The Trocadero Theater
For most of my formative years, I only knew the whole garden called Philadelphia by one single flower: the block of Arch Street between 10th and 11th. This was the location of the Trocadero theater, iconic Philly punk venue, and a sacred landmark in the little part of forever that I’ve tended.
The Troc was an iconic storefront in a city of iconic store fronts. Any uninitiated pedestrian would just walk by without giving it a second glance, what with all the eye-catching architecture downtown. But if you cared that The Boils were headlining on a Thursday night, you knew to look for “Trocadero” in neon red above the double doors. On those nights, you could stand in a long line of punks in their battle jackets, and you could hear the first notes of the opening band, even if you were still waiting half a block away.
Who was playing at the Troc back then? Hepcat and the Scofflaws, Atom and His Package, Kid Dynamite, Boy Sets Fire, Avail, Ann Beretta, the Bouncing Souls, the Dead Milkmen, H2O, and lots of other true legends of 90s punk. I saw Saves the Day open for Hot Water Music, and then a year or so later, I saw Hot Water Music open for Saves the Day.
I remember the early sets at the Troc shows, when the crowd was still sparse, and I remember the feeling of hundreds more attendees crowding in behind you to wait for the headliner (always a long wait, it seemed like). I remember the dark quiet after the last song as everyone yelled for an encore. And I remember when the house lights finally turned on and you knew you had to go home.
The Troc held a little world together, on those nights. We took over 7-Eleven before and after showtime, and we could walk together to Market East after the show, anonymous in our kinship. Some of us went home to white-washed suburbia, sneaking in while our parents slept… others drifted to squats or their friends’ basements, unable or unwilling to endure their families’ complexities. Our lives were a crossroads, and the Troc was an outpost, and a sanctuary.
The last time I walked past the Trocadero — first time in twenty-odd years — it was boarded up, a bruised relic still stubbornly taking up space on Arch Street. It had closed its doors in 2019, and honestly, I was impressed at how long it had been holding things down (long after I had left the city for college). I hear it’s slated for some kind of renovation, but that will be a different venue in a different world.
Everything has its time. The older I get, the more persistent and demanding that fact becomes. But if anybody can beat death and shout down mortality itself, it’s the Philly punks of the late 1900’s. I’ll keep the Troc alive in my jacket pocket, dreaming and writing and remembering it, even if I have to live forever to do it.
