Meet Me At the Clothespin

This rusty sculpture arrived on the landscape several years before I did, so I think of it as one of the city's timeless bones. "Clothespin, Philadelphia" (1976) by Claes Oldenburg is so familiar and so peculiar that people here will often tell a friend, "Meet me at the clothespin" instead of going through the trouble to name streets or addresses. It stands 45 feet tall, and because its base sits at the top of a spiral staircase leading to an underground train terminal, it has an illusion of being even taller. I cannot remember anyone disliking the clothespin. We find it miildly amusing when we think of it at all.

Behind it stands a tower that was finished in recent years, and the tower of our century-old City Hell is reflected in its glass. The tower stands on the site of the former Meridian Bank Tower, which was destroyed by a fire around 1991. I remember watching flames shoot out from about 2/3 way up the tower, like a scene from the old film "Towering Inferno," from a building a few miles to the west. The fire roared for something like eighteen hours, and more than one firefighter died putting it out (emergency stairs were blocked by discarded cement). After 9/11, some so-called "conspiracy theorists" pointed to this fire as an example of a fire NOT causing a skyscraper to collapse, as NYC's World Trade Center towers did. I took this shot from underground in the station, thnking that this old clothespin wll make a blip sooner or later, so might as well capture it on a sunny day!