Four Seasons Total Landscaping, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – © Brian Rose

Trump’s campaign began with the candidate regally gliding down an escalator in his eponymously named tower on Fifth Avenue in New York, and his bid for re-election ended, so to speak, with a bizarre Rudy Giuliani press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in northeast Philadelphia. The reason for the venue still not fully understood.

When I saw images of the locale and its immediate neighborhood with a sex shop and crematorium, I knew that this was a job for me – to explore this urban wilderness wedged between I-95 and the Amtrak mainline. Here begins a series of photographs of a richly forlorn place, the final resting place of a failed presidency.

Fantasy Island, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – © Brian Rose

Delaware Valley Cremation Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – © Brian Rose

Justin Davidson’s wrote in Curbed: “The end of an administration marked by episodes of sordid sex, wishful thinking, and mass death took place next door to a dildo-and-porn store named Fantasy Island and across the street from a crematorium. If you were hunting for such a symbolically rich stage, how would you even Google it?

The photos that emerged from the event had the tawdriness of America’s worst cityscapes and the richness of an allegorical painting.”

Fantasy Island, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – © Brian Rose

On Saturday, a steady trickle of gawkers stopped by on State Road for snapshots and selfies in front of  Four Seasons Total Landscaping and Fantasy Island. We noticed a few people in running gear, and one stopped to tell us that he was taking part in the “Fraud Street Run,” a pun on Broad Street Run, an annual event in Philadelphia. This one followed a course along the Delaware River from Four Seasons Landscaping to the Four Seasons hotel in Center City. Event organizer, Jeff Lyons said, “What Guiliani did was so crazy and hard to grasp, and with Trump bad-mouthing Philly, I thought it would be fun to turn it into something positive for Philly and raise some money for a good cause,”

We have clearly reached peak madness as the Trump reign of error disintegrates into a screwball comedy on the streets of Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – © Brian Rose

It was a brilliant fall day, crisp and comfortably cool. I didn’t cover the 11 miles of the Fraud Street run, but I did manage 4 or 5 miles around this weird corner of the city, the kind of place that exists only in America. It is a place that is at once richly evocative, colorful, and yet at the same time, a blown-out dead-end landscape, There are gas stations, body shops, an automobile auction, an archery center, baseball batting cages, a mattress outlet, a check casher, a chemical plant, metal recyclers, storefront churches, a smattering of clapboard houses, an abandoned Catholic orphanage, a superfund site, a marble stone cutter, and, of course, a sex shop, crematorium, and landscaper. It is not, generally, an area suited for pedestrians. It’s even a little dangerous.