Scene Through the Lens | April 20, 2020
Inquirer staff photographer Tom Gralish’s weekly visual exploration of our region
As a visual person, I like to think I am more observant than the average bear. So it’s humbling to stumble across something I’d never noticed before — a half-block from my newspaper office at Eighth and Market Streets.
Credit the coronavirus. Working under the “old normal,” one-way streets and restricted left turns meant I never drove west on Market on the way to the press parking spaces behind our building.
Driving there under the “new normal” the other night, I spotted two figures working in a window of the former Lit Bros. department store, across Eighth from the Inquirer offices in the former Strawbridge & Clothier building.
Was it a coronavirus-theme window display from the retailer Five Below, which has a store and corporate headquarters in the Lits building? That seemed more like something the sometimes-controversial Urban Outfitters, another retailer based in Philadelphia, would do.
I parked in front — flashers on, even though Market during the “new normal” is deserted at night —- and took a picture through my front windshield (I didn’t want to startle the window artists). It was only after I made a few “safe” photos and got out of my car to walk closer did I realize the window-dressing artists were actually a performance art/video installation piece under a new canopy-marquee entrance to the main lobby. By “new,” I mean almost a year ago. I had just never seen it before.
Brickstone Cos., which refurbished and reopened the landmark building in 1987, later adding 14-foot tall digital signage on the roof and color-changing LED lighting on the facade, hired the Frankford-based design agency Bluecadet last year to help rebrand the historic structure as the Lits Building. Bluecadet created the marquee entrance and canopy, and brought in Philadelphia artists Gina Triplett and Matthew Curtius to paint a number of murals. Bluecadet director of photography Dan King filmed them live, creating the time-lapse video that fooled and delightfully surprised me.
Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:
>>SEE MORE: Twenty years of a photo column