Adara Johnson

She knew this city was cool before TikTok said so

Scroll through TikTok long enough and you’ll find that young people everywhere appear to be discovering that Philadelphia is kinda cool — something 23-year-old Adara Johnson finds a little funny.

Creators like @pearlmania500, @cierralikeseggs and @bran__flakezz are presenting this city as young, lived-in, and real. They skip the skyline shots and cheesesteak tourism and cover local politics as group-chat comedy, documenting what it actually looks and feels like to build a life here in your 20s. They’re turning everyday moments into sharp visual storytelling about the Philadelphia that people who live here already know: specific and unfiltered.

Johnson, who grew up in Mayfair and is just out of college herself, could teach them all a thing or two.

“People act like they’ve discovered something underground, but it was always here,” she says.

So she showed up. She signed on as a guide at the Philadelphia Visitor Center. She started volunteering at the Reading Terminal Market. She applied to be a Phambassador. Like many Philadelphians, Johnson understands the value of just showing up, paying attention, and talking to strangers. That, she says, is just what happens when you live here.

“I feel like I always end up talking to people I don’t know, with someone just striking up a conversation out of the blue,” she says. “Here, it’s not unusual for someone to just start talking to you on the sidewalk. I don’t think it works that way everywhere.”

It took leaving to really understand that. Johnson spent four years at Iona University in Westchester County, studying English and communications, surrounded by people from every New York borough. And it was great. But she also couldn’t help noticing how divided the place felt. You’re from the Bronx, you have opinions about Queens. There’s the Yankees versus Mets, and the Jets versus Giants.

“In Philly, it’s just not like that,” she says. “It’s go Birds, all around.”

Johnson graduated last spring, came home, and started rediscovering the city on her own terms.

One of the first things she did was fall back in love with the Free Library, which she’d gone to a lot as a kid. A librarian at the Northeast branch recently pressed two unreleased advance copies into her hands and told her to just take them. She read both. They were both good.

“I don’t know why more people don’t use the library,” she says, genuinely puzzled.

She also found Fergie’s, on 13th and Sansom, and made it her favorite spot to meet friends for a drink.

“No TVs,” she says, “which means you actually talk to people.” There’s live music some nights. Last time she was there, an Irish folk group sat around a table and played, unhurried, like they had nowhere else to be. The whole room just listened.

She talks about it like it was a gift, which, in a way, it was. And so is the rest of her 23-year-old city experience. Because Philadelphia did what Philadelphia does, which is reach out and pull you closer.

Through the Visitor Center, Adara jumped at the chance to help staff the 2025 Wanamaker Light Show, which, with the Macy’s department store closing, was going to be its last. That light show figured prominently in her childhood. Every Christmas Eve, her parents would bundle the whole family into the car and ride downtown together, watch the light show at the Wanamaker Building, walk through Love Park and the Christmas Village, and wind up at McGillin’s Old Ale House for dinner. She looked forward to it the way kids look forward to things that feel permanent, like the city itself is holding them in place.

She applied for the job. She got it. For the better part of a month, she stood on the other side of the thing, helping thousands of visitors find their way in, watching families cluster around the light and sound of it. She knew exactly what they were feeling. She’d been one of them her whole life.

“That was such a great thing, something that was always really important to everyone in my family,” she says.

The show has since ended its run, and the tradition her family built around it will have to become something new.

She’s okay with that, she says, although it’s bittersweet. Some things you don’t know you’ll miss until they’re over. Some things you don’t know meant everything until you’re standing on the other side of them, watching other people feel what you felt.

But that’s also just where she is right now: at the beginning of something. The light show is over, and the next tradition hasn’t been invented yet. That feels about right for a 23-year-old who came home to a city that keeps surprising her.

She doesn’t know yet where her career will land. She’s staying open, doing the right things, and trusting that the city she calls home has got her back.

Given its track record so far, she says, that seems like a pretty safe bet.