World Premier: Who Killed Thomas Merton?

World Premiere of…

Rendezvous in Bangkok…Who Killed Thomas Merton

Sabina Clarke Thom Nickels

Commodore John Barry Club… ‘The Irish Center’

6815 Emlen Street, Phila, PA 19119

(215) 843-8051

Date: Sunday, September 26th, 2021

Time: 3 PM

Tickets: $20 (doors open at 2 PM)

* Wine and cheese reception to follow

3Marita Krivda, Michael Doane and 1 other

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Go home, New Yorkers!

City Safari: Sadly, my neighborhood has been gentrified by New Yorkers

• Jul 14, 2021
 
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Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

New York license plate, a type frequently seen throughout Philadelphia.

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There’s not a single vacant space in my Riverwards Fishtown-Port Richmond neighborhood that hasn’t been rezoned for rehab by developers.

The other night as I was making my way to a friend’s house on Belgrade Street, I passed one of my favorite little houses. This tiny house used to sit by next to a large overgrown woody area. I’ve always called this house, “The little House That Could.”

  

It’s not a beautiful house by any means, but the way it is situated next to a small patch of urban wildlife near the Belgrade Street overpass has always given it a unique “house in the mountains” look. For years I’d see the owners of this house working outside on their trucks and cars. At Christmastime there was always a simple string of lights placed on the home’s humble looking door.  The truly odd thing about the property was that the overgrown yard wasn’t fenced in. For years anyone could walk in and out of the wooded area which had the look and feel of a little house in the Pocono Mountains.  

      

Then developers invaded the area, bought up the small woodsy area and built two unsightly out of scale 4 story cookie cutter houses with large picture windows and exterior steel prefabricated stairs with inboard rails. The new houses dwarfed the little old house but one could easily see that the old house was built of solid materials while the new houses looked to be built with cheap materials from Home Depot, especially the cheesy clapboard interior doors that one could easily punch a hole in with their fist.  Despite the exorbitant price, the new houses were built with little or no insulation and without a garage. 

   

Classic Riverward houses are a dying breed. For the most part they are small, imperfect structures (no insulation, antiquated plumbing) that have no place in today’s all style and no substance world. Despite their out- datedness, they have a charm that cannot be replaced by the boxy, industrial warehouse new house design that has now become the signature look all over the city.

   

The little Pocono house used to have a twin house on the street where I live. I often referred to the twin house on my street as the Sea Shore House, which was set back from the sidewalk and had the look of a shore house because of its partial wooden construction and second story deck that faced the street. In some ways the house evoked the look of an odd-looking tugboat. Years before I moved to the Riverwards, the house had a pond with goldfish in the front yard. The original owner was said to have built a huge wooden boat that he kept in the backyard. Strangely enough, the boat resembled a small Biblical ark. Things don’t get much stranger than this. 

        

I never met the original owner of the Seashore House because by the time of my arrival the house had become a rental property. The fate of most rental properties is well known. Renters don’t set down roots in neighborhoods, and they come and go like door-to-door salesman in the 1960s.  

Unfortunately, all the Seashore House renters weren’t exactly nice people either. One couple that rented the place had a lot of deck parties. They’d sit on the deck that faced the street and make comments about the people passing on the sidewalk below. The neighbors tolerated these upstarts because they knew that, as renters, that their days on the street were numbered.

       

One day the seashore house was demolished and a few months after that an army of trucks and a construction crew arrived to build an out of scale 5 story monolith Northern Liberties style house that towered over all the other houses on my street. The huge new house was like King Kong pounding his chest in victory while laughing at all the other residents of the neighborhood in their tiny little Lionel Train homes. The new house at least had real exterior steps rather than those abominable steel prefabricated stairs, but that was the only plus.

  

The new monolith house imposed itself on the street like an occupying army.  For months after it was built my life felt dwarfed. My little house was just under its huge shadow, a small garage or water closet by comparison. The new house also blocked the view outside my bedroom window. I used to be able to see treetops but now I saw big picture windows and grey slate. Sometimes I’d sit on my stoop and stare at the monolith house’s observatory deck that was so high in the sky it resembled an astronomy lab. Our street was now a little medieval village surrounded by a large castle. 

  

How did this happen to our fine little street?

   

Friends would visit and say, “Oh wow, your street has had an upgrade. How tall is that house? A bit out of scale, wouldn’t you say?”

  

The new house became a magnet for other King Kong houses. Very soon I noticed a lot of cars with out of state license plates, most of them from New York.

  

New York—it figures.

  

New York developers had discovered our hidden away neighborhood and now real estate agents, many of them young women dressed to the nines in tight dresses showing plenty of cleavage, swaggered from expensive cars in a rush to show these new cheap homes to potential buyers.

   

Armies of slick looking men in suits began crawling all over the neighborhood.  Most of them were eyeing the two vacant properties further up the street. These men would arrive early in the morning and walk up and down the street with a ‘take no prisoners’ look. They accompanied surveyors who scoped and measured the land. Eventually plans were drawn up for two monolith 300k+ houses towering 6 or 7 stories on the same side of the street as my house.

       

Things were on a roll. For months the sound of construction filled the air. The blunt, relentless crash of industrial hammers on steel made the ground and the walls of my house shake. Outside on the street, Brooklyn accents mingled with the clang of equipment and machinery. Suddenly it was a whole new world. 

  

Some neighbors could be heard muttering under their breath: “Go back to New York! We don’t want you here!”

When the monolith houses were finally built, more female real estate agents returned in stilettos and killer skirts, their long blond hair complimenting their new silver cars. For months all I heard was the sound of high heels on asphalt as the agents showed the new homes to prospective suckers. The suckers were New Yorkers escaping a doomed city, most in their twenties and thirties, or Californians (escaping a doomed state), arriving in groups of five or six. Many also had dogs, which meant a lot of dog poop.   

   

Construction started on a house on the far end of my street. This house had been boarded up for decades. The rehabbed design for this structure was the same utilitarian warehouse design that all new houses currently have. This means lots of wires, cable gizmos and PECO meters on the front of the house, a terrible look that calls to mind housing projects in China. The building materials used were generally cheap (Home Depot again) and of course those steel prefabricated exterior stairs. 

   

My little street was changing faster than climate change.

     

In conjunction with all this, the oldest indigenous family on the block moved off the street, meaning that all the original people that were on the block 15 years ago when I moved here from Center City were now lost to the ages. Where did the time go? 

   

It’s easy to wax nostalgic, especially since I numbered myself as one of the first “gentrifyers” from Center City. I thought about the old neighborhood that I knew then, especially the look of the broken walls of the old paint factory at Thompson and Huntingdon.

    

I recalled the Port Richmond Shopping Center when it was a real shopping center with a first-class Chinese restaurant, a user friendly Dunkin Donuts, a restaurant other than Applebee’s, a Hallmark Card variety store that sold gourmet chocolate, and one of the best thrift stores in the city.

  

Today the shopping center has more for rent spaces than active businesses. One can hardly even call it a shopping center. Who needs so many dollar stores? Or nail salons? I blame the New York outfit that owns the shopping center and that charges so much rent. They would rather have empty stores sit for years rather than lower the rent.

   

Everywhere I walk in my neighborhood now I see 400K townhouses that look like more and more like housing projects in China. 

  

All of these homes when sold will bring in more people, more congestion, more traffic, and more parking problems. Henry Miller in the 1950s called America the air-conditioned nightmare, but what will we call this area of the Riverwards when it becomes so congested that people will be living on top of one another? 

     

I’m wondering what these new neighbors will be like. Will they be disaffected New Yorkers? Or will they be students who are here today and gone tomorrow?

     

Everyone knows that students are not authentic Philadelphians but transients who view the city as an amusement park for their weekend pleasure.   

This brings me back to my first days in the neighborhood when I’d ponder the obscurity of the area. This was when you couldn’t find a taxi to save your life, when nobody lived here except old families with ancient roots. In those days I prayed for rapid fire gentrification and sadly, I got my wish.

  

And now I hate it.

  

Now I’m stuck in an area that will soon be as crowded as the city of Shenzhen, China, the fifth most crowded city in the world, trailing India's Mumbai and Calcutta.

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Mary S. Wiggins, Philadelphia Memorial Park

City Safari: What was it about Mary Wiggins?

• Jul 21, 2021 Updated Jul 21, 2021
 
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Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

Memorial Park Cemetery & Mausoleums

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I picture myself in Memorial Park, the cemetery without tombstones. This cemetery (in Malvern, Pennsylvania) does contain a small patch of graves with tombstones. This is the old Eastern European section where you can see photos of the deceased next to their names. There are images of women in kerchiefs; young babies with bulbous cheeks; boys in long bow ties with dark hollow eyes, all of them buried long before I was born and now dust or bones, these images live forever.

I visit this cemetery whenever I can, but as a boy, I went all the time, in the summer, fall and even the winter when the ground was coated with a layer of snow.

I’d visit my favorite grave, Mary Wiggins’, positioned at the base of a fine-looking tree and on the top of a hill. Mary Wiggins, the ninety-year old woman who taught us Nickels children how to make snow ice cream. Mary Wiggins, who washed mother’s dishes and ironed our clothes for a small salary while looking after me when I was sick. Mary Wiggins became part of our family. Though “only” a neighbor, in some ways she was better than a grandmother. To this day, I ask myself: What was it about Mary Wiggins?

When mother told us Mary was coming to the house, we knew it was going to be a good day.

One day I showed Mary Wiggins a letter I received in the mail. The letter was written on thick incense-smelling parchment. The sender was none other than Pope Pius XII, writing in response to my letter to him: a schoolboy writing to the pope because he had a question. Not long after this, Mary Wiggins became Catholic and then very soon after that, she died.

I couldn’t help but think that she became a Catholic because of the letter from the pope.

  

Mary died in winter when snow was on the ground, when the cemetery without tombstones was coated in white.

     

Years later I brought a small votive candle to Mary’s grave. While placing the candle in the earth I spotted a hawk making circles in the sky as fall breezes bent the tree tops.  

An old railroad track borders the cemetery. In the old days freight trains with brown boxcars and little windowed cabooses traveled on this track. Next to this was The Dead Track. The Dead Track led into a forest before going over a bridge and then alongside a vast quarry where one time I found what everyone said was a dinosaur fossil.

      

The Dead Track and the surrounding fields and forests smelled of corn, wet hay, cow pods and smoky embers from faraway fireplaces. 

When I’d visit Mary’s grave, I’d sometimes think: Is she skull and bones? Can she see me now in spirit form?

When I would visit her grave as a boy, I would often say a prayer asking Mary Wiggins to appear to me if she could. I would ask God to give her permission to appear. Please, make an exception to the rule…. Just this once let me see someone come back from the dead. Give me a sign. Our family is all about signs. When did we not sit around after Christmas dinner and make pacts with one another? “When I am dead I will try to give you a sign,” a tap on the knee, a knocked over vase, a window opening by itself, levitating spoons. Everyone promises to give signs on the other side and they swear that the signs will be clear and not confusing. 

      

Before my mother died, she said to tap our knee three times if we wanted her to come to us.

        

But signs from the dead must be clear and not ambiguous, like the time my great Uncle John, dead about a year, appeared on a chair dressed in white to my great grandmother. “There he was, sitting in that chair looking straight at me, dressed all in white! He was there!” my great grandmother insisted.

     

I wondered if Mary Wiggins would come through to me. Hadn’t she nursed me through the worst bout of double pneumonia as a ten year old, refilling the Vicks Vapo Rub steam machine, spooning out cough medicines, soups, rubbing my chest with Vicks, and telling me stories?

  

Appear Mary Wiggins, appear!

      

But nothing happened, so the only thing to do was to leave the tree and walk around the cemetery, this city of the dead, and wait to see if something happened in its own time.  

  

Then, one day when leaving Mary’s grave, I felt a tingling sensation rise up from my feet to the upper portion of my body so that the lower part of me felt like it was no longer there. I had never experienced anything like this before.    

    

Something did happen, but what?  I certainly never saw Mary Wiggins. All I saw were a nearby farmer’s hay stacks in the setting sun.

   

On my way home, I moved around the perimeter of the cemetery near the far end of the railroad tracks where there were a few random graves. Unkempt, isolated, forgotten graves but why were they so close to the boxcars?

     

I felt a compulsion to follow The Dead Track, the track that leads to the quarry. 

        

The Dead Track meanders through trees and fields before passing a rustic terrain that looks like the Old West. My father once told me that this is where Hollywood once came to film spaghetti westerns.

    

An invisible hand seemed to be pushing me along The Dead Track; I walked quickly, as if on a mission.

   

I followed the track under the canopy of trees, counting railroad beams, walking tightrope fashion on top of one rail, sometimes losing my balance but then repositioning myself, skipping from one beam to the next. Then I resumed regular walking wondering why I seemed to be in a hurry.

   

When Mary Wiggins visited me in Chester County, hospital she had to talk to me through a tiny slit in the isolation ward window. I was in my hospital Johnny reading Black Beautyand The Hardy Boys but also listening to radio soap operas. The nurses hated it when I listened to soap operas. “Why are you listening to that?” they said, giving me crooked, suspicious glances.

     

Mary Wiggins and my mother would pass boxes of chocolates to me through the slit in the hospital room window. You’re coming home soon, son; Sister Constance from Saint Patrick’s school delivered 100 get well letters from your classmates. Dad sends his love. But the worried look on their faces worried me. There had been talk of putting me into an iron lung but then the doctors settled on a non surgical procedure. I wasn’t sure how an iron lung worked. I was told that they slid you into this big oil burner container but only up to your neck and that you had to lie like that until they took you out. The iron lung did your breathing for you. Some people never got out of the iron lung but were swallowed up inside.

  

I was afraid of being swallowed up.

Walking along The Dead Track I came to the creek with its crayfish and minnows after passing the spaghetti western fields where warring cowboys and Apaches once pretended to fight.  If I were able to fly like a bird I would have flown up over the trees until I came to the cliffs of the quarry.

Ahead of me in the clearing, standing before the grey quarry cliffs I was able to make out what looked like the shadow of an old lady. It was  really a shadow cast by the sun among the rocks but in the shadow world it resembled an old lady. The form lasted only a second but somehow it was enough to keep me moving forward…

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