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This Issue 04/13/2006

Also in this issue

• Ode to the peeps
• Street Beats
• Gefilte goes gourmet
• Fom the editor

Today, all that remains is an empty lot. The buildings on both sides are abandoned. Their windows are boarded up, except for the top two, which reveal white paint peeling from the ceiling. Trash clings to the chain link fence surrounding the lot. Paper bags, tissues, cigarette butts, a faded Marlboro box, a Doritos bag and a flyer for a roller skating party -- these are the things that are left. Some of the weeds are five feet tall.

Jewel Gibbs, who lives a block from the lot on Clearfield Street, remembers the mural that used to be there -- a portrait of an anonymous young man. Standing 29 feet tall, the young man stared pensively, or sorrowfully as some used to say, onto southbound traffic. She remembers his face. The dark eyes. The slight slouch. The thin face and big lips. She remembers coming up Clearfield to turn on Broad Street every day and passing the young man. And she remembers the fire that took him away.

"For myself personally, it just gave me something to think about. Just something to ponder," Gibbs says, standing in front of the now absent mural. "It made me wonder who that person was that was right there."

It all began with a photograph taken in the anonymous young man's childhood living room. The picture appeared with an article entitled "Nelson Mandela, Teen Idol" in the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 9, 1990. "It's happened across the country -- a 71-year-old foreign political leader catching the hearts and minds of American youths," the subhead read.

The 13-year-old was centered in the middle of the text, wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of a black Bart Simpson saying, "Young, Gifted and Black, Dude." "It's important for us to know black heroes," the caption quoted him as saying.

Nearly a decade later, the photograph -- detached from the article -- found itself in the hands of Philadelphia muralist David McShane at the Free Library of Philadelphia. He had been flipping through a file with dozens of photos of children in the print and picture department when he was struck by it.

"I was thinking that he looked very pensive and serious," McShane reflects while reclining in a blue foldout chair in the cramped upstairs studio of his Manayunk home. Paintings, sketches and books are spilled out onto the floor around him, mounted into piles along with paint cans, brushes and boxes of photos. The LaSalle University graduate's long dark hair is slicked back into a ponytail. He has a short-trimmed beard and bright blue eyes hidden behind wire-rimmed glasses. He's wearing a blue and red flannel shirt, jeans and white socks -- no shoes. "Even if I had somebody pose for me, I'm not sure I would have caught something that was quite this perfect."