Philly's Mural Mile

During all of the Independence Day weekend festivities, I went downtown on the 2nd of July and actually participated in one of the events. That is, if you consider getting a free hot dog as participation. My actual purpose on this trip was to take the Mural Mile walking tour. We have a great thing here, the Mural Arts Program, through which local artists create murals on the walls of buildings with input from the community. They've now put together a walking tour of 17 of the murals in center city as the Mural Mile. It's actually 2.5 miles if you walk the entire length of the tour, but there's an abridged one-mile version including 12 of the 17 murals.

I downloaded podcasts to my iPod and listened to descriptions of the program, the individual murals, some of the creative processes and commentary from some of the artists and others. It was very interesting, particularly the story of the mural that wraps around Dirty Frank's bar. There's also a LGBT mural called "Pride & Progress."

I took a bunch of photos and have put them into a Flickr set. You can go here to see it. I've added a few photos below as a sample.
Because I have a cheap camera and am not exactly a pro at this, (plus I was dodging cars -- quite a few of these murals are on buildings with parking lots next door) I really couldn't capture images of the complete murals as often as I'd have liked, so I also took close-ups of some segments. Sometimes the murals extend to multiple buildings and the walls differ in size. In one particular case (Finding Home) it wraps around a small structure. There's also one that they haven't even started yet. You'll see that blank wall if you go through the entire set.