"People were amazingly generous with their time and information," he says. "And I was thinking, 'OK, this is not like New York.' "
For years, young artists have been settling in Philadelphia in increasing numbers. Lately, the community has reached critical mass.
Hundreds, mostly recent graduates but also some with established careers, have chosen to make their homes and studios here, drawn by the very qualities that have long given the city an inferiority complex: blue-collar grit, block after block of industrial burial grounds, less fury in the grapple for the top rung.
As the immigration has quickened, artists are moving into areas with more poverty and more crime. Places where the landscape features dunes of trash and crumbling brick.
But also where those willing to reach out to neighbors struggling to get by can create an artistic nirvana. Make almost anything they can dream up. And do it in spaces with plenty of light at preposterously low rates for rooms so vast, the artists have to travel by skateboard to get from one end to the other.
They come from local art schools, where the accepted wisdom - that you have to leave Philly to have a career - is no longer so accepted.
After graduating from the Temple University's Tyler School of Art in 2006, Joe DiGiuseppe discovered 16,000 square feet for rent in a warehouse on the rusted perimeter of Philadelphia's Badlands.
The steel building faces a tight-knit Hispanic community on one side and trashed, weedy lots on the other. DiGiuseppe admits he was a little disturbed when he had to step over heroin needles to get through the door. But when the landlord showed him inside, the space was so amazing, he says, "it took my breath away."
Today, he and his friends lease the warehouse, where they operate FluxSpace gallery plus a warren of 25 artists' studios called Art Making Machine.
