Market Street

A REPRESENTATIVE of the city slipped a little surprise under the windshield wiper of my car when it was parked in the shadow of the Convention Center on 13th Street near Arch the other day. I received my first parking ticket. I had carefully weighed my decision to back into that spot in a one-hour parking zone. After the first quarter clicked and the little arrow on the meter granted me 15 minutes, I glanced at the parking lot next to me. Should I stay at the metered spot and have to interrupt lunch with my friend Kia to dash back to feed the hungry machine, I wondered?

POLICE in the Southwest Detective Division are on the hunt for a pint-size punk in connection with a series of brazen attempted gunpoint robberies in West Philadelphia. The boy targeted five people, including this Daily News reporter, near 46th Street between Market and Chestnut from Monday night to Tuesday afternoon, police said. One incident was reported Monday night, and four others unfolded between 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Tuesday. The victims told police that the would-be robber looked to be about 12 or 13. In some instances, he asked victims for the time, then pulled out a silver handgun and demanded their belongings.

What a teriffic idea: Link some of the city's more historic tourist attractions with two pleasant walkways that will send visitors back to Elk City, Okla., raving about what a doggone neat city Philadelphia is. Run one of the walkways east-west, from the Liberty Bell to Christ Church, between Market and Arch Streets. Run the other north-south, from the site of Benjamin Franklin's home to the Old First Reformed Church, between Third and Fourth Streets. Build the walkways of brick, and line them with shady trees, flowering gardens and wooden benches.

Melanie Sellers fed quarters - one after another after another - into the new "smart" parking meter on Chestnut Street overlooking the Schuylkill. After the 11th quarter, the digital display read "3:23" for three hours and 23 minutes, which included a bit of time left from an earlier feeding. After the 12th quarter, "3:38. " After the 13th quarter, "3:38. " Sellers gave the rock-solid meter a few swift smacks of her palm. Nothing. Less than an hour later, the time was erased and the meter was flashing "Out of Order.

The fog crept down into the city at dawn, across the rivers and factories, turning Philadelphia into a photograph snapped 100 years earlier. The statue of William Penn was cloaked in wisps like cotton spilling from the spool of City Hall Tower. Far below and to the east, standing in the dark imagining things past, David K. O'Neil began to shiver. Below him, the Reading Terminal Market hummed with morning city sounds. But the train shed above the market was lost in the mist, and that was where O'Neil stood, in the yawning silence and gloom of the largest single-span train shed left standing in America.

They startle, amuse, befuddle and excite, these rows of parking meters so uniform - and so clearly beheaded. Pole after pole, it's stub after stub: no domes, no timers, no faces. From the far Northeast to Penn's Landing, from South Philadelphia to the western reaches of Market Street, almost everywhere that there are parking meters, there is a file of the decapitated. And with 2,500 of its 17,500 meters now headless, even the Philadelphia Parking Authority says these are times of meter-maiming madness.

Motorists are having to dig a little deeper to park their vehicles in Center City, and they haven't seen the last of it. Parking meter rates have gone up along a three-block area of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and regulated parking hours are being extended three blocks at a time in Center City from Market Street south to Walnut Street, Philadelphia Parking Authority officials said yesterday. Parking Authority officials say that the extended hours and rate increases are being implemented because of the increasing popularity of these areas of the city.

It costs $8 a day to park in the DLC Parking lot on 21st Street between Market and Chestnut - the closest available parking next to the Market Street office buildings that house Keystone AAA offices and Conrail. But if you have handicapped credentials, you can park for free at one of the 10 metered spaces farther up the block, near Chestnut Street. Guess where workers from the buildings who use the credentials are parked? The tale of 21st Street is no different from that on dozens of streets throughout Center City, where the growth of meter parking by cars with handicapped plates or placards has more than doubled in four years.

NASIR PINKNEY and four fellow members of the Wheels of Soul motorcycle club rolled up to their West Philadelphia clubhouse at 6 a.m. Sunday after a 12-hour drive from Chicago, where they had attended a funeral for another member of the brotherhood. The men, who had taken turns driving an SUV, were getting ready to go their separate ways when a gunman near the club's door opened fire on them, club members said Monday. Pinkney, 31, was shot in the head and taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he later died after being taken off life support.

Philadelphia didn't need Bicycling magazine to confirm that it is one of America's best biking cities (No. 17 on its 2012 list). You can see it every day on the streets: The steady stream of commuters sluicing down Center City's bike lanes. The tangle of bikes hitched to U-shaped racks and bike corrals. (More, please.) The proliferation of neighborhood bike shops. Philadelphia probably could have ranked higher in the magazine's esteem if it had a bike-sharing program, like most of the list's top 20 cities.