Forty years after Lynch left Philadelphia, Callowhill remains an assortment of industrial detritus and railway infrastructure, where isolated homes and abandoned warehouses sit alongside parking lots and auto-repair shops (Plate 8). Cut off from downtown by the Vine Street Expressway, it maintains a feeling of desolation and poverty, though the remnants of glorious Art Deco hotels and factories have led to the area’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. The transformation of several of these buildings into upscale apartment blocks has also placed Callowhill at the center of gentrification debates in the city. Callowhill is, like Łódź and downtown Los Angeles, brimming with fertile decay, the kind of ill-defined terrain that sparks Lynch’s imagination. Fittingly, the area now enjoys a new nickname: the “Eraserhood.”
― from “The Architecture of David Lynch”