Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam

Author:Robert D. Putnam [Putnam, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-03-10T06:00:00+00:00

Molly, Lisa, and Amy

Molly (55) and her two daughters, Lisa (21) and Amy (18), along with Lisa’s in-laws, have lived in the Kensington area for generations. We meet Molly and the girls in a 20-foot-wide, overcrowded row house where the family of Molly’s current husband has lived for three generations.5 Because both Molly and Lisa’s mother-in-law, Diane (41), have always lived in this same area, our conversations with these two extended families offer an unusually detailed moving picture of how dramatically the neighborhood has been transformed during the past half century.

Kensington is today one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in one of America’s most crime-ridden cities. But it was not always so. Molly and Diane both recall that when they were growing up, the area was so safe that on hot summer nights kids could sleep outside on rooftops, something no one would think of doing now. In that close-knit white ethnic working-class enclave, virtually everybody knew their neighbors by name, and together they kept the neighborhood safe and clean. Diane’s grandfather was a cop in the neighborhood and knew all the kids and their parents personally. In fact, nearly everyone knew everyone else’s kids, creating a pattern of communal childrearing. “Everybody looked out for each other,” Diane reminisces. “If you got into trouble with the neighbor two blocks down, because your mother knew them, they would beat you, take you home, tell your parents, and your parents would beat you again.” Molly adds, “You could not go down the street without [someone] saying, ‘Molly, go back home,’ or ‘What are you up to?’ ”

The two mothers recall many organized, no-cost youth activities, including a local youth recreation club named (appropriately, in what was then an Irish neighborhood) the Leprechauns. Kids went skating at the local rink, hung out in the local parks and public pools, and—Molly recalls from her teenage years—drank beer at the secluded back of the park. The local Police Athletic League (PAL), along with fraternal organizations, sponsored team sports, and the city recreation department offered free jazz and tap dance classes. Even when Lisa and Amy were in elementary school, they were free to play outside, so long as they did not roam beyond the well-defined neighborhood borders.

Like the Main Line in those years, Kensington was also more diverse in class terms. “Factory workers, downtown [office workers], lawyers, you had every kind of worker on a block,” Molly explains when we ask where the neighbors worked in those years. But just as longshoremen’s children have long since disappeared from the Main Line, there are no more lawyers’ kids in Kensington. Since the 1970s, Kensington’s history is one of disappearing jobs, fracturing families, declining population, rising racial diversity, and above all, mounting crime and drugs.

Fear of crime is pervasive. Police no longer walk the beat, for fear of being shot. Three babies in the neighborhood have recently been hit by stray bullets, so Lisa is home-schooling her daughter. The residents’ concern for neighborhood amenities has also collapsed. “No

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