The South Street "Riots" - Update: The Reason This is Stupid

The best way to sum up the general reaction to this is simple:

HOLY CRAP! TEENAGERS ARE GETTING TOGETHER AT ONCE TO JUST HANG OUT!



<--- This is how you and many others are reacting



Now, I'm just as guilty. A year ago, I was actually semi-headlining the group of people who thought this was the start of something big and horrible. That was actually as late as May of last year. Since then, the groups have come and gone.

So this past Saturday, on the first nice Saturday of the year, after a long , cold, snowy winter, the weather was awesome and people did what they normally do on those days: they go out and have fun. In this case, it was 3000 teenagers doing the same thing at the same time; going down to South Street to hang out.

I'm not going to hold back and I'm not going to be elegant: The fact that this is a crowd of basically over 3000 black teenagers is a little unsettling to a lot of people in this city. In fact, its unsettling to... everyone. White, black, hispanic, etc... its a pretty insane thing to witness and be stuck in the middle of. Would it be different if the skin color was different? I doubt it. Its still a large group of teenagers descending on a single area for seemingly no reason.

One thing I saw tossed around was "how is this different than when people go out after the Phillies win"? You basically just answered your own question. It's different for two key reasons: First, its about celebrating after a team basically everyone in the city loves win the biggest game in their career, and the city goes nuts. The second is that said reaction in understood, properly prepared for, and actually has a point.

So, these gatherings... what are we missing here? Easy: They're young. Look, if you grew up in this city during the last 25 years, you know that EVERYTHING shuts down in this city at 7PM, and there isn't anything interesting to do here unless you either have money or drink. Otherwise, your options are limited. So what you did was go down to South Street because it was the only place around where there was anything cool to do. Well, WAS, but you get the point.

Brian Sweeny of Philebrtiy said it best:

But have you noticed that both of the big flash mob incidents lately — the one at Macy’s earlier this month and the one on South Street on Saturday — have occurred in places that, not so very long ago, were vibrant hubs of the city but are now retail dead zones, symbols of civic failure?

God bless, you hit the nail on the head!