But the centerpiece of the campaign by the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. (GPTMC) has no expiration date: an online "hoagie finder" with maps listing 38 shops, from popular purveyors to obscure outposts.
If tourists bite, then hoagies, hoagie shops, and their host neighborhoods could become as famous as the Liberty Bell, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the neon stretch of Passyunk Avenue where Pat's and Geno's have waged a high-profile cheesesteak war for years.
"We're in good company," said Lenny Bracale, owner of Lennies Home Plate on Ridge Avenue in the city's Roxborough section, as he heard the names of hoagie shops from his native South Philadelphia that also had made the list at www.visitphilly.com/hoagies.
Though Bracale is a former college baseball catcher, it was another small hoagie guy, Dennis Fink, who turned to the baseball diamond to describe his own reaction to making it into the hoagie finder:
"It's a home run," Fink said.
Fink's, like Lennies, is not in the center of the nation's fifth-largest city. His easy-to-miss Princeton Avenue store in Tacony takes big orders every day, but seldom from tourists, because it's in a rowhouse enclave in Northeast Philadelphia.
"Tourists aren't coming to the Northeast," Fink said Thursday, as the phone rang incessantly, with orders from a hospital cancer unit and hungry locals.
The hoagie finder is the genteel result of a campaign that, if City Councilman Jim Kenney had had his way, would have been rougher around the edges, Philly-style.
