Philadelphia's Lack of Public Toilets

The Local Lens

Published • Wed, Nov 05, 2014

By Thom Nickels

I doubt whether there’s a man or woman in the City of Philadelphia who hasn’t felt the need to use a public restroom while out on the town. It can happen while shopping, clubbing or while taking a casual ride on the subway.

When you have to go, you have to go.

But finding a spot "to go" is not easy, especially when "Restrooms for Customers Only" signs seem to be everywhere and "going" in public can be a risky endeavor.

When I was in college, I remember how scandalized my parents were when one of my cousins, then at an Ivy League university on a scholarship, found himself in some trouble while in Center City with friends. Apparently they’d been bar hopping on a Friday night when nature called. Walking down a deserted street very late at night, this relative of mine decided to sneak a leak in a remote back alley where a number of dumpsters acted as a barrier between him and the sidewalk. Unfortunately, what he thought was a safe space instantly proved to be in the eye of a nearby policeman who had been surveying the desolate scene from inside a squad car with its lights out.

My cousin, the straight "A" scholarship student, was arrested.

Outraged at the queer injustice of it all, his parents raised high the roof beams, got an expert lawyer, and had the case thrown out.

Now, what my cousin did in the cloak of darkness in an obscure alleyway– away from all prying eyes– was nothing compared to what I used to witness in Center City in the mid 1980s, especially along Chestnut Street near 12th and 13th.

At the time, there was a homeless woman, affectionately called The Duck Lady, who would quack like a duck when she wasn’t asking for money. She was a benign old soul, as sweet as they come and people generally liked her. Rumor had it that she was from an old Philadelphia moneyed family and that once she had lived in a big house before tragedy changed her life. The tragedy, whatever it was, left her penniless, and she wound up on the streets. Soon after that she began quaking like a duck. It was actually Tourette’s syndrome, although next to nothing was known about Tourette’s at that time. The wealthy family connection was also false; she was merely a bag lady with a mental illness.

Stories of The Duck Lady circulated for many years. She became a Center City legend. She’d turn up at art openings and various public events, walk around and quacking. People usually asked if she needed anything, although sometimes getting a straight answer from her was difficult. With real ducks you just feed them bits of bread, but with The Duck Lady people just gave her things: sweaters, designer dresses, new boots, hand bags and sneakers. She was a favorite among the hippie/bohemian crowd in West Philadelphia’s Poweleton Village. In some cases these circles adopted her as a mascot.

The Duck Lady’s fans realized she was losing it when in the middle of a weekday afternoon at 13th and Chestnut Streets she pretended that the sidewalk below her was a commode. She proceeded to do the "porta-potty" deed among scores of startled pedestrians some of whom screamed and covered their eyes. There may have been police in the area when this happened, but whatever the case she was not hauled away. I think had she been hauled away there would have been a small riot.

"Leave the Duck Lady alone!" I can hear the crowd chanting, even if, frankly, the future looked bleak for her if this behavior became permanent.

In Europe there are many public bathrooms. However when I was in Paris several years ago I was shocked to discover that hundreds of men line up in a row and openly relieve themselves late at night along the Champs Elysees. French pedestrians on the street were oblivious to the sight. No one seemed to care. Even police officers looked the other way. Unlike the scene in American cities where late night "goers" at least attempt to hide, on the Champs Elyees all the men had become like Philadelphia’s Duck Lady.

I thought about what the reaction would be if something like this happened on a mass scale in Philadelphia. For one thing, each and every one of these would be given a one hundred dollar fine, which of course would be entirely appropriate if only because "going" should not be an orchestrated event, like a Jay-Z concert.

But honestly, what’s a gentleman or lady to do if there are no public restrooms?

"South Street is the city’s second most visited tourist area," Councilman David Cohen told Philadelphia City Council way back in 2004, "yet there are no public facilities available for all these tourists."

The situation remains the same in 2014, although there’s no reason why Philadelphia cannot do what almost every European and Canadian city has done: install retractable urinals and toilets that are invisible during the day but quite obvious at night during the peak after-bar hours.

It makes sense to me: If you don’t want tourists and urbanites to go in public then provide public restrooms!

In 2012, The Philadelphia Daily News reported on the lack of public restrooms in the Italian Market area. The paper quoted many restaurant owners who said that they would not allow the public to use their "employee only" restrooms. Exceptions to the rule might include extreme hardship cases, like a mother and child in distress, or that one-in-a-million customer with a good "Please let me use the bathroom" line.

Ordinarily Italian Market customers are told to go to the public restrooms at the Capitolo Playground at 9th and Federal. Unfortunately, the Capitolo restrooms are usually closed at night and locked up during the day as a protection from vandals.

Many Philadelphia public restrooms have been closed because of a vagrancy problems. It’s not uncommon to hear that once reliable city restrooms in gas stations or mini-markets have been closed because the owners were tired of having them vandalized. Rather than constantly fix up the destroyed property, the owners opted to simply close them. As a result, everybody suffers.

Finding a public restroom is a little easier in New York City.

New York City has 468 subway stations but among those stations one can find at least 78 subway restrooms open to the public. 78 may not be much compared to what NYC had in 1940, 1,676 public toilets, but it trumps Philadelphia.

There are no public restrooms on any of the stops along the Broad Street subway or the Market-Frankford El, minus the improved facilities at the Frankford Transportation Center and the terminal at 69th Street. But at the hundreds of small stops in-between there’s nothing but a waiting platform and a private restroom for employees only.

Philadelphia on New Year’s Day, especially along the Broad Street concourse during the Mummer’s parade, attracts revelers who line up the way they do in Paris. While the police discourage such behavior, the sheer numbers of law breakers makes handing out tickets impossible. The presence of porta-potties lately has helped relieve that situation.

Under the Rendell administration, the city tried to install self-cleaning public restrooms in the city but the deal fell through when the city and the manufacturer couldn’t agree on how they were to be funded.

But can a major tourist attraction like Philadelphia afford to wait any longer?

The Chinese may have the answer. The city of Beijing installed 7,700 public toilets in city streets because their government feels that all travelers should find a toilet within an 8-minute walk in the business area.

After decades of inaction, in late 2012, Philadelphia did install a pilot pay toilet near City Hall; complete with a self-cleaning apparatus and piped in music. The structure proved too good to be true. The pilot program simply vanished.

Perhaps if they had skipped the music and stuck to essentials the project would have worked.

Gritty Literature (Or Life Under The El)

Weekly Press • Wed, Nov 05, 2014

By Thom Nickels
Contributing Writer

While researching my new book, Literary Philadelphia, Greg Gillespie of Port Richmond Books lent me two novels by two Philadelphia novelists, now long dead and not well known to the general public.

The first novel, Steps Going Down, by John T. McIntyre, published in 1936 by Farrar & Rinehart (New York), got my attention because McIntyre has always been known as a Noir writer, meaning a writer who describes the gritty side of life, as in the city’s underworld. ‘Noir’ might also be described as the gritty truth underneath a mainstream sugar coating: the life of petty criminals, drug dealers, streetwalkers under the El, small time mobsters, or the unstable drama inside dingy bars filled with cigarette smoke, suspicious characters, and of course lurking danger.

McIntyre was born in Northern Liberties and left school at age 11 to work full time. For a while he was a freelance journalist with The Philadelphia Press. He wrote over 20 books most of them "Noir" or crime novels but some had a conventional slant. A "Noir" novel might also be called ‘B fiction,’ as in ‘B’ movie.

One ‘B’ movie that comes to mind is the 1965 exploitation film, "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" directed by Russ Meyer and starring Tura Satana, about three strippers who wreck havoc and violence on a young couple they encounter in the desert, and who then kidnap a wheelchair-bound old man as they attempt to seduce the man’s sons for the family money. Although there’s some redemption in the fact that all three bad girls come to a bad end, it takes a long time before this happens.

McIntyre, who was Irish Catholic, manages to weave elements of his Catholicism into the most sordid of his stories. While one chapter may describe how the main character falls in love with a streetwalker, in another chapter he presents a small paragraph about the Virgin Mary.

Consider this passage in his novel, Steps Going Down where characters Gill and Hogarty are having drinks in a sleazy El bar, where "there was noise, and smoke, and the smell of drink in the place…the floor sloppy with spilled beer…the walls grimy with the rubbing of many a loafer’s back [as the] cash register rang and rang":

In this section, Gill tells Hogarty that sometimes when he sees what he sees (as in pretty awful stuff), he says a prayer to the Blessed Virgin.

"She has a far-reaching voice in Heaven," Gill tells Hogarty. "And God Himself is always hearkening to her. More poor souls have been saved from despair through her than you can put to the credit of all the saints and martyrs in all the far depths of the heavens."

As if this nod to religiosity wasn’t enough, Gil and Hogarty begin to talk about the Annunciation and the biblical city of Nazareth.

But after that, it’s a jump to a house of ill-repute on Sixteenth Street in Center City.

"Lola only bothered with those who were substantial when she was going good….Her trade usually dressed at night: tails, top hat, Inverness. Quite the thing. Everybody dressed. Lola had been something to see…"

Curious to know a lot more about McIntyre’s life, I headed over to Temple University Archives to examine McIntyre’s documents and manuscripts. Oftentimes when a famous writer dies, his or her papers are turned over to a university. There they are archived and labeled for researchers and biographers. In McIntyre’s case, I was able to go through quite a number of boxes, some containing business papers, such as rent receipts, bank correspondence and statements, while other boxes contained personal effects like personal telephone books, correspondence, and rejection letters from publishers.

Although McIntyre published a lot in his lifetime and was very successful, when he shopped his work around he got his fair share of bad news.

Most of the rejection letters came from the Macmillian Company, a New York publisher. On March 15, 1943, his novel "Gun Smoke Along the Nueces," was turned down. In May of the same year, "Murder in the Mist" was rejected, the letter signed by a Lisa Dwight Cole, an Associate Editor there. Then, in November, he received a rejection letter for his book "O Land of Milk and Honey." In 1948, a Macmillian editor sent back his novel, "Some Days in the World," and apologized for keeping it so long. "We are very much chagrined at the length of time we have had your manuscript."

McIntyre probably rejected the phrase "we are very much chagrined" as a spine tingling language abomination.

In 1944, McIntyre sent a letter to his friend, Alfred Lunt, asking for money. McIntyre had just been fired or laid off from a job because business wasn’t doing well. He wrote, that "just two minutes ago I was told that I was through at Street & Smith’s, business conditions being what they are, etc." The letter was painful for me to read because I knew what was coming. "I hate to ask in times like these," McIntyre continues, "but could you possibly send me some money? Every cent I have will be the money I’ll get this Friday. We’re in damned desperate straits here as it is and this thing will make it just so much worse." McIntyre ends the letter by requesting "some letters of introduction to men who rate in the publishing business."

In another box I found an interesting exchange of letters from a Cooperstown, New York banker replying to the novelist’s request to purchase back records of a newspaper called the Saturday Star Journal.

Apparently McIntyre wanted to know how much the bundle would cost, and the banker puts the fee at $300, far too much money for the cash-strapped author who then offers the banker a counter offer of $175. The banker replies that, "I am not inclined to accept the offer for them of $175 but would be willing to lower my price somewhat. If you wish to make an offer of $225 for the lot, let me know and I will consider it." It’s all very bureaucratic and unfeeling, the banker obviously looking down at McIntyre from his high financial perch. Then, one month later (March 11, 1941), everything changes. The banker sends a handwritten note to McIntyre refusing the writer’s latest offer, but you can feel that something isn’t quite right. Why a handwritten letter? The letters pick up again in August, when the banker sends McIntyre another handwritten note although it is not on the bank’s letterhead. The writing is very disconnected looking and sloppy, as if the writer had a broken hand. "I went to the hospital April 10th for a severe operation," the banker says. "I am writing to ask you if you are still interested in my Saturday Star Journals and if your previous offer for them still holds good. Your offer was $175.00 for the Star Journals and $50 for the Dime Libraries." We don’t get McIntyre’s response, though I imagine he felt some sympathy for the Second National Bank official who was no longer sounding high and grand. Two weeks later, the two men conclude the deal, and McIntyre gets his bundle.

A sad discovery in another box was a 1951 document detailing the writer’s funeral expenses from the Oliver Blair Company: Gray cloth covered casket; silk lining; pillow; old silver extension bar handles; crucifix and services, pine case…$410.00."

I left Temple Archives feeling as if I’d met McIntyre in person. In fact, I found myself thinking of him for the rest of the day.

Another one of Greg’s books, Old Booksellers of Philadelphia (copyright 1891) by A.P. Brotherhead, contains descriptions and editorial comments about the city’s many booksellers since post colonial times.

Among the entries, I found some curious descriptions of old booksellers that probably wouldn’t see the light of print today.

There’s bookseller Apley, who had a shop on Chestnut Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets, circa 1879. Brotherhead writes, "He was a man of about fifty years of age or thereabouts; he might have been older, but his dirty and ragged appearance made it difficult to say how old he was. He always looked dark and sallow. His features were not repulsive to look at, but they had that miserly cast which at one glance caused him to be a marked character. The windows of the store were so thick with dirt and rubbish that is was difficult to see the titles of the books."

Then there was Duross, "a specimen of the rough, gruff Irishman; a rough diamond—though he had kindly impulses, and to those who knew him, he was a good fellow. His old store was in the Arcade near to Apley’s. Mr. Duross died at an advanced age."

Brotherhead lets loose on a man named Hugh Hamel "who had risen from a mere peddler of books, and by dint of perseverance, collected them as a junk dealer collects his rubbish. He was probably the most ignorant of all the old booksellers in this city. At one time he could not write his own name. He was in appearance a thick-set, low-looking, vulgar Irishman; and it is to be regretted that the latter years of his life were as much devoted to stimulants as to his business."

In other words, Hamel was a drunk.

Bookseller Scanlan was "…a clear-headed and conscientious man, an Irishman by birth…an earnest man with very strong Roman Catholic views on religion. Though seemingly tolerant to others who differed with him, yet below the surface you could see mirrored the Catholic of the middle ages."

Brotherhead’s skeptical view of the Irish is perhaps understandable given the temper of the times. At no point, of course, does he say anything untoward about the ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’ booksellers. He tends to keep that professional.

The third book from Greg was novelist Richard Powell’s The Philadelphian (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York), published in 1956 and later made into a film, The Young Philadelphians, starring Paul Newman and Robert Vaughn, among others.

Powell was the vice president of one of the largest and oldest advertising agencies in the country, N.W. Ayer & Son, on Washington Square. This seventh generation Philadelphian once wrote that he would never have started to look "objectively and analytically at Philadelphia if I hadn’t worked on a Philadelphia newspaper, and if I hadn’t married a girl from Cleveland who began questioning the Philadelphia institutions and beliefs and attitudes which I had accepted as a matter of course."

Some of those attitudes, of course, had to do with the class structure of the city (old families versus immigrant new families, like the Irish). In Powell’s novel we can see that in the relationship between Irish immigrant Margaret O’Donnell, who arrives in Philadelphia from Ireland in the spring of 1857 and finds employment as a maid with the very Anglo Saxon Protestant, Mrs. Clayton, whose husband is a bank official. When poor Margaret becomes pregnant from a one time roll in the hay with Mrs. Clayton’s Harvard law school son, she’s quickly told to vacate the premises and paid a handsome sum to care for the baby, a baby the Claytons do not want because of Margaret’s station in life.

Mrs. Clayton, however, does visit poor Margaret to assist in the birth of the baby. She does this in a humble city rooming house, where she tells Margaret (in between labor pains), "You’re a little Irish bog trotter who thought you could come over here and be a queen. Only it’s not that easy."

Later, while holding the new baby girl, she tells Margaret one more thing: "You Irish girls with your hot young bodies. As if all you had to do was wave them at a man to get anything you want."

Powell’s novel gets better and better, by the way.

Still True Today

The Bulletin - Philadelphia

Top of Form 1

Bottom of Form 1

Jihad In Philadelphia Says Free Library Speaker

By THOM NICKELS
The Bulletin

Published:

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Tom Trento, Director of the Florida Security Council, was in Philadelphia early last week to showcase the film “The Third Jihad,” and to share his thoughts on what he calls “the silent jihad in Philadelphia.”

Over two hundred people packed the main auditorium of the central branch of the Free Library to watch the controversial film that former presidential candidate Rudy Guliani calls “a wake-up call for America.” The “Third Jihad” exposes the destructive aims of radical Islam, including the subtle dangers of “peaceful” cultural jihad and its influences on western society.

Among the many people interviewed in the film were Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former member of the Dutch Parliament who made the film, “Submission,” with Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh was later killed by a Muslim radical for his portrayal [in “Submission”] of the treatment of women in Islamic societies. Ali, a former Muslim, escaped to the Netherlands to free herself from an arranged marriage in Somalia in 1992.

After the feature length film—a large part of which focuses on Western Europe’s growing radical Islamist populations that call for the institution of Sharia Law in these countries—Mr. Trento took the podium.

A power de-surge prevented the lights in the auditorium from switching on, so Mr. Trento was framed in shadows, as was the audience, symbolic, perhaps, of the doomed nature of the subject at hand.

“Islam is a political system, primarily,” Mr. Trento said. “Serious analysts and Islamists say this also. There’s no separation of God and state in Islam. There’s no separation of mosque and state. If this is true, then the essence of its quality, Sharia, also called the pathway or Sharia law, begs the question: Can this coexist with a Constitutional Democratic Republic? Is there a way to bring these two together?”

Mr. Trento’s answer is an unqualified no.

“We are talking about a clash of civilizations here,” he said, going on to quote CIA operative Claire Lopez, who also makes an appearance in the film: “We are in the battle for the essence of the United States of America.”

Mr. Trento, in fact, calls it “the epic battle of our lifetime” but insists that most Americans are asleep when it comes to the silent jihad happening all around them.

“You have a battle right here in Philadelphia,” he said. “In fact, on October 28, we are going to hold a 3- or 4-hour workshop on Jihad in Philadelphia and detail all of this in an evidentiary way. For instance, you have an individual in Philadelphia who made a lot of money in the Philadelphia Soul Sound. His name is Kenny Gamble, or Luqman Abdul-Haqq.”

Mr. Trento reminded the audience that Mr. Gamble became a Muslim in the 1970s after a personal crisis and then “used his money to build a lot of companies that are working to rebuild the inner city.”

“We are seeing this sort of thing all over the United States,” Mr. Trento said, “This is what is part of the stealth jihad.”

While quick to remind the audience that his desire was not to bash Muslims, Mr. Trento said that it was his intent to confront the ideology of Islam that desires to implement Sharia Law in place of the Constitution of the United States.

“If anyone wants to mess with the Constitution, they become an enemy of the United States. But the issue isn’t Muslims; it’s where you stand on Sharia Law. If you’re for Sharia Law, you’re an enemy of the United States.”

Sharia Law governs every aspect of private and public life of an individual, from how one eats, dresses, grooms, and worships.

“Kenny Gamble has an operation going on,” Mr. Trento said. “Now, when U.S. Intelligence starts to look at these guys—and they’ve been looking at them for a long time—they will see that a kind of organizational flow chart is being utilized by the Islamic world through an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is the Costra Nostra of the Muslim world. So, when you look into this in Philadelphia, and you see the guys with black berets, the new Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, all these various Islamic organizations tie into Kenny Gamble, and they all sit on boards together.”

The next question Mr. Trento asks is: What is Kenny Gamble doing?

“If Kenny Gamble desires to save the inner city, we are with him 100 percent. If he desires to use Sharia Law and establish an enclave which is separate and distinct from the American Republic Democratic Constitutional system of government as is occurring in London, then he becomes someone that needs to be stopped.

“This is why Kenny Gamble is currently under a pretty intensive microscope,” Mr. Trento said.

An additional concern, Mr. Trento feels, are Kenny Gamble’s “young shock troops… boys anywhere from the age of five to 12. Called Jawala scouts, “these young troopers are the exact duplication of the Hamas model,” Mr. Trento explains. “The psychological impetus being that if you influence a kid when they are 7 years old, you have them for life.

“Part of the plan, whenever poison is introduced anywhere, is to introduce it in a nice container of some sort,” Mr. Trento said. “The container right now is trying to rebuild the inner city. We’re going to give Mr. Gamble a chance to denounce Sharia for U.S. principles. Right now, the effort is to clean up the neighborhood and grow young men and women in the Islamic faith. I do believe there are sincere Muslims who want to do that, but there are higher officials and they are working out a grand plan, and they are using non Sharia Muslims as useful idiots, as Karl Marx did, to help usher in hundreds of billions of state and federal dollars to protect the progress of low income housing and job finding programs.”

One audience member asked Mr. Trento’s opinion of the proposed Islamic Center two blocks from New York’s Ground Zero.

“There’s a doctrine in the annals of the theology of Islam that allows it in wartime to deceive, to have a deceptive position,” Mr. Trento said. “It’s affirmed by the four schools of Islamist theology. It’s for real, folks. When we hear various Inman’s saying, ‘We’re building a building of love and compassion, so that Jews and Christians and everybody can get together, you can believe that if you want to. But it’s important in Islamic theology that once you conquer something or have a conquest of some sort, you claim the land, then you own it eternally. That’s why there will never, never, never be peace in Israel because the 1.3 billion Muslims believe that they own that land because they conquered it at one point.

“Tell your friends and family about this film, tell everyone,” Mr. Trento said. “We are fighting a theocratic political system that’s an irresistible force!”

The Woman Who Would be Philly's Next Mayor

Is Terry Gillen one of The Incorruptibles in Philadelphia’s race for a new Mayor?

Weekly Press • Wed, Oct 15, 2014

By Thom Nickels
Contributing Writer

Is it ever possible to trust a politician?

When a friend suggested that I accompany him to meet 2015 mayoral candidate Terry Gillen, I saw this as an opportunity to meet a future mayor of Philadelphia. The small Old City house party for this ‘get acquainted’ session was an intimate affair, about twelve people including two members of Gillen’s staff.

Of course, put any politician in a room full of people and you’re likely to get a polished, canned delivery. Politicians have to sell themselves. They have to be like those Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen of old who used to go door-to-door —men in meticulous suits and shiny black shoes with winning, toothy smiles.

Politicians are at their best in such settings because they have a captive, mostly friendly audience.

When I attended a Michael Nutter for Mayor "house" event years ago in Center City, the enthusiasm in the room was contagious. The room was filled with genuine true believers. I’d been brought to the event by a conservative Republican woman friend of mine, a Tea Party sympathizer and a supporter of George W. Bush. I have friends of many different stripes, and I wanted to know how and why "articulate Meredith," as I called her, was such a solid supporter of this big city liberal politician.

Meredith’s fascination with Nutter reminded me of Walt Whitman’s famous line, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." Meredith and I could have conducted workshops on how to get along really well with someone of opposing political views. We learned to listen quietly to one another, and to offer unemotional counter views. We both realized that no political issue is ever worth the loss of a friend.

This was certainly not the case with my older friend McCall, a cantankerous but usually very loveable left wing soapbox kind of guy. While I usually agreed with McCall on the issues of the day, over time he found that sometimes the tone in my writing and columns diverted from "orthodox" progressive paths.

McCall let me know how he felt about my political deviations one night after inviting me to dinner. The coupe de grace occurred when we went out for an after dinner drink.

"In your writing you’re beginning to sound like a damn Republican! What’s happened to you—you’re turning conservative… I’ve half a mind to throw you a punch right here!"

In the past, McCall had told me about his periodic tendency, while sloshed, to "let somebody have it" if the situation warranted. McCall is no knucklehead, however. Intellectually, he usually impressed people as brilliant. He has academic degrees from all over the world. Politics, however, is his Achilles heel.

"Conservative!" I said, as shocked as if I had heard him call me a closet Rosicrucian.

Of course, McCall didn’t deck me, but just the idea that he thought about doing so caused me to take another look at what politics can do to people.

From that point on our friendship seemed to deteriorate. It went from chatty dinners at his place to cursory "hellos" in the street and then to sometimes pretending we didn’t see one another when we were out. It was painful to realize that our once cozy friendship had become a skeleton of its former self. Today when I see McCall with friends at the theater or movies, I assume that that each and every one of them has passed my old friend’s political acid test.

As for Meredith, she was so in love with candidate Michael Nutter that she wanted to have a small fundraiser for him in her apartment. This is in sharp contrast to the political fundraisers she threw for Tea Party candidates, or the Republican fundraisers she’d invite me to in Old City, which always seemed far more upscale and lavish than overcrowded "cheese and crackers" Democratic events. In many ways when I went to compare the two events I thought of Marie Antoinette versus the peasants. Your heart may be with the peasants, but your love of good food and nice things will always tilt towards Marie.

Before I return to the Terry Gillen part of my story, let me say that halfway through Nutter’s first term as mayor, Meredith had become so disillusioned with the mayor and the, as she put it, continual decline of the city, that she bought a house in New Jersey. At the time of her move she was complaining about the crime and the riotous late night street behavior outside her high-rise condo at 13th and Spruce Streets. Perhaps the late night racket wasn’t the city’s fault at all but had more to do with Meredith’s advancing years and a growing need within her for peace and quiet. In any case, Meredith left the city and never looked back.

Center City, of course, is hardly experiencing a serious decline. In fact, the opposite of that it true because Center City is its own city apart from that other Philadelphia: the city of neighborhoods. The city of the neighborhoods is far from anyone’s definition of a Utopian ideal.

And there are many reasons for that.

As Gillen told the assembly of twelve gathered in her honor, it’s the city’s Byzantine tax structure that causes many businesses to relocate in the suburbs. Another problem, according to Gillen, is the sad state of Philly public schools. While college grads—seduced by the glamour and fun of Center City-- may choose to live in town after graduation, the moment they marry and have their first child, they exit stage right. That’s because the city’s public schools seem to be a hybrid mix of The Blackboard Jungle (a 1950’s film starring Glenn Ford) and a National Geographic Special on untamed wild life. Gillen wants more funding for the city’s public schools so that each and every one of them, in every neighborhood, becomes "high functioning."

When someone in the room asked Gillen about the plight of teachers, she insisted that there should be no pay cuts but that this issue can be discussed later, once funding comes through. Without proper funding, nothing else can happen.

Gillen’s call for reform of the city’s Byzantine tax structure, increased public school funding and ways to help small businesses, all sound very attractive even if her Utopian goal of creating 5, 000 to 10,000 new jobs in a city seems a bit of a stretch.

The city’s possible next mayor was educated in public schools before going off to the University of Rochester and then getting an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago is generally considered to be a conservative place, spawning monsters such as economist Milton Freidman. She then went onto the University of Pennsylvania where she edited the Law Review.

In 1993, she spearheaded a campaign to challenge the Pentagon’s attempt to cut 10,500 defense jobs in the city. She’s also worked with the Rendell Administration in Harrisburg and before that as Deputy Commerce Director under then Mayor Rendell. Most of her expertise is in the financial world. Her resume is filled with words and phrases like, "developed the infrastructure for the City’s new land bank," "implemented the $64-million HUD stimulus grant program," and "directed the reorganization of Philadelphia’s Redevelopment Authority."

She’s all about fixing the city’s financial woes.

Her financial focus can be seen in her choice of words as well as in the manner in which she conducts herself before a crowd: she uses an economy of words, gets her point across, and then frames her answers during the Q and A in tight fitting manner that reminds me of a bank teller stuffing coins into wrappers. If, for instance, you ask her more than two questions at a house event Q and A, you might find that her eyes don’t look at you but instead focus on someone else in the room. It’s as if she is sending a message that only verbal spendthrifts let themselves go with too many questions.

Of course, taking a canned political speech on the road and dressing it up with smiles also has a speed dating quality to it. A politician—in this case, Gillen—wants to win you over, so she’s going to go to the limit in exhibiting the best human qualities—patience, an ability to listen, as well as exercising a careful watch for facial expressions and grimaces that might be perceived as sardonic or condescending. Politicians on the make have to watch themselves every step of the way. One cross word, one thoughtless gesture, one statement only half thought out or uttered too casually can come back to haunt.

It’s not easy being a startup politician, but the potential rewards are many. The power rewards that await the winner of an election are very seductive. It is this power that has corrupted the most wholesome and best intended of novices.

We can only hope that this hard working public school grad is one of the incorruptibles.

A Philly Flash Mob Gay Bashing

I've come to believe that only losers travel in large packs when they go bar hopping in the city. People who need a lot of people around them whenever they go out on the town strike me as people who are stuck in a high school frame of mind. They are much like wolves, who also travel in packs. Then, of course, there's the infamous pack mentality, often described as crass and animal-like.

Bar hopping packs are plentiful in Center City Philadelphia, especially on (formerly sedate) Sansom Street, which has become the city's west end version of South Street. Sansom Street on a weekend night is more crammed than the Wildwood boardwalk, with most people traveling in groups upwards of 12. Most of these alcohol-fueled packs are not dangerous. There's nothing especially wrong with a bunch of people in a happy-clappy drunk mode as long as things don't turn... violent.

Center City is a melting pot of many different groups: College students; young professionals; elderly theater goers; geeks on bicycles; homeless people holding cardboard signs; raging maniacs in white robes (and crowns) preaching death to all light-skinned people; the "happy hour" corporate executive with alcohol stains on his dress shirt; the lonely suburbanite looking for the address of a restaurant or bar; con artists; couples in love; lipstick and butch lesbians; gay couples; transgender prostitutes and regular prostitutes; an occasional Mennonite or Amish family, and an increasing number of women in burkas. This list only scratches the surface, but the message should be clear: If you cannot take Center City's diversity -- from women in burkas to transgender women in stilettos -- then you had better not come into Center City at all. By all means, stay home with your microwave popcorn and be comfortable.

But if you do happen to venture into Center City, please keep your 'editorial' disapproval of certain people in check: Don't sneer at women in burkas; don't make rude comments to elderly, barely-able-to-walk white haired couples coming out of the opera; don't eyeball hipsters in plaid shirts, dorky glasses and skinny jeans; don't sneer or shout "Get a job" at panhandlers sitting on the sidewalk. Think what you want to about these people; bitch in the car or bus on the way home -- "Why isn't the world the way I want it to be? Why isn't everyone like ME!" -- but you have no right to get in anyone's face about who or what they are. No right at all.

I'm thinking of that male and female twenty-something group out on the town recently who attacked a gay male couple simply because they were gay.

This isn't something you expect to see in Philadelphia; Cheyenne, Wyoming, perhaps, or North Dakota or maybe even Alabama, but not in this city of tolerance founded by William Penn. And yet it did happen. It was doubly shocking to read that many of the attackers were Archbishop Wood grads, ideally people who should know better.

Think about it: what about the catechism lessons these Wood grads must have heard about loving your neighbor as yourself? What about the morality of physically attacking someone to such a degree that there's a risk of breaking the Sixth Commandment -- Thou Shalt Not Kill? The most important lesson any religion class should teach is the value and worth of every human person, whatever their status, orientation, unpopularity, or perceived "sinfulness."

It's hard to get into the mind of a basher. Maybe this pack of thugs was looking for an excuse to beat up anybody. Perhaps if an Asian person had crossed their path, the results would have been the same. Anti-gay prejudice used to be called the last acceptable prejudice, but that has changed in recent years. Despite societal advances, many still believe that being gay is a major sin. Although one can believe this and still be respectful of gays as persons, the concept can become twisted in the minds of rabble rousers. The quaint saying, "Hate the sin but love the sinner" may sound good on paper but the concept never quite works in reality. In real life, the "hate" part always filters down, like leaky battery acid, into the so called sinner himself. The sinner becomes the sin, despite the bad theology that tries to do otherwise.

What some self-righteous bashers don't realize is this: If you are going to hate the sin so much that there's an overflow into the "sinner," then you had better be prepared to be tested under scripture's repeated warnings against spiritual pride, considered the worst sin of all. As soon as anyone basks in feelings of spiritual superiority over others, he or she is doomed. Saint Maximos the Confessor once wrote that the spiritually advanced who, on becoming puffed up with pride in their spiritual progress, are then "rightly handed over to hardship and suffering for the express purpose of humility."

Mental health experts say that it is often the men who make a big show of their hatred of gays (by violence and use of the "F"-word) who have the most to hide. Ironically, this type of individual at times comes out of the closet years down the road because their violent reaction to everything gay actually indicated a fear of what they found within themselves.

This is why whenever I hear a younger man constantly using the "F"-word, I say to myself, "Ah, most likely he'll be hitting the gay bars in three years."

The Center City bashers did accomplish one thing: the complete ruination of their lives. Already a basketball coach has been forced to resign. One could get away with this kind of behavior in the 1970s, 80s and even the 90s. The police very often weren't very cooperative then. Many times they didn't take bashing incidents very seriously. The police in those days often assumed that the basher had a good reason to do lash out. Sometimes the police even had sympathy for the bashers, so there wasn't much of an inclination to find the perpetrators.

Years ago, at age 23, I went to a bar in West Chester, sat at the bar and ordered a beer. I'd driven over from my parents' house in Frazer, where I was visiting temporarily. As I sat at the bar, a guy sat next to me and started up a conversation. He asked what I did for a living. At the time I was writing for The Drummer, a Philadelphia underground newspaper. The guy mentioned that he had seen the latest issue of the paper that carried a feature about Center City's underground gay nightlife.

"You're part of that scene, aren't you?" he asked, a touch of hostility in his voice.

"If I said I was, would that matter?" I replied. "The Drummer is an underground paper. The editorial policy is to cover every scene in the city."

"I saw the way you were looking at me."

"Actually, dude, I was looking at that mounted stuffed moose head over your right shoulder."

When I went to leave the bar, I felt something queasy in my stomach. My stool mate had gone to the back of the bar where he talked with friends. I paid my bill and left, walking casually to the exit and out onto the sidewalk when I heard the rush of footsteps behind me, four or five guys in hot pursuit.

Luckily, I managed to get to my car in time, but while driving away I saw them cursing and raising their fists through the rearview mirror, their faces crunched up as if they'd been hit by a spray of... battery acid.

Thom Nickels delivers inspired reading from his latest book: Legendary Locals of Center City Philadelphia

Thom Nickels entertains audience at his most recent book reading. Photo: N.C.

Weekly Press • Wed, Sep 24, 2014

By Nicole Contosta
Staff Reporter

Prolific is an apt word to describe Thom Nickels, a Philadelphia-based author, poet and journalist.

Working as a journalist, Nickels publishes and edits on an ongoing basis for periodicals like Icon Magazine, the Weekly Press, the Spirit, the Lambda Book Report and the Huffington Post.

As an author, Nickels has published over ten works including Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia, The Tropic of Libra and Spore.

Over the past few weeks, Nickels has kept up a frantic book reading schedule for his latest work: Legendary Locals of Center City Philadelphia.

And it was his reading at the Philadelphia Center for Architecture, 1218 Arch Street, that this reporter experienced Nickel’s lively delivery.

Notably, even if you have read the book, Nickels’ style of reading treats the fact-based material in his 128-page book with a comic touch. Always conversational, Nickels frames the reading as a discussion with his sister asking him questions about why he chose certain Philadelphia legends but not others. Throughout that "conversation" Nickels peppers information with personal anecdotes from both his life as well as the lives of certain subjects. If you missed Nickels readings so far---he fortunately has three remaining on the horizon--but we’ll get to those dates and times later.

Legendary Locals is Nickels fourth book from Arcadia Publishing.And the groundwork for Legendary Locals began during the planning of Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture in 2005.

An editor from Arcadia "proposed writing a book on well-known people in Philadelphia," Nickels explained. "But I chose architecture because I didn’t feel comfortable writing a book about famous Philadelphians at the time," Nickels continued, adding, "basically, I didn’t want to get into the cult of personality. So I put the book on the back burner for several years."

When Nickels first entertained the idea of actually writing it—he considered notorious Philadelphia legends like Ira Einhorn. Ultimately, however, he decided to take a "straighter" approach.

"Many of the people selected in this book are people that are under the radar," Nickels said. That doesn’t mean they weren’t known in artistic or local communities, but they weren’t household names either. At the same time, "that’s not to say that there aren’t the typical, well-known people either, because there are."

Published in a coffee-table format, Legendary Locals contains an informational page and photograph of each subject. The book, divided into three sections, includes: Early Pioneers of Politics, the Arts and Science; Modern-Age Activist and Entertainers and Today’s Athletes, Businesspersons and Spiritual Warriors.

With the lives of so many dynamic people reviewed—it is difficult to know whom to highlight. So lets just consider the woman Nickels dedicated the book to: Agnes Repplier. A contemporary of Henry James, Repplier became an essayist of international critical acclaim. This proved particularly true for Repplier in Boston. But in Philadelphia she remained, "a relatively insignificant writer living quietly west of the Schuylkill," Nickels wrote, adding, "Here she found only obscurity, the obscurity, she felt that is Philadelphia itself."

Nickels however, is anything but an obscure figure in Philadelphia. As a journalist, Nickels was able to access a lot of information from his decades worth of archives. "The facts were true and good," Nickels said, adding, "but in some cases, I had to conduct the interviews again."

Nickels will be reading at the following dates: October 11th at the Port Richmond Books, 3037 Richmond St., at 11 a.m., October 18th at the Bazemore Gallery, 4339 Main Street, 3 p.m. and the Philadelphia History Museum, 15 S. 7th St., 5:30 p.m.

For more information on the book or to order a copy: www.legendarylocals.com.

Joan Rivers (from the Broad Street Review)

Remembering Joan Rivers (three)

The person and the persona

THOM NICKELS

I grew up with Joan Rivers. There she’d be on The Merv Griffin Showtalking about her husband Edgar as if he was a homely guy sitting at home in a pair of flannel pajamas waiting for her to give his life meaning. In those early days, Joan was always saying Edgar this and Edgar that, enough to make my boy’s mind wonder why she always made out Edgar to be so ugly and unexciting. Here she was, the undisputed Queen of Comedy — presumably she could have any man in the world — and yet the only thing she wanted when it came to love was Edgar, who by all accounts was the human version of a comfortable but ratty old shoe.

Rivers in a 1967 publicity shot

Of course, in those days I was far too young to understand the comedy of self-deprecation and put-down. All I knew is that on TV Joan Rivers didn’t look half bad. I loved her blow-dried blond hair and sparkling white teeth, a far cry from, say, the brunette Carol Burnett with her undistinguished, Vivian Vance housewife locks. Hollywood blondes like Kim Novak, Barbara Nichols, and Mamie Van Doren for me in those days were always special, although my adolescent love for Lauren Bacall came out one day when, watching Merv Griffin again with Mom, I blurted out, “I love Lauren Bacall. She is so masculine!”

 “She’s what?” my mother asked, sitting straighter on the sofa. “What did you say?”

While Joan certainly had gutsy attributes like Bacall, she was certainly not like all those early male comedians — from Don Rickles to the once hilarious Richard Pryor — who seemed to fade into unfunny obscurity long before their deaths. Joan seemed to know that living life is often hard work and that being a celebrity is no insulation against life’s slings and arrows. People may treat you like a goddess onstage, but in your personal life you are just like everybody else: a vulnerable human being.

Lies and betrayal

In an interview with a psychologist, she confesses that the life pain she’s struggled with most has to do with feelings of personal betrayal.

Her husband’s suicide — secretly well planned, but a shock to her — was a betrayal. In the interview, she says she still hasn’t gotten over her anger with Edgar for this act of duplicity. She explains how Edgar made good-bye videotapes to family members, and then, before he went off to kill himself, he told Melissa, their daughter, that he was only going away for a night and that he would see her the next day.

It was a lie, Joan tells the psychologist. He told my daughter a lie, and now I am worried for her. She will grow up thinking that every man is a liar. And when he died he left me with a fabulous mansion, but I was alone with no show and no contract, and I was miserable. I wanted to die, too, she said.

But if anybody knows Joan Rivers, it is Melissa. Melissa became the new Edgar, the caretaker, the tower of strength behind the scenes. And Joan, the talented perfectionist, was undoubtedly impossible to live with. “Imagine being under her scrutiny all the time,” a friend of mine commented a day after Rivers’s death. “Imagine the pressure and stress of that.”

Presenting a perfect face

When I first set out to write this piece, my idea was to expound on Joan’s addiction to plastic surgery. I somehow equated her plastic surgery obsession to her belief that in life there’s only the here and now. As she told the psychologist, she didn’t believe in an afterlife — “This is it!” she insisted (with theological certainty), which meant of course that she had to make “this” absolutely the best world possible — at any cost, but if that didn’t work (those unavoidable human betrayals again), she might be tempted to end it all herself.

But there’s also this: Joan was like the jester whose job it was to keep the royal court entertained, regardless of how or what she was feeling inside. The job that she had to do — conquering feelings of personal sadness so that they wouldn’t show onstage — meant that she had to continually perfect her face because that face had become the mask of comedy itself.

While there was a lot of rage and rawness in her late comedy routines — for many, Joan went into cesspool realms — that anger, I think, was always fueled by love, as well as a sense of disappointment, in life and in her perception that there’s no redemption anywhere, even in the act of comedy itself.

 How can anyone not get angry when, as Peggy Lee once sang, is that all there is?