Sherelle Washington

You Can Leave Philadelphia, but Philadelphia Doesn’t Leave You

Before the sun comes up on a summer morning in Fairmount Park, Sherelle Washington’s grandfather is already there.

He rose at 4 a.m. to claim his family’s spot, staking out a patch of grass near what is now the Please Touch Museum, setting up grills, arranging coolers packed with fried chicken and potato salad, laying out blankets. By the time Sherelle and the rest of the family arrived, the whole production was in motion. They’d spend the day out there, all of them together, eating, playing, then drifting into a nap right there on the grass.

“You wanted for nothing when my grandparents took you out there,” says Sherelle, who now lives on the west side of South Philadelphia, near Washington Avenue and 22nd Street. “That was a labor of love.”

It’s also, she’ll tell you, pure Philly, that instinct to gather, to feed people, to make sure nobody goes without. Sherelle has been living by that instinct her whole life.

She wasn’t born here. Her family moved around a lot in her early years, and when her grandmother’s health declined in the late 1970s, they relocated to North Carolina. Sherelle graduated high school there in 1982. But she never stopped thinking of Philadelphia as home.

“I crawled my way back,” she says simply.

She made it back in 1985, unemployed, with no prospects. But the house she eventually found was, in true Philly fashion, right next door to her mother. She’s been rooted in South Philly ever since, and has made sure that her children would be too. All three were born at Pennsylvania Hospital. Her two newest grandchildren, twin boys born on New Year’s Eve, arrived there as well.

“I wanted them to have that legacy,” she says, born at the nation’s first hospital, in the city that made her.

Sherelle spent 32 years in the insurance industry, the last 15 of those in IT, before her company outsourced the department and let the American staff go. It was a hard landing. But instead of spiraling, she booked a two-week trip to Australia.

“Honestly, I didn’t even think about my life,” she laughs. “I just enjoyed myself.”

She came back clear-headed, and landed at Philadelphia Works, where she’s spent the last several years doing workforce development in the hospitality sector. She holds a degree in hospitality and tourism, and now those skills are her instrument of service.

Her job, as she describes it, is trying to give money away. She works with small businesses to fund the training and onboarding of new staff members, helping them hire and retain workers they couldn’t otherwise afford. One of her favorite success stories involves Tina Phillips, owner of the Famous 4th Street Cookie Company, a woman-owned small business that came to Philadelphia Works needing help with hiring costs. Sherelle’s team funded the onboarding. Tina not only kept her staff, she’s now opening a second location, and Philadelphia Works is helping fund that too.

“We’re just helping them launch,” says Sherelle. “Getting them lifted off the ground.”

That’s a pretty good description of what Philadelphia has always done for her.

She loves this city the way you love something you choose. She loves its position on the map, being so close to airports, highways, and only two hours from New York and three from D.C.

She also loves the food, with a depth of feeling that only an expat truly understands. When she returned in 1985, the first things she did were get a pretzel and a cheesesteak. She’d been in Australia and seen restaurants marketing “Philadelphia cheesesteaks.” It was not the same.

“I’m from Philadelphia,” she told one of them. “I know.”

She loves the people, too, and pushes back on anyone who doesn’t. “We’re very friendly folks,” she says. “You just have to get to know us.” She has evidence. Not long after she moved back in 1985, she walked into a corner store on her block and ran into Crystal Blue, a classmate she hadn’t seen since junior high. They picked up right where they left off. “It was like we never separated,” she says.

She’s also passing it all forward. She raised her kids the same way her grandparents raised her, getting them out to the parks, the museums, the creek at Rittenhouse Town on sweltering summer days. (Her older daughter once waded in so enthusiastically that she lost her shoes.) When she took her first grandson to Smith Playground in South Philly, the famous one with the giant slide, named for the same school she attended as a girl, she realized with a pang that her own kids had never been. She hadn’t even known about it when they were young.

“I felt like the worst parent in the world,” she laughs. “What kind of parent are you?”

The kind, it turns out, who shows up. Who books a flight to Australia when the bottom drops out and comes home ready to work. Who moves next door to her mother. Who makes sure her grandchildren are born in the same hospital as their parents, and their parents’ parents.

Ask her to name a place she’d rather be, after all her travels, London, Paris, India, Australia, the islands, 35 of the 50 states and counting, and she can’t do it.

“Where would you go if not Philadelphia?” she says. “I honestly can’t answer that.”

She doesn’t need to. No matter how long you’re gone, she’ll tell you, when you come back to this city, it’s as if you never left at all.