The long, wooden staircase that leads to the second-floor offices of the Philadelphia Independent is being painted bright green. Brushes and open cans of paint obstruct the narrow entranceway. Editions of the City Paper are strewn about, effectively serving as drop cloths. After squeezing past partially erected displays of eclectic artwork situated in the center of Lost Highways, the art gallery/museum that occupies most of the floor, one finds the aorta of the nascent publication nestled in the back.

In January, founder, editor and publisher Matt Schwartz and his committed team of artsy newsfolk celebrated the one-year anniversary of, by far, the broadest broadsheet in town. "Too big to read on the subway" is just one of the mottos emblazoning the sporadically published newspaper, which measures about a foot and a half by 2 feet.

"I always had romantic notions about what working at a newspaper would be like," says Schwartz, 23, who recently quit his day job as a food runner at a fancy Center City brasserie. "They weren't quite fulfilled, so I created one myself."

The paper, most notable for its distinctly old-fashioned layout and design, is the brainchild of Schwartz, a recent Swarthmore honors graduate with a short but impressive list of mainstream newspaper credentials. (He was a Pulliam Fellow, an editorial assistant with AP and an intern with Gannett.) Schwartz and his dedicated team of twentysomethings -- most unpaid -- have embarked on an ink-filled labor of love.

"We think that Philly needs to read about itself," Schwartz says. "Our stories are about where the city has been and where it's going. We're taking a trans-historical look to develop an urban consciousness."

In the past year, the Independent, which sells for 50 cents in Philly and a buck beyond the city limits, has published five editions. The sixth edition is scheduled to publish Friday and will be distributed in the hand-painted, refurbished honor boxes that have become one of the paper's trademarks.

"I work anywhere from 90 to 100 hours a week," Schwartz says. "Selling ads takes up most of my time, because most of our money comes from ads. I'm not a born salesman, but I really believe in the paper. Right now, it's just about breaking even and it's pretty much hand-to-mouth. But from issue one to issue five, our ad revenue has increased by 800 percent."

For the most part, articles in the Independent are written in the first person, laid out using a wide assortment of curly-cue fonts and accompanied by loads of hand-drawn art. Schwartz says he doesn't view the city weeklies as competition; he says the Independent has its own separate space with readers.

"We're trying to imitate what newspapers used to be like in the 18th and 19th centuries," Schwartz says.

A staff of the devoted mans the publication, which cost less than $3,000 to start. Senior Editor Richard Charles, a 22-year-old English major at Temple, says that after seeing the first edition last January, he decided he wanted to be part of the process.

"It looked like a good paper, something good for Philadelphia," he says. Before coming to the Independent, Charles had honed his chops writing for the Journal of Modern Literature. Now a college senior, he puts in approximately 30 hours per week helping Schwartz line edit the scads of articles contributed by unpaid writers. "Eighty percent of the writers come to us," Charles says. "A week after an issue comes out, our mailbox is pretty full of story ideas."

While Schwartz explains that very few of the writers are financially compensated, he does offer them attractive alternatives.

"We don't pay our writers -- yet, but we want to eventually," he explains. "Instead, we give them free advertising for their own projects. Like [contributor] Erik Bader; he just finished writing a novel. When he writes a column for us, he gets an ad for his novel."

Independent Art Director Jacob Weinstein, whose elaborate headers add an unmistakable touch of class to the broadsheet, says that he's been contributing his own comics to the paper since the first issue.

"With me and other cartoonists, we get an opportunity to do bigger strips than other papers allow," says the 23-year-old Haverford College fine arts major. "Here, artists have an entire page. Other than comic books, there are very few opportunities for cartoonists to have this much space and be able to reach this many people. I'm hoping it really becomes a forum for cartoonists -- and all artists, in general."

Printing approximately 10,000 copies per edition, Schwartz says the paper's goal is to publish a 20- to 30-page paper the first Friday of every month. With a mere 150 square feet and just three computers in its newsroom, the paper is currently sold at 75 outlets throughout greater Philadelphia. Schwartz says a website is on the horizon.

"The best thing, my favorite thing about the whole paper," he says, "is finding really talented writers and artists and being the very first person to say to them, 'You can have as much space as you want, to write what you want,' and then watching their eyes light up. That feels great."