I believe the neighborhood that's immediately adjacent to the South Street bridge has changed a lot since both Karen and Frank's unhappy experiences. I think you might be interested to know that there had been intolerance and violence in that area much earlier than the 1950's. My grandfather was an Irish-Catholic policeman and a young father living and working in that area back in the 1920's. According to one of my uncles, a neighbor came pounding on my grandmother's door one day, urging her to come quickly, her husband had been attacked by a group of thugs. Apparently, the large Irish criminal element of the time felt that becoming a policeman was an act of treason, punishable by a brick to the head. My grandfather got the message and moved his family across the river to Springfield Avenue, also a far better place, he thought, to raise his children. I can't speak to the area generally referred to as "Grey's Ferry", but the streets on the east end of the South Street bridge, say from Lombard to Christian and 20th to the Schuylkill have been relatively safe for years now. Ironically, my brother is now raising his son in the same neighborhood our grandfather fled so many years ago. And so streets and neighborhoods and cities change over time, subject to events beyond the control, perhaps even beyond the understanding, of Penn students and their teachers.
As for the UC Review article - my reaction was similar to Frank's. I would have dismissed the students' ideas - rebirth! retail! green space! - as a collection of tired cliches, and their attitude towards city residents' participation as condescending baloney, except for the fact that the article was so poorly written, typo-filled and frequently incoherent, that I am willing to give the students the benefit of the doubt as to what they really had to propose. -----Original Message----- From: Karen Allen <[email protected]> To: UnivCity Listserv <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, May 19, 2010 3:05 pm Subject: RE: [UC] UC Review RE: I have to say that when I lived in the the Grays Ferry neighborhood in the mid 80s it was the most intolerant place I'd ever experienced. My partner and I were harassed almost daily, mostly because we were gay but also because we were RENTERS! It was awful. > > F---- That little neighborhood's actual name is "Schuylkill", and runs east of the Schuylkill River to about 23rd Street, Pine to Christian: http://www.phila.gov/PHILS/Docs/otherinfo/pname3.htm It was an Irish-Catholic neighborhood for at least most of the 20th Century, until an aging population and gentrification brought change. The parish church was Saint Anthony of Padua at Grays Ferry Avenue and Fitzwater Street, and it's the tall church tower you can see when looking east across the river from West Philadelphia. St. Anthony's was closed in the 1990s and was sold to a Baptist church. Unfortunately, Frank, that neighborhood had a long history of intolerance: I was raised from birth by my great aunts, and from the mid-1950s until 1968 I lived with them in South Philly, first in the 2100 block of St Albans Street, where they had been raised, then in the 1900 block of Catherine Street. Both locations were a short walk from the South Street Bridge. When I was small (late 1950s thru mid 1960s) my Aunt Florence used to take me on Sunday outings, and we often walked across the South Street Bridge to go to the University Museum or the old Commercial Museum (the little building that used to be adjacent to the old Convention Hall). Aunt Florence used to say that we had to be back across the bridge before dark, because otherwise we could be harassed by the white people there. She also told me about how her brother William had gotten beaten up by white kids in that neighborhood when he was a kid, which would have been sometime during the 1920s or 30s. > From: [email protected] > Subject: [UC] UC Review > Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 12:12:11 -0400 > To: [email protected] > > "A vital chapter in the protracted saga of the South St. Bridge restoration > came to a close last week with a presentation by Penn students of their > development ideas for the Grays Ferry neighborhood at the eastern foot of the > South. St. bridge." Vital? Really? > > http://www.ucreview.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=2117&wpage=&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=2320&hn=ucreview&he=.com > > Their suggestions are preposterous. > > I have to say that when I lived in the the Grays Ferry neighborhood in the > mid 80s it was the most intolerant place I'd ever experienced. My partner and > I were harassed almost daily, mostly because we were gay but also because we > were RENTERS! It was awful. > > F---- > You are receiving this because you are subscribed to the > list named "UnivCity." To unsubscribe or for archive information, see > <http://www.purple.com/list.html>;. =
