Passionate about history? Love a good treasure hunt? Well so do the so called privy diggers. What they do is certainly controversial, but it follows from a basic instinct to convene with the past. John Vidumsky caught up with “Digger George” for an interview, Peter Woodall went on-site for photos

Hidden City has covered more churches and schools that have closed, are closing, or might be closing, than we’d really care to. John Vidumsky has plotted them on a citywide map to illustrate just how widespread the closings have been, and to place them into their geographical context

The Neck? South Philly swampland coveted by urban dreamers for more than a century was finally tamed for refineries, the Sports Complex, and FDR Park. The turning point: the six-year-long “pig wars” and the final end to South Philly’s agrarian history. John Vidumsky recreates the showdown with pigs as proxy for the yeoman lifestyle and an interview with one of the last surviving homesteaders

Our master of the occult John Vidumsky finds himself inside a Thelemite temple, talking magic worship and DIY construction with the occult religion’s local leader Frater Lux ad Mundi, whose name means “Brother of Light to the World”

Under the El in Frankford an ordinary sneaker store masks the only “atmospheric” movie palace in the city, the Circle Theater

Cavemaster John Vidumsky takes us beyond even the usual lost caves of the Wissahickon to this one, dug originally by the Roxborough Mining Company in 1763–and used by a modern-day hermit

John Vidumsky discovers the people and the places behind the birth of electric light in America–at the heart of it the inimitable John Wanamaker and a brilliant inventor named Charles Brush whose power station, the first in Philadelphia, is still in use today

Philadelphia’s row homes are often a bit plain at street level, but a look up to the roofline reveals a wealth of decorative metal cornices. We talk tin (and zinc, iron and lead) with expert conservator Adam Jenkins