Campaign Poster Number Two

I finally found a picture to go with this text. (Click on the poster to make it larger.)

The photograph is an Agfachrome from 1978. I took it at the Bronx Zoo in New York City.

See also A Campaign Poster, How the Ship Sinks, What Happened in Ferrara?

What Came Before the Laurel

There Was a Fire Thirty Years Ago

Walnut street on a tough day.

"On the morning of Dec. 14, 1994, a fire broke out at 1913 Walnut Street. Before it was over, six alarms had been sounded, the building - a pleasant 1897 brownstone with several commercial tenants - had been destroyed, and the neighboring buildings, including the Eric Theater, had been damaged." 

That's from an article I wrote that appeared in the January 25, 1995, edition of the Welcomat (pp. 31-32). The Welcomat later became the Philadelphia Weekly. The switch was the right thing to do, but a tiny part of me misses that marvelously idiosyncratic name.

Most of the article is a critique of the coverage provided by the Inquirer and the Daily News, and I confess that I probably hadn't given a thought to it for several decades. Then, one day last year, I was looking at old 35 millimeter slides - digitizing some of my Kodachromes is, by this point, a multiyear project - and I picked up yet another little yellow box. On this one I had written "december 1994 walnut street fire." What fire, I thought.

As I went through the slides in the box, it slowly came back to me, and I also remembered the Welcomat story. It took me a while to find it (it was mouldering in the basement).

The slides have never been published. I think they tell the story. Great art? No. But decent documentary work, in my opinion.

The photo at the beginning of this article was as close as I could get to the fire on Walnut Street. The fire department had very properly properly closed off the block, and I didn't have press credentials. You can see the Eric Rittenhouse sign on the right. I'm standing on Walnut just west of 19th street.

Here's another shot of Walnut, from the 20th street side. The firefighters are squirting into 1913 Walnut, the source of the fire. Note the firefighter on the roof. The movie theater is the white building to the right of 1913.

The firefighters used a lot of water. Here's where all that water comes from - first a hydrant, then a pumper. This pumper is on Walnut just west of 20th, with the back of the Rittenhouse building visible across the parking lot that's just behind the Church of the Holy Trinity. 

(There are two steam vents in the sidewalk here. I think the white cloud is just steam. Steam clouds on the sidewalk used to be fairly common,)

Here's another pumper, on 20th just south of Moravian.

Much of the fire-fighting actually took place on the Sansom street side, with equipment marshaled in the large parking lot at 20th and Sansom. This lot is now occupied by a relatively low-rise building that is part of the Laurel complex.

On a good day, the commanders at the fire scene coordinate the various vectors of approach so the firefighters don't, for instance, squirt too much water on one another. Not every day is excellent, but then that's one of the reasons firefighters wear raincoats.

Here's a shot down Moravian, looking west from 19th.

And yes, there was a lot of smoke. Going over these slides, I regularly found myself getting disoriented. I can only imagine what it's like to stand in thick smoke on the roof of a burning building.

I think maintaining situational awareness in a situation like this must be very difficult.

And above all remembering to make sure you know where your comrades are. This is dangerous, difficult work.

Rittenhouse Square - note the Church of the Holy Trinity in the background. 

Why are these men smiling? They have been in peril, and now they're out of it, and they're elated.

So that's the back story for the enormous, and may I say very attractive building that has finally succeeded the Eric Rittenhouse, 1913 Walnut, the parking lot, and a bunch of other parcels of land on this block. Personally, I am very happy about the Laurel. It's big, but they've done a lot to try to keep an intimate feel at the street level, and by and large I think they've succeeded. As the construction barriers have come down, I feel better and better. I'm not sure why it took thirty years, but at this point, why quibble?

See also Quo Vadis, Philadelphia?

In Defense of Disgusting Alleys

Actually There Is No Defense

2000 block of Moravian.

I've clearly spent too much time in Philadelphia's alleys. Now the dumpsters are talking to me. This one is saying Don't Gentrify My Alley.

I always just assumed that the dumpsters would prefer a snug, secure little space out of the weather and away from the rats.

I understand that the garbage haulers like things the way they are. After all, it's easier for them. And I understand that many of the business owners prefer to treat their garbage literally as an externality and stow it out in the commons, aka the alley. But I never expected the dumpsters to line up with the bosses.

It's not like anybody treats them very nicely or shows them respect. Does anybody ever wash a dumpster?  And yet this dumpster has clearly drunk the Kool-Aid.

Oh well. Despite the massive opposition arrayed against me, I will continue my crusade to turn every alley in Philadelphia into a clean, well-lighted place. But I think I'll start in the 1400 or 1700 block of Moravian. That dumpster in the 2000 block scares me.

Back in 2018 I ran a story entitled Streets Without Joy, which was largely a rant against razor wire but also encouraged the 1800 block of Cypress, which was neat and clean and dull, to think of some color. Here's a parking pad in that block today.

It doesn't take a lot. People just have to care.

See also A Few Deft Touches for Back Streets, Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, This Isn't Just Any Alley, My New Favorite Alley, Alleys, What Should We Do With the Humble Dumpster?

A Campaign Poster

Here is my very first campaign poster ever. And probably my last. I have the words, but not the pictures.

See also What Happened in Ferrara?

Shall We Release the Kraken?

A Note on the Homeless

I found this little scene on Chestnut between Di Bruno Bros. and Target. The woman standing in the bus shelter is yelling at the woman lying on the bench, telling her to sit up so that she, the standing person, can sit down.

2023.

I'd like to say that scenes like this are rare in the place where I live, but they are not rare, and they are not new.

Somewhere near Rittenhouse Square, 1982.

Moravian street near the Union League, 1984.

Over the years, the people of Center City Philadelphia have pitched in and tried to help alleviate the suffering. For instance, the Bethesda Project, headquartered at 1630 South street, has been providing emergency shelter, housing, and supportive services to the homeless since 1979. It currently has 15 locations, including the Trinity Memorial Church at 2212 Spruce Street and the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square. 

(Bethesda was a place of refuge and healing in Jerusalem. Jesus heals a man there in John 5; the priests don't like it because it's the Sabbath and Jesus told the man to pick up his bed, and the man picked up his bed. And things kinda go downhill from there.)

Since 2018, the Center City District has had an outreach program, called Ambassadors of Hope, that helps the unhoused seek shelter and treatment.

I hope we can all agree that these admirable efforts, and others like them, are not not fully meeting current needs. We do have a problem of the homeless on our streets. It is bad, it is getting worse, and local residents are beginning to lose patience. There is pervasive unhappiness with aggressive panhandlers and others whose bizarre behavior disrupts the normal life of the sidewalk and often frightens people who are just trying to walk down the street.

Let me add that the problem is not confined to the city's sidewalks. One recent evening a friend of mine was sitting in her living room when she heard small noises in the kitchen. As her husband had already gone to bed, she got up and investigated. A homeless man had gained entry into the house and was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, removing his shoes. She spoke to him, and he mumbled incoherently. My friend is a retired middle-school teacher, so she used her teacher voice and ordered him to put his shoes back on and leave the house. The man put his shoes back on and shambled out.

Waverly street, 2023.

There are undoubtedly further things that the City and other local organizations, both public and private, can do to help address the situation. However, I think we also need to recognize that homelessness and its related issues are basically a national problem we've been failing to address for a very long time.

For example, many of the unhoused are mentally ill. John F. Kennedy, in the last bill he signed before he was murdered in Texas, pointed the way forward for this group. The law centered on two ideas: closing the mental hospitals, which were widely seen as dumping grounds that did not serve the patients well but did permit the rest of us to ignore their existence; and, second, opening a large number of community mental health clinics that would provide treatment and support to patients while allowing them to live in their home communities. 

The first proposal was accepted with alacrity, and the mental hospitals were closed at a grand rate. However, the money saved by closing the hospitals was, by and large, not recommitted to the proposed community mental health clinics, the vast majority of which were never created.

The result was a large number of seriously ill people released into the public sphere, sometimes with housing, but rarely with adequate provision for their care. I had personal experience with this process in Asbury Park in the 1970s and 1980s. The town had lost much of its popularity as a beach resort, and it had a lot of empty rooms in hotels and boarding houses. The state sent along the mental patients, and their presence, with beds but without adequate support systems, was a powerful accelerant to the city's further decline, which only turned around after the year 2000. (See The Uncertain Eighties. For more on the national situation, click here and here.)

20th and Walnut, 1984.

Subway entrance, 123 South Broad, 1984. 

So I do think the current situation in Philadelphia amounts to playing with fire. And I do think local initiatives can do more to alleviate the situation. We just shouldn't kid ourselves about what we're up against, or expect work at the local level to fully resolve a national problem.

I'm hopeful that our new mayor, Cherelle Parker, may help make the situation better through local initiatives, but I would also encourage her to form an alliance with other mayors to try to get this issue before Congress once again. 

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 15, Mayor Parker spent time with President Biden and visited Philadundance with him. The Inquirer reported that the two discussed how the federal government could assist Philadelphia with issues of public safety and affordable housing, and also "the opioid crisis afflicting the city's Kensington neighborhood." So I am permitting myself some cautious optimism, with the hope that people will recognize that the problem of homelessness extends well beyond Kensington and involves issues other than opioid dependence.  Mental health, for instance.

Finally, a word of caution. I am concerned that Mayor Parker's initiative in Kensington may be over-reliant on the services of the police. As George Orwell noted in "Shooting an Elephant," the injection of a police presence into a volatile situation can lead to suboptimal outcomes.

Unfortunately, I feel this may well be the path that Mayor Parker chooses. Following Sidney Powell, we can call this Releasing the Kraken. It will certainly be popular. But it won't work, and the optics will be terrible. 

Lombard street, 2024.

Wikipedia has a lengthy and very detailed article on the history of the Kraken. I think we should offer a prize to anyone who actually reads it through to the end. To see the article, click here.

See also The Uncertain Eighties, A Moment in Time, Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Quo Vadis, Philadelphia?

Wounded Souls

Albert Camus on Moral Compromise 

Neptune, N.J., 2023.

I suppose this post is mainly for evangelical pastors and Catholic priests, especially the bishops. But it is really for us all. A key aspiration of any fascist regime is to create a state where every individual is morally compromised.

Albert Camus, who wrote the story containing the brief passage transcribed below, started his newspaper career in his native Algeria before moving to Paris shortly before the outbreak of World War II. After the German conquest of France, Camus joined the Resistance and served as editor of the underground newspaper Combat. After the war was over, his career flourished, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. 

I read a lot of Camus when I was in my twenties. I checked, and I still have my copy of Le mythe de Sisyphe on a bookshelf, not far from Marc Bloch's Apologie pour l'histoire ou metier d'historien, which begins with the immortal sentence, "Papa, explique-moi donc a quoi sert l'histoire?" (Roughly translated, "Daddy, what is the point of history?")  Professor Bloch wrote this little book during World War II. He also joined the French Resistance; he was arrested on March 8, 1944, and on the night of June 16, shortly after D-Day, the Gestapo murdered him. 

Returning from the digression: Until recently, I had not been aware of the piece that contains the following story. It's in a little Modern Library collection of some of his shorter pieces. Camus made the selections himself shortly before his death in a car crash in 1960. The story is dated December 1943; in a brief introductory note Camus says that it was published in issue number three of Les cahiers de Liberation at the beginning of 1944 (p. ix); in this note (p. x) he also writes, "I loathe none but executioners." (To see the original article, click here. The Bibliotheque nationale gives issue three the date of February 1, 1944. Camus signs the article "Louis Neuville.")  

One day I noticed this little book on my wife's bureau. I asked her where it came from, and she said she'd found it on one of our bookshelves. Neither one of us has any idea how it got on that shelf. A few days later I noticed the book was still sitting on her bureau and asked her if she was reading it. Her answer, roughly translated, was "Why don't you read it?" And so I did.

The following little snippet, on pages 11-13 of the book, gave me an insight into the reality of a fascist regime that I simply had not had before: 

"Let me tell you this story. Before dawn, from a prison I know, somewhere in France, a truck driven by armed soldiers is taking eleven Frenchmen to the cemetery where you are to shoot them. Out of the eleven, five or six have really done something: a tract, a few meetings, something that showed their refusal to submit. The five or six, sitting motionless inside the truck, are filled with fear, but, if I may say so, it is an ordinary fear, the kind that grips every man facing the unknown, a fear that is not incompatible with courage. The others have done nothing. This hour is harder for them because they are dying by mistake or as victims of a kind of indifference. Among them is a child of sixteen. You know the faces of our adolescents; I don't want to talk about them. The boy is dominated by fear; he gives in to it shamelessly. Don't smile scornfully; his teeth are chattering. But you have placed beside him a chaplain, whose task is to alleviate somewhat the agonizing hour of waiting. I believe I can say that for men who are about to be killed a conversation about a future life is of no avail. It is too hard to believe that the lime-pit is not the end of all. The prisoners in the truck are silent. The chaplain turns toward the child huddled in his corner. He will understand better. The child answers, clings to the chaplain's voice, and hope returns. In the mutest of horrors sometimes it is enough for a man to speak; perhaps he is going to fix everything. 'I haven't done anything,' says the child. 'Yes,' says the chaplain, 'but that's not the question now. You must get ready to die properly.' 'It can't be possible that no one understands me.' 'I am your friend and perhaps I understand you. But it is late. I shall be with you and the Good Lord will be too. You'll see how easy it is.' The child turns his head away. The chaplain speaks of God. Does the child believe in him? Yes, he believes. Hence he knows that nothing is as important as the peace awaiting him. But that very peace is what frightens the child. 'I am your friend,' the chaplain repeats. 

"The others are silent. He must think of them. The chaplain leans toward the silent group, turning his back on the child for a moment. The truck is advancing slowly with a sucking sound over the road, which is damp with dew. Imagine the gray hour, the early-morning smell of men, the invisible countryside suggested by sounds of teams being harnessed or the cry of a bird. The child leans against the canvas covering, which gives a little. He notices a narrow space between it and the truck body. He could jump if he wanted. The chaplain has his back turned and, up front, the soldiers are intent on finding their way in the dark. The boy doesn't stop to think; he tears the canvas loose, slips into the opening, and jumps. His fall is hardly heard, the sound of running on the road, then nothing more. He is in the fields, where his steps can't be heard. But the flapping of the canvas, the sharp, damp morning air penetrating the truck make the chaplain and the prisoners turn around. For a second the priest stares at those men looking at him in silence. A second in which the man of God must decide whether he is on the side of the executioners or on the side of the martyrs in keeping with his vocation. But he has already knocked on the partition separating him from his comrades. 'Achtung!' The alarm is given. Two soldiers leap into the truck and point their guns at the prisoners. Two others leap to the ground and start running across the fields. The chaplain, a few paces from the truck, standing on the asphalt, tries to see them through the fog. In the truck the men can only listen to the sounds of the chase, the muffled exclamations, a shot, silence, then the sound of voices again coming nearer, finally a hollow stamping of feet. The child is brought back. He wasn't hit, but he stopped surrounded in the enemy fog, suddenly without courage, forsaken by himself. He is carried rather than led by his guards. He has been beaten somewhat, but not much. The most important lies ahead. He doesn't look at the chaplain or anyone else. The priest has climbed up beside the driver. An armed soldier has taken his place in the truck. Thrown into one of the corners, the child doesn't cry. Between the canvas and the floor he watches the road slip away again and sees in its surface a reflection of the dawn. 

"I am sure you can very well imagine the rest." 

See also A Teacher's Dilemma, A Lesson From the Berlin Wall.

Trump Is a Russian Agent

But It's Apparently Impolite to Say So

The term fifth column got its origin in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. The Nationalists (the bad guys) were attacking the Republicans' forces (these were the good guys) in Madrid. The bad guys had four separate columns of soldiers attacking toward Madrid from different directions, and the bad guys said there was also a fifth column inside the city, ready to attack it from within.

The term has been remarkably durable, perhaps because it is so useful.

Vladimir Putin is a career KGB agent turned politician, and today one of his favorite activities is erecting fifth columns in countries where he is feeling mischievous, like the United States. So who is leading his fifth column in America? Well, Trump, of course. He has helpers, like Mike Johnson and Tucker Carlson, but let's face it: Since the beginning, Putin has been putting his money on Trump. 

And Putin desperately needs Trump's column to succeed, since his main column, in Ukraine, appears significantly lacking in tumescence.

Like the New York Daily News (see picture above), I decided that Trump was a Russian agent after the Helsinki fiasco in 2018. That was five years ago.

But what kind of agent is he? He's certainly not a trained KGB officer like Putin. There are no mysterious gaps in his resume - times when he was off at spy school in Moscow, struggling to pick up some Russian while learning sixteen ways to kill a man quietly with his bare hands.

I think it's possible that he is an unwitting agent, that he thinks Vladimir is doing all these nice things for him out of friendship. And perhaps the file Vladimir keeps on Donald is labeled "useful idiot." Donald is, after all, quite stupid - and worse, he thinks he's smart.

Or maybe he's just a venal, money-grubbing slug whose real-estate con in New York has gone sour, and Roy Cohn is no longer there to show him the way out of his self-inflicted catastrophe. But Putin is there.

I don't know what exact category to put the Donald in, but I think the label "agent" fits. And I wish people who clearly think he is a Russian agent would say so more often, in public.

See also An Inflection Point; The Correct Strategy: Fight; 7/11 - The Day the Trump White House Fell Apart.