As a child, one of my earliest memories is my family driving into Center City on I-95, coming in from the Northeast. As we rounded the exit onto the Vine Street Expressway, I looked north, and atop this otherwise nondescript storage warehouse, I see one of the most recognizable faces in Philadelphia history (not to mention the larger American (& French) histories) sandwiched between the words “Electric” & “Factory”. My 5 or 6 year old mind then drew the obviously logical conclusion that this clearly must be the power plant that supplied energy for all the massive buildings just on the other side of the highway…

It would be another 15 years before I would actually walk through the doors of this power plant of music, during my freshman year of college going to see Rise Against with some pals from high school. As the bouncers patted me down they found a pocket knife which had been with me since my Scouting days (a present from my sister’s trip to Switzerland years earlier and something I mindlessly just carried under my wallet at all times…it was a different time). I had to run around the corner and find a pipe in an alleyway to stash the knife and pray it was still there till after the concert (it was).

Last year the Electric Factory was sold to a company from New York and rebranded something like Franklin Music Hall, and the sign was taken down. Through happenstance and having the right conversation with the right person at the right time, I was able to get access to the spot where the sign was being…”stored” would be a generous term. Discarded is more like it. It had been gathering dust and had a smattering of ancient and rusted trash thrown in front of it, guarded almost by an old-before-I-was-born-Chevy covered with enough dust to conduct an archaeological dig…

As of the time this is being posted, the sign has since disappeared, either claimed by whoever owned it, or taken by someone who came across it.

All in all, a piece of Philadelphia history is gone and I count myself immensely lucky to have been in a position to document it in it’s liminal space between existence and memory