Author: George Hunka

Today is the ninth anniversary of my father’s death. He was born on January 4, 1931, in his parents’ bedroom at 451 Fairmount Avenue in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia. (That’s the second-floor front in the photograph to the right.) He would have died there, too, most likely, if he hadn’t required hospice care at the end of his life in 2008. The house had been in the family since my grandfather Max purchased it for his small but growing family back in the 1920s, and by the time my brother and I sold the place a few years ago, it had been in the family for 80 years or so.

If I’ve been writing about Philadelphia more in the past few months, it might be because of the nostalgia you feel for the places of your childhood as you grow older. I spent a lot of the time in that house, in that neighborhood, too. Though by the time I came along in 1962 my parents were living in Feasterville, a suburb of Philadelphia, we came into town almost every weekend to visit my father’s parents in Northern Liberties; my brother and I played in the small garden and cobblestone-paved alley in back of the house, much as my father, his stepbrother, and their friends must have done when they were children. I was baptized in the St. Andrew’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral just around the corner. My godmother and a close family friend, Anna Shopa, lived next door to the cathedral. (And it has something more of a history, too; see Harry Kyriakodis’ 2012 book about the neighborhood, Northern Liberties: The Story of a Philadelphia River Ward.)

By 1981 I was living in the house myself (my room is the top floor in the above photograph) with my father, my grandfather having died in 1972 and my grandmother eight years later. Both of them had jobs in the neighborhood, my grandfather having operated his business as an electrician on the first floor and my grandmother as a charwoman in a local elementary school. They took in boarders in the 1950s and 1960s to help pay the bills. I still remember the mess of electronic and electric material in the shop, wires and lightbulbs and other detritus, that my brother and I played with on our frequent visits in the 1960s. (My grandfather had installed the electric wiring in the nearby St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church on Seventh Street, just a few blocks away, in the 1920s.)

By then, Northern Liberties had changed from the years in which my father played in those streets as a child. When my grandparents arrived in the neighborhood, it was a heterogenous community of recent poor and working-class immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe, Jewish and gentile, African-Americans as well; my father’s playmates were from a variety of backgrounds including his own Ukrainian heritage; for years he picked up a nickel or two on Saturday afternoons as a neighborhood shabbos goy. In the 1960s, when I first saw Northern Liberties, it had fallen into some decrepitude. There were empty buildings everywhere, boarded up; five blocks to the east, fronting the Delaware River, Front Street was an avenue of mysteriously dark storefronts, single bare lightbulbs glaring out of a window here and there; poorly maintained public housing had sprung up just west of the neighborhood, poverty-stricken ghettos to the north, and abandoned warehouses and factories to the south. It was a dangerous place. My grandmother continued to scrub the marble stoop in front of the house every other weekend, as others in the neighborhood used to do before Northern Liberties fell into a period of decline. The low rowhouses that lined the empty streets, lit at night by dim yellow streetlamps, weren’t inviting.

When I lived in Northern Liberties in the 1980s, things had improved somewhat with the onset of gentrification. A few bars opened up; artists and young professionals were buying houses at rock-bottom prices with an eye to renovation. Ortlieb’s brewery at Third and Poplar had opened a bar where jazz musicians used to congregate after their gigs in the tonier joints of other parts of town.

In the 1990s I moved to New York, followed not long after by my brother, and when my father died nine years ago we thought about gut-renovating the place (it would have been uninhabitable without that renovation). But we had lives away from Philadelphia now, the renovation would have been exorbitantly expensive, and neither of us wanted to oversee it from a hundred miles away. So we sold it, and indeed, it was gut-renovated soon after, the entire interior torn down for redesign. You can see what it looks like here, and it looks like most contemporary rowhouse gut renovations. “They did an excellent job gutting the building of all of its character,” my brother grumbled when he saw the video, and he’s right.

But all things pass, including building interiors. Northern Liberties — now called “NoLibs” by the real estate mavens, who apparently don’t have time for more than two syllables — still retains a place in my heart, like the city itself. And if there are such things as ghosts, a few Hunkas are among those who haunt the neighborhood around Fifth and Fairmount. A lifted glass, then, to my father.

Earlier this month the thonkingly huge history of New York in the early twentieth century, Greater Gotham (Oxford University Press, 4.6 pounds), landed in bookstores. Suitable for pressing leaves or dropping upon large cockroaches from a great height, the book is the long-awaited sequel to the 1998 Gotham (Oxford University Press, 5.8 pounds), the history of New York from its founding to 1898. These are, obviously, substantial works about the history of the city, and regardless of its quality the new one is destined to end up, like its predecessor, imposingly displayed on bookshelves in apartments around the city, spines unbroken, unread because, given their length in these distracted times, unreadable.

Philadelphia had one of these too, though unlike the New York books it’s now out of print. Back in 1981, W.W. Norton released the 2.9-pound Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. The City of Brotherly Love has, for all its historical interest, taken a back seat in recent years to metropolitan histories from major publishers. If you’re not keen on a multi-year commitment to 1,000+ page narratives about New York, you can turn to the less daunting The Epic of New York City by Edward Robb Ellis (Basic Books, 1.2 pounds), but slimmer journeys through the history of Philadelphia, from its founding to the twenty-first century in which we find ourselves, can be hard to locate.

I raise a hosanna, then, for Roger D. Simon’s revised and updated Philadelphia: A Brief History, the first edition of which was published by the Pennsylvania Historical Association in 2003 and the second edition of which was released a few months ago (Temple University Press, 9.9 ounces). A history professor at Lehigh University, Simon cites the Norton volume a great deal in the 15 pages of notes attached to his slim, 123 pages of text; this is very much a “just the high points” survey, but it fills a profound need for a Philadelphia history of this kind, and it’s likely to be the go-to brief history for this generation.

As the editors write in their foreword, “The book’s central premise [is] that Philadelphia’s story is about residents’ attempts to sustain economic prosperity while fulfilling community needs” — and so it’s a case study, really, in what every city attempts to balance. Through his chapter subtitles, Simon makes explicit his approach: “Establishing a Community/Building an Economy” (Beginnings to 1800), “Industry Triumphant/Civic Failure” (1865-1920), “Economic Decline/Community Turmoil” (1930-1980) all point to the quite American dilemma of civic ideals running dead up against business interests. And he is especially attentive to the racial and socioeconomic tensions that this dilemma produced.

Alas, the inner conflict continues. Over this past weekend, Philadelphia magazine posted “A Challenge to Our Most Influential Philadelphians,” an essay by Tom McGrath urging that Philadelphia’s business community take a harder look at its civic responsibilities to the city. With a sigh, I note that McGrath’s remedy seems to be, like that for other cities, a greater emphasis on “innovative entrepreneurism” or “entrepreneurial innovation” — meaningless marketspeak that seem to refer to a new emphasis on technology and the service industry — which promise no clear solution to Philadelphia’s problems with public education and infrastructure. This new emphasis may attract new business to the city (for example, the establishment of Amazon’s second national headquarters there), but that attraction will be founded on things like tax abatements and other gifts to business and corporations. Good for the upper-middle and middle classes of course; not so good, though, for most of the rest of the population, which will continue to be economically squeezed until those tax abatements expire. It would be better for Philadelphia if Amazon established new distribution warehouses in the city instead of a shiny glass corporate tower; at least then the company would create hundreds if not thousands of jobs for unskilled labor, jobs profoundly necessary for the health of urban neighborhoods and the marginalized formerly working-class workforce. There is enough warning in Simon’s book that such band-aids will create less, rather than more, affluence in the Philadelphia communities and neighborhoods that desperately need it.

The history of Philadelphia uniquely reflects the nation’s. Neither arose organically like the cities and nation-states of Europe; both were deliberately founded in the contexts of rebellion and escape from religious prejudice, and no other country in the world sets as one of its primary concerns the “pursuit of happiness” in its founding documents — a happiness that, perhaps inevitably, remains frustratingly out-of-reach for most of its citizens. For this reason alone, as well as for many others, the city’s history retains its relevance for the rest of us.

Simon’s writing is pellucidly clear, and the text is graced by several well-chosen illustrations and photographs, as well as a few instructive population tables at the end of the book. That said, Simon concludes with an ambivalent envoi:

[In 2016] more than four hundred thousand people survived on incomes below the poverty line. While the city became more diverse in the aggregate, it remained as segregated as ever at the neighborhood level. … The city had limited options to address community needs, particularly for its large impoverished population. … Business leadership seems preoccupied with Center City and reducing the taxes on business, but Philadelphia will be a successful community in the twenty-first century only if public and private capital invest in education, social welfare, and housing needs beyond the glamour of Center City.

From Simon’s book to the ears of Tom McGrath’s “Influentials,” one hopes. Not investment in technological innovation, but investment in innovative urban and community planning, will provide for a renaissance in Philadelphia, as Simon’s history suggests. In the meantime, lovers of Philadelphia can trace the historical possibilities of this renaissance — as well as more than a few cautionary tales — in Simon’s Philadelphia: A Brief History. It’s available now from Amazon.

For my birthday last week I treated myself to watching 1776, the 1972 film adaptation of the Sherman Edwards/Peter Stone musical about the creation of the Declaration of Independence. It’s about as accurate as a musical comedy about the Declaration can be, what with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others singing and prancing around Independence Mall, built on a Hollywood back-lot; Wikipedia has a substantive list of the considerable liberties taken by the musical to history, and critic Roger Ebert was decidedly negative about the film. Nevertheless it still retains a great deal of silly charm, and as even The Columbia Companion to American History on Film concedes, “few [of the inaccuracies] are very troubling.” 1776 was the ur-Hamilton in a way, an attempt to render early American history palatable to those who may feel it rather dry and boring; as Hamilton anachronistically uses hip-hop to get its musical points across, 1776‘s score is more reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, fifes and drums added to the arrangements, than Mozart, a genuine contemporary of the Founding Fathers (though there are still enough gavottes and waltzes to go around). And I still find most of the performances delightful. To me, John Adams will always be William Daniels, never Paul Giamatti.

I first saw 1776 upon its original release in 1972, when I was ten years old. It was released then with a G rating; these days, what with its occasional swearing, sexual innuendo, and bathroom humor, it would likely earn a PG (perhaps we live in more, not less, innocent times today). But I was already familiar with Old City Philadelphia and its environs to a certain degree. I was born in center city — at Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce Streets, which itself was founded in 1751 — and visited there very often. My family lived in the city’s outskirts, but because my father’s parents still lived on Fairmount Avenue in the Northern Liberties section of the city, we made it into town just about every weekend, and my brother and I were dragged along to Independence Mall, the Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House, Elfreth’s Alley, and other historical points of interest before we were ten. So I have rather deep roots in the city.

As the years went by I investigated Philadelphia more and more on my own. I live in New York now, and New York has its own history, but it isn’t living history to the extent that Philadelphia’s is. Just getting from one place to another in downtown Philadelphia — from home to work, say, or a night out on South Street — you regularly passed Carpenter’s Hall and the State House, these buildings still carefully maintained in an 18th century style, especially around 1976, the nation’s bicentennial, when Philadelphia expected an onrush of tourists that never really materialized. A part of the bicentennial celebration was a tab version of 1776 performed in an outdoor theatre on the Mall through the summer of ’76.

I watched 1776 last week with the Declaration of Independence fresh in my mind. Turning from that film to the New York Times political headlines the next day, I was reminded of this observation from Henry Adams, John Adams’ great-grandson, who wrote about President Ulysses S. Grant in his 1918 autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. Adams refers to himself in his memoirs in the third person:

What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called — and should actually and truly be — the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as common-place as Grant’s own common-places to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

And that was Grant, 100 years before Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump. Henry Adams can thank his God that he died in 1918, before this recent rush of evidence disproving evolution.

To fill in the film’s gaps and as a corrective to its inaccuracies, I’ve also been reading Richard Beeman’s Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776, a popular history of the events leading up to the Declaration. It’s quite the page-turner and I recommend it highly. As I read it, two things are occurring to me.

First, as Henry Adams suggests, Adams, Jefferson, Hancock, and the others were undoubtedly great men: Philadelphia from 1760 to 1800 was one of those unique locations in history to be blessed with people who participated in an intelligent, radical rethinking of the human spirit. The Declaration was not law, to be sure — it was propaganda directed at the world. But what effective propaganda it was. Of course, it reflects the flaws of its creators as well, its attitudes to slavery and women chief among them — though even here the founders allowed within the Constitution itself a way to amend it through the years; it was a living document. The Declaration, and the Constitution that would follow a decade later, made America unique among the modern nations in that its founding was based upon principles and ideals. That those principles and ideals were laid out in two documents that it may take you about two hours to read carefully is something of a miracle. It’s the only modern nation to come with an owner’s manual, and unlike the owner’s manual that came with your microwave, it reaches occasional poetic heights that it would behoove us to re-examine today.

Second, these ideals and principles are still clearly in the air. They are a part of our basic belief system as a nation and a people — religious tolerance, open discussion, a free press, the need for representative deliberation, but most especially, I think, for the right to agitate and become radicals against tyrannical powers of government. Eventually a “wait-and-see” attitude towards George III became impossible and unconscionable, a crime against the rights of man. They are as much in the air as history palpably surrounds you on the streets of Old City Philadelphia.

I often wonder whether such documents could have been created anywhere but Philadelphia in the late 18th century. Philadelphia is itself unique in world history, a city founded upon Quaker principles of religious tolerance, self-reliance, simplicity, humility, and the certainty of an Inner Light in each and every individual regardless of race, gender, or talent. Those principles fell by the wayside rather quickly — William Penn last saw Philadelphia in 1701, and even then the tide of immigration was revising those religious principles in the name of expansion, democracy, and commerce. But even now, walking Philadelphia’s streets, there is something of that sentiment still available to anyone willing to recognize it. But of course you do have to acknowledge it. And that, too, takes humility. Both of my children were born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village — they are native New Yorkers and always will be. But, in my own way, I’m a native Philadelphian, and always will be. That said, I can’t wait until I have the opportunity to drag them around Independence Hall as well. And hell, 1776 is a musical — maybe they’ll even enjoy that one day.