With so much time spent in Philadelphia over the years, the time around the edges of my baseball trip gave me a chance to dig a bit deeper into the city. Having previously explored museums, public art, music, sports, and food (oh, the food!), I was scratching my head during the planning for the trip on how to dig that little bit deeper.

What I came up with for a morning of exploring was a series of urban murals that are part of a public art initiative. A density of murals south of Market Street made that an easy choice and it also helped that by walking south of Market and east of Broad, I would be heading in the general direction of my favourite cheesesteak place, Jim’s Steaks, on 4th.

On a humid morning not out of place on the east coast in late July, and sweating through my shirt before I was only a few blocks out of the air conditioned comfort of my Center City hotel, I started my exploration. If you know me, you’ll know that “Gimme Shelter” by David Gunn, painted on the side of the Morris Animal Refuge, would tug at my heart strings. The shelter commissioned this beautiful mural to help tell their story of providing adoption services for abused and abandoned animals.

On the narrow north-south streets just south east of Philadelphia’s City Hall, there are a number of murals on the sides of the five and six story walkups. You have to crane your neck a bit, and standing still on a Philly sidewalk puts you at risk of being run over by your fellow pedestrians or aggressive taxi drivers, but it’s worth it. Here is “Personal Melody” which was created by graffiti artists from Spain who worked with art students from Philadelphia.

In the same general are of the city, “Philly Chunk Pack” is a welcomed injection of colour, especially so on this grey morning. Kenny Scharf from Brooklyn created this and I love the cartoon and childlike nature of the mural with the bubblegum coloured characters looking down on the street below.

Below, another beautiful mural on the side of a narrow building makes great use of what would otherwise be dead, and bland space. Compared to some of the other art, I liked the abstraction and delicate nature of this one.

Of the murals that are part of this city walk, “Philadelphia Muses” by Meg Saligman is arguably the most famous. The first thing I liked about this one was how vibrant and realistic it was. The characters in the mural felt liked they were popping off the side of the building. I also enjoyed the story behind this mural as its depiction of the characters honours forms of creative expression including sound (the man playing the flute on the right), performance (the dancer in the upper left), invention, movement and other forms.

A little further south as the center city transitions from high rises to more of a community neighbourhood, “Garden of Delight” made for a beautiful backdrop to a community garden.

Staying on the theme of food, “Taste of Summer” by Ann Northrup is a lush painting on the side of Vetri Ristorante, the restaurant of James Beard award winning chef, Marc Vetri (a restaurant that is on my must visit list for a return trip someday). The painting is of an idealized landscape – a bit of a mashup between Lancaster County to the west of Philadelphia, and Perugia, Italy.

I found “Spring” by David Guinn to be ingenuous. In terms of placement, I love how this works the tree on the sidewalk into the mural and then extends the landscape along the building at the back of a parking lot. Love the colour, love the pixelated parts of this mural further emphasizing the delineation between the real and imagined landscape, and love what I take to be a wish for greener urban spaces.

With art having filled and nourished my mind and my feet having taken me about a third of the way toward Jim’s Steaks, I kept on that path to nourish my body (if eating a cheesesteak can ever be called nourishing). Pretty easy to say one of those things was better for me than the other.