His illustrations capture iconic Philly moments, and now his work is in a city museum

Meet Bob Dix, a lifelong Philadelphian who illustrates the unusual moments, memes, and characters that define Philly’s popular culture.

Artist Bob Dix was living in a West Philly storefront, working on his resume and drowning in concerns about his future, when Hurricane Ida hit in September 2021, flooding the Schuylkill and turning the Vine Street Expressway into a veritable canal.

The sight of a major roadway becoming a muddied river and of Philly looking strangely like Venice led some Philadelphians to commune with this new waterway by diving into it or floating down it with a beer.

Early on it became clear the Vine Street Canal, as it was affectionately known, would forever be a part of Philly’s legend and lore.

Dix went to see the flooded road, but it wasn’t until a friend told him people were asking why nobody had drawn Gritty floating down it yet that he decided to capture the Philly-ness of the moment.

“I said, let me see what I can do,” Dix recalled. “So, I cracked a beer and did that illustration.”

“That illustration” is Crossing the Schuylkill, Dix’s magnum opus that’s a nod to Washington Crossing the Delaware and is awash with Philly legends, memes, and history.

In Dix’s piece, beloved Philly mascots Gritty and the Phanatic are in boat on the Vine Street Canal with the Northeast Philly Monk (a Carthusian monk whose 15th-century portrait went viral because it’s said to resemble guys from Northeast Philly), and Green Man (a reoccurring character from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia).

Dix emblazoned the chest of Green Man’s suit with the logo for Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the Northeast Philly site of a bizarre news conference by Rudy Giuliani, and he put a rum ham in Green Man’s hand (another nod to It’s Always Sunny).

In the muddied water floating nearby are hitchBOT, the traveling Canadian robot who met his demise in Philly, and a large rubber duck, a reference to the 61-foot rubber ducky that came to the Delaware River for the Tall Ships Festival in 2015 and was immediately ripped and deflated (as so many have been by Philadelphia).

It took Dix 25 minutes to create the piece. He then put it on social media and put himself to bed.

“By the next morning my life had changed,” he said. “My phone was blowing up. I had all these people who wanted prints and T-shirts of it … and that’s when I knew, alright, I’m going to be able to pay my rent for months.”

Dix continues to sell prints of the piece today. Last September, Craig Bruns, chief curator of the Independence Seaport Museum, bought one from Dix at the East Passyunk Music Festival and was so enchanted by it he asked if he’d like to donate the original to the museum’s permanent collection.

It was an incredibly validating moment for Dix.

“The museum’s job is to document the history of the port … and all the rivers. That flood was one of those things that’s hard to capture, but here it was,” Bruns said. “It’s one thing to have the pictures in the newspapers, but to have this editorial illustration was just like ‘Oh my God!’”

Now 60 and living in South Philly, Dix continues to illustrate other iconic moments with pieces like Where the Highway Ends, about last year’s collapse of I-95, and classic characters like Eagles fan Mary Kate Mink, a.k.a. the “Mare of Havertown,” who went viral for yelling obscenities at NFL refs (Dix said Mink’s “whole family” bought the Christmas ornament he made).

As for Dix, he’s just as Philly as his illustrations. He worked at Bob & Barbara’s for 16 years, his dad is a Mummer, his neighbor is Alexander “the Chicken Man” Tominsky, and he tells an urban legend about the curse of the Citywide Special.

Dix paints every day at Ultimo Coffee in Newbold, where he sets up his pens, pencils, and watercolors at a tiny table and is beloved by the staff, who have one of his paintings behind the counter.

“The real trick is not to dip my brush in my coffee,” said Dix.

Growing up in a working-class family in Wissinoming, Dix was drawn to art as a child but was dissuaded by his parents from pursuing it as a career.

He obtained a bachelor’s degree from the now-closed Art Institute of Philadelphia and worked for several companies as a graphic designer, creating images for everything from car manuals to pharmaceutical case studies, all while making his own illustrations on the side.

In the early 2000s, Dix attended meetings of the Philadelphia Cartoonist Society at Bob & Barbara’s Lounge on South Street. That led to a job at the storied Philly bar, where he slung drinks, booked bands, ran the BINGO game, and did “Charlie work” (a.k.a. stuff nobody else wants to do) for 16 years.

Today, Dix supplements his artist’s income by teaching classes at the Tacony LAB Community Art Center, assisting with karaoke at 12 Steps Down, and repairing lamps and other items at the DreamEerie, a goth and home decor shop on South Street.

He enjoys painting live at shows like World Cafe Live’s Jim Henson Holiday Extravaganza, and setting 40-day artistic challenges for himself. In the aftermath of his neighbor, Tominsky, eating 40 rotisserie chickens in 40 days, Dix painted a portrait of a chicken every day for 40 days. When he painted his last chicken live at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar, Tominsky made an appearance.

Dix is now prepping for his next 40-day challenge, “PhilODDelphia,” which he’ll begin on Feb. 20 and will post to the Instagram account, @philoddelphia. He calls it a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” that will focus on the weird things he loves about the city, from the legend of Uncle O’Grimacey to the iconic business signs of Philly that are no more.

“I like championing different things about Philadelphia,” he said. “I try to find those little nuggets of bliss and I always try to bring light to what’s happening.”