A frozen car in Fishtown became a tourist attraction on Google Maps

Independence Hall, the Rocky statue, the Liberty Bell, and … a 2016 Honda Civic parked in Fishtown?

That odd appendage at the end of the list just became one of Philadelphia’s newest tourist attractions on Google Maps.

How does a silver sedan get minted a must-see site in the birthplace of America?

It gets completely covered in ice.

In photos of the car now seen around the world, a sheet of ice wrapping around the roof and hood of the car extends all the way down to the pavement. Paralyzed windshield wipers propped up perpendicular to the dashboard look like a pair of arms flailing frantically for help as the car suffers an frigid death. Passersby might easily mistake the sight for an ice sculpture of a car rather than a real one.

The journey from plebeian commuter vehicle to local celebrity has been a source of both humor and headache for 24-year-old Tianna Graham, the car’s owner.

At first she wasn’t terribly worried about the situation.

“It’s fine. I’ll figure it out,” she remembered thinking.

Then the shock wore off.

“Now I’m like, ‘OK, what do I actually do now?’”

The saga starts at the intersection of North Front and East Allen Streets, under an I-95 underpass, where Graham first parked her car on Jan. 23. She knew a major snowstorm was looming, so when she found an open spot near her apartment, she leaped at it.

After the deluge of flakes and sleet left the city coated in 9.3 inches of snow and ice, her girlfriend helped her shovel her car out of the spot on Tuesday so they could run a few errands, she said.

When they returned, they found the spot still vacant, so Graham parked there again.

On Wednesday, Graham, a fifth-grade math teacher at Community Academy of Philadelphia, noticed the street she had parked on was cordoned off with caution tape.

She asked a nearby police officer if she should move her car, she said, and he advised her to leave it there.

What happened next, Graham, the city, the people of Philadelphia, and frozen-car fanatics worldwide may never fully know.

On Thursday, the Philadelphia Water Department repaired a leak on a six-inch water main at North Front and East Allen Streets around 2:30 p.m., said department spokesperson Brian Rademaekers.

The department did not receive any reports of water gushing dramatically from the pipe, Rademaekers said. It is not clear if water from the pipe, from the highway overpass, or from another source led the car to becoming enveloped in ice.

But, when Graham returned from work last Thursday around 3:30 p.m. during what turned out to be a weeklong Arctic freeze and checked on her Honda, she saw it frozen absolutely solid.

“I was freaking out a little bit,” Graham said. “I was just like, ‘I don’t even know where to start.’”

So she started where many Gen Zers start — on Instagram.

Graham posted the photo on her private Instagram story, asking friends what she should do.

Her first instinct was to try to break apart the ice. So she and her friend came at it with a small shovel and an ice pick but quickly found it a futile effort.

Graham was, however, able to pry open the passenger-side door and look inside.

“There was water everywhere,” she said. “The inside of my car is soaked. The floors are soaked. My seats were soaked. Everything is wet inside.”

On Friday, she was able to turn on the ignition, she said, but had no such luck when she tried again this week.

She filed a claim through her insurance company, Geico, which dispatched a tow truck Monday, she said. It is now awaiting inspection.

“It’s really just overall inconvenient,” she said. “I understand that it’s like hilarious and everyone’s loved it, but nobody has been offering any kind of valid help at this point.

“I don’t really know where to go from here,” she said.

As Graham was dealing with the logistics of trying to save the car, the car itself was skyrocketing toward social media stardom.

Photos and videos of it began circulating online. Area residents began posting clips of themselves visiting the car, some even climbing on top of it.

When 23-year-old Abbigail Erbacher came up to Philly to visit her friend on Sunday, the frozen car was quickly added to the day’s itinerary.

The Egg Harbor Township, N.J., resident had seen the videos of the car on TikTok, identified the location with her friend based on landmarks around it, and headed to Fishtown.

“My first thought was, ‘Oh, my god, this is real.’ And then my next was, ‘I feel so bad for her,’” Erbacher said. “It had to have been encased in anywhere from an inch to two inches of ice.”

Shortly after the visit, Erbacher took to TikTok.

Her video starts with her screaming upon seeing the car and gently knocking on the frozen solid driver’s-side mirror. The overlaid text: “philadelphias newest monument.”

As of Wednesday the video had 22 million views.

Erbacher was surprised to see her clip become so widely viewed, but was not at all shocked to see the story itself gaining traction.

“I think our generation is so unserious,” she said. “These sort of things feel like the type of things that only happen to our generation.”

Between the political climate and the pandemic, Erbacher said, she and many others Gen Zers feel particularly prone to bad luck.

“I think we definitely feel a bit victimized,” she said. “And so when things reinforce that, we’re like, ‘OK, cool. That would only happen to us, so we just kind of got to go with it.’”

And Graham did, indeed, go with it. She started documenting the journey on TikTok herself late last week beginning with a simple video featuring the camera panning around the frozen car to the Rob49 song “WTHELLY.” That post got 8 million views.

On Monday, she posted two more videos. One of her girlfriend and friend gingerly cracking the ice off the car with hammers to the No Doubt song “Just a Girl,” which was viewed more than 27 million times, and another of the car getting towed away to the song “Vroom Vroom” by Charli XCX that was watched more than 12 million times.

“Bye ice car!” she wrote over the video of its immobilized tires cutting through hefty chunks of ice as the tow truck dragged it across the street.