Mocking German Things Mummers Philadelphia - Ach Du Lieber "Fitzheimer Band" January 1, 1909 - 246-254 N Broad Street (pictured)

Library of Congress - Bain Collection

1925

Architectural point of reference. 1925 photo identifying Hahnemann Hospital Annex on left at 238-240 N. Broad St. - S/B 234-240 N. Broad St.

Building on right seen in 1909 Library of Congress image of "Fitzheimer's Band" - 242-248 N. Broad Street.

In L.O.C. image on right is image of a building sign "Gawthrop & Wister" selling "Elmore" automobiles. Image of 1908 Elmore below. Gawthrop & Wister's official addresss in business directories is at 244 N. Broad Street in the middle of the white building on right in 1925 photo, used as garage and sales office apparently by Gawthrop & Wister at the same time in 1909 photo. A separate office down N. Broad Street from garage with the capacity of 80 automobiles per the 1916 Sanborn Insurance Maps.

1908 Elmore Automobile Model 40


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Remember when Trump Fakerism started with Obama Birtherism (Racism)

Birther Fraud Lady – Who is this undocumented Person?

Well I see this thing on MSNBC. MSNBC shows the one reeler and passes it off as journalism without the who, what, where, when, why of the old classic journalism.

Joe the Plumber’s Mom gets up at a town hall meeting of Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware and waives her invalid hospital issued birth certificate and then begins to rant about how Barack Obama is not a citizen of the USA but rather Kenya – (the GOP and the new racism).

MSNBC shows this amusing little tidbit and is starting to practice third rate journalism on the way to the fourth and fifth levels of Murdockian half truths and lies like on Fox News and the fat drug addict on radio.





I too was undocumented some few years back when I tried to exchange my Pennsylvania license for a New York State license having moving back here. In order to register my car, I needed a valid driver’s license. In order to have a valid driver’s license I needed a state issued, embossed with a raised seal, birth certificate.

I have had a New York State driver’s license on and off for thirty years depending on when I was a resident there. My old driver’s license and its same driver license number for thirty years could not be reissued without a valid state issued birth certificate to prove my place and date of birth and my citizenship.

My hospital issued birth certificate was now considered invalid. It had been valid forty years ago to get my original passport. But then and there and with all the bullshit Homeland Security rules and regulations – I was undocumented in my native land - temporarily a man without a country.

I had let my passport lapse for too many years. It was no longer valid as ID or proof of American citizenship. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place and a deadline to register my car before I would break the law on that count for not having a valid car registration.

Finally and reluctantly I went on line and ordered a Pennsylvania issued certificate to save some time. It still took a couple of weeks to get it. LOL

So when I see Joe the Plumber’s Mom on You Tube shouting about the undocumented state of Obama’s black butt, I know that this broad has never left this country or the house she has lived in for decades. One day she will try to get a passport or move in with the kids across the stateline and not be able to transfer her driver’s license – BECAUSE she is an undocumented person, with a phony hospital issued birth certificate, living in our great and safe and no longer totally free land.

While we are at - have any of you “Birthers” seen Jesus’s birth certificate lately? 

July 23, 2009:

https://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2009/07/birther-fraud-lady-who-is-this.html




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Licking Blocks of Ice on a Hot Day - NYC - July 6, 1912 - Library of Congress, Bain Collection

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Trump Knows The "Type of Woman" He Prefers 2 Rape

Can we be proud as Americans because our President knows the "type of victim" he prefers to rape?

G.O.P. party of Trump Family Values?


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Olivet Presbyterian Chapel / Church Philadelphia - 22nd and Wallace / Mt. Vernon - 1858

Photo, handwriting on side: "Rev. Newberry's Church (Presbyter.) 22d and Mt.Vernon Sts. July, 1858"

Photo source: Free Library of Philadelphia digital collection

The Presbyterian Churches of Philadelphia, 1895

1895


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Gone for the Summer - See you hopefully Soon

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Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament Convent and School - 836 N. Broad Street

1938


Ran into the closing article of the closing of the oldest RC Afro-American Parish in Philly at 12th and Lombard.

Saint Peter Claver Church

Saying Goodbye to Philadelphia's first black Catholic church

Which got me onto an old mental data bank search on my memory to identify a RC Catholic school where I tutored some students in the late 1960s.

This is one of those memory things I have been meaning to research for some time. Problem was the starting point and a bunch of strung together bits and pieces of memory. Of memories from high school and a semester of going to some poor parish in North Philly to tutor a child for an hour or so on a Thursday with his reading.

The bits and pieces have to do with driving with a bunch of fellow high school students under the label of "community service corp" who got convinced into volunteering for the tutoring task in an afternoon Chemistry lecture with Father Reese. Father Reese was also the driver of the one school bus used for the sports teams and going to their events etc. And my Chemistry grades sucked, so I thought it prudent to volunteer for the Chemistry professor's last minute plea to show up at two schools in North Philly for the tutoring programs there.

Freshman Chemistry btw was lab, first period Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays and in the winter the windows were wide open same as the rest of the year to no doubt vent the gases that might build up in a laboratory. And Tuesday and Thursday fifth period after lunch in the Chemistry lecture hall where two freshman Chemistry classes shared one teacher and lecture.

The thing is this, about twenty students packed into this rickety red school bus, the school color, and I remember that it got bought with green stamps in a high school wide drive my older brother got involved with as a student in the same high school. Never been on a school bus and did not realize how shaky and noisy one of these things were along with their tight little seats.

The first ten students got dropped off somewhere along the way, which I do not remember in terms of geography or architecture. The longer ride down Broad Street was a mystery ride to me. Along the way, some kid mentioned that those buildings were Temple University and soon afterward we were in a dark alley of a street one block over west of Broad. Then into some very basic building, the smell of pine oil hitting my nostrils as we entered. It the smell of pine oil that was one of all institutions or schools and was a normal smell to me in such places.

Never saw the front of the school and the thing is that this was a poor parish. One could tell. The school over a basement had four classrooms on two floors above that basement and in retrospect I cannot remember any windows. Light was from florescent lighting above. The four classrooms taught grades 1-8 or maybe 1-6. Which meant that at the very least, two grades shared a classroom which meant a lot of down time for half the class in reading or writing assignments as the other half learned at their level.  Like the old fashioned one room school houses in rural America and colonial America etc.

I had not been able to document my experience back then. In my mind, I thought the school was "Saint James". But in retrospect I think I was talking or assigned to my tasks in the school by a Sister Saint James and or Sister James, an Afro-American nun in her late twenties and or early thirties. That after a semester of tutoring on Thursday afternoon, Sister James I will call her, announced that the school was closing. To which I optimistically asked if they were moving into a new school. To which she said no. The school was closing. I was not too up on social issues. One of the articles on the closing of St. Peter Claver Parish mentions that black Catholic Churches suffered in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, no doubt implying that Black Catholics no longer needed to be segregated per say, whatever.

My memory thing conflicted with the fact that "Sister James" was black. That I knew that the order of nuns Mother Katherine Drexel founded to teach the Native "Indian" and "Colored" population had no, and accepted no applicants from those demographic communities in its early days. This was another factor in trying to piece together where exactly did I tutor in 1967.

I recently finally found an article in the online version (new?) of the Catholic Standard and Times regarding the dedication date of the Annex built for Northeast Catholic High for boys in the 1960s. I still went, with search words like north broad street or black school etc and could find no hits on that site, its existence and sadly no mention of its closing in June 1967.

But after the use of maps and using the Philly History photos of the recycled church at 712 N. Broad Street, first Presbyterian from 1878, Roman Catholic from 1910-1972 and lately Baptist, that the RC church of Our Lady of Blessed Sacrament sent me searching for a school which through the process was four rooms tacked onto the back of an old brownstone mansion (convent) and side yard (school yard?) of the Mission Convent of Mother Drexel's Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament pictured above from a side angle.


Broad and Parrish West Side

Philadelphia County Land Use Map 1962

Inquirer 18 Nov 1951

Central Presbyterian Church - 1895

Colored Catholic Church - 704-14 North Broad Street - 1925

Present


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Spinning Room - Philadelphia - 1910 -- Free Library of Philadelphia Digital Collection

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Teachings of Jesus and Christianity Under Attack on Trump's Border - Arizona - Scott Daniel Warren - "you gave me shelter when I needed it"

Scott Daniel Warren

Good Samaritan In Tucson Attacked by Federal Government

June 11, 2019, 10:48 PM EDT

By Associated Press

TUCSON, Ariz. — A U.S. jury could not reach a verdict Tuesday against a border activist charged with conspiracy to transport and harbor migrants in a trial that humanitarian aid groups said would have wide implications on their work.

Defense attorneys argued that Scott Daniel Warren, a 36-year-old college geography instructor, was simply being kind by providing two migrants with water, food and lodging when he was arrested in early 2018. He faced up to 20 years in prison.

But prosecutors maintained the men were not in distress and Warren conspired to transport and harbor them at a property used for providing aid to migrants in an Arizona town near the U.S.-Mexico border.

The case played out as humanitarian groups say they are coming under increasing scrutiny under President Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies.

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"Only One Apiece" Toys - Civil War - 1865 - G.A. Schwarz, toy and fancy emporium, 1006 Chestnut Street, Philada. - Free Library of Phila. Digital Collection

(Click on images to enlarge.)

Interior view showing display cases and cabinets. Baby coaches and rocking horses line the aisle. Statuary and vases are displayed on counter tops.

G.A. Schwarz, importer of German, French and English toys & fancy goods. Fancy china ware, English cutlery, velocipedes, gigs, &c., &c. wholesale and retail.


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Bishop Sheen Being Evicted From His Crypt in Saint Patrick's Cathedral NYC - Bones Worth More in Illinois Religious Market Than NYC Market

Archdiocese of New York gives up fight over Bishop Sheen’s remains

Door to the bishop's crypt under the altar btw opposite a door leading to the sacristy and altar boy's changing room (wink, nod). Millionaire banker Eugene Kelly who started his substantial fortune in the gold fields of California in 1849 paid for half the original cathedral and got denied a crypt promised to him in the "private chapel", the original "crypt" under the Lady's Chapel, now rented out by the hour in the basement. Countess Annie Leary promised a spot there too but her niece ripped her off and never gave the archdiocese the $200,000 promised in her will in 1919 for said purpose. Miss Anna Leary cited over years for keeping two houses, in Manhattan and Queens, full of cats and dogs which the ASPCA had to clean out and destroy every ten years or so for neglect ("cruelty"). Miss Leary died alone and blind, aged 91, and in the care, in the house of her housekeeper in Hastings on Hudson in 1965 and worth half a million dollars and without a will. Oh the bricks and faux stone facades of St. Patrick's have a lot of tales to tell. Meow.


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Eric and Don Trump Jr Celebrate Gay Pride Day in Flaming Purple Igoe Inn County Claire Ireland - On the House - Check is in the Post Mates

  
Black and Tans always 1/2 price at the bar. 



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Religious Fright - Fear of Religion

Rather than move the world forward in a positive manner, many aspects of religion no matter how “peaceful” your one true religion is, many aspects of religion are a redundancy decades or centurties after secular institutions began to function in the place of ancient religious insitutions such as courts, hospitals, universities and civil government.

Indeed, I think that religion here in the west is just hanging around after it has been become obsolete on the secular civil level. As such what good is it except to clutter those secular institutions with superstition and useless remembrances of the past.

The past is the past. The Modern World is now. A Post-Modern world is tomorrow. There seems to be a lot dead weight regarding religion trying to drag us away from modernity.

That dragging people into a mindless past with Sharia Laws, Islamic or Christian, is anarchy – trying to destroy the secular real, functioning, world around us.

In the news I see sad things in that seven people were mowed down in gun fire at a Coptic Christian Christmas Mass celebration in Egypt. Fully 10% of Egypt’s 80 old million souls are Coptic Christian which these days comes close to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in their beliefs.

There are also fire bombings at Christian churches in Malaysia, an Islamic Country, where a court ruling said that it was legal for Christians, a minority, to use the word Allah as the word for their G-d in Christendom. Semantics. Bloodshed. Misunderstanding.

I am looking briefly at the concept of post modern Christianity with various mainstream and evangelical fundamentalist branches of the Christ tree trying to rethink and retool not to a modern world – but a post modern world – whatever that means. The here and now is modern enough for me.

I will say that dialogue if it exists at the high CEO level of church entities doesn’t talk to the little people on the ground on how to rethink and retool- sounds like I am talking automobiles in Detroit – more so than churches – Religion is like General Motors – only the empty factories give evidence of a once great human enterprise. Empty churches – empties factories – Obsolete thinking! Gross mismanagement of purpose.

The RC church, the so-called power house of Christian entities that should be setting the pace on post modernism, if there is such a thing, is still wallowing in the 32 years of Vatican mismanagement. Still languishing in the disaster reign of Pius IX in the nineteenth century who started the war on modernism (like a similar war on terror – it will never end).

In fact, Vatican II and all its negative fallout to this day forty odd years later is partially a result of trying to undo 32 years of RC/Christian gross mismanagement of humanity and its spirituality. The Vatican likes electricity and flush toilets (very modern things) but everything else that is not medieval is Verboten.

Indeed, Benedict’s attack on Islam, a new holy war, his infamously incompetent and tactless reference to Islam in the 14th century in his Regensburg Lecture in September 2006 is something mainstream Christianity will have to deal with in terms of collateral damages for decades and perhaps centuries to come. Perhaps bloodshed in the news today in Egypt and Malaysia has its direct roots in that very same speech.

While one part of Christianity wants to address interfaith issues and improve the perception of Jesus’ message to the ages, bumbling hack Vatican bureaucrats are still debating the bloody Crusades!

There is a point in time long ago where the secular world took over most institutions in the West. Rather than give the devil his due, I would say that most of Christianity lives in the delusion of the past before street lights, electricity, running water, penicillin, birth control and all those other truly evil things of a modern world.

Religion, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism Etc. must look at reality first in the present and assess where they have been or where they are going. Otherwise, the coming rapture happens to them all - as they get whisked away into obscurity and history. Good riddance.

The Coptic Christian killings above is indicative of the dysfunctionalism of Islam in Egypt. Before Obama’s visit to Cairo earlier this year, the hack cronies of the Government decided that the pigs being raised by Christians in Cairo would cause a national swine flu epidemic even though there was little or no scientific data to support such a slap in the face of the Coptic minority population which eats pork.

The pigs were confiscated and destroyed. Compensation from the Government did not materialize. What would you expect – Justice?

The Moral of the story of Egyptian Muslims harassing Coptic Christians in Cairo - The pigs used to eat the garbage in the streets. The pigs are gone. Now all of Cairo smells of rotting garbage. If you want to be post-modern and or even modern world, start a secular garbage collection bureaucracy before you impose your stinking religious prejudices on the entire world. Think first – cause and effect.

The west and the Christians can learn from the lack of tolerance to others in the smug present world moving into a future world. That world will likely see the decline and disappearance of all religion because the guy in the back end of the Donkey costume does not know how to signal or cooperate with the other guy in front end of the suit. Or vice versa.

We are all interdependent in this world -“joined at the hip”- if it takes a hundred years to start up an interfaith dialogue, guess what, the secular will survive while your religious world crumbles and disappears.

Religions will come and go in the post-modern secular world. Whether there will be any religions left in that post-modern world? Well - one third of the passengers of the Titanic did after all make it all the way to New York.

In the meantime, garbage will continue to be picked up in a timely secular fashion.

Reality is real. Religion frightens me.

T.C.C.,January 9, 2010

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Francis Cardinal Spellman - Patron Saint of Closeted Clergy?

Looking at the agony of some closeted clergy who can’t leave their job and or vocation, they have no job skills. And quite frankly they have never touched a child or adolescent in the rounds of their duties.

Looking at the heartbreak of young men who cannot lie to themselves about their natural sexuality, who cannot pretend that they are not homosexual in their life outlook or deny their birthright. They do not want to be clergy living a lie. That is one reason the clergy is dying. For centuries it has always been the "odd" son that got foisted off the family meal ticket and into Holy Orders.

Looking for an image to match the hypocrisy of the self serving American Bishops, trying for close to a decade now, to keep throwing shit against the wall in hopes that it will stick and find a sufficient scapegoat, to blame the clergy child sex abuse scandal on, nothing sticks except the truth.

Mismanagement and not caring about humanity has marked the American Catholic Hierarchy for decades.

The magisterium of the RC church has always been trickle down from the top. Arch-conservatives such as Francis Cardinal Spellman set the tone of things to come, failure, in the American Catholic church when he said “Change will not get past the Statue of Liberty” at Vatican II to his cronies.

When the John Jay College/USCCB whitewash talks about priests not properly trained in the 1940s and 1950s and not being able to function, they only scratch the surface of ten more needed studies on human sexuality and the repressed state of it in the RC church.

“Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said most of the abusive priests were ordained in the 1940s and 50s and were not properly trained to confront the social upheavals of the 1960s.”

Interesting point. But who was in charge of the American Catholic Church in the 40s, 50s and 60s or set the tone for the whole nation. None other than Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, first among equals among American Catholic clergy and very clever and very ambitious to push that church’s foreign born agenda.

“Franny” was the success role model of every Irish Catholic boy in the Seminary who wanted to be rich, respected and powerful. And yeah there was that ritual and Jesus thing too. But the real power was in raising money from rich friends to build schools, hospitals, universities and churches too.

The baby boom of post WWII meant that you had to crank up the seminary machine and spit hundreds and thousands of new priests out on an annual basis to maintain all that new church property, schools, hospitals, universities and churches too.

On that point, the John Jay College report may be right. But then again what the Vatican is presently embracing with pandering to the right wing SSPX party in the church is probably a mistake and an unintended cup of hemlock.

Grinding out priests out of makeshift seminaries in South America, Africa and Asia is setting the stage for the final refuge of the RC church and also the final death throes of that church using the Spellman model of church business success to sell the product. It is a defective dysfunctional model of that product, because child abuse among untrained and sexually repressed, closeted, celibate clergy will produce the same results in the rest of world that it has done here in America in the past half century.

I remember attending the Army Navy Game in 1967 with my father in Philly. The loud speaker made the announcement that Francis Cardinal Spellman, Vicar General of the Armed Forces, had died. The crowd was momentarily silent and then went back to its business.

I asked my father who Cardinal Spellman was. He gave me that “don’t ask” non verbal Irish look. It was also the look you might get when asking about uncle Fred who you never met. It was that don’t ask about your crazy queer uncle in the attic look. I shut up.

Indeed, Cardinal Spellman’s taste for chorus boys was no secret amongst Irish Catholics it would seem. The MSM complied with the conspiracy to keep quiet as well on the subject of the biggest queen in America, red dress and all, living in the Bishop’s Palace at 50th St. and Madison Avenue in New York City on the grounds of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as Archbishop of the New York Diocese.

Perhaps the present political culture wars started in the thirties when people like Joseph P. Kennedy, Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) and Franny Spellman sat down to dinner in Boston to plot the silence of radio populist Father Charles Coughlin and plot other political strategy for the 1936 re-election of FDR. But this is not really a history lesson, is it?

An aside, I don’t think that J. Edgar Hoover was as big a queen as Francis, as some say. J. might have been a closeted gay and maybe even asexual. I don’t think that he wore dresses. I think those stories about J. Edgar are exaggerated and revenge after that blackmailing bureaucratic snake went to his eternal reward and have been perpetuated by his many, many, many enemies.

Indeed, the dysfunction of recent American culture seems to stem from the McCarthy era. Everybody knows that Joe McCarthy was a tortured repressed closet gay and only married to have a beard wife. Another crony of Joe Kennedy, former gangster and bootlegger, and father of a future Catholic (first and only, thank God) U.S. President.

The overtone of the present culture war is not so much about gay or suppressed gay sexuality as it is about suppressed sexuality among Christians who have a mindset that all sex is dirty. It is an immature view that the rest of the world is not aware of from a distance. But if the American Empire falls tomorrow and people, future historians, ask why. One primary reason was that honest discourse in the public arena had to always talk around the elephant in the room, and that is the Christian distorted view of human sexuality. Laws against women, laws against gays, they are all laws against God’s gift to humanity – sexuality.

In a sense there was one great conspiracy among the RCs or the Irish Catholics in general to get a RC and or Irish Catholic into the White House. And if that meant covering up everybody’s personal flaws - of McCarthy, Kennedy, Spellman, well it worked. Don’t ask, don’t tell worked quite well for centuries among the rich and the elites of governments and church hierarchies.

There is an incredible amount of silence and lack of published documentation about Franny Spellman’s open secret sexuality. Even the New York Times kept silent. Now that was power to be feared for the NYT to be silenced back then when that paper still had a backbone.

So when the present hierarchy of the American Catholic Church want to blame child abuse on the 40s, 50s and 60s, let’s also have an open discussion about celibacy and closeted clergy and the patron saint of closeted “celibate” clergy, let’s start talking about Saint Franny, our gay uncle in America’s history attic. The truth could set you free. 



T.C.C. May 24, 2011