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."
The photo was the centerpiece of a non-violence themed mural he was commissioned for in North Philadelphia in 1999. At a community meeting he attended to gather design ideas, someone suggested painting local kids who had been killed as a result of violence, but McShane had reservations.
"I didn't want to feel like people would feel excluded from the process by not having their son our daughter on the wall," McShane says. "That's why I intentionally entitled it Portrait of an Anonymous Young Man, because I wanted it to be nobody specific but represent all young people."
McShane asked the high-school students he was working with as part of an after school program called Safe and Sound about their aspirations for the future. He wanted the portrait to be surrounded by a collage of positive choices that young adults could make. The students conjured up dreams of becoming construction workers and professional basketball players, and McShane added their ideas to the design. Other ideas were the artist's own -- a poisonous African lionfish to show the beauty and deadliness contained in one being.
McShane modified the anonymous young man's hair, softened the bridge on his nose and redressed him in a white shirt with a light bulb to remind people that he was meant to be a positive, intelligent figure.
The non-violence theme was an appropriate one given the location. Neighbors remember feuds between gangs on either side of Broad Street. The anonymous young man was right in the middle.
While painting a mural of Jackie Robinson on Broad Street, only a few blocks south of where A Portrait of an Anonymous Young Man would be painted a little over a year later, McShane remembers witnessing crime on a daily basis. Prostitutes and drug dealers were regulars in the area, and people would ask him for money so frequently that he stopped carrying his wallet.
McShane once watched two men beat up a homeless man using the legs of a chair found in the trash-strewn lot in front of the mural. Standing helplessly on a lift 20 feet above, he was surprised that they didn't kill the man.
He was prepared for a similar experience when he began painting a Portrait of an Anonymous Young Man, but he encountered no crime and few beggars while there. Instead, he got to know the people on the block, the teenagers in the Safe and Sound program and an enthusiastic third grader who showed up every day to help.
Darien Lawrence, a former school bus driver who has lived in the neighborhood for 11 years, believes that the mural, along with other city programs, have had a positive impact on the community. Violence has been a problem for as long as he can remember, he says, but he "was moved" by the mural.
"Ten years ago, you see drug deals out there all time, drug activity, prostitution," he says. "You don't see any of that now. This neighborhood's come a long way."
The mural was completed on June 1, 1999 after almost five months of work. In a transcript of the speech given at the dedication ceremony, McShane wrote, "As I was painting this mural, people would ask me, 'Who is that boy?' And as an answer, I've titled this mural Portrait of an Anonymous Young Man (A Mural About Non-Violence). The young man is no one in particular. I made him up."
***
David Stubbs recognized the anonymous young man the first time he saw him. He was commuting to the site of a student, market rate and affordable housing project he was working on only a few minutes away when the painting caught his eye. He couldn't explain how or why the portrait got there, but the young man looked so familiar.
The first time he drove by he said, "That looks like me."
The second time, he said, "I think that's me."
The third time, he pulled over to look closer.
"I know that's me."
***
It's Saturday morning, and Stubbs, now 29, is sitting down for breakfast at Marathon Grill. He's wearing a crisp, white collared shirt, jeans, a red Neiman Marcus scarf, a blue Phillies cap and a black leather jacket. He has a simple gold chain around his neck, a silver and gold bracelet on his right hand and an expensive-looking watch on his left. Even with his shaved head and cleanly groomed beard and mustache, he still resembles himself as the young man.
He closes his menu without ever having looked at it. He already knows what he wants. The "control freak" omelet: peppers, onions, spinach, cheddar cheese, turkey bacon and the softest bread they have.
"Breakfast is a big thing," he says. "I'm not a control freak ... I know what I like and I go after it. I put a lot of conviction in what I want. I'm a Pisces, you know. I'm just really easygoing. Kind of a dreamer."
Breakfast has always been a big thing for the Stubbs family. Joyce and George Winston Stubbs were the kind of parents who gathered the family for feasts of blueberry Belgian waffles, scrambled eggs and bacon on weekend mornings. They were the kind of parents who read to their sons, who checked their homework, and who bought them Toys "R" Us stock.
His father is an ophthalmologist and his mother was a motivation coordinator for a local high school, providing support for students to go to college, and later a vice-principal. She wanted her students to see everything -- plays, museums, famous speakers. And wherever her students were, she made sure her sons were there too.
"Sometimes I had to drag them, even David, kicking and screaming like they didn't like opera, but the kids had to go to the opera," Joyce says.
When Stubbs was 10 years old, an art teacher at his mother's school told her of a 19-year-old who was living in the projects with a friend and needed a family. His mom, brother and sister had died in a fire when he was 13, and his father could not support him financially. Joyce tried to place him with a friend (she didn't trust Social Services), but she ended up bringing him into her own home instead. She was always bringing children home.
"He and Dave just hit it off like boom," she says. As the new older brother, Troy Johnson would draw with Stubbs and teach him about black history. He also told him stories about his past, which his mom says instilled in him a sensitivity towards poverty that remains to this day. Johnson is now an artist in California and has painted several murals of his own.
Stubbs went on to become the president of his senior class in high school. His ambitions since then have been as varied the mural's background. He graduated from Howard University, just like his older brothers and parents. He started out on a pre-med track then took a winding path through philosophy until he ended up with a marketing major and a film minor.
He returned to Philadelphia with dreams of opening his own nightclub or going into film distribution, but he didn't have enough money. He considered becoming a stockbroker, but began working for a general contractor who was in business with his mom instead. Stubbs took real estate courses at Temple University, and within a couple of years, he and his mom formed their own real estate company, Stubbs Enterprises Inc.
"I'm really young to be in this business. Especially at the levels I've been involved in," says Stubbs, the company's president. "And there's barely any minorities in real estate in Philadelphia."
Real estate, or "the business" as Stubbs calls it, has consumed his life for the past three years, but he feels like he is making positive changes to the same neighborhoods that McShane hopes to improve through art.
"When I think of real estate development, I think of bettering communities," Stubbs says. "When you come in and you do housing or you do commercial, you're increasing the value of that community ... but in the end, to go where there's nothing and to build something, to create value where there is none."
***
The block captain did not think the mural would last long. She was sure someone would graffiti over it.
A City employee threatened to tear it down because of the dire state of the abandoned building it was painted on.
"That was a common thing for people to have that sense of hopelessness like no matter what you do now, it's just going to get ruined," McShane remembers.
It seemed a tragic inevitability, then, that the building caught fire only a little more than a year after its completion. McShane had seen homeless men, possibly drug addicts, pry the boards off the back doors or windows and sneak inside. He remembers glancing into the interior to see that it had been gutted of pipes and radiators. He and several neighbors suspect that the squatters started the fire to keep warm, and the flames got out of control. Even after the fire, though, the wall remained mostly intact, and it wasn't until several months later that the City began to tear it down.
McShane was getting ready to leave for Christmas in Los Angeles when he received news that the building was coming down. He left his wife to finish packing and drove over to the mural to take final pictures before it was gone. By this time, the anonymous young man's head lay in a mound of rubble.
"I always felt like that was one of my best murals," McShane says. "It was one of the first murals where I really felt like I connected to a community."
A year after the mural's destruction, McShane decided to make a tribute to the anonymous young man by repainting him on a wall in the Wilson Park developments in South Philadelphia. The mural was part of a series of paintings visible along Interstate 76, depicting people at various stages of life in different seasons.
This time, the young man was painted in shades of blue with thick horizontal stripes of green and yellow stretching to his left, and pieces of grass rising to his right. A basketball floats above him to his right. (Stubbs says he "played around," but his grandfather was one of the original members of the Harlem Globetrotters.)
Stubbs was driving to Washington D.C. when he first noticed the second mural. He had put together a tax credit application for Tasker Homes, a housing development located a couple of blocks north of the Wilson Park murals in 2002, two years prior to the mural's completion.
"This thing is following me around," Stubbs says.
Still, he waited six years after first seeing his face on a mural to contact the artist. The Davids exchanged three e-mails in which they confirmed that Stubbs was in fact the anonymous young man. They both remembered the Bart Simpson shirt.
"If I could have used anyone, just randomly, he was the perfect person because he's someone who clearly made a lot of good choices," McShane says. "I could have randomly stumbled on someone that made bad choices and ended up incarcerated or who knows what, but I didn't."
Since then, their lives have continued to follow each other. Stubbs is currently working on a development in Manayunk where McShane recently moved. But until now, they have just passed each other by.
***
David Stubbs and David McShane grin as they shake hands for the first time. The mural is behind them.
The two discuss the series of events that have brought them together on this patch of lawn next to the highway. Stubbs smirks when McShane tells him how maybe there was a name attached to the photo that the murals were based upon, but he never wrote it down. He laughs when McShane professes he thought he should have gotten permission to use it, but never did.
McShane's wife asks if he can take off his sunglasses for a photo.
"Oh yeah, you're the guy," McShane says, laughing.
The muralist tells him that his next big project is a mural in West Philadelphia about leaders. One of the people he is painting is movie star Will Smith, who grew up in the area. Smith was one of his mom's students at Overbrook High School, Stubbs says. Now, his brother, George, a film director, works with him in L.A.
"I wouldn't be surprised if where you're working and I'm working cross paths at some point," McShane says.
As they stand there chatting, a steady stream of traffic flows behind them. They speak loudly in order to hear each other over the roar of the highway. It's almost deafening -- the sound of thousands of anonymous people just passing each other by.
