“Working on a Dream"

 PHILADELPHIA. Bruce Springsteen may have made his most optimistic CD with 2009’s “Working on a Dream."

Meanwhile,  the Boss' beloved adopted hometown has increased its profile as an arts destination, a four-star restaurant town, a World Series pennant holder and a city where black-and-white relations are solid.

But since Springsteen first sold out the Spectrum in 1976, not everything has been so rosy.
As he returns to the blue-collar Spectrum for two final shows tonight and tomorrow, the poverty-filled lives and hard-scrabbled existence Springsteen wrote about before his “Dream” still seem sorrowfully in effect.

Long-desolate areas of the city are in even more dreadful decay. Corrupt politicians in existence since 1978 only recently found themselves convicted of their (137 federal) misdeeds. Too many cops are racist ones. And the sick and the elderly — the have-nots — are a hidden class far apart from the haves.

“In some neighborhoods there’s a pervasive sense of ‘forgotten-ness’ hanging in the air on a daily basis where everyone is fending for themselves with no expectation for any type of city or state ‘deus ex machina,'" said Kenn Kweder, a legendary Springsteen-esque poet/singer who once worked for the state interviewing folks for heat and energy assistance. “There’s no longer a "remembered-ness" when things were better; just a present tense void.”

“If Bruce had written a song about his adopted hometown, it may have been ‘My City of Ruins,’” said Tom Sheehy, a music and social historian from the University of Pennsylvania, referring to a song in which brothers on their knees  surrounded by “empty streets” and “boarded up windows” rise up in prayer and empowerment to save the day.