St Francis Xavier Philadelphia

My Philadelphia: Spring Garden - Metropolis

By Patricia McLaughlin

About 30 years ago, we bought a house in the "Art Museum neighborhood" in kind of a rush: We'd told our landlord we were buying a house, and then backed out of the deal but, by then, he'd decided to move into our apartment himself, so we had to move anyway.

We hadn't particularly meant to move to Spring Garden.  In fact, we lived here for months--surrounded by drop cloths and buckets of joint compound and the implacable seepage into everything of the dust and grit produced when you demolish or repair walls made of plaster and horsehair, or so somebody said at the time--before we knew we had. (It's bounded by Fairmount Avenue on the North, Spring Garden Street on the South, the Parkway and East River drive on the West, and maybe Broad street on the East.) "I could get my cab impounded," he said. We were also right around the corner from the Eastern State Penitentiary which, according to some survey, a majority of neighbors wished were still a working prison, because its presence had deterred crime. I think there was also something about the prison workshop producing well-priced kitchen cupboards.

We bought the house from a Mr. Czarnecki; he and his late wife had moved in around 1958 and raised a family there. Now he was old and, judging from the rows of pill bottles lined up on top of the china closet in the dining room, not well. His Teamsters Union newsletter kept coming for months after he left.

Every room had brown wallpaper, and the number of extension cords in use testified to the scarcity of electrical outlets, but the locks on the cellar door, the china closet, the linen closet, the shallow closets in the second-floor-front bedroom and the closet in the second floor bathroom all still had their original brass keys, their bows polished to a soft shine by fingers that had been turning them since 1868. (I read somewhere that it was only after the Civil War that street car lines reached the neighborhood,and that attracted developers.

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