Blow Out was released 25 years ago next month, and what struck me most was how different our city looks. Sure, we still have City Hall, The Gallery and 30th Street Station. But everything in-between looks absolutely foreign. You know Reading Terminal? It was actually still a terminal. With running trains and everything. (It's where Nancy Allen's character is hanging out when she's about to skip town.) Next to The Gallery is a big gaping excavation site … and it's not the DisneyQuest hole! (This is where John Lithgow's character does something mean to a woman with a sharp wire that is coiled up in his wristwatch. Bad John Lithgow! Bad!) Market Street West is virtually unrecognizable—no Liberty Places, no gleaming white skyscrapers. A just-built Penn Center and just-planted Clothespin were up at the end of the street, but everything else looked like beat-up storefronts and porno theaters.

And much of the city looks like it was sprayed down with a grime machine, from the seedy bar where Travolta tells Allen his life story to the seedy hotel where Dennis Franz's private eye character holes up with nothing but a ratty-ass wife-beater tee and a bottle of J&B to keep him company. The only thing quite this ratty in Center City these days is Patrick Rapa's office here at the CP.

Blow Out, of course, was filmed long before the advent of the Center City District, and about 15 years before Ed Rendell applied the defibrillator paddles and shocked the downtown back to life. (I wonder if he decided to save downtown because he saw Blow Out one too many times.)

I've got to say, I'm very happy to be living in Philadelphia in 2006.

But there's something 1981 Philadelphia had that we don't have today.

More people.

In early October 1981, we had 1,648,582 residents. That month, The New York Times reported that Houston, with 79 more people, had overtaken us and snatched the title of "fourth largest city" away from us. (Did you know that? We used to be the fourth largest city in America, probably within your lifetime?)

Twenty-five years later, we remain on the verge of being overtaken again. This time, by Phoenix. According to the latest Census estimates, as of July 1, 2005 (I read these in Brett Mandel's must-read Philadelphia Forward mailing list), we're holding somewhat steady at 1,463,281 residents, while Phoenix has 1,461,575.

And as Mandel points out, the only reason we held steady in the past year is because more people were born in Philadelphia than died. Apparently, we're screwing a little bit faster than the bullets can fly.

This raises the question: Why are we losing people? After all, Center City looks a hell of a lot better than it did when John Travolta was racing down Market Street, almost running over Mummers, trying like hell to find his hooker friend before she fell victim to John Lithgow's scary-ass watch.

The answer: It's not about Center City.

It's the rest of the city. The stuff they didn't show in Blow Out. The neighborhoods, where most of us actually live.

We're losing residents to the 'burbs and other cities because an increasing number of people think life's better lived elsewhere, for a variety of reasons.

The climax of Blow Out takes place at a fictional "Liberty Day" celebration, which runs down Market Street straight to Penn's Landing. There are crowds of people and fireworks and red, white and blue out the wazoo, as if nobody bothered to tell Brian De Palma that the Bicentennial was, um, five years previous. But it does look cool.

And this weekend, Fourth of July weekend, there will be a similar blow out all around the city. Fireworks. Crowds.*

Wouldn't it be nice to celebrate the return of residents to our neighborhoods?

Such transformations are possible. We've done it before. Rent Blow Out and compare the Philadelphia of 1981 with the Philadelphia of today.

We've just got to point the camera in the right direction.

* If you're at Welcome America! and notice someone who looks like John Lithgow … RUN.