Kiara Alegría Hudes

And I think I had to leave Philadelphia to write –

my community stories because I kind of only know how to tell the story in hindsight when you've already left it.

That's how I grew up hearing them.

So that's kind of how I tell them now.

The thing that really turned me on about living in Philadelphia growing up was the simultaneous disconnect and overlap between the fact that it is a mythological part of American history and also it's just a very real place where very real people live.

And so I would get excited walking.

You know, I was kind of like a rebellious teen.

I would be wearing like my heavy motorcycle boots walking around downtown with my notebook writing poems.

And in the historic part of downtown Chicago.

There's cobblestones and they're kind of these blue, shiny, eroded cobblestones.

And sometimes they'd have to dig them up.

The city would dig them up and find unmarked graves beneath them, find pottery remnants and shards from American Indian groups, would find kitchens that had –

you know, that revealed through their clues the history of slave labor even in Philadelphia.

And so here you are, you're walking over

10 feet below your boots.

Layers, centuries of Philadelphia history.

And all that history is layered on top of an extensive stream network that got kind of paved over.

So there's layers and layers and layers of geologic history, colonial history.

And then I'm walking north on Fifth Street and...

When you cross Girard Avenue, at least in my childhood, it was almost this invisible wall, like boom.