They Threw Rocks at Mayor Dilworth

Tuesday Evening Wasn't that Bad. Still, Pretty Bad.

The Acme parking lot, a little after 6 pm yesterday.

"Parking in South Philly was a problem even in 1961, when, as Binzen puts it, 'the mayor proposed requiring residents to pay for overnight parking spaces in front of their houses. The proceeds of the $40-a-year licenses' -- about $320 in today's dollars -- 'were to be earmarked for building off-street parking lots.  Such a plan worked in Milwaukee, but Dilworth's scheme got nowhere. When he confronted his critics at a stormy public meeting, rock throwers targeted the building. A city councilman, Tom Foglietta, was cut by flying glass.'"

There. I'm actually quoting myself, from an article I wrote about Peter Binzen's biography of Richardson Dilworth. (To see the story, click here.)

There were a lot of flashback moments on Tuesday evening. A stretch of 11th Street in South Philadelphia has been redesigned to include a two-way bicycle lane and (gasp!) daylighting of streetcorners. After a lengthy period of consultation with the community, construction has finally begun, and many local residents have at last awoken to the serious threat this redesigned street poses to their special way of life.

Whether they would have awoken if they hadn't been prodded by some television news organizations desperate for viewers in the dog days of August is another issue. But I don't really blame the newsies. The killer bees seem to be asleep, and the sharks have stopped biting people. What's a colorful journalist to do?

So here I was, attending my third public meeting on this topic. South Philly is a special place, but the first two meetings were actually about information. This one, held at the old folks center on Passyunk Avenue near the Acme market, was about yelling.

The meeting was held by the Passyunk Square civic organization, and the city sent four representatives, including Mike Carroll, a professional engineer and the highest ranking transportation official in the city administration.

The guy who owned the show, however, was a bulky man with a florid complexion and eyes that he could, apparently at will, make bulge in an alarming way. He stood in the center of the floor. His modus operandi was simple. He interrupted everybody. Friend or foe, nobody could finish a sentence before he started bellowing. Occasionally he was coherent, and he did at one point summarize his party's position quite well. "Put it back the way it was," he said.

I imagined him as a stock character in the old Italian commedia dell'arte, wearing a silly costume and strutting the boards on a creaky stage in the main square of a small Tuscan hill town in, say, the seventeenth century. Bellowing and making strange faces, frightening the small children and fascinating their parents.

Eventually, Mark Squilla, the local city councilman, escorted this fellow from the room. He went quietly. I'm guessing he was pleased to have been the center of attention for such a long time.

And things got a little bit more orderly, but not a lot. There were many others there who were happy to raise their voices whenever they felt like it, speaking all at once, complaining of lost parking spaces and saying again and again, in many ways, how much they hated bicyclists. There was the usual litany of zombie arguments against bike lanes. One woman said there wasn't enough space left in the motor-vehicle lanes for emergency vehicles to get through. Jeannette Brugger from the city pointed out that the two lanes were ten and eleven feet wide. (This is a two-way street, by the way, which is a bit unusual for this neighborhood. The overall street is quite wide - seventy feet - again an anomaly for the area.)

Towards the end of the meeting, the other side managed to get a few words in edgewise. One woman with small children rose to say how much better she thought the new, daylighted intersections were, and how dangerous and scary the old ones were. And a man stood and said that he was a bicyclist and he thought the redesign of the street was a great improvement and he wanted to thank the city for its work and also the Passyunk Square civic for holding the meeting. (Sarah Anton, Passyunk Square's president, did a heroic job riding herd on this unruly mob.)

The bicyclist then did something unusual. He asked for a round of applause for the city and the Passyunk Square civic. And there was a tremendous amount of clapping. Many, possibly most, of the people in the room were actually in favor of the redesign. They'd been sitting quietly through all the histrionics of the opposition; now it was their turn, and they used it well.

At the end of the meeting, Mike Carroll, the senior city official, did something that made me very happy. I've been writing since 2014 about the parking lot next to the Acme. It's pictured above. He said he'd reach out to the owners to see if something could be done to increase neighbors' access to the lot.

I think such a move would go a long way to alleviate parking issues in this neighborhood. As for the hatred of bicyclists, I don't think that's going away any time soon. They're just a particularly visible symptom of the fact that the neighborhood is changing - this is in fact one of the most heavily biked neighborhoods in the United States.

The downside of change is that things change. And the unilateral control that long-term residents have had over their streets is coming to an end. Personally I think that's a good thing.

See also About that Parking Lot in South Philly, Drunken Episcopal Bishop Kills Bicyclist, Once There Was a Prison.