South Philly's most "Electric Street"

The 1300 block of Percy Street is unique simply from an architectural perspective — it bends, there’s no front yard or house façades, you enter it one side and can’t see the exit on the other. This is cool and, sadly, an opportune space for undesirable behaviors: trash dumping, doing or selling drugs, graffiti, generally anything one doesn’t want to be seen doing.

Enter artist David Guinn and the Passyunk Square Civic Assocation’s (PSCA) beautification committee. Add a healthy Knight Foundation grant and a matching endowment from the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, plus lighting designer Drew Billiau, and “Electric Street” is born, a bright neon mural electrified by bendable LED lights.

Guinn’s a Philadelphia lifer who calls the 1100 block of Cross Street home. The artist is a graduate of the McCall School, Masterman, Central High and Columbia University, where he studied architecture, and has been painting murals in Philly for years through the Mural Arts Program. In fact, he’s painted nearly 30 Philadelphia murals since 1998 (plus more in Montreal, New York City, and D.C.).

“I feel pretty connected to all the work that I do,” he said, but pointed towards his seasons murals at 10th and Bainbridge (“Crystal Snowcape”) and formerly Ninth and Bainbridge streets (“Autumn,” which was recreated at Fleisher Art Memorial as “Autumn Revisited” after the 629 S. Ninth St. lot was developed). Mario Lanza Park, 200 Catharine St., houses “Summer,” and “Spring is in Center City.

“Autumn Revisited” holds extra meaning for Guinn — he took art classes there as a kid. The Quince Street native had a best friend in South Philly at Sixth and Fitzwater streets, and he fondly remembers wandering south.

“I had gone to Fleisher as a kid and taken art classes — to paint a mural there was an honor,” he said, and cited a long-gone destination for him and his friend. “Brocco’s was this legendary deli or hoagie spot and in my memory, I don’t know if this could be true, but you could get a hoagie for a dollar.”

Where did the spark for this bright, neon mural come from?

“It came from a couple different places,” he began, and quickly arrived at the PSCA holiday happy hour at Garage Bar, 1231–33 E. Passyunk Ave. There he ran into PSCA beautifcation enthusiasts Sarah Anton and Andrew Emma. “The civic had identified the block as something to make nicer and draw people down it — it’s a block that curves, and people have a lot of privacy back there and that leads them to do bad things. It’s a really unique spot in Philadelphia. It’s not a straight street, which you don’t see very much of, and I don’t know of any other example.”

Theatre Exile’s, 1340 S. 13th St., producing artistic director, Deborah Block, had previously worked with light artist extraordinaire, Billiau.

“Sarah recommended talking to Deb Block, and she said I know this great guy and I think he’d be perfect for this — we got connected and got to work and it’s really a collaborative effort between Drew and I,” Guinn said.

Bright greens, oranges and reds are but the tip of the iceberg when one wanders down Percy now, which has drawn tourists, PSCA’s garden, 1304 E. Passyunk Ave. visitors and street art enthusiasts since its unveiling in mid-June.

Did Emma or PSCA expect the retro-flavored, ’80s-vibing art deco neon that Guinn and Billiau cooked up?

“No way, no way,” laughed Emma, a resident of the 1300 block of South Ninth Street and a Parks & Rec inspector specializing in setting standards for parks, rec centers and playgrounds. “We were thinking something simple like Christmas tree lights strung from house to house. This was totally unexpected. We have never heard of pliable LED lights so this was nothing we could even fathom.”

As Emma, a 2011 South Philly Review Difference Maker, said, he thought a Guinn mural was cool enough, “not realizing that he had Drew in his back pocket.”

As Anton describes it, she, Emma and others from the civic have long hoped to turn Percy into an arts walk, and this may very well be just the beginning — they’re already trying to get more residents on board. “The vision is for the entire block to be a kind of arts walk, so we’ve been working with new artists and trying to make it a really interesting destination and something positive. Can we maybe get some lighting on the street and make it not such a dark corner?” they wondered. Guinn, it seems, knocked it out of the park.

“It’s been terrific. We’re so excited about how much press it’s been getting,” Anton, a resident of the 900 block of Federal Street, a 12-year block resident and non-profit administrator, said. “Sadly, there’s been a little bit of vandalism. Hopefully, that’s over.”

At the end of June, there was some vandalizing and tagging of the mural that Guinn said he was about to go fix. When he and Billiau have gone to check in on it at night and “people were coming up and taking selfies,” something the artist hadn’t really thought of, but young folks with smart phones are eating it up.

“We’ve amazingly not gotten any negative experiences,” Emma said. Having Guinn and Billiau by their side made the PSCA’s mission to overhaul Percy Street a little easier — the residents who’d house the mural were more eager to help than before when it was just an idea. “We’ll see if we can get the next wall with the official thumbs up to keep it going.”

Anton called it the “perfect meeting of a project and artist, which is something that we can do to keep awareness going for opportunities in the neighborhood and constantly talking about it and listening to people with creative skills.”

“Drew and I really connected. We really saw eye-to-eye, and he saw things in a three-dimensional way,” Guinn said. “There’s a progression as you enter the street and you keep turning corners and discovering — it’s a journey. It piqued the interest in the architect in me — this is something that could really be this experience.”

The colors in his seasons murals are a bit muted but, he admitted, lately he’s come to embrace color and “just going for it.”

“I think of color as really important to my painting, and I kind of look at it as a sort of strength of mine,” he said. “Recently I’ve sort of opened up with color, and, at Percy Street, we wanted to attract attention — so the colors being bright seemed like it made sense.”

[This was originally published JULY 7, 2016 for the South Philly Review.]