BLUE-COLLAR CONSERVATISM by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Neighborhood Politics

South Philadelphia’s Grays Ferry neighborhood did not remain quiet for long after Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo’s tuxedo-clad heroics at the Tasker Homes public housing project in June 1969. In the years thereafter, trouble routinely erupted between the white, mostly Irish Catholic Grays Ferry community and the largely African American residents of the housing project and the Kings Village neighborhood that bordered Grays Ferry to the north. Sandwiched between the Tasker Homes to the south and the Schuylkill River to the west, Grays Ferry whites felt surrounded. They were also determined to keep their neighborhood from being taken over by “outsiders.” Problems with Kings Village residents primarily stemmed from African American children passing through Grays Ferry on their way to and from school. Black parents feared sending their children through the hostile white community. Although most of the white parents sent their children to Catholic schools, they still resented the influx of black schoolchildren passing through the neighborhood. The racial battles over neighborhood space were even more pitched over access to the Lanier Playground that sat between the Tasker Homes and Grays Ferry. The confrontations over the playground often turned violent, as residents from both the housing project and white neighborhood fought over recreational space in an area with limited resources. Between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, the combined racially charged clashes over neighborhood access and recreational space led to nine near riots, several assaults, and three murders. By the mid-1970s, the entire area encompassing Grays Ferry, Kings Village, and the Tasker Homes became one of the most volatile in the city.1

To make matters worse, despite white residents’ intense pride in their homes and community, their neighborhood was on the decline. Like much of South Philadelphia, Grays Ferry was once a testament to Philadelphia’s urban industrial might. Its scattered warehouses and industrial plants intermixed with its row-house architecture immediately marked Grays Ferry as a classic urban, white ethnic, working-class neighborhood. For generations, residents shared cramped city streets, church pews, and bar stools as they created the kind of close-knit community that made Philadelphia a city of neighborhoods.2 Like so many other working-class neighborhoods in deindustrializing cities, however, Grays Ferry in the 1970s showed the signs of age and economic downturn. City-owned vacant houses and boarded-up corner stores littered the neighborhood, providing constant reminders of an urban renewal plan that never quite panned out. Although residents had once embraced urban renewal, they now held past liberal failures responsible for the area’s condition.3 They likewise held the Tasker Homes project and the influx of African Americans in the communities surrounding Grays Ferry responsible for the neighborhood’s deterioration. Both were the result of liberal social engineering, Grays Ferry whites said. By the 1970s, the community felt besieged on all sides, but emboldened to defend their neighborhood. Francis Rafferty, a self-proclaimed “working stiff with five kids” and president of the Grays Ferry Community Council (GFCC), captured the overwhelming feeling of the community’s residents in an interview with a local reporter. “These jerk liberals come in here and try to tell us how to live,” he said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.