South American Street in 1968

BY JOAN WILKING

In the beginning…

There were the houses. Father, Son and Holy Ghost, we called them. Three small rooms. Three floors, three windows, one door. Ours was the third one down on the dark side. Twelve houses in all. Two rows of five sitting back to back, two more, endcaps facing South American Street. Ours looked out on the blank wall of the furniture factory next door. I could stand in the center of the alley, arms extended, and touch cool rough brick with my fingertips.

Those bricks were by the same maker that baked the bricks for Jefferson’s Monticello. That structure, so imposing. Unlike ours, so plain, not much more than a holding pen for the indentured dockworkers who labored on the Delaware – and were locked into the gated alleyways at night by overseers living in the slightly larger houses facing the street. Our house and the two narrow alleys were all that was left of what had once been row upon row, stretching down to the river.

I loved that little house as much as Jefferson loved his domed brick pile. I arrived on the second Tuesday that November – Election Day, 1968. I stood at the head of the alley. The iron gate was ajar. I was in the city of my birth awaiting entry into a foreign land. Fifteen miles to the northeast was a green lawn and sprawling ranch house built out of Pennsylvania fieldstone. I fled that for a world of tired brick and stained concrete. There the air smelled of fall leaves. On South American Street cars and trucks rumbled by spewing exhaust fumes. An old lady wearing a flowered housedress yelled at a pack of little black boys to get the hell off of her stoop.

I arrived for a man and I left with him eighteen months later to live on Cape Cod. Those eighteen months felt like lifetime. I’d never felt so free or so loved.

At the end there was...

The J&W Thrift Store where we bought all of our clothes and thick heavy mismatched pieces of Buffalo China, once even a delicately painted Dresden plate.

The ancient Rag Lady whose shop was across the street and down towards the river. She teetered on five-inch heels. Nylon runs up and down her blue-veined sticks of legs. Belly bulging in a dress too short. Lifeless black hair with grey roots too long. Crimson lipstick smeared out of place by unsteady hands and impossibly myopic eyes. Glasses so thick the eyes looked twice their size behind the lenses. She followed passers-by down the street, old clothes in each hand, haranguing them to buy.

Storefront after storefront boarded up, blank faced, only a few still alive.

View looks east from South Street toward American Street in 1962.

Photo courtesy of PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records

A pool hall in a basement, snooker and eight-ball. One huge high-ceilinged mirrored room. Decor unchanged since the 1930s. Smoke-filled and always oddly silent, but for the clacking sound of the balls.

A bar on South between South American and Second Street so scary even we avoided it.

Abbott’s Dairies where high-schoolers on roller skates spent their summer vacations pushing frost-coated metal racks with mittened hands filling ice cream orders. A place so cold, if they stayed too long inside, they slowed down like 78 rpm records played at 33 1/3 and had to be pulled out before they froze.

A shop where old lady seamstresses stitched aprons, and bathrobes with leg-of-mutton sleeves. I bought a long one that was brightly flowered on a field of darkest maroon. The cotton weave felt like soft puckered popcorn all over.

A kosher restaurant we went to for potato knishes and once watched as a white-shirted round ball of a man, licking his lips, stuck a cloth napkin into his collar and ate two whole roasted chickens and a pickled tongue at one sitting.

An elderly, wizened man in the same suit and tie day after day. Not a hair on his head, or anywhere else as far as I could see. Grey green with a patina of never washed off grime. I once watched a cockroach crawl out of his collar, which once – but no longer – fit his neck.

A factory, three doors down off South Street on South American, where machinery that looked like it had been there since the beginning of the Industrial Age spit pastelcolored drops of a sugared mixture onto long thin strips of

10 November / December 2018

614 S. 4th Street, Phila PA 19147

Locally Owned, Locally Operated, our 14 th year serving the community.

South American Street in 1959.

Photo courtesy of PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records

white paper. The strips, draped back and forth on wooden racks until they were dry and ready to be cut into measured lengths, were wound around rectangles of cardboard, packaged and sealed in cellophane to be sold to children who for a few cents would greedily bite off the hard sweet dots devouring bits of the paper with them.

And us, there not out of necessity but by choice. Not yet outraged by the inequity of it. Not like the blacks and whites, Italians and Poles, some of them, like us, young – too many – old and poor, all displaced urban refugees sent into flight. But to where? It was never our neighborhood. We didn’t lose it. We left it and moved on.

We watched them come…

The art galleries first. The owners took whatever they could get for the buildings and we got Julia and Isaiah Zagar’s Eyes Gallery, Rick and Ruth Snyderman’s The Works, the short lived Gazoo, The Painted Bride. That was how it started. Eventually it achieved a life of its own until there was no stopping it. I didn’t understand then the way I do now – that the beginning and the ending are the same thing – one paving the way for the other over and over again, a twisting Mobius strip of experiences that reinforce the notion you might as well live as well as you can because there’s no guarantee there will be a tomorrow – or – that it doesn’t matter how you live – for exactly the same reason.