Note: This historic church in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood is being replaced.
I want to tell you the parable of St Laurentius Church
St Laurentius is an old church, at least by American standards. It was built in 1882, with the donations from Polish families who wanted something of their own — beyond the other Catholic Church nearby that catered to Irish Catholics.
Continue reading The Parable of St LaurentiusLike others I knew in the middle class U.S. Northeast in the 1990s, I was raised Roman Catholic by a family who felt limited by the religion’s slowly moving moral structure. I was there for a foundation that I could return to later in my life, by my parents encouragement. For all the complaining I did then, I am thankful for that.
For the first time in years (excluding weddings, though even mine wasn’t Catholic), later this week on Christmas Eve I plan to be in a church service. But there still isn’t much there for me. I’m saddened by that.
I hit the final free throw to put my team up four points in the last few seconds of the final championship game of the inaugural Jimmy Quinn Memorial Basketball League in Fishtown.
Including a playoff game and a best of three championship series (we won in two games), our team went 7-2, through September, October and November (lost one game due to a week of bad weather as we played outside at the Fishtown Rec before the playoffs inside at Shissler).
The league featured an active Facebook group, on which one of the league coorganizer’s wrote weekly wrap ups of the first few games before the contributions slowed, though they were fun while they lasted. Naturally I plucked some of the wrap ups below:
Continue reading Jimmy Quinn Memorial Basketball League in Fishtown
Prideful, working class white ethnic neighborhoods in cities have been ignored and poorly represented for at least a half century, goes a major theme of Peter Binzen’s 1968 Whitetown USA dissection. [Google Books here.]
Written by a former Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper reporter with whom I was thrilled to have lunch last month, the book attacks the principle that whites are a monolithic group of privilege. Binzen, a former education reported, focuses heavily on the school system in the book to tell a tale of why working class and even upwardly mobile middle class whites were opposed to affirmative action and other social welfare programs perceived to help blacks.
The first third of the book features the similarities of Whitetowns from cities across the country: white neighborhoods often with many recent immigrants that are working class, prideful of place, protective, provincial, conservative and often seen as bigoted. The rest dives deepest into Kensington, a decaying industrial corridor then and a decayed shell today, and its adjacent Fishtown, a smaller, more residential neighborhood where I now live.
As I often am eager to do, I wanted to share some of my favorite passages and thoughts from the soft cover copy I tore through:
Continue reading Whitetown USA: 1968 book on the ‘silent majority’ of poor urban whites by Peter Binzen
With Mike Herzenberg and Scott Hoffman, two of my childhood idols, I played in the three-on-three basketball portion of the 19th annual Freddy Adams Sports Tournament in Fishtown, Philadelphia.
In honor of a teenager who was killed in 1993, the tournament is a big cultural anchor point of my neighborhood.
We played well enough for being a bit out of shape and practice. We made it to the quarterfinals, the fifth to last team standing of 50 or so teams. Photos and video below.
Urban neighborhoods change.
We’ve known that for, what, like 150 years or something? In the past quarter-century or so, as educated (mostly, but not entirely white) professionals moved back to neighborhoods that had populations that didn’t always resemble them — in race or class or culture or all and more — there were natural clashes.
Mostly, I feel like those clashes have mostly been put in three categories, one initiated by new residents, one from more native residents and one that both share:
Last month, my neighborhood helped to make Philadelphia the largest city in the country with a legally-sanctioned casino.
SugarHouse Casino opened in mid-September, as scheduled.
The six-year battle to bring casinos to Philadelphia is not one I want to remark much on. If you want to hear argue for or against the existence of casinos in urban communities, you’ve come to the wrong place. Isaiah Thompson at Citypaper is downright obsessed with reporting on why casinos are in the net bad for communities.
That’s not what I’m writing here for.
By the time I bought my home in Fishtown, the neighborhood that the casino arguably resides within, SugarHouse was already coming. That argument was over with.
What was still up for debate were two issues that I did care about, if a casino was going to come to my neighborhood.
This weekend, I enjoyed the beautiful weather by taking a leisurely stroll through the casino’s compact 45,000 square-foot innards and the compound that surrounds it. In an hour’s time, my initial reaction was that, if a casino were to come to Philadelphia and considering much of the debate and compromise that has come with it, what SugarHouse is to date isn’t so terrible.
Continue reading SugarHouse Casino: Thoughts from a gentrifying homeowner in the neighborhood
A few times a month, I go out to civic and town watch meetings in a variety of neighborhoods. Yes, I actually find most of them to be fun — local politics on the smallest of scale.
Since moving to Fishtown, I’ve begun going to monthly Fishtown Action and Fishtown Neighbors Meetings and filing reports for the Fishtown Spirit. It’s all within a few blocks of my house and endearing to be sure. Each month, I’ll probably share those two and any other pieces I might have had in the Spirit.
As I wrote after my first piece for my small, local community news weekly, it’s my way of getting to know new people and the issues facing them in a new neighborhood.
I have one on two controversial proposals in today’s issue:
City officials defended two controversial proposals to close a $150 million shortfall in the city’s 2011 budget at last week’s Fishtown Neighbors Association meeting.
During the 90 minute session that saw raised voices and broad criticism of city spending, Deputy Streets Commissioner Carlton Williams addressed a proposed $300 trash collection fee and Mayoral Press Aide Katharine Martin talked about the two-cent-per-ounce sweetened beverage excise tax. Both proposals need City Council approval and remain executive branch proposals that are vying against ongoing deliberations, including suggestions to raise property taxes and tax smokeless tobacco products.
Read the rest here, or below find other pieces I’ve done in the past few months below.
Continue reading Fishtown Spirit: Community meeting coverage of soda tax, I-95 and more
My neighborhood has a historian: Ken Milano.
The author of several books and speeches, a friend gave me his cherished Remembering Kensington and Fishtown: Philadelphia’s Riverward Neighborhoods, which, of course, has lots of focus on my neighborhood and, even, my own block.
Living in a neighborhood named for its fishing communities, notably of the shad of Delaware Avenue, perhaps one of my favorite take aways from the book was an old local fisherman’s rhyme [Page 37]:
When the Lord made shad,
The Devil was mad,
For it seemed such a taste of delight,
So to poison the scheme,
He jumped in the stream,
And stuck in the bones out of spite.
The 128-page book is full of interesting stories, but, below, I share some of my other favorites:
Did William Penn’s Treaty with the Leni-Lenape Take Place? [Page 17]
Earliest Known Use of the Name ‘Fishtown’ [Page 76] — 1808
Edgar Allan Poe Reports on Kensington in 1840 [Page 80] — On the Kensington railroad riots
USS Alligator, first submarine of the United States Navy [Page 82] —
Cohocksink Creek, Kensington’s Historical Border [Page 91] — Discusses Kensington and Fishtown boundaries
West Street Burial Ground [Page 96] — Across the street from my house was a graveyard
I’m no serious driver, but I’m fascinated by car culture in all its forms.
Like the severity with which parking is taken in many urban neighborhoods in even transited cities, Philadelphia certainly included. My own new neighborhood of Fishtown has all the makings of a fight to be had: long-time residents, a conflicting gentrifying population, limited parking, middle class to working class and, recently, a historic snowfall.
Where even the mayor seems to support saving street parking if you’ve cleaned out a spot and the requisite question comes of what that all means, I’m slowly developing my own opinion.
I’ve been in neighborhoods where people reserve parking year round — around a quickly expanding Temple University community with serious town-gown issues — and so these topics seem to vary. But mostly, I figure you ought to have a majority of these requisites to toss a chair of bucket to block off street parking.
![Freddy Adams Tournament [VIDEO]](https://i0.wp.com/christopherwink.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/freddyadams-wink.jpg?resize=550%2C410&ssl=1)