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?...

Cowardly Racists Emerge From The Shadows of America -- Santorum: Obama exacerbated racism -- Officials to investigate alleged racial discrimination at pool of Philadelphia swim club

I quit FB because I had no real friends there, save for one or two. I no longer talk to the victimizing older brother who still has my mother's ashes in a closet there in Phoenix years after I offered to pay half of the cost of shipping her body to be in a grave with our father in Bucks County Pa - he my "brother" among former online "friends". 

The thing about FB is that I joined a few groups related to Philly centered on neighborhoods. One was of the greater area of Kensington and one on the narrower neighborhood of Harrowgate, an invented Railroad Burb of the 1880s within Philadelphia County which eventually became the factory town that I grew up in. I quit the  Kensington FB forum after someone made a nice comment on the poet Maya Angelou after her death, a poet of which I had no particular fondness in her writings, but the anonymous - they did have their full names on FB - but I did not know them except as "friend" of a "friend" response or hatred of a black female poet. (and I only recently bothered to read a Wikipedia bio of Maya to realize what a monumental life she had led even if I was not previously aware of it etc.) Well I shy away from conflict. That and later in life realizing that I have had a touch or more of A.D.D. all my life which in retrospect explains why I have not been more successful in my life of trial and error false start runs for the money. That many times for me and my memory, a word like "spatialize" would send me to a dictionary in fear of my unknown ADD to be discovered or looked down upon in comments by Ph'ds or worse I-V league trained lawyers in forums that I did not really belong in. Should know my place in life this late in life for "my kind".

Well I shied away from Kensington FB after the white jackals got their jollies off chewing up the bones of the person who thought it appropriate to say a simple RIP to a black poet on FB. I quit that "Forum". That over time, the FB crowd talk a lot of code and the "they ruined the old neighborhood" talk told me that a lot of people I grew up with and did not grow or accept others in their own right and or light of the divine within that the Quakers rhetoric be prone to in the Quaker subculture context of Philly.

PC Curtain in the Temple now Torn in half in America with the LEADER now in the WH.

Recently this Jerk Off Opus Dei Catholic X-senator Santorum of Pennsylvania shows up on the Jerk Off Fox Network wanting to show and share his dirty tighty whitey racists tracks, share them with his friends, like papal royalty like Countess Annie Leary like Newt Gingrich where it can be purchased as in bought and sold ambassadorships and hang out in the white teenage country club locker room to share w/ brotherhood members of the Dick memories of their conquests over c**ts and n****** and democrats - context... 

Rick Santorum did not live in Pennsylvania when he was senator from that Alabama North turf. He lived in Virginia where his children could attend daily mass at his Opus Dei suburb of purity. 

Of course my relatives went to Montgomery county in 1964, after the local Philly riots and I have not seen or spoken to them since, me be poor and not therefore not white enough for them I think. The incident mentioned below in Huntington Valley Pa., right over the Philly city line, where they live, happened before with the mixup on scheduling and the black kids upsetting the delusion of safety in the burbs in the 90s or the 00s - even pools needs cash flow even if it from the city budget of that distant place where inferior people live etc. 

This time, it blew up almost as a flashpoint of toxic flammable hate being ignited by Obama at this pool in July 2009 which I think in some bizarre way of Catholic College Education in America these days means what Santorum sadly genuinely believes what he is saying. Anointed white penised Christian males tell no lies? Obama did indeed exacerbate racism simply by being born and being himself and of course being POTUS. 

Sad how America in its best parts, the burbs do not know how to retire, leave the next generation to deal with the day to day stuff, live and let live like the rest of planet, and enjoy the multi-culturalism as it exists in big northern and west coast cities. Sad how some successful white men who are workaholics and lonely and cannot retire and relax end up like people like Anthony Bourdain who are talented with the gift of the gab and have skills and have never matured past adolescence into adulthood. Good luck with obscurity Rick. And your lonely old age when yours kids discover their freedom from your putrid chains. Whatever.


Santorum: Obama exacerbated racism

Santorum responded by saying that it was actually Obama who used the presidency to fan the flames of racism.

“Many people saw Barack Obama being just that, doing more to exacerbate racism,” Santorum said.

Asked exactly what Obama did to exacerbate racism, Santorum said that “every time someone of color was involved, he took the side, many times, against the police.”

"He did it over and over and over again,” Santorum added. “President Obama was to many people out there someone who could have come together, brought this country together.” 

Santorum has often shied away from criticizing Trump and instead chosen to focus on Obama.

Last month, he brushed off questions about false claims from Trump and said that Obama told more substantial lies.

Officials to investigate alleded racial discrimination at pool of Philadelphia swin club

"A couple of the children ran down saying, 'Miss Wright, Miss Wright, they're up there saying, "What are those black kids doing here?""' she said.

The gated club is on a leafy hillside in a village that straddles two townships with overwhelmingly white populations. It says it has a diverse, multiethnic membership.

Wright said she went to talk to a group of members and heard one woman say she would see to it that the group, made of up of children in kindergarten through seventh grade, did not return.

"Some of the members began pulling their children out of the pool and were standing around with their arms folded," Wright said. "Only three members left their children in the pool with us."

Several days later, the club refunded the camp's $1,950 without explanation, said Wright, who added that some parents are "weighing their options" on legal action.

The Boundaries of Harrowgate, Philly – Kenzo vs. Gatee

This all got started over the unique Philly and or Kenzo rocket science about where Kensington ends and Harrowgate begins kinda bar talk. I grew up on that end of that northeast Philly turf. The other end of turf questions, rocket science, regarding the boundaries of Fishtown and Kensington – I am not going to touch here.

With the Act of Consolidation of 1854, all districts, townships and boroughs in Philadelphia County were brought under the one authority of Philadelphia city. This was done to improve infrastructure developments and also to establish some law and order outside the then downtown limits of Philadelphia city.

In other words if you killed somebody in center city in a bar fight or street knife fight, you hauled ass over the border into the bad lands, the Northern Liberties, where I think the traditional Fishtown and or Kensington begin on a map, to a place that literally had no police force, where you might be safe for some time depending on how important the victim was – you know how that goes etc.

The so called anti-Catholic riots in 1844 that burned down half of Kensington back then happened according to Wikipedia because the only cop in Kensington was the entire police force with the title of Sheriff. The neighboring Philly city militia was reluctant to respond to that Kensington Sheriff's pleas for help because the city militia got stiffed in the past and was not paid for services rendered previously. Who can ya trust?

As it turns out, Harrowgate was not one of those political entities that were absorbed into the greater Philadelphia in 1854. It is or was just a state of mind I guess. There was a health spa, healing well water in the 1780s and 1790s that was connected to a hotel lasting until the 1840s near the present Harrowgate Park at the Tioga El stop.

The hotel had a reputation of sorts from reading some historic research. Apparently actors and entertainers were not allowed to register at any respectable hotel in old Philly, so prim, proper and Quaker. The actors had to hike it or ride it up to Harrowgate if they wanted a hotel room.

Whatever. Must have been an interesting place at one time in terms of the local party scene.

Two things have inspired me to write this about Harrowgate and its possible boundaries.

One is that I see real estate maps of “Harrowgate” that don’t cut the mustard.

Two, a famous Harrowgate landmark, the Cedar Gove mansion moved to Fairmount Park in the 1920s, is being listed by some writers as having been in Frankford. Frankford is not Harrowgate and vice versa.

While we are on the subject, let me put Cedar Grove on the Harrowgate map since all tour guides and written guides don’t have a clue where it once was located in either Harrowgate or Frankford.

It was on a map just off the western extension of E Sedgley Ave. past the intersection of E. Sedgley Ave. and “K” Street. In present day terms, its original location is now in the middle of a parking lot of what appears on Google satellite to be a warehouse off Eire Avenue.

That at least puts one object in the picture as being in Harrowgate besides Harrowgate Park.

I think the minimum boundaries or the heart of Harrowgate might be the parish boundaries of Saint Joan of Arc Parish at Atlantic St. and Frandford Ave. which has always listed itself as St. Joan of Arc Harrowgate since its founding around 1919.

In fact on old maps, Atlantic Street at Frankford Ave. was the start of a long gone road, “Harrowgate Lane”, that went straight to Cedar Grove on those old maps.

The Parish boundaries are Clockwise:

Aramingo to Venango to Tulip to Allegheny to Emerald to E.Westmoreland to Jasper to Ontario to “J” to Erie/Torresdale to Frankford Creek