A wrecking ball is set to fly through Little Pete's. Progress commands that a 300-room hotel must take the place of the parking ramp at 219 South 17th Street in whose corner nestles one of Center City Philadelphia's treasures. We're not talking Bookbinder's, chock full of tourists and overpriced, or the smattering of trendy boutique restaurants that surround Rittenhouse Square like hipsters lounging on the margins of a poetry reading. We're talking about a Genuine 24-Hour Greasy Spoon, Home to Collars Both White and Blue, an Insomniac's Oasis in the Night, a Caffeine Addict's Last Resort, a Trusted Purveyor of that mysterious mélange of grill top odds-and-ends, scrapple. We're talking about Little Pete's, for Pete's sake. The news is grim.
I'll forever associate Little Pete's with my youth, not just as a composer coming into his own, but also as a person whose world was opening up in one Big Bang. My life as it was then, almost impossibly full, was discussed, vivisected, celebrated, dreaded, and mourned at Little Pete's.
Autumn 1981. This Wisconsin Boy, a tender nineteen years old, had only just moved to Philadelphia. The Grace of Whomever had handed me a lottery ticket in the form of an invitation to study at the legendary, preposterously intimidating Curtis Institute of Music. I was a Brooks Brothers shirt and blue jeans sort of guy. I grooved to Stockhausen more than Rorem, Berio more than Barber, and Bernstein even more than the Beatles.
Little Pete's was the setting for countless post-lesson symposia. During my lessons, my mentor Ned Rorem casually dropped priceless aperçu and dry, acerbic criticisms while slashing through my compositions, his pencil waving this way and that like a rapier. Afterwards, a bit shell-shocked by the enormity of Ned's self-assurance, my best friend, and fellow Rorem pupil Norman Stumpf, and I would head for Little Pete's, where we would debrief. "Did he tell you that you succeeded in being boring?" I asked Norman, over Pete's wretched, perennially burnt Joe, one afternoon. "Not this time," Norman replied. "But he told me that William Flanagan wrote my song better in the late 50s." "Who was he?" I asked. "That's what I said," replied Norman. I already knew what Ned's answer had been: find out.
I didn't yet have a telephone in my apartment. I'd use the payphone in Little Pete's to call home for reports of my mother's gradual submission to cancer back in Wisconsin, and then drink with a cellist friend until four or five in the morning, attempting to slake the thirst for silence in my head. I cannot recall how many dawns I greeted, my body still young enough to absorb the alcoholic gut punches dealt it during the previous hours, doing my counterpoint exercises at Pete's lime green counter, "scrambled eggs and" a few inches away, untouched, the dread of disappointing Ford Lallerstedt in class a few hours later by presenting mediocre work pulling me back from the edge.
I celebrated my first critical triumph as a composer at Little Pete's; I also received my most gratuitous wing clipping by a music critic there. In 1983, the Philadelphia Inquirer's august music critic, Daniel Webster gave my string orchestra work, Prayer for Peace, which William Smith had just premièred with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a glowing review in the paper. I'll never forget my brother Kevin, who had come to town for the performance, spreading the newspaper on the table between us, skimming it before reading it to me, so that, if necessary, he could spare me the worst bits. Seventeen years later--a lifetime, really--my alma mater commissioned a piece to celebrate its 75th anniversary called Much Ado. Made careless by the standing ovation the piece had received the night before, I spread the Inquirer out on a table at Pete's expecting at least a casual nod from the critic. Instead, my frothy showpiece was dealt a pasting. Composers do read reviews. Well, I used to--until that day, anyway.
I courted my girlfriend for months by walking her each day from Curtis to her train at Suburban Station. She rented a room out on the Main Line in the home of Bernard Jacobsen and his wife. The day that she allowed me to carry her violin for her was the equivalent of moving from "vous" to "tu." Afterwards, a little giddy, downcast, yet hopeful -- the way you can be when you are in your early '20s and in love and have time and health and just enough money to get by, I bought the Daily News and the New York Times and worked my way through them at Pete's until I felt the urge to compose percolate up within me like a welcome fever. Then, a man with a mission, I'd head for a practice room at Curtis and spread notes on music paper like jam on bread. God, that felt good. In time, the love affair sputtered. Music did not.
This morning, an old school chum posted the news on Facebook that Pete's shall soon be no more. The comments following her post were lovely, and they're still coming in. I shouldn't be amazed by how much the place meant to all of us.
No more sentimental reveries over crab cake sandwiches when I return to Philadelphia for the occasional master class, performance, or lecture. One less skein of memory holding me to one of the few places on the planet, and one of the few times, when I was able to summon both the elegia of James Agee and the earnest and callow drive of Thomas Wolfe. "Aw," a Philadelphia-based friend told me on the phone just now when I called him to confirm the news, "just drive on, old friend. It was inevitable. It had to happen. And it all began the day that they let people throw up buildings taller than William Penn's hat."