Words and photos by Streets Dept Founder/ Editor Conrad Benner.
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UNLOCKED: This post was originally published in June 2021 exclusively for our Streets Dept Patreon subscribers. Today we’re republishing this article here on the blog to support a video we’ve just posted on Instagram and TikTok that talks about Philly’s Leaning Tower of Pisa Pole. Subscribe to our Patreon now to gain access to extra content and support the growth of Streets Dept.

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God knows people in Philly love an underdog, and in a city of some 4,000+ murals and hundreds more other works of public art there’s one tiny, mysterious “mural” off South Street that continues to win hearts and attention. In fact, this artwork’s place in the Philly zeitgeist is pretty monumental. Today we’re going to look at the Leaning Tower of Pisa parking pole mural (as seen above) and work to uncover its origins.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa mural was a meme before there were memes. It’s a mural painted in black and white on a parking pole at the intersection of 5th and Gaskill Streets right off South Street. The parking pole, like its possibly more famous inspiration in Italy, leans a bit in its bed of concrete. The mural is fun, unexpected, and it makes lemonade out of lemons. And this might be a stretch, but it reminds me of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum to embrace its flaw. Why fix this parking pole’s flaw when we can celebrate it!

So who painted it? And how long has it been there? That’s where things get tricky.

First, I know it wasn’t created by legendary Philly street artist Joe Boruchow, despite it’s not-too-dissimilar appearance to his black and white wheatpastes. But that’s about the only thing I did know until recently.

Like many Philadelphians, I had taken notice of the Pisa pole many times in my life, including long before I started a street art blog in 2011. But the first time I had ever talked about it on Streets Dept was in a January 2013 Instagram post. Street art and mural work mostly stops in the winter, naturally, and I remember not having much new artwork to talk about that January. Walking by the Pisa pole one night, however, I took a quick cell phone photo and posted it mentioning that I never knew who created it but that I loved it. I didn’t expect much, because the artwork had been around so long. I thought surely this post wouldn’t excite people too much. But that post quickly blew up and became my first Instagram post ever to reach over 500 likes. Nevertheless despite the attention, no artist came forward to claim credit.

I like mysteries. And there are a lot of mysteries in street art. Many artists want to remain anonymous and we respect that. So I figured this was one of those kinds of situations and moved on. It wasn’t until this year and Streets Dept’s 10 year anniversary that I thought much more about it.

To help celebrate my decade of Philly street art blogging, I started posting photos from over the years and the Pisa pole was one of them. And just like the 2013 post, this post did exceedingly well. Over 5,000 likes this time. Only now, many in the comments seemed to know much more about its origins!

The first comment to grab my attention was from @the_austin_millbarge: “I worked across the street in 1994 to 1995. It was a woman who had the shop there. I saw her painting that for what seemed like months. I always thought it was a cool idea.” An interesting hypothesis, but we needed more sources. Then I noticed this comment from @spentproduct: “There was a cafe / Italian restaurant at that corner back in the late 90’s. I think they were responsible. Fun little spot. Like a low key Astral Plane. Very glad the piece is still there.” And this made so much sense, of course an Italian themed cafe would paint something so “on brand” like this.

The comment thread that sealed this Italian cafe artist idea for me was started by @vellumstsoapcompany who noticed different people touching it up over the years: “I owned the bakery Cookie Confidential that was there for five years, and two totally unrelated folks touched it up in my time there. Just neighborhood folks who wanted to keep it looking good!” Then under this comment, @ladyday16 confidently added: “The original artist was one of the two girls who ran the coffee shop before Cookie Confidential. Blackbird If my memory serves me correctly.” Mystery solved! 

In 2019, a new series of parking pole murals started to pop up around Fishtown that transformed the ordinary infrastructure into playful pencils. These mini pole murals also captured a ton of love online. Maybe we just love seeing the mundane turned into something fun?

I wonder if the woman who painted the Pisa pole to match her coffee shop’s theme ever thought that nearly three decades later strangers from the neighborhood would be touching it up to keep it going? That a street art blogger who was around 9 years old when she painted it in the mid-90’s would be spending hours trying to figure out its origins for an article in 2021. That thousands of people would be liking it on social media post. That you’d be reading about it right now. And that her tiny work has made so many countless people smile big.

Long live the Pisa pole mural!