The History of LOVE Park

On the drawing board in 1682, the area that was to become known as LOVE Park, stood at the center of William Penn's City of Brotherly Love. His vision would soon attract settlers from around the world drawn by Penn's notions of tolerance, design, and community.

Slightly over 300 years later that same space, now known as LOVE Park, drew skateboarders from around the world attracted by tolerance, design, and community. Many of those who came remained, attracted by a city open to a new type of settler.

Yet in 2002, the wheels of government would silence the wheels of the skateboarders.

In 1932 Edmund Bacon, Philadelphia's future city planner designed "A Civic Center for Philadelphia" as his architecture thesis at Cornell. One of the features of the plan was a park at the southeastern terminus of the city's great boulevard, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Bacon could not have anticipated skateboarding when he designed LOVE Park, yet his space became one of the world's most famous skating spots, and came to represent Philadelphia's image, worldwide. That is, until Philadelphia's Mayor John Street banned skateboarding in 2002. This essay describes the history of LOVE Park, dating back to its roots in the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and even further back to William Penn's original vision for his city.

Literary allusions in The History of Love

There are many thematically significant literary allusions in The History of Love. The writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940), as eulogized by Leo Gursky in the chapter titled "The Trouble with Thinking", has unmistakable affinities with Zvi Litvinoff's description of Leo's own writing style, and the description of Rosa Litvinoff's writing style in the early chapter "Forgive Me". The Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) and his classic The Street of Crocodiles, is mentioned several times in the novel, as is Nicanor Parra (1914-), whose 1954 book of antipoems is translated by Charlotte Singer and read by the mysterious Jacob Marcus. A passing reference to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is also significant because Don Quixote is a novel that contains stand-alone stories within it, much in the same way that The History of Love contains excerpts of a mysterious book called The History of Love. Other important literary allusions in the novel include references to James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Leo Tolstoy, Rubén Darío and Pablo Neruda. In some ways, The History of Love is a celebration of the power writing and of the imagination, so it is hardly surprising that it would be so full of literary references.