The Kensington Avenue of my youth is long gone, but the memories remain

For Easter, the elderly ladies, their ivory curls held up by bobby-pin scaffolding, scrawled your name in white icing on the dark chocolate coconut cream egg.

The furniture store, Levin’s, covered two whole blocks, selling to working-class families like my own who didn’t have hundreds to put down on a sofa, couch, or TV set. People paid monthly for a section of the American dream to sit on, and Mr. Fisher, a barrel of a man with a hearty laugh, would come to your home to collect. Mom would send him on his way after a beer and a sandwich.

The Beneficial Bank manager visited your eighth-grade class, showing you how to open your first savings account. The $20 you deposited was untouchable; it was yours and made you officially worth something.

You would buy your first 45 record at the Record Spot, your rock n’ roll baptism. You coveted the brand-new yellow wood baseball bats in the Dennery Sporting Goods’ store window. And, like Cinderella, you could have dress shoes slipped onto your feet by a kneeling clerk, if not by a prince.

Kensington Avenue was America: a cosmos of commerce, joy, family, prosperity, pride, and gratitude for a good job that provided an equal shot at the American dream.

All that’s vanished. What’s left on the avenue, under the thundering elevated trains, is a place where Mother Teresa, who was called to serve the wretched and the poor, would find herself at home.

Of course, it’s easy to yearn for “the good old days.” Yet the descent of the neighborhood’s namesake thoroughfare is much more complicated. In the 1920s, Kensington was the mightiest factory neighborhood in America.

Huge factories blocked the sun, casting shadows over whole blocks while punching out clothing, carpets, lace, paper, machine parts, and hats. Miles of sturdy redbrick rowhomes housed the swelling number of workers earning enough to allow mom to stay home and hover over a blooming brood.

My dad toiled as a SEPTA bus mechanic for 35 years. His $23,000-a-year salary in 1979 — good union pay he used to raise six kids — would be worth $97,000 today. The current median household income in Kensington is around $48,000.

Still, even in my younger days, Kensington was a place with razor edges, barroom brawls, and street corner gangs from rival neighborhoods like Fishtown and Port Richmond mixing it up in the center of the playground on a Friday night.

As teens, we crammed the corner bars on weekends, drinking like Vikings. I remember seeing truckers and factory workers, mugs gripped with calloused hands as they tried to numb their barbed-wire existence. To find peace, at least for a night.

We beamed when the classic 1976 Academy Award-winning film Rocky was filmed on our streets. In it, hardscrabble palooka “Rocky” Balboa sits on the bed edge telling his girlfriend, Adrian, that he can’t beat the champion, Apollo Creed.

“Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed,” he says. “And if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.”

That’s what latter-day Kensington was all about — not being just another bum from the neighborhood. A North Catholic High School teacher once called us “river rats.”

“They oughta put a fence around you,” he said.

We agreed. We wanted that chain link not to keep us in, but to keep others out. We knew Kensington was a place of pride, of heroes and sheroes, proud workers who would sacrifice their last dollar for their children, hold a neighborhood raffle for the little kid with leukemia, or scramble together a trademark neighborhood beef-and-beer banquet raising $6,000 in a night for a family whose house burned down.

We relished the neighborhood’s tough reputation, creating a mock tourist slogan: “Kensington, where the men are men and so are the women.”

But it’s not funny anymore.

The Great Depression killed its share of factories, but the 1970s crippled Kensington, with business owners following the new ribbons of highways to the suburbs, more land, and lower taxes. My heart broke at the headline atop a 1987 Philadelphia Magazine article: “Notes from the White Ghetto.”

That story began with jobless youths on a corner, just blocks from the house my father grew up in. The writer backed up his claim: Kensington had double-digit joblessness, poverty, high school dropouts, teen pregnancy, and single-parent households. With those woes came alcohol and drug abuse, the would-be salve that instead eats at people’s bodies and souls.

Today, a whole battalion of lost souls are trapped chasing the kind of elusive peace that those hard-drinking men at the bar sought on the weekends of my youth. They are injecting lethal chemicals into any available vein that their broken-down body will provide, all for a moment that takes away the feelings of worthlessness, shame, anger, despair — the life traumas that have taken them to my old neighborhood.

The avenue is not what it once was, and perhaps that bygone era of a lively main street with thriving shops will never return. In fact, it cannot do so until we all come together to improve the lives of those facing the challenges of addiction and homelessness.

What we need in place of a sporting goods store now is compassion. Instead of a record store, drug treatment. Instead of investing in banks, investing in humanity with affordable housing and medical services. Instead of a candy store, resolve to reduce the drug supply and restore order. Instead of a furniture store, we need city officials who will live their faith, stop shielding their eyes from this catastrophe, and take empathetic action.

Help us, Lord. Please help us.

Gerard Shields is an author and Kensington native.