The Portal has to leave City Hall. Here’s where people think it should go next in Philly.

I’ve been a fan of the Portal ever since I spent five hours documenting how Philadelphians reacted to it and how the world reacted to us when this interactive installation arrived here in 2024.

The soundless, circular livestream screen with sci-fi vibes that connects strangers around the world was at its best at its first location in LOVE Park. But after it was vandalized twice, it was relocated to the courtyard of City Hall last year, where it has remained.

Honestly, I’m impressed it made it this long. Most of us didn’t give it 24 hours.

The Portal’s time here may soon be up though if organizers can’t find a new home for it. The city didn’t extend its permit, citing upcoming commitments to the holiday market in the courtyard, Nicolas Klaus, CEO of Portals.org, told The Inquirer last week.

With the permit due to expire at the end of October, Portals.org is now looking for a new home for the 3.5-ton video screen and a sponsor to cover the cost of relocation and annual maintenance, which averages about $30,000 a year, according to Klaus.

Philly could lose the Portal to another city if a new site isn’t found, and Philly doesn’t like losing anything — even if it is our fault — so I asked readers on social media where it should head next.

With money no object and logic an afterthought, here’s where people said they’d like to see the Portal go.

If you want to frame this city beautifully for outsiders, there’s perhaps no better place to put the Portal than at the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps looking down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. This was the clear winner from people who answered my question seriously (I was surprised I got any serious answers).

We could put it right in front of the Rocky statue so that when folks run up the stairs, people around the world can cheer them on or make fun of them for tripping. Nobody will be able to hear their laughter, so what does it matter anyway? Let’s give the viewers what they really want — athleticism and slapstick. Plus, the Art Museum is where all of our great city celebrations are held. Next time one of our teams wins a championship and ends its parade at the museum steps, folks could fly to Lithuania for a front-row seat to the celebration. Pirmyn paukščiai!

For a crash course in our culture, there’s nowhere to get the full-on Philly quicker than by putting the Portal at the sports complex, so long as organizers can also slap an R-rating and a force field around that thing.

Several people suggested putting the Portal in tailgating lots (particularly K and Jetro), which I think the Irish would really get a kick out of. I can picture “Whiskey in the Jar” sing-a-longs across the pond and peat moss fires in the parking lots.

Others suggested placing the Portal right on Lincoln Financial Field or at third base at Citizen’s Bank Park (please meet our king, the Phanatic, and his court of jesters, the Galapagos Gang) and one guy wants it put in the “Last stall, men’s restroom Section 323 at the Linc,” which is oddly specific and unsettling, sir.

Personally, I think it should go inside Gritty’s secret hideout at Xfinity Mobile Arena. Gritty is a master at entertaining without talking and we’d finally get to see what he does at night. Plus, Gritty could invite LeBron James to hang out after Sixers games. Portal ratings would go through the roof!

When it comes to indelible Philly landmarks it’s hard to top the “Boner 4ever” building, the 14-story building on North Broad Street that’s been adorned with the graffiti tags “Boner 4ever” on one side and “Forever Boner” on the other for as long as anyone can remember.

Thanks to Shana Fallon on Bluesky for this fantastic suggestion.

“I mean, honestly, this is the only right answer,” Fallon wrote. “Bunches of tourists taking the BSL up to Broad and Erie for Max’s, the Portal, and Boner 4ever/Forever Boner. What a full, Philadelphia experience.”

Putting the Portal here would also ensure that the building and graffiti remain forever, as is foretold, and spotlighting a building festooned with such an enduring nickname will make people even more confused about just what goes on here in Philly.

For an easily-digestible microcosm of Philly, putting the Portal inside of a Wawa would be a Sizzli move, as Larry Durland suggested on Threads. You may not like that one of our region’s cultural touchstones is a convenience store with touch screens, but for many it’s a third space on the go, which makes it a classic fit for the Portal.

With the Portal at Wawa, the world could see our sartorial splendor on full display — men in matching track suits and slides, women in pajama pants and flip-flops, and without fail, someone whose every item of clothing is Eagles-branded. Plus, the doors at Wawa are already like a portal all their own, making us all a little more polite toward our fellow man.

Of course everything changes after midnight at Wawa, so if viewers get bored watching folks patiently stand around waiting for their order numbers to be called, they need only wait for the clock to strike 12 a.m. Eastern for the real show to begin.

Few places in Philly are as iconic as the garage doors of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the site of one of the greatest and worst press conferences of all time. It’s inspired shirts, a beer, a run, a concert, and countless memes, perhaps it could inspire a whole new era of the Portal as well.

Working together, Portal organizers and Four Seasons staffers could bill this as the hottest spot in between a crematorium and a sex shop to hold press conferences that have absolutely nothing to do with landscaping — and they’d be broadcast around the world too! Sure, they wouldn’t have sound, but I’d cover every one to let you know what was said.

Four Seasons has already proven it’s great with lawn-distance relationships and the Portal sows good will so let’s make this thing happen. Thanks to Bluesky user Tim Bak for the suggestion.

As a place frequented by both residents and tourists, putting the Portal “dead center” inside of Reading Terminal Market would definitely give folks a flavor of Philly, as Bluesky user Mike Zufel suggested. It’d provide phenomenal foot traffic and captivating esthetics, but organizers would risk people in other cities demanding a scratch-and-sniff function be added to their devices.

If the Portal was inside of Reading Terminal, viewers would also get to watch one of Philly’s more unusual traditions — the market’s annual Scrapple Sculpting Contest. Explaining scrapple is hard enough, explaining why people here chisel sculptures of the Eagles’ Tush Push out of blocks of it to win a pig trophy would be sow hard, especially since you can’t use words. We’re gonna need the Philadelphia Ballet to start working on an interpretive dance about this now to help us explain it to the world.

This suggestion from a Threads user is about as serious as it gets, and it’s an excellent one too. No place in Philadelphia has faced more scrutiny, controversy, or whitewashing of history this year than the President’s House Site, which until recently laid bare the Founding Fathers’ role in slavery and told the stories of the people George Washington enslaved here in Philadelphia.

After months of legal battles and under the cover of night in mid-July, President Donald Trump’s administration installed its own watered-down panels at the National Park site on Independence Mall, panels that experts say diluted Washington’s position as an enslaver of human beings. Large, solar-powered surveillance cameras now loom over the President’s House, giving it an eerie surveillance-state vibe.

So let’s give Big Brother a taste of its own medicine by putting the Portal at the site so we can keep an eye on what the federal government is doing there at all times. Plus the more people who see the President’s House, the more questions they may ask about it, questions that could lead them to research the full history. And even if Philadelphians can’t talk to people through the Portal about what’s happened at the site, I guarantee they will volunteer to hold up signs in front of it that speak the truth.

Several people who didn’t skirt around the fact that Philadelphia is probably most internationally known for the steak sandwich that carries its name suggested putting the Portal right outside of a cheesesteak shop to help give folks a taste of Philly.

These sharp readers were on a roll, but they differed on exactly which shop the Portal should go to. Some said it should be flanked by cheesy Pat’s and Geno’s, so people can gawk at tourists, while others suggested local favs, like Angelo’s or Dalessandro’s, so visitors know where to go.

Though it’s cliche, I’m on board wit this idea for one reason: I’ve been hoping for a Portal love connection story since day one and if there’s anywhere a meat-cute is bound to happen in Philly, it’s at a cheesesteak shop.

I can see the handwritten love sign on dirty butcher paper being held up to the Portal now:

“Whiz you were here xoxo.”