Several weeks back I was doing a training walk to prepare for the Breast Cancer 3-Day walk when I came upon one of the many out-of-the-way parks that dot the landscape of this city and that seem to spring up like beautiful, tree-lined oases in an otherwise barren, urban desert. In this park was a weathered sculpture of several gargoyle heads looking in all directions. It looked like it had been there for hundreds of years, a ruined reminder of a civilization long past.  Of course, the more likely story is that it was made from some cheap rock that doesn’t hold up well in the rain, but regardless, it got me thinking of how many weird, unusual things there are to see in neighborhoods all throughout the region.

Most of us walk around here in a daze, either plugged into our iPods, staring blankly ahead or avoiding eye contact by keeping our gaze firmly planted on the ground as we make our way from place to place, trying as hard as we can just not to bump into other pedestrians (or get hit by a bus).  Our routes have become our roots, digging so deep that we hardly even think about them as they anchor our experience of Philadelphia’s visual environment.  In fact, we’re more likely to notice the piece of trash that blows across our path than the provocative street art that occupies the bus station at which we wait… every day…

There are some really cool things to look at around here, if only to pause and think, “I wonder who put this here?” or “What is this supposed to represent?” or even “What happened to the people who lived here or the workers who toiled here?”

To that end, we’re going to engage our readers in a little game over the next several weeks.  Our photographic wunderkind, intern Masashi Hanada, has been out and about in an every expanding radius that started with Center City and has moved into parts of Bella Vista, Queen Village, Fairmount, North Philly, Fairmount Park and West Philadelphia.  We asked him to take pictures of anything worth pausing to look at, whether it be interesting street art, architecture, public art, relics, artifacts or anything that might cause someone to think, “I know I’ve seen that before, but where?”

Starting today, we’ll put up three close-ups of such objects every Monday and give you a chance to identify and locate them.  Each Friday we’ll provide a wide angle shot to reveal the objects in question and provide the locations and as much information as we were able to dig up about the subject of the photo.  For some subjects, we don’t have much so we’ll open it up to you to help fill in some of the details and broaden everyone’s knowledge of those quirky things that make it so interesting to just look around.

Some of these will be instantly recognizable, some a little more obscure.  On some we’ll have to include hints in the caption but most will just be picture by itself.  We’d like to make this into some sort of contest but don’t really have much else to offer other than the notoriety of being the first person to send us the correct answers.  Comments to these posts will be closed to keep people from revealing the answers to everyone else but you can send your guesses to Masashi at mhanada (at) whyy.org (since he is keeping track of everything).  When we post the answers, we’ll also post the name of the first person to get all three objects correct and allow people to give us more information about things that we don’t know much about.

So let’s get started with the first three:

Hint: This picture was taken a few weeks ago and it definitely does NOT look like this any more, so the question is what was it?