September 20, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Opinion

Road work worries

Chestnut Hill is a remarkably small neighborhood. At approximately 10,000 people, it’s a third the population of West Mt. Airy, which has nearly 30,000. Lately, however, given the regularity of construction equipment, this small neighborhood sometimes seems a lot bigger.

All summer, construction on the two banks coming to W. Highland Avenue, Citibank and Valley Green Bank (but mostly Citibank), has made driving around the block a regular challenge. At times, with all the trucks in the road and the noise, you get the sense you’re in midtown Manhattan.

Now just as construction begins to subside for fall openings of both bank branches, PennDOT is beginning a substantial project on Germantown Avenue, a $17 million reconstruction that will, at times, close down portions of the busy thoroughfare for weeks at a time,

Certainly, the construction is going to affect Mt. Airy businesses and Mt. Airy neighbors a lot more than Chestnut Hill. The owners of the largest businesses on the stretch of Germantown Avenue that will be disrupted the most — Trolley Car Diner, Brewer’s Outlet and Cresheim Cottage Café — have said they’re anxious the disruption in traffic will hurt their businesses. Mt Airy business leader and Trolley Car Diner owner Ken Weinstein told Jennifer Katz that if promised funding to help businesses weather the construction did not come through, he’d do whatever it took to stop construction.

Weinstein’s anxiety is not misplaced. The work will definitely reroute a lot of traffic away from the Avenue. If drivers decide to avoid the avenue all together, it will certainly harm businesses like the diner that rely on drive-up traffic.

To a much lesser extent, business owners in Chestnut Hill have a cause for concern. While no businesses in Chestnut Hill will have the hardships of the diner, Brewers Outlet or Cresheim Café, they may see a drop in traffic through the holiday shopping season.

It may be easy to write off concerns that the construction will have a negative impact on Chestnut Hill businesses with the observation that the closure is on one end of the Avenue and that there will be pent of routes around it.

By comparison, however, when the Germantown Avenue Bridge over the Wissahickon Creek was closed for many years, restricting traffic at the other end of the Avenue, many business owners told me at the time that the believed the closure was hurting business. The sense then was that a majority of traffic was going to Stenton Avenue and bypassing Chestnut Hill all together.

It was not easy to prove a direct correlation between the bridge closing and business then, and it may be just as difficult to prove the same now. However, it’s important to pay attention to the project and consider ways that we might keep shoppers from avoiding the Hill completely.           

Pete Mazzaccaro

Opinion: Germantown transit stations reflect larger malaise
by Jim Foster

If you are not a regular or even occasional patron of the regional rail system from Northwest Philadelphia into center city, you may not have seen at first hand the depressing contrast one finds when the R7 or R8 trains pass from Mt. Airy stations to those within the defined borders of Germantown.

“Shameless neglect” are the only words for the worst of the lot, the Germantown Station on the R7, a nearly isolated overgrown shambles that would make anyone nervous to use in the daytime, let alone after dark. The smaller Wister Station and the much larger deteriorated hulk at Wayne Junction complete the trio that are by far the worst maintained stations on the entire SEPTA regional rail network.

Not much better are the Germantown Stations on the R8 Line at Queen Lane, the perpetually decaying Chelten Avenue and Tulpehocken ones. How does a community that once was considered so important that two competing railroads built expensive parallel lines only blocks apart (the Reading R7 and Pennsylvania R8) permit these facilities to fall into such disregard?

That anyone would be deterred from regular use of what was once the pride of the American transportation system is an incredible reversal of history. In fact, what today is the R7 line is the exact route of the first passenger-carrying railroad in Pennsylvania and arguably only the second or third in the nation.

When city planners (yes, we definitely had them then) determined where that first railroad was to be built, Germantown was the clear first choice, as it was the suburb held in the highest regard and the most productive economically and socially by a wide margin.

Opened in 1832, the line followed the same route from 9th and Spring Garden streets that it does today, the only change being that it was diverted from the original terminal at Price Street and Germantown Avenue when the line was later extended to Chestnut Hill. The train made the trip to Germantown in an incredible 28 minutes — lightning speed for the time.

By the 1920s one could board any number of express trains to New York at Wayne Junction, and by the late 1930s streamlined air conditioned trains took folks directly to New York or Washington from that station without changing trains and on schedules faster than one could approach today by auto and turnpike.

Today Germantown is by far the most neglected community in this city when it comes to retarded development, numerous expensive failed studies that produced few effective results, and a real estate debacle second to none in the loss of productive tax-paying residential and commercial enterprise. It takes hard work to keep this managed decay a deterrent to development, but our local political system wants to keep it that way.

It is always easier to control a dependent community. Let us never confuse control with governance. Non-producing and deteriorating properties are a part of the landscape in virtually every sub-community in Germantown, and their presence deters even the most dedicated of serious investors from aggressively reinvigorating this most worthy example of historical survival in the United States.

Manayunk, a fairly unremarkable mill town, blossoms into full-fledged renaissance far outpacing its original history, and Northern Liberties and Brewerytown do the same, as well as portions of other Philadelphia neighborhoods, none of which has anything close to the character, history and architectural diversity of Germantown.

There seems to be no limit to how many pubic and private dollars perform these urban miracles in relatively short time frames while Germantown runs a steady downhill course from its second-only-to-center city prominence as a shopping and residential district in the 1950s. There is no other explanation other than the lack of political will to spark the resurgence.

Instead of well-planned, carefully-selected enterprises that will jump-start progressive redevelopment, we have the largest city concentration of subsidized and substandard care centers and halfway houses that often are poorly run and regularly appear in the community without prior legalization.

Recent Philadelphia Inquirer exposés pointed to Germantown Settlement enterprises (a large group of subsidized non-profits with common management) as being among the worst in the city and still receiving funding despite multiple failures in performance and record keeping. Despite many millions of study and development dollars that have been channeled through the 8th District over the last 15 years, nothing resembling a cohesive development plan has emerged.

What we do have, however, are unfinished projects, along with failed and foreclosed facilities standing empty, consuming, rather than paying, tax dollars. The well-attended Philadelphia Planning Commission’s neighborhood inclusion project, held Sept. 13, only underscored these points.

While the community meeting was intended to center around the long-overdue rebuilding of the SEPTA stations in Germantown mentioned above, the meeting actually served as a conduit for all manner of citizen complaints focusing on specific long-term problems in all Germantown neighborhoods that threaten the quality of life. The study groups produced a continuous stream of outpouring from citizens with clear levels of outrage.

The meeting went from focusing on the stations and their present shortcomings to the perception of those who live here that the stations only mirror what is in the bone marrow of Germantown — uncontrolled decay with little remedial action that would bring security and improved quality of life to these communities.

No one in his or her right mind would wait for a train before or after rush hour at most Germantown stations. Some of those who were “urban planners” at that meeting seemed oblivious of these realities, and one questions whether they ever visited the sites personally.

Wayne Junction should be reconstructed, possibly turning the architecturally historic original ticket office/restaurant into a combination station and tourist center for all of Northwest Philadelphia. Surface transit lines should loop at the junction in well-secured adjacent shelters where interchange would be facilitated.

A manned tourist bureau should be open at regular hours providing information for the multitude of historically-designated buildings in the Northwest, with maps and special fare tickets that would allow tourists on-and-off use of surface systems to access many of them in one day.

The long neglected and overgrown property next to the Germantown Station (a former freight yard) should be developed and, again, all surface lines in that part of Germantown should loop near that station for easy access and to encourage use of mass transit. Lincoln Drive can only handle so many cars and a new expressway development should be considered out of the question in this urban setting.

While we focus on transit in this area, we must not overlook the results of shortsighted city and SEPTA management that for years dialed out city neighborhoods in a quest for suburban-to-city, in-and-out service with little regard to the changing demographics of work places relative to residence.

On the R7 line, two stations were eliminated in the 1980s that would well serve folks who now live there and work in suburban locales. This is known as the “reverse commute,” and I strongly recommend the reopening of the Tioga and Nicetown stops at Allegheny and Hunting Park avenues, respectively. Residents could access every regional rail line from those stations and avoid long surface travel in many cases.

Intentionally bypassing and neglecting the inner-city service on these lines has become all too obvious when compared to the service and facilities elsewhere.

It is time we took back our city and its services from those who run it more for personal gain and the interests of “selected citizens.”

Jim Foster of Mt. Airy is an independent candidate for City Council’s 8th District.

From Darby to the African Savannah: Meeting Loren Eiseley, part 1
by HUGH GILMORE

The road that leads us to become who we are is seldom straight. 

If it weren’t for Tom the barber back in Darby, and all his girlie magazines, I never would have had my life turned upside down by the great writer and philosopher Loren Eiseley.

At the age of 10, back in Darby, I started going to Tom’s Barber Shop near Fifth and Main. I should call it Tom’s Kingdom, I suppose. He ruled that place like a petulant prince. He was probably only in his 30s then and he was Italian in a way that seemed exotic in our Irish neighborhood. He oiled his hair heavily and combed it straight back and barked orders at us kids and joked crudely in such a way that you always watched what you said or did in there. He could snap at any moment. When Al Pacino arose as an actor, he so resembled Tom in appearance that my first reaction on seeing him was to brace for a slap to the back of my head and an order to sit still. I can’t see the scene in Scarface where Pacino holds up his machine gun and says, “Say hello to my little friend,” without being reminded of Tom and his electric hair trimmer.

One thing you did not do if you were a kid was touch Tom’s girlie magazines. The problem was that he had no other kind. Every table beside every chair held a sprawled pile of the men’s mags of the day — items whose covers featured women with hips and bosoms and tummy flesh and whose titles bore names like Adam, Rogue, Whisper, Wink, She, Man, Jaguar and Duke. These magazines were strictly no-no’s for boys. Any kid caught picking one up, or trying to hide one inside a newspaper was yelled at or taunted in the most embarrassing way.

By trial and error I discovered that Tom allowed me to read Esquire magazine. Early in its history Esquire had a girly, racy edge, but it had toned down by the time I started browsing it. Maybe that’s why he let me read it. I was about 15 by then. Every issue had a semi-nude photographic feature, a Vargas-drawn pin-up and a gushing tribute to the likes of actresses such as Arlene Dahl, Audrey Hepburn or Gwen Verdon.

Coincidental to Tom’s original motives for subscribing to it (and mine too), Esquire was a sophisticated magazine that published many of the best writers of the day. Examples included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Gallico, Ben Hecht, Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley. At various periods in its history it published regular theater reviews by George Jean Nathan, book reviews by Dorothy Parker and movie reviews by Dwight MacDonald. I slipped into reading the stories and articles and, quite by accident, was introduced to an intellectual world wider and grander than any I could have imagined.

I read Esquire before, and even after, my haircuts through high school and college and the two years before I got married and left home. Out of sight, out of mind where magazines were concerned, I did not read any issues of Esquire for a while, not till I had a “grown up” notion one day.

I had moved to a rented apartment on the top floor of one of those beautiful gray fieldstone houses that dot Wayne Avenue in Germantown, near Lincoln Drive. When a man married and established his household in those days, several components were necessary to make matters official. A wife, of course. And furniture and drapes and dishes and a vacuum cleaner. But a man also needed, once these humdrum necessities were in place, at least two more things. While women aspire to “a room of one’s own,” most men aspire to “an arm chair of one’s own.” Something to ease into and train to one’s bodily dimensions by sitting and reading.

And once that comfy chair was in place, a man had to have subscriptions to magazines — the most absolute confirmation that he was now a stable, law-abiding, man-of-the-house. Subscriptions required an address. An address implied stability. My first subscription was to Esquire magazine.

Those were the heady 60s when Esquire helped establish what was known then as “The New Journalism.” Writers such as Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe appeared regularly in Esquire’s pages.

The covers were audacious then. Sonny Liston as Santa Claus. Muhammed Ali shot full of arrows in a parody of Mantegna’s The Death of St. Sebastian. Lieutenant Calley of My Lai infamy posed with a bunch of smiling Vietnamese children. A Hubert Humphrey puppet sitting on LBJ’s knee. A boy eating dinner before a TV showing the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. They helped boost Esquire’s circulation from 500,000 to nearly 2,000,000 readers.

Throw in the annual “Dubious Achievement Awards” with the ubiquitous picture of Nixon captioned “Why is this Man Laughing?” and you’d have to say that Esquire was the number one wiseguy magazine for young, aspiring intellectuals in its day.

All the more reason I was intrigued to open the April 1967 issue of Esquire and be confronted by photos of Loren Eiseley, a stern-faced man in his 60s staring out at me. Eiseley’s heavily-creased, strong-nosed, tight-lipped face, half in shadow, fascinated me. Why had he been photographed that way? Did it say something about him? I was curious.

I’d never seen nor heard of him before. The article asked the question “Could America’s best prose writer be a scientist?” Eiseley, it said, was an archeologist, an anthropologist and a naturalist. And, he wrote essays so beautifully, so poetically, eloquent about his subjects that many people felt he was a better prose writer than anyone else on the contemporary scene. Though such claims are made for many writers today, the notion was fairly novel then.

How could that be? Filled with love for and a devotion to the beauties of British and American literature, I took that statement about Eiseley as a challenge. I’d read something by him and see for myself.

Soon, I’d find a second-hand copy of Eiseley’s The Immense Journey and my life would never be the same.

As for my quest to read 100 books this year, I managed four this week, despite one of them being Denis Johnson’s 613-page Tree of Fire. One of the others was a bathroom book. Another two were gym books that happened to finish up this week. Now at 68 with 106 days left in the year.