Boxing Widow Remarries After Six Months of Mourning - Public Ledger 20 Sept 1916

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Harrowgate Tales - Excerpts

My latest on Kindle - Harrowgate Tales


Excerpts:


Parade in Kensington - Harrowgate Memorial Day Parade


...The biggest event annually in Harrowgate - Kensington was the Memorial Day Parade being that most parents of school aged children in the neighborhood and areas were veterans of WWII and Korea. Old males likely vets of WWI etc. I once marched in Memorial Day Parades in high school with the North(east) Catholic High marching band of which I played Sousaphone.

One performance I personally remember was in a parade that was in Port Richmond, we were bused to different locations that day in a P.T.C. chartered bus. There I saw two amazing things. An old man of about ninety, skinny and tall and wearing what looked like a Boy Scout Uniform with some medals and looking through thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle lenses of his eyeglasses. This old guy was an actual Veteran of the Spanish American War. Small world. There too, this is the late 60's, I saw my English teacher from freshman year who at that time was a seminarian studying to be a priest, teaching on a year long sabbatical of sorts, teaching in our high school for a year, after finishing four years of college in the seminary before continuing with an additional four years of seminary training after this year of teaching. It was after all a teaching religious order and his salary from the archdiocese doubt went to support the order. 

He was no longer in a black cassock but in a white tee shirt, shorts and sandals. She was also with what must have been his girlfriend. He saw me during a break from marching and said hello with no other explanation other than to say hello and ask how Junior year was going etc. I guess he left the seminary for one reason, reasons or another etc. ...


The Long Dark Corridor

...I guess that the religious order had decided to maintain the property until it could be evaluated whether to sell it - use it, convert it etc. I think that maybe about fifteen priests and seminarians used the grand estate as a second faculty house - to relieve overcrowding in the primary faculty house – and commuting by car back and forth to the high school. 

In retrospect I connect some dots (possibly in total error) and perhaps it was the gay section of the original faculty house that went into separate quarters at this white elephant mansion.

Oh this speculation breaks down into two categories: good gays, abstaining from gay sex religious and the bad gays - actually occasionally practicing their natural instincts -

There is not much to this story except for connecting dots and wondering. In the middle of that sophomore year, a young, dynamic, charismatic seminarian teacher died in a car crash coming back from some long distance weekend duties - deacon at some parish etc. I remember his picture in the newspaper and the official speculation that he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car in this "single vehicle collision" - And then my biology teacher, I liked him, died during the summer break.

I suppose I would not be writing this today except that in the next school year, my junior year, a very prissy but not unlikable priest blurted out something in class. Father Tom, a history teacher, said something like a veiled admission regarding the sudden tragic death of Father Ed, the biology teacher. He said something like "wrapping oneself around a highway pillar was indeed a suspicious thing to happen" while talking to the class one day, I think his comments went over many students heads... 

Chapter Two - The Long Dark Corridor

...But I got the A+++.  Been there.  Done that.  Time to move on. Etc. 

I decided then and there. I would drop his course. So much of what he had fed this class so far was his own personal bullshit full of his ambitious plan to one day run the school system downtown which he in fact did one day. I have since read many things about cults and brainwashing and such and “E.” would have made a great Jim Jones in the secular world etc. IMHO. 

I also as I have written this blog for many years have to wonder how ambitious church lady types with penises, how they rise to the top of their professions being perhaps tops and not giving a shit about who gets ground into sausage along the way, especially children.

I also have  to wonder how “E.” built his great education system as the archdiocese, one by one, shut down their inner city schools and high schools.  That glory sometimes is a story, a press release, as the world and or institution dies from attrition.  

Will the last person in the Archdiocese Education Office at “222” kindly turn off the lights as they leave the building forever. 

I also have to wonder how many times how the elites of the Education Department rubbed elbows with the Elites of the hierarchy at board meetings or gatherings over cocktails and how polite church talk and education talk never got mixed with the very real talk of child abuse and criminal cover up emanating from the Cardinal’s penthouse office suite on the top floor above?...

Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery Vandalized in Philly

I used to have a photo(s) of ourselves, family, in fuzzy unfocused "Baby Brownie" Black and White, of ourselves on Memorial Day or the 4th of July picnics at Wissinoming Park in Philly of over fifty years ago. (Wissinoming - Lenni-Lenape word of "duck creek").

The photos might still exist but are in the hands of my gay brother in Phoenix who refuses to share them with me. Still victimizing his younger sibling after all these years and him pushing 70 - whatever. No love lost there.

Wissinoming Park is a nice little plain stretch of ground with big trees and a dried out impression or small creek bed that runs through the property, all that is left of some 19th century Philly robber baron's country estate. The mansion in the middle of the property is long gone.

The significance of this park was that my father and his childhood family also picnicked there as a child, his childhood home nearby and now under I-95 across from the old Frankford Arsenal.

In a small corner of this very tranquil piece of real estate was a tiny crowded cemetery, a Jewish cemetery with grave stones carved in English but mostly Hebrew. I say crowded because the whole scene is also surrounded by Cedar Hill Cemetery, the major secular cemetery that dominates the landscape north of the old town of Frankford. Some of my great-grandparents buried in there I was told by my wasp grandmother. I have yet to look up that Scots/Welsh branch of my family tree.

The town dates back to the Swedes before the Dutch and the English and the cemeteries were built post Civil War out in the farmland and countryside of Philadelphia County before all this was absorbed into a dense urban center full of factories and now a decaying hulk of a place. But the cemeteries escaped the fate of a lot of once country and then urban cemeteries that were condemned,  disemboweled, and moved on mass in boxed bones to other resting places further out into the outer suburban counties of Philly.

The condemned cemeteries usually ended up as things desperately needed in the urban sprawl as playgrounds or supermarkets or supermarket with parking with other small stores, laundromats in what even in an urban setting is the traditional American Strip Mall.

But surprising there is a hill or higher land setting above the old town of Frankford which now ends as a terminus of the Frankford to downtown to Upper Darby elevated train. The old Frankford Road splits into a fork in the road at the entrance to Cedar Hill Cemetery into Bustleton Pike to the left and on the right old Bristol Pike now Frankford Avenue. - (The road to Bristol Pa. and Trenton N.J. beyond - and the oldest road - originally an Indian footpath in the state.)

Long intro to the Hebrew Cemetery. and the recent tragic event in the news. I say this because between the decay of the old Frankford town and the fancy row houses that went up from the 20s to the 50s of post WWII Mayfair on farmland beyond is this brief land of cemeteries and a park that gives a welcome and calming shade of trees and green to the urban setting.

Surprising to hear of the vandalism of the Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery. There always through the years were acts of terrorism vandalism - some spray paint or the turning over of a gravestone or two in Cedar Hill or Mt. Carmel representing IMO more as act of teenage angst on a Saturday night with a couple of buds from the neighborhood sharing a six pack.

While there were pockets of anti-Semitism in Philly, it was nothing what I see on TV or read about in Irish Catholic places like South Boston where the sub-culture there is no doubt back bay Brahmin in direct conflict with working class Irish American and somehow the Jews in between.

I have tried in the past few days to talk to some ppl on Twitter who use the desecration of the Mt. Carmel cemetery as part of some great political plot under the current Russian Junta running the White House.

I am in the middle working with memories of older than forty years from Philly, is the memory that the Quaker subculture was always unique in that tolerance was preached if not always practiced in Philly town square, i.e. the Know Nothing Riots of the 1840s that inspired the RC archdiocese to build a separate and in many ways superior school system for children of that particular belief system. But alas that RCAD only has a few token minority catering high schools left in the inner city to supplement its premiere in the suburb rich white Catholic education business.

I should say that Mr. Carmel was built on a tiny lot, photo below and a text of sort in comment of the current political situation - daily ten minute 1984-style Fake Hates out of the Trump Whore White House. The tiny plot seemed overcrowded in the number of stones per square inch and always seemed to me to comply with the European concept of "ghetto".

I grew up near one of these forgotten and condemned Jewish Cemeteries in Harrowgate, Harrowgate and or the German Cemetery and or Jewish Cemetery on old urban maps. I grew up not even knowing that it was and or once was there. I in a way am a very minor contributor to not letting forgotten Philly and or Harrowgate history slip away into the nothingness of dumbed-down American nothing recognition of the past. Those who do not know of or understand the past are condemned to relive the worst parts of that past etc.

My sometimes hobby is making up a Find a Grave entry for forgotten Philadelphians. I ran into the fact of the old Harrowgate Jewish Cemetery and resurrected the memory of a rabbi once buried there before being moved elsewhere. At the time I did not know that the Cemetery did not still exist. The spot on the map in a Google satellite image is still green etc. I am not perfect but it bothers me that some ppl in Philly died after their children or never married and people who made major contributions to the history of the area are forgotten to the present.  So below one of my grave entries and that in some cases get adopted and managed by others more enthusiastic than moi on the person and or subject matter. Doing my part as part-time amateur historian.

In a way I am here to be along with real citizens and volunteers especially Muslims in Philly to if only virtually restore overturned Jewish grave makers of once free and equal living Philadelphians, I am here to help not lose our valuable American heritage to the current Russian/Nazi Hate generating out of the White House and descended into the apes Republican KKK Party.

Rabbi MarcusMordacai Jastrow

Also: Sabbath Tales

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Changing American Demographics - St. Joan of Arc School Harrowgate Philadelphia - 1957

In a changing American demographic from white to moca, from urban to suburban, from blue collar to white collar and or pajama (work from home), the boomers have been on a ride of a lifetime.

Saint Joan of Arc in Harrowgate Philly is defunct. It as a building designed by famed British architect George A. Audsley as his last project, in his eighties, the building still functions as a “charter” school, whatever that is.

The church, the parish was officially dissolved in 2013, merged with 3 or 4 other ethnic enclave churches, just as much for lack of attendance and or interest in the ancient Christ myth as the fact that celibacy and a lack of numbers in the priesthood make serving in the sheep with good shepherds impossible. That and the AD of Philly had millions to pay for decades of corrupt buggery hidden from view etc. Needed to sell a lot of R/E.

In looking back this photo is the first grade class of boys circa 1957 and there is 62 kids reporting this day for the photo, probably the official - take your kids photo day marketing thing. The nuns, the catholics were always nickeling and dime-ing the inmates in order to finance and survive, getting their cut on the promotions, Chocolate Bars, Half and Half lottery tickets on Bingo night, even shoes at one point but rather unsuccessfully I might add. The Nuns, women married to Christ and their faith, devoted their lives to us children. For that I am grateful but somehow the picture looks strange to me. It came into view the other day on some Facebook page and the comments there reflected re-awaking to memories, of childhood connections reconnected across the vastness of America now where many of these children and their sisters, siblings now live.

There are probably ten or so kids not present, out sick with sniffles etc. in this photo.

My first grade class numbered in the nineties for students, the baby boom yet to peak, in a latter first grade class, my own.

They used to bolt two of these old cast iron and wood desks together and sit three of us across. If you took a few sick days, you lost your place in the three across temporary daily seating thing. Lost your pencils and boxes of cardboard letters and numbers used as a teaching aide too etc. Lost in the shuffle of life.

Have to wonder in retrospect what was the effect of the baby boom on class size in the local public schools. But for us factory working, Irish Catholics and Italians mostly in this photo, parochial school was the only way to go. 

No PTA meetings and you did what you were told. And if you got out of line with a little ADHD? That was what the wooden ruler, wooden chalk board pointer was for - to crack over your knuckles on break over your back to get your attention – to focus. That did happen once with the chalk board pointer but at a higher grade level, bigger boys etc., but luckily not to me. Sounds terrible. LOL. But considering the memories I see mentioned in comments on Facebook, few remember the discipline.

The only thing I notice greatly between then and now, besides the numbers thing, size of the class, physical size of the room, was how white lower middle factory working class Harrowgate was in 1957.  

The demographics, they are a changin’.

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George L Horn - 1825-1903 - Harrowgate - Philadelphia - Licensed Methodist Preacher - Religious Bio Sketch

Former East Allegheny Avenue Methodist Church - Harrowgate Philadelphia
Google Street Maps

George L. Horn, a licensed Methodist preacher in his youth and one of the founders and trustees of the the former East Allegheny Methodist Church, 2023 E. Allegheny Avenue, Harrowgate, Philadelphia.  

The Christian Advocate - 6 August 1903

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The Human Touch and Purpose - 85 years Young and Still Going - Blasius Chocolates Harrowgate Philly

Bless the human spirit and the need to contribute to the productivity of the Community@!

Gloria

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No Vision – Just Ambition – In America Today

http://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/Detail.aspx?assetId=80779

I started writing this less than a week ago and I thought Oh No, another sour grapes thing about the RCC in the seventies in Philly that drove the masses out of the churches and schools in time or at least in the inner city as they are now calling my old neighborhood.

As some friend has described to me, with planned or likely closings of RC churches here, there actually, there will be no RC churches in the Frankford and Harrowgate sections of the city soon. 

My own grade school closed in 2003. And the economics of it all is not necessarily racist. The state and city screw things up with popular school vouchers legislation or threat of its passage which from a distance I do not know much about.  

I do know that as soon as you add money to a system with school vouchers or even employer covered health or dental care, you directly or indirectly inflate the basic cost of doing business. That is economics and some politics.

That education in America is big business with student loans, seven hundred dollar college text books etc. That is economics and politics.

The real crux of the matter was that jobs first went south and then overseas and emptied the local factories of very marginal jobs of the average factory workers when those jobs went south. That is economics.

Without a job - you and your environment become dysfunctional. Not rocket science to understand. 

The above bill board in the shabby shopping district of downtown Philly at Third Street and Market Street was where us factory workers went to find bargains that the department stores  further up the street could not offer us. We paid cash. We had no credit.

The money for that billboard came out of the archdiocese’s coffers or some non-profit organization or the obsessive compulsive wallets of Koch Brothers or Mellon Scaife types doing their social experimentation on the masses.

Like I said I started to write this a few days ago, stopped and erased it. I was inspired at first by the historic photo archives picture because of the date and the subject matter – abortion.

1971 was about the time I stopped going to church.  I was tired of the Sunday pulpit demands to write my state legislature to demand that Catholic Sharia Law on Contraception become the law in Pennsylvania.

Science had made a paradigm shift thing and the new chemistry of birth control just overwhelmed the boys in the RC clergy. They have never caught up.

It is a funny thought and I have mentioned it one way or another in the five years since I started this blog, the church left me, us behind when it abandoned spirituality and went straight for the economic and political approach to human sexuality.  

That if an ambitious Cardinal Krol was not hell bent on becoming pope, and attended his flock with some love instead of a Wharton Spreadsheet; maybe the economics and politics of the inner city and the racial divides could have been addressed.  

That some jobs in factories could have been saved, that there would have been less racial fear and less white flight to the suburbs and places like Frankford or Harrowgate would still have catholic grade schools, high schools and even churches there today.

In other words, there was no vision.  There seemed to be only ambition to achieve some corporate religious agenda.

There was no Vision.  There was only Ambition.

And that stagnation, which ignores the heart or the spirit of things and life situations that matter to us locally, could have been addressed by mature efforts and solutions. 

So it goes. 

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Franco Shrine to Close in Philly – Saint Joan of Arc Church Harrowgate

I find it extremely ironic that Francophile Charles Chaput with his blue ribbon committees and bankers to derivative-ize / bundle the Archdiocesan real estate portfolio before his next promotion, would could overlook this Sufi-like shrine in Philly to the secretly sainted Generalissimo.

I also find it ironic or even questioning the management style or lack of it from a temporary Vatican hack in the form of the Canadian American person of Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philly waiting around for his next real and or important assignment by the Vatican after this temporary Hatchet Job (hand job) gig in the city of brotherly luv.

Saint Joan of Arc Church will close on June 23 at noon.  It’s founder Msgr. Edward F. Hawks was quite a writer and defender of General Franco and his regime in Spain during and after the Civil War there. 

Hoods and shirts: the extreme right in Pennsylvania, 1925-1950

“Franco’s armies are good to the people, and Franco is especially kind towards the children.”   
~~ Msgr. Edward Hawks, St Joan of Arc Parish, Harrowgate Philadelphia.

 

Edward F. Hawks

(PAHRC – Phila Pa)

http://www.pahrc.net/index.php/catablog/hawks-rev-edward-f-papers-1900-1952-mc-15/

“…After converting, Hawks left his home in Canada and became a priest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where he served for several years as a parish curate. During World War I, he served as a chaplain in the Canadian army. When he returned to Philadelphia in 1919, he established St. Joan of Arc parish, where he remained until his death.  He was also the founder of the Catholic Evidence Guild, an organization designed to attract converts and lapsed Catholics.

Hawks was a well-known writer and lecturer. For more than 30 years, he wrote a column on current events for the diocesan paper The Catholic Standard and Times. From 1936-1938, after becoming a domestic prelate, he toured Spain to gather accounts of the Civil War for his column. His efforts on behalf of the Nationalist cause won him decoration from the Spanish government. …”

I never have quite understood the whole Father Coughlin thing in the depression era except that the Canadian priest had such a powerful media grip through radio on the American people and the love of Germany and Spain and Italy as fascist regimes along with anti-Semitism was a growing political threat to FDR and that the Boston wing of the American Catholic church through Joe Kennedy on behalf of FDR had Coughlin silenced through then Bishop Spellman and through then Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII) and his intervention via the Vatican in that silencing.

That in all the writings of I have seen, you see the fascism part of the Catholic Right in America, the emphasis of the love of fascism was also a means to confront the Reds and or Communist movement in Europe and in America.

Now that Communism is a threat to no one, the Right Wing of the Catholic Church in America serves up love of fascism as nostalgia and or support of pure anti-human market place capitalism.

I see that the Boston wing may have silenced Coughlin but the Philly wing under Cardinal Dougherty and via the Archdiocesan Newspaper and Msgr. Hawk’s pro-Franco, pro-fascist weekly column, that not all regions of the US RCC always acts in unison.

I also find it strange how the fascist saints of Saint Joan of Arc and Saint Thomas More got resurrected in the 1920s and continue to this day as coded symbols in the advancement of power at the ultimate expense of humanity.

That and the Knights of Columbus involved in right wing politics in the 1930s continues all the way to today.

(pax)

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Kensington and Allegheny (K&A) - Harrowgate Philadelphia

http://www.flickr.com/photos/philadelphiaphotos/6951008259/

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Harrowgate Easter Basket - 1960

This started the other night when Jimmy Kimmel had built a Peeps gun and was shooting Peeps out into his late night TV audience.

Peeps are kind of an iconic waste product that comes out in marketing every Easter and most people I believe are not fond of them other than for their nostalgic value from childhood. Biting into one of them is the oral equivalent I think of listening to the screeching of a piece of chalk on a chalk board.

They come in colors now. They used to be many decades ago only yellow and decorated my Easter morning basket.

One each I think we got. The whole Easter basket thing is another thing I as a parent recreated to a younger generation without much appreciation for the hand me tradition thing.

Stepping back a few weeks before Easter in my youth in the last century was the nuns in the grade school issuing every child from grade 1 to 8 an Easter Egg Gambling punch card thing where for a nickel or a dime you sold a box, a circle with a designated name.

The lucky person who had the winning name revealed after you sold all your peeled away red dots would be revealed behind the big red circle at the top of the gambling card.

These cards, along with Bingo were a very Catholic thing to raise funds for the school and or parish and under no circumstances could be confessed in the confessional as the sin of gambling. There was a special dispensation for it of course!

The prize(?) was a coconut crème Easter egg with its dense confection surrounded by dark milk chocolate. 

The appeal of these eggs I believe was with the older generations and strangely too with my older siblings who could not get enough of them when chopped up with some difficulty with a big butcher knife from the kitchen.  

I usually gave my coconut crème egg away in pieces, not desperate enough personally to consume more than just the first awful taste of it.

Luckily when I reached eight or nine, they now had hollow chocolate bunnies in boxes which my parents let me have in lieu of the coconut crème thing. No doubt the hollow bunnies, new to the market then, were cheaper to purchase.

The baskets with filled with the usual colored hard boiled eggs, decorated the previous day on Saturday with a egg coloring kit, color fizzy tablets, wax crayon and wire loop egg holder that cost a dime everywhere in the neighborhood stores.

The real thing about chocolate that I loved in my basket was with the Hershey Kisses which were rationed to like a half dozen. The whole product was expensive and marketed differently back then. Quality not quantity and coming in a small cellophane bag.

So now, we have the Peep, chocolate hollow bunny, Hershey kisses. 

Of course, there were jelly beans in an improvised aluminum foil shaped cup and the thing I loved most was the chocolate covered marshmallow eggs wrapped in colored silver foil which my father purchased special in a store off of K & A south in one of those stores with steps leading up into the storefront of an old house.

I believe he may have been purchasing the foil covered chocolate marshmallows at the same place since his youth. Of all the things in the sacred Easter basket, this purchase and these handmade marshmallow eggs with the most preciously thought of by all.

That into a basket with plastic colored hay. Each of us had a reserved color and I cannot remember my specific color at the moment.

One other thing, the baskets themselves, used every year and made of natural materials looked their age and use. My father would go to the local Easter Flower stand selling Easter plants, the kind you gave to your grandmother, and he would purchase the colored aluminum foil sheets used to wrap and decorate clay pots holding the seasonal plants. This foil, again following the color reserved theme, got wrapped onto tired old wicker Easter baskets. 

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On Growing Older – Group School Photo - 1966

The photo above kind of got sprung on me. It appeared on a Facebook friend’s page. Had not purchased the photo from the photographer originally. Had never seen it until about three weeks ago.

My first honest reaction to it was how white it was. That I have since lived most of the past thirty five years since leaving Philly in or around the diverse city of New York. That because of economics that means one of the less expensive outer boroughs other than Manhattan.

Oh I did live in Manhattan decades ago in a studio dormitory room and shared an apartment near campus.

Manhattan in the late seventies was still a largely American city. Now it is an International City with international prices like Hong Kong or London.

That the mind does wander and getting back to Philly and youth and the memory of it all, perhaps could be the subject of a book.

The Neighborhood in which I grew up in is no longer 99 and 44/100 percent white, ethnic western European white. The neighborhood was predominately Irish with a smaller percentage of Italian and Polish.  

The German ethnic label thing had faded into the background with two world wars and it was not thought of as an ethnic thing even though some of the names of my classmates in retrospect were definitely German sounding.

The school is still there as a building. It is no longer a Catholic school but a public charter school in the now 50% black and Hispanic neighborhood as per official government stats.

The front doors in the photo were plate glass. The present ones are steel. The parish complex is chopped up with the school a city owned public school, the convent with its many cell like bedrooms is a half-way house for Catholic pregnant teens and the Church is on life support with two weekend masses and two weekday masses being said by one priest shared with another parish about a mile away, the Italian parish, with that priest in that rectory.

There is or was the grave of the Monsignor who founded the parish in 1919 somewhere in the church yard next to the closed up old rectory.

Lots of stats and not lots of feelings.

The real feelings have to do with growing older and with word of mouth knowing that at least eight of the faces in the photo are no longer with us on this earthy plane.

In fact, my being on Facebook had to do with one friend seeking me out after the death of my neighbor classmate of two doors down from where I grew up. The social network thing is the present day family dinner or town square of virtual reality.

I never really thought much about it. The classes were not co-ed. It was an all-boys class, separate and not equal next to an all-girls class. The boys classes got the better qualified teaching nuns imho. Then all off to an all-boys High School, now also a Public School charter high school. 

The inner city has no appeal to the RC church. The money is in the burbs.

And indeed in another age of segregated by sex schools, a mighty school system was built as separate but superior to the public school system that rejected Irish and German Catholic immigrants in the 1840’s, riots and the determination to build that separate but superior Catholic School System in spite of the Protestants and the Protestant Banks having all the money.

That many a Catholic parish in inner city America got built on pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters of immigrants looking positively to a better life in America. That is something that carpetbagger bishops now cannot understand regarding the history of the place in which they now mismanage or "govern" by modern global Harvard / Brown / Wharton spreadsheet style management.

As I try to reconcile a lot of things, I realize that the factories surrounding that school above are either empty, torn down and turned into parking lots or on a small scale supporting many small businesses in one building or gentrified into living lofts etc.

That the coded talk of my youth, with the adults wanting to escape Philly and get over to Jersey or to Montgomery County was code talk to fantasize a non-racial paradise outside of racially changing, economic changing Philly in the post WWI and post WWII changing world of demographics along with rights for minorities – civil rights that extend to the future, the now, and regarding issues like marriage equality etc.

That I catch an occasional fragmented sentence from old friends, perhaps coded phrase of now living in Jersey or Montgomery County of really meaning having achieved their parents dreams of family harmony in a safe enclave place outside the origins of the family within the old city proper.

The Europeans spent decades rebuilding their inner cities after war and love to live, eat and entertain there.

American spared the destruction of war and with a vastness of land into which to expand, made the loop thing of the American civilization being turned into a grassy fortress suburbia supported by the combustion engine etc.

Someone took the time to label the photo with names. I remember and recognize 90% of the names and faces there.

Cannot quite still figure what happened to a lot of the years from there to here.

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Perversion (love?) Among the Ruins – Ascension RC Church – Harrowgate Philadelphia

Ascension RC Church - Harrowgate Philadelphia - Out of Business

One of the strangest footings along a pathway of historical research, looking for a historical geographical reference, yesterday, landed me back where I had written a piece about a dying decaying parish adjacent to the parish I grew up in, in Harrowgate Philly, of that of Ascension Church and Parish.

Trying to disseminate the closing story which apparently came very quickly and in a press release, so typical of Charles Chaput, like a thief in the night mentioned somewhere in the Gospels was an overlay story of BTW, the pastor of Ascension already on one admin leave and cleared by one of Charles Chaput’s Blue Ribbon Citizen’s Committees of Justice had to be put back on admin leave because the Blue Ribbon Commission missed something when they gave him a clean bill of health to be around children etc.

Citizen Robespierre Chaput offers no explanations, just a press release. "Off with Ascension's head!"

And since I was trying to disseminate two stories I missed the timeline which was that Pastor Michael Chapman had been re-relieved from his duties(?) among the ruins of a once great city upon a hill church and Parish in old white working class Philly and ten days later the Archdiocese padlocked the place with less than a week’s notice for the sole office worker to pack her box and a few other miserable boxes of church records and become unemployed after 25 years of service etc. 

Want a mass? God is that way. Go 1.7 miles that way or another mile or so that way.

I should say that the racism in Philly has always been there. The neighborhood where I grew up was quite white, catholic and lower working class Irish.  That the new mix of 50% Hispanic and Black probably changes nothing in terms of the human condition there.  Those conditions always were poor to none for the inhabitants.

That I could blame the Hunky Cardinal Krol for ignoring race relations in favor of his politics to become the first Polish pope.  I could also blame the traditionally bigoted Italians, the Guinea Cardinals “Small Tony” Belivacqua or Justin “Big Frank” Rigali as his Swiss Vatican Guard male friends used to refer to him when he was their chaplain, but I won’t blame anybody.  It is what it is. 

It is the modern disease of the American middle class that once you manage to blow, with sex or drugs or frat house connections, a foot over the threshold of the front office, get your toe into that front office cocoon, the back office, the little people, the rest of humanity can just go to hell as you party and count your crony Bonuses etc.  Just the same way Jesus played the establishment game in his day. Right?

Whatever.

Anyway, I do not think that many people read my piece about Ascension in which I actually quoted Pastor Mike – geezus mary and joseph.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/03/big-frank-rigali-and-his-religious.html

http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2012/09/17/news/doc5057808682614960538309.txt

The Rev. Michael Chapman, 56, was originally placed on administrative leave following allegations of sexual abuse of minors last spring . Chapman, who is pastor of Ascension of Our Lord Parish in Philadelphia, was placed on leave in March 2011 for an alleged violation of archdiocese standards of ministerial behavior and boundaries.

After an investigation, Archbishop Charles Chaput found Chapman suitable for ministry in May 2012. But before Chapman's return, the Archdiocese received new allegations of sexual abuse of minors against Father Chapman in May. The alleged abuse reportedly occurred approximately 30 years ago. The Archdiocese immediately reported the new allegations to law enforcement and delayed Father Chapman's return to the parish.

http://articles.philly.com/2012-09-26/news/34083394_1_archdiocese-archbishop-charles-chaput-worship-site

(Sept 26) Archbishop Charles Chaput has approved plans to close the Ascension of Our Lord Parish in Philadelphia's Harrowgate section, the Archdiocese announced today.

Parishioners can now go to either Holy Innocents Church, about 1.7 miles away, Visitation, B.V.M. Parish, less than a mile away, the Archdiocese said in a statement.

It said the church will not be maintained as a worship site since the 98-year-old building requires at least $3 million in physical improvements.

The closure, effective Oct. 1, is the latest in a series by the Archdiocese as it deals with declining enrollments and rising maintenance costs for aging church buildings.