Alyssa Songsiridej: FOUR DESTINATIONS AWAY AND NEARBY

Alyssa Songsiridej
FOUR DESTINATIONS AWAY AND NEARBY

4814 Trinity St
My tenancy in this house—a longstanding punk house in permanent dereliction—took place from 2011-2013, but this is just a sliver in the house’s long history, a drop in all of the total personal experience held by its walls. The story of the house existed as myth and oral rumor, passing through a series of different names: The House of Less Cock, the Unholy Trinity, and then, when I lived there, only Trinity. Human life ebbing and flowing and leaving waves of random detritus: a bronze Buddha, a stripper pole, the expired rubber pads from an endless number of bikes. A show house, a collective group house, and a sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional experiment in group living.

49th and Chester
From this corner, you have several options. There’s lingering: you can go into Jennifer’s Grocery, full of marked up dry goods and Fabuloso and an original Ms. PacMan machine. And then there’s leaving: by the number 13 trolley, west to Yeadon and Mt. Moriah, cemetery or east to Center City, or by the Regional Rail line to the suburbs in the west. The #13, whose humming electric cars are even older than me, served for many years as my only method of returning home or escaping. (Except in July, the annual trolley blitz, when the tunnel is closed and leaving the neighborhood is basically impossible). Although public transit is now a chore, when I first moved here I thought it was a miracle, that you could pay two dollars for some vehicle that would take you far away.

Farm 51
The gates of this garden once opened on Thursdays to sell fresh produce from the now-defunct urban farm. My housemate at Trinity found it first. Inside, she said, it looked like an advertisement for rustic housewares no one could afford. What I do remember is walking up with her after work to spend too much money on eggs, sold by the neighborhood kids who were employed by the farmers. They counted out our sweaty change and tenderly handled the heft of thin-skinned heirloom tomatoes. The eggs came in mix-and-match six packs, just like deli beer, different sizes and shades—pale green, speckled gray, the soft white of cotton sheets—reflecting their layers’ plumage and personality. But once cracked, they revealed yolks of a uniform gold, thick and syrupy. I’m not sure if you can still go in. Believe me when I say that it used to be otherworldly.

Kingsessing Branch Library
Years of neglect are now this library’s ornament, part of its grandeur, one of the first Philly libraries paid for by the Gilded Age railroad tycoon Andrew Carnegie. While the trolley can take you away physically, the library carries you off mentally, bringing in books from far-flung branches. Brass light fixtures and crown molding, brown now with water damage, linger as a reminder of the building’s original glory. On one side, the construction-papered glory of an afterschool program—or what was once an afterschool program, when the library used to be open in the evenings—while in the back hum public computers. In the basement: rooms for community meetings, slumbering booths for voting. But for now, you can’t even go inside; a new funding initiative, this one paid not by a rich guy, but from a tax on soda, has brought in the hulking machines and chain link fences, and the promise of eventual improvements to be unveiled at a distant point in time.

Alyssa Songsiridej is the author of Little Rabbit, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Edmund White Award. A 2022 5 under 35 National Book Foundation honoree, she lives in Philadelphia. Alyssa Songsiridej is also the managing editor at Electric Literature.