A gamble on Philadelphia nets a love of SEPTA underground trolleys

Megan Ritchie Jooste

is a writer and photographer

in Center City

I was young and idealistic, a newly minted resident of Philly, and SEPTA was my chariot of choice. It was 2002, and each morning I would bound down the stairs of my apartment building at the pre-Tria corner of 12th and Spruce and make my way to the El access on Market.

Once underground, I would amble west for a block to catch the subway to my first real job at a university in West Philly. On the platform, my fellow passengers and I would lean forward, craning our necks to catch a glimpse of the lights far down the tunnel to the left heralding an incoming train. Some days we waited longer than others. We would turn to each other and shake our heads, "Oh, SEPTA," we'd cluck our tongues. But really, I didn't mind.

After work I would gather with other fledgling educators, lawyers, and project managers on the top floors of Center City buildings and we would mingle and network and drink free wine as Bluetooth devices glowed from ear canals. We waxed positive about the amazing developments happening in Northern Liberties and Passyunk Square and believed in Sam Katz, then Michael Nutter. We made sure the unions (eventually) moved aside when MTV's The Real World came to town. We took over dilapidated warehouses and turned them into spaces for learning, art, and performance. We were the ones who stayed - who witnessed the annual postgraduate exodus to New York, Boston, Raleigh-Durham, and San Francisco, and dug in our heels. We were the believers. We were the gamblers.

One morning, I descended the stairs under the giant rotating guitar at 12th and Market and discovered that someone had thrown an entire deck of cards down an empty stairwell that led to a defunct passageway to the trolley routes below. The thick glass doorway that led to the stairwell was always locked. But someone had still managed to toss an entire deck down there. Aces and jacks, kings and queens - piled haphazardly at the top of the staircase and spilled down to the left, where the stairs disappeared into the dark. Day after day, after week, after month, they remained, unmoved and untouched, immured in this space. The dust built up, concealing numbers and colors in grime. Then one day there was a large metal wall concealing the doorway. I couldn't see the cards at all anymore.

The SEPTA strike of 2005 drove me above ground to Via Bicycle, and I purchased a rusty set of wheels for $40. We crossed the Walnut Street Bridge in droves that week, pedestrians and bikers alike, resembling some mass uprising out of Center City and into West Philadelphia. If SEPTA wouldn't take us, we'd get there ourselves. There was adventure in the air, a sense of camaraderie. A few years later, SEPTA struck again, and eventually the sense of adventure was replaced by the tedious task of just getting to work, or back home. Just getting anywhere.

The other day, I took the trolley to Avril 50, a coffee shop at 34th and Sansom that I knew would carry an Australian fashion magazine I suddenly needed to possess. From a bright late summer morning, I descended those same stairs at the Hard Rock Café, and looked to my left. The metal wall was still there, revealing neither stairs nor cards. I plunked a token into the turnstile and turned right, descended another set of stairs and walked down the ramp to the trolley terminal at 13th.

There has remained a romance, a mysterious allure for me about the underground trolleys. I'm not the only one who feels this way, who feels the poetry in the curves beneath the grid: There's a poet among the drivers, one celebrated in the @SeptaPoet Twitter handle, which regularly features the poetry if not by the driver, Mike Fuller, then a Fuller-esque turn of phrase such as:

then, slowly

like a gambler in recovery

we come out of the hole

into southwest philly.

Often hashtags will follow: #40thstreetportal #westbound, signaling to the reader where the bard had dropped a verse.

The trolleys squeal and whine their way through the bowels of Philadelphia, and when it's time to step off, the weight of your body opens the doors. "Step DOWN" a less-lyrical driver or an impatient passenger inevitably hollers to the young university student or other newcomer. "Dude, it's rude" placards above the rear doors implore passengers to take up only one seat. But gone are the stickers with the old SEPTA slogan, limply declaring: "We're getting there."

Though I can't see that deck of cards anymore, I know that if I pushed aside that metal wall the cards would be there, in the never-used staircase that leads to the trolleys that carve light into the dark tunnels under our city. I've had more than a decade to think of the reason someone would have cast a deck of cards down a set of stairs in the underbelly of Philadelphia's transit system, and I can't for the life of me think of why. But I guess that's the whole thing about gambling. You throw down your cards, and you wait.