First, a memo sent around the newsroom yesterday by Daily News city editor Gar Joseph:

Folks:

The realities of our business have recently forced another reduction in news hole. We are now down 20 percent for the year. Also, the Commerce Bank briefs page counts against our news hole budget. What we know from our reader surveys is that readers want the variety of stories we give them, so we are not going to change that. But what we must do is try to tell those stories as concisely as possible. Turning a 15-inch story into an 11-inch story almost always produces a better written story. So that’s our goal as we adapt to the new realities. Please keep that foremost in your minds as you discuss story lengths with your editors. Managing the problem on the front end is much better than just whacking away at overly long stories on the back end.

A 20 percent cut in editorial space in less than a year? Maybe not: DN managing editor Pat McLoone, who says he’s seen a lot of cuts in his years at the paper, contests that estimate. “Gar’s wrong,” McLoone says flatly. “I’m not going to get into the number, but it’s nowhere near that high.”

And venerable DN columnist Stu Bykofsky thinks McLoone is right on the number — whatever that might be. “I think you’d have to go back several years,” he says, “to find cuts that [accumulate to] 20 percent of the news hole.”

Last week I reported on some rumors coming out of the PhillyCarShare camp, namely the apparent ousting of co-founders Tanya Seaman and Clayton Lane — the latter said to have been prohibited from the premises after an in-office blowup. As Philebrity noted yesterday, the commenters on my post have had some not-so-nice things to say about Lane, so they will be very happy to know that, according to a spokesperson, PhillyCarShare has accepted Lane’s resignation.

Lane was unable to be reached for comment today, though his former colleague (not to mention former girlfriend) Seaman — who notes that she was not forced out but resigned and is now consulting with other car-sharing organizations — had this to say: “Clayton put in more than anybody at PhillyCarShare, and he cared more than anyone else did. He put in a ton of time and was very committed.” Given that this is coming from Lane’s ex, I figure he can’t be all THAT bad.

I thought I must have read the press release wrong yesterday: “AC/DC to bring ‘Black Ice’ to Wachovia Center on November 17th … Tickets at $92.50 will go on sale this Saturday, September 20.”

$92.50? To see AC/DC? Whether you sit in the front row or the nosebleeds? No way, I thought to myself. So I fired off an e-mail to a Comcast-Spectacor spokesperson who confirmed my darkest fears: $92.50. For all seats.

Now don’t get me wrong: I crank it whenever “Dirty Deeds” or “Back in Black” comes on the radio. And “For Those About to Rock” is one of those songs that I play at my desk when I need an attitude adjustment (oddly, so is Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast“). But this is good-old, working-class, screamed-not-sung rock-’n'-roll. And a flat $92.50 ticket price (think of what you’re going to spend after those dreaded service and “convenience” fees) — whether in this economy or in a thriving one, whether you’re close enough to feel the spit of singer Brian Johnson or so far away that you’re left to watch the whole thing on video screens — is just unconscionable.

So this Saturday at 10 a.m., hug your kids, water the lawn, eat an omelette, take a stroll through the park … hell, I don’t care … cut your friggin’ ear off. But whatever you do, do not buy tickets for this ripoff of a show.