Walking Broad: Looking for the Heart of Brotherly Love

If you are looking for a trip down the street of your memories and you are from Philly-especially from the North Philly,Logan,Cheltenham,Elkins Park of the 50's and 60's give this easy to read ,funny ,somewhat irreverent book a shot.My family is Irish Catholic from West Philly and we lived in an Italian neighborhood (49th & Thompson)so it tossed a bit of a perspective about a different(Jewish) ethnicity along North Broad.I could live without the Rizzo bashing and his liberal intonations on the evils of the white man ;but if this is what the author felt in his trek-so be it. All in all, a nice little book.Pick it up.

i devoured bruce buschel's "Walking Broad" in two sittings. like many philadelphians who left long ago but still pridefully cling to their orginating identity, buschel's tale is one of love for the imperfect city that raised him. like other great works of art, "Walking Broad" evokes contradictory emotions, in particular the tragic-comic depictions of his childhood and their context with the city's character. the book lent me to reflect upon my own broad st./philadelphia experiences and reaffirmed my love for this complex city. regarding some of the poor reviews written here, it wouldn't be philadelphia if the boos didn't rain down on the deserving or the virtuous. in this regard, mr. buschel clearly falls into the mike schmidt category.

This book range true to me, an ex-Philadelphian who chafed at its parochialism while I lived there but who remembers with fondness the city's refusal refusal to change its small-town mindset. I was there when Sally Starr and Gene London ruled TV, when Jerry Blavet and WFIL ruled the music scene, when Richie Allen became Dick Allen, when Rizzo was a character in "Doonesbury", when Rocky was installed at the Art Museum, and when the Phillies won the World Series; ah, good times. Then Wilson Goode bombed MOVE, I graduated from college, and left for New York. It was time to move for me, too. Any Philadelphian who was in the city in the 60s, 70s, and 80s will recognize the Philly Bruce Buschel remembers and discovers in this book, but Buschel and his brother are funnier than I and my friends could ever be. His transliteration of the Philly accent is pitch-perfect (Chapter 3), and he gets the defiant "We're not NY and we're not DC and we don't care" addytood of the natives just right (every chapter). I visited Philly in 2005 and was surprised that it finally did something with the waterfront. The historic area is unequal in its treasures (don't miss Elfreth Alley!) and will raise a lump in your throat with pride at what happened here. Sterile Veteran's Stadium has been razed and the Phillies now lose in a wonderful new old-fashioned stadium. Visit! But read this book before you go. You'll learn how people in Philly coped with living amid reminders that your hometown used to be the most important place in the colonies, but lost something somewhere for some reason. You learn to ignore the bad and shrug off the absurd, and the only thing that really matters is where the best cheesesteak is made. That's Philly, to me.

It's clearly the best thing ever written about Philadelphia, as it finally locates the city not as some colonial relic at the confluence of two rivers, or as a culturally ineffectual grid between D.C. and NYC, but as an urban metaphysic that tracks from north to south along the unique spine that is Broad Street, the spine that supports and defines all Philadelphians' relationship to the city, to themselves, and to each other. --Matt Damsker, former arts critic for the L.A. Times and Hartford Courant Like the Phillies, Walking Broad will bring you great joy and then break your heart. --Steven Levy, Newsweek writer Interviews with quirky Philadelphia characters aren't unexpected in a book subtitled "Looking for the Heart of Brotherly Love." Nor are evocative descriptions of the urban landscape. What does surprise about Buschel's chronicle is its complexity and elegance. His walk down Broad serves a larger psychic purpose. As Buschel concedes, the plan to find oneself by walking Broad Street can be "baby boomer perdition or Walt Whitman rapture." I tore through Walking Broad and laughed at almost every page. That I was pissed off when I put it down is a testament to how rich it is. --Liz Spikol, Philadelphia Weekly Walking Broad is a 13-mile journey filled with personal insights, a joyous overview, and a Marx Brothers attitude. --Robert Downey, a Prince and a Filmmaker In this charming book, Bruce Buschel returns home to the Philly of his youth to look back and remember those times of yore. Walking down the city's main drag, Broad Street, Buschel not only recollects the stories that defined him, he goes on to examine the soul of the city and the evolution that continues to change it to this day. Laced with humor and full of heart, Walking Broad is at once a history of a city and a passionate declaration of love to the place he called home. --The Strand Bookstore This painfully honest and blunt memoir reveals how Buschel's love-hate relationship with the city is inextricably connected to his painful Broad Street youth: the death of his father when Buschel was three, his troubled relationship with his hard-working and hard-drinking mother and the abuse he suffered after being sent at age seven to a city boarding school for orphans. --Publisher's Weekly Buschel is an amusing companion who successfully avoids the folksy lovability of, say, Studs Terkel. But ultimately, Walking Broad is not so much a coherent whole as a series of entertaining pit stops. Then again, as he might say, so is Philadelphia. --Los Angeles Times A gem. Very Philly. And great fun--jaunty, highly engaging, fast but never superficial. --Tim Whitaker, Philadelphia Weekly editor

He captures the great and not so great things about this city that only an insider that loves Philly can do. Honest, funny and compasionate.