Erie Avenue and Pink Elephants

I caught a replay of American Routes’s Philly show while rolling down Erie Avenue this Saturday.  The Philly-born jazz duo Eddie Lang and Joey Venuto’s 1927 recording of “Pink Elephants” became the appropriate soundtrack to my tour down an enduring landscape of the Roaring 1920s.   The residential, commercial and industrial development patterns along Erie were a product of that bubbly time of easy money: for investments into new broad factories and thousands of quickly built rowhomes.  The street that may have once bounded with the jaunty strains of “Pink Elephants” still hums with a new vitality.