Exploring the Kelly House

 City Safari: Philadelphia Free Press 

   The Kelly house at 3901 Henry Avenue in East Falls wasn’t far from my old Germantown apartment in the late 1970s. The Kelly house of course was famous because it was the childhood home of Grace Kelly, later Princess Grace of Monaco.

    My great aunt, who loved stories about royal families the world over, loved Princess Grace about as much as she loved Queen Elizabeth. Princess Grace, however, was her favorite because she was Roman Catholic.

   As a boy I’d stay with her on long weekends when she would drive me around town in her cream colored Chevorlet Impala. During these trips she’d often find an excuse to drive into East Falls to show me the Kelly house. I always saw the house in quick glimpses, while walking, riding the bus or traveling in another person’s car.

  This past weekend I found myself inside one of the upstairs sitting rooms at 3901 Henry. The event I was attending was two flights down in the old Kelly family den. Invitees were encouraged to tour the house so I took advantage of that, going from room to room.

     The six-bedroom house was built in 1928 by John B. Kelly, an Irish brick layer. John and his wife Margaret raised six children in the house, which was sold by the family in 1973. The house had a number of owners after that, including a crazy cat woman who turned the home into a feral animal farm. The animals left a path of destruction of breaking news proportions. In 2016, Prince Albert of Monaco, Princess Grace’s son, bought the house for $755,000 and had it remodeled to look like it did in the 1950s. Many of the original features can still be seen including the famous linen closet door with Grace’s height recorded over the years. 

     In several of the bedrooms I noticed freshly painted icons in the Byzantine tradition. Two of the icons were quite large and could have been part of the iconostasis in a church. They were not part of the original Kelly family décor but were painted by Grace’s niece, Susan Kelly vonMedicus, an icon writer and teacher at the Center for Irish Studies and the Department of Theatre and Studio Art at Villanova University.

   My self-guided tour included a contemplative moment sitting in a chair in a small anteroom off one of the bedrooms. When you sit down in a house like this, away from other event goers, your first impulse is to try to imagine the past and then conjecture what might have happened in the room in question. If only the past could be summoned up genii-like; if only we had access to an incantation or chant that would present the past to us as it really happened.  

 

   The Kelly family has been compared to the Kennedy family. Jack B. Kelly’s brother, George, was a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright but his homosexuality caused him to be regarded as a family pariah despite the fact that he was Grace’s favorite uncle. Many families have stories like these. I recall an uncle on my mother’s side who committed suicide in a motel room because of his pariah label.  

   

     A main feature of the event was the showing of old Kelly family films on a wide screen TV in the family den. I watched sunburned children playing leap frog in the backyard; various Kelly family members relaxing or partying in the very den that I was standing in; the same brick walled den where Prince Rainer and Grace Kelly gave a a television interview after the announcement of their engagement.   

   Kelly for Brick Work napkins were piled up on the old ‘Kelly Tavern,’ the bar just off the den that Jack Kelly built to offset the absurdities of Prohibition. The bar in those days was stocked with large kegs of beer.

    Susan Kelly Von Medicus was the event bartender. I didn’t know this at first although my sense was that the woman pouring me a glass of red was indeed a Kelly. There was some identity confusion later on in the evening when I introduced myself to a tall man standing alone, his Irish ginger hair aglow with some kind of Kelly aura and his fine taste in clothes—a pin stripped shirt and a tie of the highest Brooks Brothers quality. I asked him if he was a Kelly, and he said he was, he was Susan’s brother, John B. Kelly, III, or JB. When e got chatting, he mentioned that the dazzling antique Packard car parked in front of the house was not his but his girlfriend’s.  When I spotted the car after getting off the 32 bus, my first thought was, “Ah, this looks like a staged Woody Allen set for a film about F. Scott Fitzgerald.” 

 

     I told JB the story of how many great aunt, so enamored of royalty, had once reached out and touched Princess Grace on the elbow when she found herself standing behind her at an outdoor ceremony at Saints Peter and Paul cathedral. I told him how Grace turned around and gave my great aunt a scolding, castigating look.

    

    This was a predominately Irish event sponsored by Villanova’s Center for Irish Studies, so Irish heads were everywhere: Blue eyes, red heads, gingers, black Irish, a smart smattering of over 65 white haired gentlemen. In my mind I did a quick comparison of the Irish crowd to the mainly ‘English’  crowds I had observed at English Speaking Union of Philadelphia receptions. The vibes were similar, I decided, only with the Irish there was a bit more of a helter skelter element: more jostling and moving about and at a slightly faster pace, too. The trio of musicians playing Irish music near where the family videos were showing set a fast and furious tone. The melodies caused one woman to dance a jig while they gave my picking at the food table a jerky, Chaplinesque quality.  

     

   When I told a friend that I had attended a reception at the Kelly house he expressed a great amount of interest. “I’ve always wanted to see the inside,” he said, but like so many other people, he only got to view the exterior in quick glimpse drive-bys in cars or buses.

  “But,” he said, in a tone of voice that commanded attention,” I must tell you that years and years ago when I lived in Germantown I went to a noted

lamp maker in the area who told me that one of his customers was Grace’s mother. She was an eccentric woman, very persnickety and exact. Every time I took a lamp shade to him for repair he had another Kelly story. It’s too bad I don’t remember most of what he said.”

   I was the last to leave the event mainly because I needed directions to the Center City-bound 32 bus. Susan suggested I ask JB for directions.

    Together we went into ‘Kelly’s Tavern’ where I spotted JB in the back room washing glasses. Now, that’s a prince!

    Susan asked JB about the 32. “You know,” she said, “the bus that you take when you go back to town.”

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

    

    

            

       

    

City Safari: Deep In My Own Head On The Streets Of Philadelphia

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Dec 18, 2019

  Philadelphia Free Press

The homeless landscape, since the bottom fell out of the Johnny S. Bobbitt, Jr. Go Fund Me scam, has changed considerably. Many of Bobbitt’s street friends, who used to hang out with him, have disappeared. One of Bobbitt’s closest friends, RW, who I wrote about in Learn to Do a Bad Thing Well, is now drug free, employed and living with a girlfriend in Bucks County. I ran into RW not long ago on Aramingo Avenue. RW used to walk the neighborhood here, with a pale of water and Windex and a squiggly brush so he could wash the windows of Dunkin Donuts and a pizza shop for tips.

RW’s reinvention of himself—an almost impossible feat after the years he spent on these streets---is tantamount to a miracle. RW, of course was really the first opioid addicted, homeless guy to frequent this area. He was here when the sight of homeless tribes in knapsacks was nearly nonexistent. His presence soon attracted many others, which in turn led to an influx of opioid homeless because they saw my neighborhood as a much more relaxed space to panhandle than the mayhem associated with K and A.

  

!9th Century Homeless Men

The influx of homeless into the Riverward neighborhoods has diminished somewhat, but it’s still significant. Mini-homeless camps will sometimes pop up behind Dunkin Donuts and Arby’s, but they don’t last long. Security in the area has “quad tripled” since RW dubbed this area as the Promised Land. The WAWA on Aramingo Avenue, which used to provide the homeless with spare change when they held doors for customers, is now a barbed wire camp. Security guards patrol the store and property as if the store were on Israel’s West Bank. It can get a bit heavy handed at times with guards mistaking customers for panhandling homeless or treating all customers as soon as they walk in the door as potential shoplifters.

It’s tiresome shopping in a barbed wire camp, that’s why I try to avoid this WAWA. One night, dressed in a coat and tie, I had to visit to the store for a quart of milk. As I reached into the store refrigerator in search of a bottle of 2% non-fat, I noticed a security guard peering at me from behind the aisle displaying Lay’s Potato chips. Something about me had caught his attention, but what? I was obviously not homeless but when security guards are bored and when there’s no “illegal” action happening they often slip outside civilized boundaries.

Sometimes when you’re deep into your own head in public this acts as a magnet or an inducement for others to come clamoring towards you. Recently while riding the 32 bus back from Germantown a man sitting in the front of the crowded bus caught my reflection in the window, turned around, pointed at me and screamed, “Andy Warhol!”

“Anybody tell you look like Andy Warhol?” he said, after which many passengers turned around to get a look at me. I smiled and looked away hoping that he would be distracted by someone else, but that was not to be.

“Yes, Andy Warhol,” he said. He kept pointing and saying the name Andy Warhol. I smiled and nodded again, not sure if this was the best response. Finally, I acknowledged his commentary with an ‘okay,’ but this only caused him to move to the seat in front of me. “I just got out of the penitentiary,” he said, showing me the thousand-dollar watch on his left wrist.

“Andy Warhol, yes,” he said for the fifth time. “Studio 54! Sodom and Gomorrah!”

These types of encounters, of course, happen quite frequently in the city.

Another change in my neighborhood is the increase of black homeless. Just over a decade ago, my section of the Riverwards was a ‘no go’ zone for black men. Black men were often chased out of the neighborhood by thuggish white teen gangs. That’s no longer the case, especially since Irish girls here took to hooking up with black men and having their babies.

The construction around the reconfiguration of I-95 has made history of the homeless camps that were once located here. My thoughts drift to Jared, the Main Line-born and bred 29-year-old Italian guy who made his home in a large construction pipe. From an affluent family, this Temple grad and UCLA post grad film student was not allowed to return home until he cleaned up his act. Going from shelters to recovery houses and finally to sleeping on the streets, his mainstay was Front and Girard. Adept in this dog-eat-dog homeless world, where friend steal from friends, he’d tell me how just taking a nap outdoors in the summer often leads to someone taking your sneakers right off your feet. “You hook up with a buddy thinking there’s trust all around when, before you know it, you’re missing your knapsack.” Bottom Line” You can’t trust anyone on the streets.

Jared didn’t dress up his pipe but he talked about it so much that one day I had him take me there. He had a few coats lining the base of the immense tube, some towels, a bar of soap and some chocolate wrappers. Jared’s penchant was stealing candy and cakes from WAWA. He would go in there in his XL coat with big pockets and fill up. He had a sweet tooth. Once he showed me his stash. There were nutrition and candy bars, cookies, Red Bull and multiple small pies.

“WAWA just writes the losses off,” he told me. “It’s not like I’m stealing from a person and causing harm. Stealing from a corporation is not stealing.”

I’ve heard this line of logic from time to time. “I would never steal from a person, but WAWA is rich so who cares.”

Once I stepped into the McDonald’s at Front and Girard for a coffee when I spotted Jared and his people: buxom blond girls with heavy features and eyes half shut in a methadone trance; young men with gaunt faces. Their language was disconnected; some talked in short spasms but then their words would fade out like the air going out of a balloon; they’d wind up with their head in their heads on the McDonald’s table. High interpersonal drama marked these groups: “Some bitch stole my SEPTA Key card,” “If I see her I’m gonna kill her.”

Jared always kept a distance from this tribe, no doubt the result of his upbringing and the fact that his affluent family said he was welcome to return home if he cleaned up his act. Then they would send him to a rehab of his choice. Jared kept putting this off. He knew he had plenty of time. Occasionally his father would seek him out, take him to lunch and then buy him a phone and some clothes for the road. Jared was always loaded down in new stuff.

“My dad bought me this phone,” he’d say, placing it among his bag of stolen candy and cakes. A week later the phone would be gone, stolen or broken because it fell from his hands during a drug-induced stumble. No worries, though. He’d get another phone in time but soon even the replacement wound up cracked or stolen.

Laptop Zombies Ruin Good Bookstores

City Safari: Have Bookstores Become Caffeinated Hangouts For Cyber Zombies?

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Nov 20, 2019

 (Philadelphia Free Press)

It’s over. It’s done. The city bookstore is dead and maybe even the suburban bookstore is dead as well. Something awful has happened, but what?

I think I know the answer to the question.

A quick summing up: Bookstores have become café stronghold hangouts for students with laptops who loathe working in the privacy of their own room or apartment but who opt for public space theaters where they can sit for hours in W-Fi bliss.

Walk into any bookstore now where there is a public seating area, such as a café, and you will see multiple rows of students arranged like penguins along a beach front. The students sit frozen in a transcendental state, massaging hand held devices, clicking or swiping ad infinitum as the aroma of coffee pervades what has become a ‘dormitory away from school.’

What are the ramifications of this?

For an author scheduled to do a reading or a book signing in one of these cyber station universes, the experience can be challenging. The cyber zombies, you see, view the bookstore as primarily a bricks and mortar physical space where they can catch up online, snapchat or cavort with friends. The zombies divorce themselves existentially from the soul of the bookstore and in the end the bookstore might just as well be a hardware store with a large café, a church basement or a gift and novelty shop that’s gotten into the muffin and coffee trade.

Some naïve ‘futures experts’ have perceived the rush of students into bookstore cafes as a good sign. They see it as increasing book sales but that simply isn’t true. In a café setting books are taken off the shelves to accompany the coffee drinker to the table but more often than not end up back on the shelves with coffee stains on the corners of the pages. Classic book lovers tend to wander the shelves and might occasionally sit in the café but certainly the tendency with them would not be to linger all day unless they happen to be homeless novelists or get off by posing as wannabe Sartre’s or Beauvoir’s trying to write in an imaginary French café.

The majority of bookstore café lingerers are students doing homework or cyber stuff that has little to do with books. Many are there because they fear the solitude of their rooms.

The current reconfiguration of bookstores into full service cafes or restaurants has contributed to this craze. The idea of a bookstore has been demoted and denuded so much that The New York Times reported that Barnes and Noble has taken the word ‘bookstore’ off the labeling of their college stores. That is significant because even B&N realizes that college bookstores are not real bookstores but student homework hangouts and mini-department stores.

Philadelphia’s UPenn Barnes and Noble is a perfect example of this. Nearly half of the UPenn B&N is devoted to school apparel. There are racks of university-branded polos, windbreakers, backpacks, pompom hats, scarves (stripped, of course), baseball caps, coffee mugs and assorted knickknacks. The books are still there, of course, but they appear weirdly sidelined almost as an 11th hour afterthought. God help the unsuspecting author who has agreed to do a book signing or talk in one of these university department stores because the laptop students won’t budge from their mass hypnosis. Susan Sontag, revisiting from the land of the dead, could appear and begin to speak but these students wouldn’t even raise their heads to see what was happening.

Dead to books, alive to digital--that’s the truth of this new age.

Matthew Norman, a first-time novelist, wrote an article entitled, “On the embarrassment of confronting an empty space,” in Literary Hub.

Norman’s relates what happened to him during his author’s talk in a downtown Baltimore bookstore:

“[The events manager] looked over at the café and nodded. “There are a few people there,” he said.

Technically, he was right. There were some people—students, it seemed—sporadically hunched over laptops drinking coffee at some tables. “I don’t think they’re here to see me,” I said.

He sighed. In retrospect, I suspect this is a conversation he’d had before with writers like me who’d found themselves suddenly thrust into literary obscurity. “Well, there’s really no way to know,” he said. “Maybe give it a few minutes. Wait and see. Maybe some more folks will roll in.”

But nobody rolled in, as it turned out, because the students just weren’t interested. And Norman was their age, a millennial twenty-something.

Shakespeare and Company on Walnut Street opened with a great deal of fanfare and promise. I attended the opening press event and was very impressed with the beautiful store and the friendly staff. The store’s potential at that time seemed limitless…until, of course, the invasion of student cyber homework zombies. Student cyber homework zombies live in small frame fishbowls and rarely have any intellectual curiosity beyond the confines of their world. To some degree, this is a perfectly natural attitude when you are twenty-something. At that age, we think we know everything. It’s a time when harsh criticism and (sneering) cynicism sometimes comes as naturally as breathing.

It’s the mass indifference enhanced by the new digital world that I don’t like.

Shakespeare & Co.’s CEO Dane Neller was quoted as saying that “Each new bookstore should be rooted in the local community and offer a cultural sanctuary where customers can escape from their daily routines, turn off their smart phones, relax, unwind and indulge in the luxury or reading.”

Obviously, it doesn’t seem that anything digital has been turned off.

The fact is, real bookstores are disappearing. Earlier this year, The Guardian published a piece about the disappearing bookstores in New York City. The blame for this is attributed to several different sources: competition from Amazon, Kindle, Tablets and Smartphones. One must also add the fact that bookstore have had to become café/restaurants in order to survive.

The Guardian also noted that reading has become a specialized, elite activity, seeming to contradict what Forbes magazine reported in an article entitled, Millennials: A Generation of Page Turners, that praised millennials as “reading more than their elders.” (Of course, what they’re mainly reading is suspense novels and Harry Potter).

Way back as 2011, Authority Publishing published an article entitled, Why Book Signing Events are a Waste of Time for Authors.” The author, a former bookseller, wrote:

Back when I owned a bookstore, we held author events every weekend. The vast majority of authors sold eight books or less. I remember one author who didn’t sell a single book and many who sold less than five. Ouch.

The authors who sold more than eight books typically invited in their following. They had mailing lists, alumni groups, coworkers, and other networks that showed up to give support. Once in awhile, coverage in the local paper or news would stir up some shoppers, but even those mentions fell flat more often than not.

Memory Eternal + Carolyn Dorothy Nickels +

Philadelphia's 8th and Market Street Homeless Hub

City Safari: SEPTA’s World Of Makeshift Cardboard Encampments

Homeless vet

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Nov 27, 2019

The block of 8th and Market Street, a stone’s throw from the new Gallery Mall, has become the unfashionable nerve center of Center City’s drugged-out homeless population.

The problem is so pronounced it’s even noticeable during the daylight hours. Spend ten minutes standing by the Frankford – Market Street El entrance at 8th and Market Street and you will be swept away by the activity there: Men pacing endlessly or loitering around the SEPTA ticket machines, some of them on the lookout for drug connections while others (benignly) ask for cigarettes or look for cigarette butts on the ground. Numerous men stand in corners under the stairs to the ticket area, their faces covered up in XL hoodies while others stay frozen in bent- over positions as if venerating an invisible sidewalk Krishna.

This is not a place where you will want to linger for long, because if you do, the ordinary passer- by will assume that you are a member of this collective (the guilt by association assumption).

The Burger King near the 8th Street station is a kind of “Get warm” ground zero for many of these people. A homeless man holds the door for customers going in and out. This Burger King is much like the infamous McDonald’s at Front and Girard in Fishtown where 90 per cent of the customers are methadone patients from a nearby drug clinic or homeless wayfarers getting something to eat with their panhandling money. The drama that one sees at this McDonald’s is epic. The McDonald’s at Broad and Arch Street down the street from PAFA is another five-star panhandling-homeless attraction. These are not places where tourists go after a kaleidoscopic experience at the Masonic Temple.

The scene at the 8th and Market station intensifies at night. Once the sun sets, the drug addicted homeless men (who refuse to go into shelters) come out in droves to set up their makeshift cardboard bedding along the main SEPTA passenger corridor leading to the train platform. This line of makeshift beds extends along both sides of the corridor so that commuters have to walk in-between this village of sleepers, most of whom are awake and sitting with their heads buried between their legs in some kind of drug induced “wipe out.”

Some of the homeless men stand or jerk around, their wild, untamed body language indicating K2 consumption. K2 is a synthetic cannabinoid in which users report some effects similar to those produced by marijuana such as elevated moods or the dangerous delusional and disordered symptoms of psychosis.

Conventional heroin usage (the needle) manifests itself in many ways but one recognizable sign is fat fingers. If you want to know whether a homeless person—even one as thin as the long-deceased Karen Carpenter-- is using drugs, just look at their hands. If you see abnormally fat fingers or swollen hands, there’s your proof.

The 8th and Market SEPTA commuter corridor has become a nighttime cardboard “Broadway” of sorts, not unlike the underground cardboard city that used to exist in the Broad Street concourse from Walnut Street to Locust Street over 16 years ago. The city managed to break up that conglomerate and the area has been uninhabited until recently. Now there are reports that the Broad Street subway concourse cardboard sleeping village is once again making a comeback.

While there are many peaceful (aka hurting) men who sleep at the 8th Street station, increasing numbers are not peaceful and should not be on the streets.

The “sleeping” encampment at 8th and Market is enough to make the public transportation-taking Walnut Street Theatre ticket subscriber want to run the other way and take a taxi or Uber. Most people would certainly want to avoid the 8th Street station. Peaceful or even mildly rambunctious homeless men are one thing, but mentally ill homeless men who act out in a violent way are quite another.

And this is what is happening.

During my wait for the El at 8th and Market after seeing The Gifts of the Magi at the Walnut’s Independence Studio on 3, I went into the 8th Street station and waited for the train headed for the Girard Street station. Standing with my back to the cardboard encampment, at some point I turned around to observe the out-of-control scene: men preparing their cardboard, blanket or newspaper beds while others stood around in small groups. Homeless men seemed to be drifting in from all directions. At one point one of the men caught my glance and said something to me.

That “something’ was probably a garbled panhandling request but I couldn’t be sure. I moved closer to the commuter corridor so I could hear what the man was saying, offered an “Excuse me” at which point a sleeping man wrapped in mummy blankets rose up and yelled at me to “Get back” and “Shut up.” Separating us was a Plexiglas wall. Seconds after this another voice was calling to me. The tone was persistent and came from a section of the commuter corridor I could not see. I inched forward to get a better look and saw a homeless man sitting in a self created cardboard bathtub. Shirtless, he really did look like he was taking a bath sans water and soap. That’s when I felt I had entered the lion and tiger section of the Philadelphia Zoo, for here was a wild animal, scowling and threatening me. It certainly was not a fitting ending to a great night at The Walnut although the bathtub nut case instantly got me thinking of the Sixties play, Marat/Sade by Peter Brook. Marat/Sade, as The Independent reported in 2011, “is full of catatonics, schizophrenics, paranoiacs and manic depressives.”

In my own Riverwards neighborhood, there’s been a marked increase in angry mentally ill homeless men. I witness this all the time walking back and forth to the bus stops along Aramingo Avenue. There are also chronic problems with the opioid addicted homeless blocking the commuter entrance and exit stairs at the Market-Frankford Kensington and Allegheny station.

“Mental illness is a major contributor to homelessness,” Mental Illness Policy.org reports. “Mental illness was the third largest cause of homelessness for single adults (mentioned by 48% of cities). Lack of treatment for the most seriously mentally ill causes the kind of delusions and bizarre behavior that makes living alone or at home with families untenable. As a result, many become people with untreated serious mental illness become homeless and communities are forced to bear the cost of that.”

After my 8th Street experience, I decided to email SEPTA about the problem and got an immediate response—two emails plus a phone call. I was told that the 8th Street problem has been building for a long time and that SEPTA is working on a solution.

There was once a homeless boy who lived in a pipe.

Andrew Busch, Chief Press Officer SEPTA, Media Relations promised me a comment by press time but that did not come through. I did receive this general SEPTA response, however:

The SEPTA Transit Police and Philadelphia PD actively engaged in efforts to address the widespread problem of homeless persons using out stations to seek shelter. SEPTA and the City of Philadelphia are working with a variety of social service agencies to try to make a positive difference. This is definitely a work in progress.

Of course, finding a solution won’t be easy, especially when the vast majority of homeless refuse to seek treatment and refuse to go to shelters.

The city has reached a point where homeless Pro-Choice just isn’t an option.

My, How Newspapers Have Changed In A Hundred And Ninety Years  

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Dec 04, 2019

  (Philadelphia Free Press)\

Several years ago a neighbor of mine presented me with a most unusual gift, the June 2, 1829 edition of The American Sentinel newspaper, published in Philadelphia by Jacob Frick and Company.

The American Sentinel was a weekly newspaper, and was only around for twenty years (1820-1840). My neighbor had the newspaper in a cardboard plastic container but generally it was in good condition. Newspapers have a poor shelf life. There are newspapers from the 1960s, for instance, that seem to disintegrate the moment you touch them, but The Sentinel was different. When I went home and took the newspaper out of its wrapping, it did not crumble to pieces. The pages didn’t even rip when I held it or turned the paper sideways. The quality of the paper seemed to be superior.

Another thing about reading old newspapers is this: There is sometimes a pungent odor that seems to rise from the newsprint. The Sentinel has this in spades, and for a moment or two I thought I might be breathing in a dusty invisible something left over from the city’s Yellow Fever epidemic.

1829 is a long time ago. This was the year that The Book of Mormon was copyrighted; the year that Eastern State Penitentiary opened, and the first year of the Philadelphia Flower Show. The cornerstone of the U.S. Mint at Chestnut and Juniper Streets was also laid in 1829.

Although I’ve had The American Sentinel for a while, I just recently took it out of its plastic wrapper and gave it a good read. That’s when the odor rose up from the yellowed pages like a magic powder from the 19th Century.

Looking over the newspaper, several stories caught my attention.

There’s a story about how a young man named Robert Chambers, “was suffocated on Saturday afternoon by foul air, while digging a well to drain an old privy near the corner of Fifth and Powell Streets.” The article states that “an older man who was in the well with him, was taken out with difficulty, and carried to the Hospital.”

The capitalization of the word ‘hospital’ is interesting because in this case the word doesn’t specify which hospital the older man was carried to. The word ‘hospital’ used alone is never capitalized but in 1829 when there were few hospitals around, there was a mystique attached to the word. Pennsylvania Hospital, for instance, was founded in 1751 by that master of genius and duplicity, Benjamin Franklin, whereas in the 1790s there was a quarantine hospital at Fort Mifflin, and then a much larger quarantine hospital near Tinicum Island in Essington, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia International Airport), called Lazaretto, after Saint Lazarus, the patron saint of lepers. Both quarantine hospitals were built to help thwart the Yellow Fever epidemic in the city.

The anonymous writer of the privy story goes into editorial mode when he elaborates on the tragedy: “Many accidents of this kind have occurred lately in the city. Could they not be guarded against in future, by sinking the new wells at a greater distance from the old ones, and by frequently letting down a lighted candle to test the purity of the air.”

Below this story is another item: “On Saturday last a man in Queen Street committed suicide by cutting his throat. The exciting cause is said to have been his having made a bad swap with a horse.” The word ‘exciting’ here seems odd and misplaced. There’s nothing exciting about a throat slashing unless ISIS is your middle name.

Like other newspapers of the period, The Sentinel also published installments of novels-in-progress, poetry, and war memories. There are also advertisements for schooners (if you needed to sail to New York or Virginia), and announcements regarding running for public office.

How simple it was in 1829 to announce your candidacy for public office. It was simply a matter of taking out advertising space in the local newspaper. It was unnecessary to receive the blessing of party bosses or have a million dollars at your disposal. Where did this true democracy go? One Sentinel announcement reads: “Gentlemen—Encouraged by my friends, I respectfully offer myself as a candidate for the office of County Commissioner at the ensuing election. Edward Penington.”

And from one Daniel Miller in Northern Liberties, we learn that he has declared himself a candidate for Sheriff. “In support of the application now made,” Miller states, “I will only state that during the revolutionary struggle I was most actively engaged in the acquirement of our national independence. Should I be so fortunate as to obtain the office I solicit, I pledge myself that no exertions shall be spared on my part to discharge its duties with justice and impartially.”

In June of 1829 at the Walnut Street Theatre two shows were being offered, Cavaliers and Roundheads and the farce, The Irishman in London, with gallery seats going for 12 and a half cents, box seats at 50 cents and the pit at a quarter. The top dollar seats were the orchestra seats at 75 cents a pop.

Searching the Web for information on Irishman in London at first yielded a lurid contemporary newspaper headline: 13-Year old Boy Pleads Guilty to Murder of Irishman in London. This case involved the stabbing death of 53-year old John Barry of North London who got into an argument with a number of teenaged males in front of his apartment building as he was trying to enter the building with his girlfriend. This obviously is not what I wanted although I was struck by a sentence in the news report that the identity of the 13 year old was being protected because of his tender age. (Protection, my foot; when you willfully murder somebody you are no longer a ‘corruptible’ minor but another type of creature altogether). References to the Walnut Street Theatre farce came up only after the news of the North London murder. I learned that the official title of the farce was really The Irishman in London, Or the Happy African; A Farce by William Macready, published in 1818.

Over at the Arch Street Theatre, I read that there was a lecture by a Miss Wright (no first name?) on Existing Evils, with seats selling for 12 and one half cents. What existing evils: Slavery, intemperance? The reader is left guessing.

 Old Warehouse on Trenton Avenue

In a published directive from the Mayor’s office, dated May 1829, Mayor B. W. Richards reminds city residents of an action enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania regarding the paving and curbing of streets and alleys in the City of Philadelphia. Exceptions were private alleys intended for the sole use of the owners even though there was a continual passage of carts on these private alleys. It appears that both the state and city had had it with unkempt dirt roads.

I checked up on Mayor B.W. Richards and found that he was elected mayor in 1829 although according to the official List of Mayors for the City of Philadelphia in 1829 the city also had another mayor, William Milnor. Milnor’s name, however, disappears in 1830 when Richards’ name appears again. Richards is mayor until 1831. But why were there two mayors in 1829?

The Help Wanted ads are anything but politically correct, reminding me somewhat of Help Wanted ads I read when I first started looking for jobs in my mid-teens. Employers, if they are honest, must harbor secret images of the kind of employee they’d like to have working for them, but publishing these “requirements” are in many cases illegal, often for good reason. Help Wanted ads, for instance, used to be divided into gender categories. Secretarial jobs were always female; mechanic’s jobs and theatre ushers always male. The end of gender labeling in Help Wanted has sometimes led to employers going through the motions of interviewing people they know their not going to hire, just to satisfy the requirements of the law.

Help Wanted ads in The Sentinel leave no room for ambiguity. One ad, for instance, states in no uncertain terms that A man is needed to attend as porter. Apply to 270 North Second Street. A coloured man would be preferred.

Other employers state that they are on the lookout for apprentice coppersmith journeymen, but that they must be “sober minded.”

It helps not to drink on the job.

A SEPTA Suicide

   Recently I boarded the Market-Frankford El at Front and Girard with the intention of taking it to Second Street to meet friend at a coffee house. It’s a humdrum route I take all the time. Most days, no matter what time you take the train, there is standing room only. That’s how crowded the city is now. But on this day I found a seat and opened two books, Thomas Devaney’s ‘Getting to Philadelphia, New and Selected Poems,’ and Brian Selznick’s Walt Whitman: Live Oak, With Moss.

  Devaney’s book was just published by Brooklyn’s Hanging Loose Press. Before the train pulled into the Spring Garden Street station, I had read his poem, ‘Memory Corkscrews So You Can’t Remember It’:

   I make my prayers in another part of the city,

   but they keep blowing back:

                   Philly makes, Philly breaks –

   What the hell are you looking at?

    At the end of the year something

    called Sneaker Day,

    Swedish Fish and tail pipes in the breeze.

      After the train pulled into the Spring Garden station, it remained there for a considerable time, passenger doors open, with no explanation from the crew as to why the train wasn’t moving. This gave me time to delve into the second book, Live Oak, With Moss “In the 1850’s Whitman had written a cycle of twelve poems called ‘Live Oak , with Moss,’ which Maurice Sendak had described  as a love story between two men who eventually part.” Selznick goes on to say that Whitman never published the cycle but cut the poems up and rearranged them in the ‘Calamus’ poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. They remained completely unknown for a hundred years until their discovery in the 1950s.  

   Meanwhile, there was no official word from SEPTA about the stalled train. We were still at the station, stuck in a situation that would very likely get worse, a parallel situation to the two men in Whitman’s poem:

   I new suspect there is something terrible in you,

         Ready to break forth  

  Finally there was an announcement on the train’s public address system but the words came across as garbled and static ridden. The speaker was also talking so fast that, combined with the static, the message was a blur. What was the poor man saying? By now the children on the train were getting rambunctious, running from one passenger car to the next, screaming with delight that something different was happening in their lives, an event to break the boredom of the day.

  Devaney:

  Children have their own music; and the owls,

  The Snow Owl: always five beats off the blink.

  Miracle of miracles, an audible SEPTA announcement indicated that the train would be moving in a few minutes. I kicked back and resumed my reading and waited for the “doors are closing” recording. Soon it became obvious that this was not going to happen. When a train going in the opposite direction also stalled at the station, I knew an emergency was in the works.  

  This came in the form of a second garbled announcement about a passenger incident at the Huntingdon station way up beyond Gerard where I boarded the train.

   ‘Passenger incident’ is often SEPTA code for suicide, though of course it could also mean the arrest of someone or a group of individuals. SEPTA is rarely forthcoming when it comes to specific information. The word suicide is still on the Index of Forbidden Words, regarded by many as offensive.  While the word may be offensive for some, an honest attitude regarding what happened always works to make passengers more understanding when it comes to protracted delays. People are less likely to swear or become disgruntled if they know that someone just lost their life on the tracks.  

   Minutes after the ‘passenger incident’ announcement passengers from both trains began to swarm onto the Spring Garden platform. General confusion reigned.  Would the trains be starting up again? Was it still true that the train would return to normal “in a few minutes?” And why, as some passengers asked, was our train, the train that had long ago passed Huntingdon station, being required to stop as if the passenger incident had occurred at Spring Garden?  

   Sometimes crowds in emergency situations like this have a kind of sixth sense and know when they have to move in a certain direction. A trickle of people began to take the exit stairs to Spring Garden Street minutes before another announcement-- sans static and garble-- that shuttle buses would be made available at street level. Some passengers still sat in the trains because it was never made clear if the trains would be up and running again. Was the shuttle only for impatient passengers who needed to be someplace quick?  The guessing game continued until at last a yellow vested SEPTA employee visited each train car with an order to evacuate.

  The evacuation call was made in harsh corrective tones as if the ‘left behind’ passengers should have known better and evacuated the train a while ago.

  On the stairs leading to Spring Garden Street a woman who did not speak English was crying because she didn’t know where she was. She looked fairly distraught but nobody spoke her language. She came to her senses and began following the crowd. 

  The street level crowd was your average mass exodus B movie scene, shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow. Did SEPTA say shuttle buses? People stepped out into the street dodging traffic in hopes of catching sight of a fleet of those shuttle buses. The scene became Waiting for Godot; it was the same on the other side of the station; crowds watching and waiting. Only the regular Spring Garden route buses appeared, leading to more confusion. The minutes turned into a half hour, and still no shuttle buses. People were starting to walk away. Many who were headed downtown took 2^nd Street and began their trek into Old City. The remaining crowd was now a shadow of its former self, so those shuttle buses, if they showed up, would only have to pick up a few people.

  I was one of the walkers who took 2^nd Street.

   Two hours later the Market-Frankford El was back on track.

     I was never able to ascertain who jumped onto the tracks at Huntingdon station. That will always remain a mystery, since rarely are names or pictures of track jumpers published so the person’s death winds up in the annals of the forgotten.   

    Huntingdon station is a hang out for many of the synthetic opioid fentanyl homeless crowd. Men and women, but mostly men, line the sidewalks there watching and waiting, carrying signs or slumping over in half body postures. The station is just around the corner from Episcopal Hospital and its bullet proof plastic ER. From the station all you have to do is walk a straight line under the tracks and you come to Kenisngton and Allegheny, so avenue is filled with the opioid vagabonds moving up and down the street.

  

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor       

  

                

Three Days in North Carolina's Outer Banks

   It’s a bright late morning in early fall and I’m packed in a large open-air Hummer with fourteen or so sightseers. This is a real safari, complete with a little man driver in an Australian bush hat who looks a little bit like a character out of Monty Python. What can be better? The Corolla (North Carolina) Wild Horse Tour guide promises not to do too much talking as he drives the Hummer along the northern most tip of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. These horses—wild Colonial Spanish Mustangs-- are the descendents of a herd brought here in the 1520s, and as such they are a protected, living treasure besides being the state horse of North Carolina.  

   Elbow-to- elbow in the Hummer, we race along the vast stretch of Corolla beach in search of the ferals. “I can’t promise you’ll see a horse,” our guide says, “Sometimes they go off and hide. They may be grazing somewhere. So, no promises…. And you don’t get your money back if we don’t spot any!”  A little comedy goes a long way though most of the paying tourists want to see something besides seagulls.

  Although we were constantly told not to expect to see any horses, in the end we were wildly—horsefully-- successful. The military style Hummer had barely gotten onto the beach, when we spotted a swaggering stallion: elegant, muscled, tail swaying triumphantly as his harem of 13 “wives” followed behind him in a single file line like brainwashed Stepford Wives, only in this case there’s no brainwashing at all just Mother Nature being Mother Nature (which is to say, politically incorrect) because, obviously, feminism has yet to hit the animal kingdom. The fact is, the stallion’s personal harem doesn’t have to stay put at 13 but can continue to grow as the stallion chooses. The only caveat is that he’ll be forced to challenge many other stallions who will want to steal his mares.

       When stallions fight it’s almost never to the death but involves biting and charging. The losing stallion is smart enough to know when to back down although serious injuries can result from these encounters. We were told about a legendary stallion who suffered the loss of an eye in a fight. “Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us,” as Virginia Woolf once said.   

  The Hummer becomes a cornucopia of clicking I Phones and cameras as it stops alongside the horses making their slow trek up the beach. The sight really is beautiful. The horses are headed for the grazing lands and the small fresh water ponds beyond the dunes and near clusters of sea weathered wooden residencies. The horses come to the beach anywhere from fifteen minutes to 3 hours a day, our guide informs us. They stand by the ocean but do not swim or frolic in the waves. They come to the water to get away from the stinging flies in the grasslands. A thousand bites from flies can result in a severe body itch, so to alleviate themselves from this discomfort the horses will roll around in the sand rather than let the ocean breakers wash them clean.

  So yes, the Hummer tourists are happy because they have seen the light of feral horses. Not only horses, mind you, but uncountable large seagulls and even a few pelicans in a massive cluster that might be a tail feather convention. Nature is happy, but our guide decides we need to see another part of the beach and rams the Hummer’s speed up a notch so that we are pulled into the wind. We bump over small sand dunes so that those of us sitting in the back of the vehicle bounce in the air like paper dolls. Mr. Monty Python is on a mission, so much so that one of the tourists loses his baseball cap. He was warned to hold onto his cap but who can keep rules when surrounded by so much raw nature and uncontrolled polygamy?

   But some rules have to kept, especially when it comes to the horses. We were instructed that no one is to get closer than 50 feet to them. Feeding them will net you a costly fine although we were told that people have attempted everything from braiding their tails to teaching them how to drink beer.

   There was a lot of talk about the dead horses on the Outer Banks’ Cedar Island after Hurricane Dorian hit. During my stay on the Outer Banks I witnessed one person come close to tears when talking about the tragedy.

  A September 25, 2019 AP release stated:

A North Carolina wild horse manager says more than half of one herd is thought to be dead after Hurricane Dorian storm surge slammed their island home. Manager Woody Hancock told the Charlotte Observer that 28 of the 49 horses on Cedar Island, between the Outer Banks and the mainland, are suspected dead.

  Our guide now has the Hummer deep into the grazing grasslands. We see solitary horses wandering among the wooden houses there. Some have been known to walk up to or linger under car ports, while others walk nonchalantly down the middle of sandy unpaved roads, rider less phantoms that seem so out of place in today’s world. We spot a lone horse nudging its way through a clump of bushes looking for a meal of persimmons.

    As we speed up the beach on the return trip—the beach is registered as  US highway 12—we’re informed that the big wooden mansion in front of us was once rented by Taylor Swift. After that we’re told that Tom Cruise once owned the multi-tiered mountain posing as a house (“To your right, ladies and gents”) during the filming of “Risky Business.”

  “Yes, he was inside there jumping around in his underwear,” our guide says, giving us more comedy.  

    The other journalist on this safari was a woman who hailed from Greensboro, North Carolina. After she and I were met at the Northfolk airport by Michelle Ellis, PR Coordinator, Currituck County Travel & Tourism Department, we headed straight to a wine tasting at Sanctuary Vineyards in Jarvisburg, an auspicious beginning to be sure. Of course, when you are assigned to hang out with another writer there are no guarantees that you will get along.

   I very soon decided that we would all be on a harmonious playing field. Michelle, who brought along a valued co-worker for the duration of the trip, was our Uber Mistress/ driver (sans the Australian bush hat). Effortless conversation evolved out of thin air and with three southern accents ‘floating around’ the effect was like a harmonious little Currituck symphony to go along with the waves on the beach. 

  As for that wine tasting, I liked it when the Greensboro writer kept pushing for another tap of Sanctuary’s Coastal Collage 2017, a red blend, or having another go at Aglianico 2017, an explosion of cedar, pomegranate, dried cherry and ripe fruit preserves. We were both rewarded for all our hard work with keepsake quality big red glasses.

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor   

                 

Church Chronicles

Today a strange little woman visited our parish church. She was a member of another denomination and was at first very timid and withdrawn. When a woman parishioner offered her a piece of blessed bread after Communion--the traditional Orthodox welcoming "sign"--she refused to accept it. She also gave a gentle cold shoulder to another woman who helped her understand how coffee hour worked by not sitting with the woman at her table but passing her over for "someone better." When she found what she thought she was looking for, she opened up like a Venus Fly Trap, chattering about her career like she was attending a business seminar. When the two women she had previously snubbed said good-bye to her she brushed them off with a quick "Okay." Who was this unmasked bandit? On second thought I don't think I want to know. Moral: If you come back, be nice, accept the bread, and stop networking.