NOT Street Art

One of the local blogs I check out (and follow via Twitter) is Streets Dept., which features photos (and sometimes video) taken around the city, focusing on things like fashion, art, things happening on the streets, or just some nice scenes. (See what I did there? Photos, video...focusing...there's no "off" position on my genius switch, I tell you.) Often you will see on the blog examples of street art -- stickers, graffiti, wheat pastings, even that yarn bombing stuff that seems to be so popular that it still brings some hits to my blog.

I bring this up because (1) I wanted to give a shout out to Streets Dept. and (2) to point out that the picture you see here is NOT street art.

I found a number of these stenciled onto the sidewalks around center city the other day. The Philadelphia Soul is our Arena Football team (in other words, not real football since they play it indoors on the floor of the hockey rink with artificial turf laid on top). They used to be part-owned by Jon Bon Jovi, and they won the league's championship in July 2008. A Philadelphia team winning a title (remember, this was before the Phillies broke through in October of that year) so freaked out the powers that be that the league went out of business, denying the Soul an opportunity to defend their crown. That, and they mentioned something about the economy tanking.

The league came back in 2010, but without the Soul. However, this year...well, you can see from the picture when they return to action. Before they were shut down, they did get some good crowds to the CoreStates First Union Wachovia Wells Fargo Center. We'll have to see if the buzz picks back up after two lost years and one departed rock star/owner.

As for those stenciled ads? I'm assuming this weekend's rain will have washed that stuff away.