The Lesieur, Philadelphia

Maya graduated Cum Laude on a Tuesday in May — Thomas Jefferson University, Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences. The whole family made the trip to Philadelphia: her parents, her older sister, a close friend, Falguni Massi and Dipan Masa, and Bhavna Massi and me. Graduations have a way of pulling people across distances1 they wouldn’t otherwise cross mid-week. Afterwards, we found ourselves at Mission Taqueria for lunch — the kind of meal that stretches longer than expected because no one is quite ready for the day to end. Across the street, the exterior of The Lesieur caught my attention. The sign is painted directly onto whitewashed brick: deep red lettering, arched and ornate, the kind of typography you don’t see much any more. A row of potted shrubs lines the pavement below, softening the building’s hard geometry. When I got home I looked up The Lesieur on Google Street View. The building was originally signed as Bar Lesieur — the word “Bar” rendered in the same hand as “Lesieur”. At some point someone painted over “Bar” and added “The” in noticeably smaller letters. The mismatch is visible if you look for it. I’m not sure why that change was made. A rebranding, perhaps. Licensing. Something more mundane. I don’t know. What I do know is that the sign held my attention long enough for me to raise the camera. There’s something in the lettering — the weight of it, the brick behind it — that reads as belonging to an earlier version of the city. Whether it actually does, I can’t say. But the feeling was enough. Nandini is an Industrial-organizational Psychology Doctoral Student at The University of Houston. The rest of us live about 90 minutes from Center City. ↩