The setting: a re-created Philadelphia

Philadelphia is also sometimes called the "City of Firsts": first public school, the first volunteer fire department, the first American magazine and daily newspaper, the first corporate bank, and even the first Republican National Convention.

More significant, perhaps, it was the site of the first naval shipyard, which would become a central piece of Philadelphia's identity. As writer Buzz Bissinger put it, on its docks "lay the greatest American spirit of all, the magnificent spirit of work, of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters ... coming together ... to make something spectacular with the labor and skill of their own hands and hearts."

Mainly because of this industrial might, Philadelphia grew from a Colonial town to a city of 2.1 million in 1950. The '50s, however, began the well-documented decline of US cities spurred in part by the flight of manufacturing jobs. Today, while the suburbs are swelling with the ranks of dotcoms - 18,000 high-tech companies encircle the city - there's very little e-commerce in the city proper. Of the 39,000 new high-tech jobs created between 1997 and 1998, 37,000 were in the suburbs.

When the federal government closed the naval yard in 1995, most of Philadelphia's core manufacturing base had already left. And since 1950, the city has lost a third of its population.

Indeed, in the past two years alone, the city has lost more residents than any other. The result has been more than 50,000 vacant lots and buildings.

Peaches took advantage of a city program to help rid neighborhoods of abandoned properties in the late 1970s. She bought her two-story row house for $13. "I had no windows, no doors, no heat, no toilet - nothing," she says. "But little by little, I started fixing it up."

It helped that she worked for a textile company through the mid-1980s, packing designer sportswear on an assembly line. But around the time she had her first child, the company closed shop and moved away. A single mother without a job, she went on state assistance.

'We gotta put a stop to this.'

Like most large US cities, in the '80s and early '90s, Philadelphia was engulfed in a crack epidemic that led to some of the worst inner-city violence in the nation. "I said, 'We gotta put a stop to this; somehow or another, we gotta put a stop to this.' " So Ramos became a tireless community activist and block captain then, and though she was very afraid at times - even now - she began to confront the dealers on her block, telling them "listen, you gotta move." Through sheer force of personality, and constant calls to the police, she established her telephone-pole boundary. Though she's been a scourge in getting the city to bulldoze abandoned buildings, Ramos believes what will drive out the dealers for good is new businesses, new construction, new jobs.

Ramos went back to work in 1997, a cashier at a local dollar store, after Congress revised the nation's welfare laws.

Today, Ramos is getting used to her new routine working downtown. It's usually still dark when she gets out of bed and peeks into the bedroom to check on her three boys. The family chihuahua, Crystal, is invariably cuddled around the legs of her youngest son, Christopher. "That dog thinks he's her mother," she mutters with a smile.

At about 6 a.m., she'll wake her oldest son, Luis, to help get his brothers ready while she cooks that night's dinner. She catches the bus at 7:45 a.m.

She has to arrive early since she's the assistant manager at the beauty supply store on Chestnut Street. The shop is seven blocks from Independence Hall, the elegant, red-brick statehouse where more than two centuries ago, the country's founders drafted and signed both the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.

Ramos likes to read about Philadelphia history, and she's quick to point out how the cemetery a block from her house was established in 1690. For now, Philadelphia is trying to take advantage of its quintessentially American past, its Colonial heritage as well as its fine arts future, to attract tourists and conventioneers. While it may never regain its status as the London of America, the city's efforts have certainly worked well enough that people with pride in their neighborhoods, like Ramos, will stick.

"I've been here for 22 years," she says, "and I'm not going anywhere."

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society

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