Returning, fifty or more years later, to where you grew up has its hazards. Particularly if your old neighborhood has deteriorated as badly as the Lower Olney section of North Philadelphia.
Even after discounting for nostalgia, there really were – safe, clean streets, row houses, trimmed hedges, purple and white hydrangeas, cool porches under striped canvas awnings – a patriarchy of two-parent families headed by bus drivers, cops, mailmen, factory workers – summer Sunday mornings after Mass, the sound of living room radios spilling out the clickety-clack of kids tap dancing on Stan Lee Broza’s Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour – late afternoons, the aromas of three dozen dinners cooking, coal ashes spread on icy sidewalks – the glow of gas lamps, milk and bread on doorsteps, twice-a-day mail delivery, and traffic so sparse we played, biked and sledded on the street almost without fear of interruption.
The down side of cheek-to-jowl living is largely forgotten. Hot evenings on open porches just inches away from incompatible neighbors. You were careful of everything you said, not wanting others to know any more of your family business than they already knew. The walls did have ears. When the unhappy couple two doors up squared off to trash each other, everyone had ringside seats. Nothing was missed. Nothing went unnoticed. The guy up the street wobbling home, late for supper with a bag of quarts, never went unnoted in the ledger of the collective consciousness. There were an infinity of minor, but critical distinctions; Catholics-Protestants, Phillies-“A’s”, possession of a few bucks or virtually none, blue collar or marginally white collar. If you did come into a little money, it became common knowledge as soon as the new furniture or TV was delivered, or when the “new” used car pulled up to the curb of our narrow one-way street.
The times seemed simpler. Everyone was just like us, the same color anyway. In truth, the world then was as complex and uncertain as it is today. It was me that was simpler, not the times. I was a child, and that fixes and simplifies those days in my mind. The arrival of black people, of other minorities, was not the real cause of change in our neighborhood. The changes, like the qualities that gave our street and most of the city’s older row house neighborhoods their flavor, were organic. They were structural and were woven seamlessly through the incidental conditions of the moment.
Now, when I hear or read the earnest urban experts promoting the idea of community, “the community”, of “creating communities,” I shudder. Community, I’ve come to believe, is a binary condition. It exists or it doesn’t. I don’t think that any amount of wishing, funding, or organizing will create meaningful community. The unreflective sense of living within a defined community that I had as a child was the natural result of a set of definable environmental constraints. As those constraints came undone, so too did the feeling of community that had made living on our narrow street of row houses tolerable, and on so many other crowded streets in so many other city neighborhoods.
We had a community on our street not because we were a better class of people, or because we were more enlightened or more civic minded than the people who live on that same street today. We simply lived at a time, in a place and within a system that was ordered; socially, technologically and economically, to foster the one essential ingredient of any real community – a continuing, high level of personal interaction by almost every inhabitant of the block. On our street, interaction with your neighbors was not really a matter of choice.
The blight, alienation and isolation that seems to characterize so many of today’s inner city streets begs questions about what had once made life work on small, crowded streets in blue-collar areas. Or, coming at it from a different angle; what were the agents of change that could have blown away a period, however brief, of stable, inclusive social patterns. There’s a measure of truth in almost every theory propounded; fill in the blanks – a changing economy, poverty, the racism of them versus us, blockbuster realtors, drugs, sex, UFOs, rock and roll.
More likely however the changes were brought on by phenomena somewhat like the species of snakes unknowingly imported to the island of Guam. The very presence of the snakes went undetected until they had eaten almost every bird on the island.
The reptilian intruders into my childhood community remain all too familiar. To this day, they sun themselves out in the open, and they continue to devour what’s left of a more congenial world. They slithered onto the scene of my childhood and their infestation offers a partial clue to the ensuing decline in the viability of neighborhood life. My choice of serpents in the urban garden of my childhood are three of the most ubiquitous applications of accessible, affordable consumer technology. One that had already arrived in those days was the automobile. I witnessed the arrival of the other two, unqualified blessings we thought at the time; the television set and the air conditioner.
At the end of World War Two in 1945, very few families on our street owned a car, maybe four cars out of thirty-five households. TV was not yet an affordable reality, and the only air conditioning was in a few upscale movie houses and stores. The absence of those three elements meant that people on our street had no easy way of going anywhere else, no good reason to stay in the house, and a positive incentive to go outside when it got hot. The result was a lot of people spending a lot of time rubbing up against each other in a relatively small public area. The arrival on our street of those three heralds of change – cars, TV and air-conditioning – in the decade or so following 1945, meant people no longer had to stand on the pavement and chat with the neighbors. They did not have to sit exposed upon their porch chairs suffering the scrutiny of every sidewalk passerby. They could now run from their houses, hop in their cars and escape the eyes and ears of their neighbors. In the evening, instead of rocking on the porch, playing ball, or strolling up or down the street in search of amenable conversation, they could stay inside and watch Milton Berle, Ed Sullivan, or the cardboard rocket ships of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. The final blow to the vitality of life on the street came with the arrival of the window-mounted air conditioner. There was no longer any reason why you had to sit outside in the stifling heat and put up with that ignoramus who happened to live next door. Your sixteen-foot wide Airlite house in Olney, Torresdale or Crescentville now offered you the cool privacy of a “Main Line” mansion.
With the postwar climate of accelerating social and economic change, the addition of cars for almost everyone, with television and air-conditioning, communal life in places like Lower Olney began to unravel. The cohesive elements that made neighborhoods more than just the collections of housing they have become, lost the power of necessity. Given choices, people increasingly retreated into the interiors of their homes, into their cars, into private spaces. Those who were able, and in the 1950’s upward mobility didn’t take extraordinary ability, were lured away to the even greater privacy of the suburbs.
In many changing neighborhoods, as young people left for the suburbs, as new and seemingly different people began moving in, the lives of those left behind, particularly older people, became increasingly isolated. New people may become acquainted with their immediate neighbors, but no one now has to be bothered if they don’t wish to be bothered.
On my own street in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s everyone knew everyone else. Often they knew far too much about each other. No stranger could walk up our street without being noticed. It would have been almost impossible to abandon a car along the curb or spray graffiti on a wall. In the days before most people had cars, before TV, before people could seal themselves in closed-up houses, there were always witnesses.
Today drug dealers can operate from a row house, and four houses away people can choose not to see it. If they do see it, they don’t have to know anything of the people living in that house. Crime and blight can go unresolved because people can, to some degree, escape by locking themselves up tightly with fifty-seven cable channels and an automatic thermostat. And, there’s usually a getaway car parked out front.
McLuhan wrote that while we have no idea of who discovered water, we know it wasn’t a fish. It may be our nature to remain oblivious to the invisible structures and hidden dynamics of our surrounding environments. The complex interactions of the ordinary; the infinite and innocuous daily changes just slide on by unnoticed, until one day we awaken to worlds that no longer make sense.
We’re no wiser today, no more prescient with our surround-sound, iPhones, or five-bedroom/four-bath homes than were my old neighbors in row-house Olney in the late 1940’s. Like us they were much too busy discovering the present, celebrating that wonderful first car, that first TV set, that first air-conditioner.
Now, a half century removed from my old neighborhood, I still keep a sharp eye out for snakes. Are they coiled in the Internet, in fast food restaurants, are they digital now? What new guises have they assumed, those silent, sneaky vipers of radical change. There’s no knowing of course, not until it’s too late, not until the venom of irrevocable loss is already within our systems.
Tags: "a's", 1945-1955, air conditioning, blight, blockbuster realtors, blue-collar, coal ashes, community, consumer technology, crescentville, crime, drugs, ed sullivan, guam, horn and hardart children;s hour, inclusive social patterns, main line, memoir, milton berle, minorities, old neighborhood, olney, patriarchy, philadelphia, phillies, racism, rock and roll, row houses, safe streets, snakes, stan lee broza, tom corbett space cadet, torresdale, tv, two parent families, ufo's, upward mobility, venom, white collar
