PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia Eagles are Super Bowl champions once again. After whomping the Kansas City Chiefs, 40-22, the Eagles join the ranks of teams with multiple title wins, a list that had felt incomplete without this most rabid of fanbases. While fans' celebrations for Super Bowl 59 were missing the first-time-winner chaos of the 2018 victory, there was plenty of screaming and mirth in the immediate aftermath of this one-sided ass-beating.
Following the Eagles' win, Defector Philadelphia Bureau members Kathryn Xu and Luis Paez-Pumar filtered out onto the streets of the city to capture the delight of a city in the thralls of Birdsmania. The results weren't quite as blissful or picturesque as either hoped, but one thing rang true for our intrepid reporters: Philadelphia had itself a party for the ages.
I Saw So Many Things On My Way To Broad Street, But The Only Photo I Got Was Of This PATCO Elevator, by Kathryn Xu
The cohort I watched the Super Bowl with consisted primarily of Philly transplants, medical students and non–sports fans, none of which precluded them from rooting fully and unabashedly for the Eagles. I don’t have the arrogance or experience to proclaim this as a uniquely Philadelphian phenomenon, though I do think everyone already understands how much the city loves its Birds. The apartment I watched the Super Bowl at was two blocks away from Broad Street and, naturally, situated close to a hospital. This meant our experience of the broadcast was occasionally disrupted by medical helicopters and, once the game was over, utterly ruined by news helicopters. That was our official sign to get out of there and join the fray.
I truly saw so many things on the way to and from Broad Street, though you’ll have to take my word for it, because I got no pictures. This is because my friends took upon themselves the task of photographing the scenes, which included but were not limited to: two men clambering atop a SEPTA bus cover, people clambering atop traffic lights and poles, street-level fireworks exploding above our heads, street-level fireworks ricocheting off building facades, a car wrapped in green Christmas lights, people leaning out of car windows and skylights to shout at passersby on the sidewalk, and a municipal waste truck blocking cars from entering Walnut Street that was perfectly blank when we passed by it the first time and tagged with "GO BIRDS!" on the side when we returned.
Rarely do you get to become part of an ecosystem that is so much bigger than you are, and that is ultimately what wading into a highly populated scene of so much pure, spontaneous affect does to a person. As it turns out, the one quick trick to turning a city into a dictatorship of pedestrians—assuming the relevant frameworks are already in place—is a Super Bowl victory. Oh, there were cars, but in the immediate radius of City Hall, they were puttering along at a snail’s pace, even when the lights were green. Pedestrian right of way has never been more clearly established or enforced.
It was with this civic-minded observation about how bodies are able to move in cities, and no other reason, that I took my only photo of the night: an empty PATCO elevator a few blocks away from the madness.
Shortly after taking the photo, the elevator actually moved, and shortly after that, we walked by a crowd of guys spilling out of the PATCO stairs, who'd evidently just arrived from South Jersey. “We have to get to Broad!” one of them shouted. We were still buoyed by the jubilation of coming back from Broad; these guys were a few moments away from experiencing it. I pointed them down the direction from which we came, along with a “Go Birds!” And that’s the miracle of movement, baby.
The Euphoric Repetition Of Spelling Out E-A-G-L-E-S, by Luis Paez-Pumar
I was watching the Super Bowl about 15 minutes northwest of City Hall. After the game, fueled by shots of cinnamon whiskey and wide-eyed catharsis, a group of us stumbled out into the Go Birds–filled night with the vague goal of getting as close as we could to the hubbub on Broad Street. As soon as we stepped out onto the sidewalk, I saw green everywhere. It was exhilarating. Having never lived in a single-minded sports city for a championship before—I grew up in Miami, which is definitely not a sports city, and New York City's loyalties are too fractured to really have one champion take over like this absent a Knicks title—I was happy to take in the energy of it all. For about 10 minutes, the walk felt euphoric, with thousands of people chanting and laughing and drinking copious amounts of street booze.
Once we got past Logan Square, where people were setting off fireworks from the fountain, and neared JFK Plaza, things slowed to a halt. Police had blocked off the area directly around City Hall, funneling the thousands of pedestrians into streets far too narrow to accommodate everyone. What had been a jaunt turned into a parking lot of humanity. This didn't stop the good vibes; people climbed sanitation trucks, screamed out the E-A-G-L-E-S call-and-response, and smoked cigars while yelling "smoking that Chiefs pack."
Still, though, I don't do well in crowds, and this was the biggest one I had been in since COVID. I grew anxious as we took John F. Kennedy Boulevard east towards Broad. Eventually, the crush became too much and we turned back west, thinking we could maybe go south a bit and then cut back east towards Broad. That mostly worked, in that we were able to get onto 15th Street, which was more open, but every time we looked at an east-west cross street, the crowd seemed to balloon outwards from Broad. I have to respect that the city has a very distinct landmark in City Hall, right in the center, for everyone to converge upon, but at around 11 p.m., an hour into our struggle to find any room to get across, the idea of getting close to the building lost its luster.
Although nothing too crazy happened on the side streets, I had a good time. I'm not an Eagles fan, but since moving to Philadelphia I've become something of an Eagles appreciator. So while I didn't wear anything green—I don't actually own too much green clothing, and I feel weird about wearing merch for teams I don't actively root for—I got caught up in the excitement.
However, I can't deny that I was a little disappointed. Perhaps because this was the second Eagles Super Bowl win of the past decade, or because of the throng of bodies on the streets, the energy, while fantastic, didn't seem historic. There's only so many times you can hear "GO BIRDS!" before a trip home and a late fast-food run become too alluring to resist.
I guess, heading out into the night, I had this idea that I would witness something that could make for an intoxicating scene report, full of joy and harrowing Philadelphia chaos, but the reality was much more banal. There were thousands of elated people on hand, but it was mostly controlled chaos and uncontrolled attempts at finding your friends in the crowd. Every block we walked towards became just another in a very similar mosaic of the same emotions.
Not to say that it was bad, but it was repetitive. There were highlights here and there: a man doing the worm in an A.J. Brown jersey garnered a small crowd, a man in a robot costume that looked remarkably similar to the Fox NFL robot Cleatus got some cheers, and there certainly was a lot of light-pole climbing. By the time we finally made it to Broad, cutting across on Lombard Street about 10 blocks down from City Hall, I was annoyed at the long walk and disappointed that I forgot my film camera at home, but mostly I was just ready for bed. Maybe this makes me a bad journalist, but while thousands of individual stories were playing out on the streets and sidewalks of Center City, I couldn't find a cohesive narrative to weave together everything into one overarching take on What This Means.
What it truly means is that the Philadelphia Eagles are two-time Super Bowl champs, and for fans, that's plenty good enough. I'm sure the parade will be more fun on Friday, and I don't want to take away anything from a city that partied deep into the night, but without the personal connection to the Eagles, this was less a safari and more of a zoo, watching people live their joy in small encampments throughout the area. The best part of it all, for me, happened once we got far enough away from Broad to breathe night air free of smoke and fireworks. Some enterprising fan had climbed the street sign for Bainbridge Street and blacked out enough letters to spell out the word of the night. Go Birds, indeed.
