MANAYUNK: A NEIGHBORHOOD JOURNAL

The following is an excerpt, starting at the beginning, of a short book manuscript written over the course of one year, with photographs by Sandy Sorlien also taken over the course of one year. The names of most people and of some streets have been changed in this work to protect individuals' privacy.

Manayunk, Philadelphia

 
Manayunk is a sprawling neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia traditionally bounded by Manayunk or Ridge Avenues, Fountain Street, the Wissahickon Creek, and the Schuylkill River. It is Catholic—Italian, Irish, Polish, Ukrainian—and Protestant—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. Manayunk is African-American, immigrant Asian, Appalachian, blue-collar, artsy, immigrant, transitory, dug in, veteran, old Philadelphia, entrepreneurial, on welfare, wealthy, laid off, retired, on the skids. Local legend says that "manayunk" was a Lenape Indian word meaning "the place we go to drink," although it's hard now to imagine ingesting even a drop of water from the Schuylkill or the Manayunk Canal. These days, Bud, chardonnay, local beers, and Jack Daniels are the drinks of choice in Manayunk.

East Street (Blizzard), 2000

Photo by Sandy Sorlien

Manayunk travels by roller blade, baby stroller, racing bicycle, Cadillac, Dodge, Buick, Nissan, Lamborghini, garbage truck, in Italian designer shoes, in work boots, by train to Center City, by bus down the Ridge, by taxi to the grocery store, on foot to the dentist's office.

Our street in Manayunk—one block long—is dominated by Italian-American Catholic families who have lived within a mile for four generations and by sixth-generation Irish-descended Manayunkers. Young newcomers spice up the pot: our neighbors across the street are a Jewish and Taiwanese couple, their neighbors are Jewish and German, and my own household is half-Bulgarian. The new family at the end of the block is English-descended from Maryland.

For the moment, at least, we are all Manayunk.

 
May 21

Went down to pick up the keys to our new rental house on St. Joseph's Street this evening. As we drove into Manayunk I was surprised by a sudden view of dense greenery on the hill across the river, part of this vertical new landscape. I would never have thought the two miles from our apartment in Germantown could bring us to such a different world. In Manayunk you drive or walk on hills so steep that you can't tell by looking ahead where you're going to end up. The sky was very clear, as it was the spring evening we signed our lease here almost two months ago, church towers standing out delicately against blue, then green, then turquoise.

We parked on St. Joseph's and went inside for the official move-in tour of our rental. There's a living room and kitchen on the first floor, two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. Kathy D'Amico, our landlady, showed us the refrigerator she'd scrubbed till it looked like new, the new bathroom floor, the repairs to the basement walls. Her husband, Dan, and two of his buddies from the street, beer-bellied and friendly, came down from rehanging the bathroom door upstairs, each bearing a can of Bud, sweating and smiling and wiping their heads. Dan told me and Georgi about his brother-in-law, who cleaned up pieces of bodies after the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. He described this while he demonstrated for us a vast range of cable television channels. "Yeah, they were picking it all up with tweezers. I mean, terrible. You get Disney, too, if you want it."

It's going to take me a while to get used to the fake rock and fake wood paneling and fake brick walls and wallpaper and stencils and wall-to-wall carpeting, but most of the place is as clean as the refrigerator. Our baby, who's just turned six months, crawled across the dark-rose pile in the living room with a look of amazement on his face, as if he'd just learned to walk on water. I wondered humbly if I could possibly match Kathy's housekeeping.

"We left that for a blessing," Kathy said, pointing to an old Christmas card tacked over the back door. It showed the Three Wise Men hurrying after the star. Over the front door was a fake silver crucifix. "We left that, too."

"Don't you want to take that with you?" I asked.

"Oh, youse can take it down," she said.

"I'm sure gonna miss this rock," Dan said, looking around at the living-room walls.

 
May 22

St. Joseph's Street is flat, running along one of Manayunk's great terraces, a solid line of two-story rowhouses on each side. Most of the façades are brick, but the houses must be much older than their fronts. Our new bedroom has those very shallow closets where people hung their one change of clothes on hooks in the middle of the nineteenth century; there isn't room for modern hangers.

When we arrived with a first load of our belongings tonight, the school kids were out playing hockey into a net set up right across the street. This wasn't a problem, because there were no cars on St. Joseph's—which isn't on the way to anything in particular—except a dense row of parked ones. Everyone had already settled into this narrow world for the night.

 
May 24

Behind the house is a tiny slab of cement, which Kathy called the "yard," surrounded by chain link fence and hemmed in by an old stone wall that runs the length of the block, banking the terrace above St. Joseph's. At the top is someone else's yard; anyone who wanted to could lie on the grass up there and peer right over the wall into our yard, like Kilroy. But the wall's so high you can't see up to the yards above it, or to the houses on the next street up the hill. The sun sets very early down here. It's like living in a canyon. When you stand on our cement, you can look through the chain-link up and down all the other little backyards at our level and see people hanging out laundry, or grilling hamburgers, or riding tricycles on their own patches of cement. There are even a few squares of grass and rows of tomatoes and zinnias.

It was hotter today, very clear again, and I still have this eerie sense of late May in a Mediterranean town. There are even swallows here, circling the church towers on clear evenings. Georgi, who works as a computer programmer, doesn't get home until the first swallows are swooping over the hills. While we waited for his arrival this evening, I took the baby out for a long walk in his stroller, through the winding, littered streets. Old people out buying their groceries or sitting on the front stoops stopped me to ask his age, sex, name. I found my way back to our street by means of a landmark I noted at the corner earlier this week: a pair of work boots slung over the telephone wire by their laces, high out of reach.

Before we moved, I knew Manayunk as Main Street, a row of elegant boutiques and restaurants. Now I see that this gentrification has spawned a second wave of fancy retail there, including some chain stores, and is creeping up the hill in the form of expensively renovated apartment buildings. But it certainly hasn't reached St. Joseph's Street yet.

 
May 25

It's really hot tonight. There's a great moon over the canal and we've been out walking with the stroller again, our new hobby. Last night after dinner we went for our first evening walk and got only a block past the Mister Softee truck before Georgi rushed back and bought two cones with twists of cold soft chocolate, standing in line for them behind a gaggle of children in their sock feet. We strolled with our cones past an old lady sitting on her concrete porch above a vertical rose garden, resting there in her flowered house dress and slippers. We waved, she waved, and then, to our surprise, our baby waved. When we explained that he'd never done this before, she stood up to get a better look and blow him kisses.

Grape Street (Shut Up), 2000

Photo by Sandy Sorlien

 
May 26

We ate dinner at a little table we put outside on the yard—my God, I'm starting to think of it as a yard myself. While we were sitting there watching the sky turn tangerine over the close, high rooftops, a black cat slithered under the fence, walked smoothly past our dog, and jumped up on the outside windowsill of the kitchen, obsidian against the white stucco wall.

I've put out our plants in pots on the—well, yard, with a blue pitcher near them for color. There's a line for laundry, too. We plan to eat out here every night, all summer.

 
May 30

As twilight came this evening, cool air began to seep through our open windows, along with a lot of sounds: the shouts of the street-hockey champions, conversations from one stoop to another, bells tolling the hours from at least three churches, the first rumble of air-conditioning window units. Also the inane tune of the ice-cream truck, the same tune Mister Softee played in Syracuse when I was in elementary school, with the same cries from up and down the street: "Mom! MOM! Can I have a dollar?" Except then it was twenty-five cents, I guess.

 
June 3

Tonight we had some friends over for dinner and ate in the yard. The next-door neighbor, whom we hadn't yet met, was out in his own little chain-link box polishing an enormous motorcycle. He looks about forty-five, but very worn down. Seemed kind. Kathy and Dan told us when we moved in that he lives alone and gets drunk sometimes. His clothesline is always full of old plaid shirts, even in the rain. He told me he hasn't taken the motorcycle out in seven years—he just likes to keep it clean.

 
June 6

Apparently the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team made it into the Stanley Cup Finals. Late last month they won some important games and there was an all-night beer party under a tent two yards down from ours. Every night all the little boys on the street run up and down in a mob, yelling "FliYAHS! FliYAHS!" There's even an elaborately decorated neighborhood van, covered with Flyers paraphernalia and loudspeakers. It's driven around during the day by two ragged-looking happy men with the radio turned up loud or the loudspeakers announcing scores. The van is often parked overnight on Ripka, at the end of our block; Linda, across the street, says it's a tradition here.

 
June 7

We don't have to actually watch any Flyers games, even out of curiosity; you can hear every point scored from televisions in all the other houses on the block, including the television set our neighbor across the way, Jack, has practically put out on his stoop. At the end of the big playoff game tonight, I knew the Flyers were losing, because the street got very quiet suddenly and stayed very quiet, dark fell, and everyone went very quietly and soberly to bed, turning out the lights early, even though it was Saturday night.

 
June 10

There are always people hanging out in the street, especially in the evening. Very few of them are passing through, it seems; they all belong here. Mostly they're our nearest neighbors, many of them children, amusing themselves as if St. Joseph's were a big playroom. Street hockey, played by skinny little boys in glasses and kneepads, dominates from 4:00 to 9:00 p.m. There's sometimes one little girl among them, a tough kid of nine or ten with a blond Dutch-bob haircut. The children here have a sixth sense about the traffic; they play ardently until a car comes through, then clear out in front of it, instantaneously, without looking around, dragging the goal onto the sidewalk with them.

The street's so narrow that if you're picking someone up or dropping someone off or unloading groceries at your front door you have to stop and block everything—hockey, pedestrians, any luckless driver who comes up behind you. As soon as you stop, skinny little knee-padded boys reappear out of nowhere, brandishing their sticks, and hit the puck around for a tantalizing four minutes in front of your car. Then you get back in and start up again, and the hockey players reluctantly clear out. Some of them look about five years old.

On other streets in Manayunk, people save parking places in front of their houses with assertive orange cones. A friend of ours who lives near Fountain Street told me that during the blizzard of '96 his neighbor dug out a parking spot on the sidewalk and saved it with lawn chairs. "This guy was defending a place it's not even legal to park. Can you believe that?" St. Joseph's seems to have an unwritten law against this kind of thing, however. You take what you can get, but I hear it's getting harder to find parking in lower Manayunk, as more and more tourists overflow from Main Street.

 
June 11

Our neighbors are starting to coalesce into individual shapes in my mind, focused out of the random forms that visit each other around the street. Since I teach part time, go to school part time, and stay home with the baby part time, I'm in and out and I see them at lots of different times of day. There's Rose, a tanned grouchy old woman with short, straight gray hair and blue jeans. She sits on her steps much of the day, up near Hermitage Street, at the other end of the block, or wanders amazingly long distances around Manayunk. Sometimes when I'm out in the car on errands I see her on foot three miles from home. Everyone greets her with great affection, so there must be more to her than meets the eye.

Then there's Maria, the retarded young woman to whom the yellow Blind Child sign refers. She goes off on a special bus to work, comes home in the late afternoon, and sits in a plastic chair on the sidewalk, drinking beer, talking to herself, and squinting at footsteps. She never smiles, and when you greet her she says something non-sequiturial and cross, like "And I told him I don't want to work on that all day." But then she adds, very cordially, "Hi, how are you? I'm fine. How are you?"

Across the street are two equally huge people, Jack and Linda, who are constantly at home; I can't figure out if either of them works anywhere else. I thought they were sort of timelessly middle-aged until Linda told me they're both thirty—younger than we are. They have three blond children in elementary school: Lenny, who is scrawny and a little shy, Jennifer, stocky and tanned, and Sammy, stocky and sociable. They all live in a house as tiny as ours, with Jack's mother, Gina, and frequent guests. When it's parked directly in front, their car, a beat-up maroon Plymouth, is longer than the house is wide.

Seville Street (No Parking), 2000

Photo by Sandy Sorlien

 
June 13

There are so many kids here that it's taking me some time to sort out who belongs to what house. Two doors down on our side of the street is Christopher, a scrappy kid of about seven with the delicate freckled face of a choirboy. Today I met Sheila, Christopher's sister. She's a homely wreck of a child—cross-eyed, with thick glasses and weedy hair and scraped-up knees, who beams and smiles and radiates considerable charm. She and Christopher are obviously very close, despite their sibling squabbles. I found out yesterday that the source of all the scraped knees is their rollerblading together up and down the street, which they do without kneepads sometimes.

All the children love our dog, Zaiche, and rush out of their houses to pat her as soon as she comes out to the front stoop with us. Sheila drops by to see her with a plastic saint's medallion in hand, running the beads over and over through her skinny little fingers or twirling it around like a circus favor.

 
June 16

Down the street from us is a ramshackle one-room building I've come to think of as the neighborhood cave. I guess it's actually an old garage; it has two big doors that open directly onto the sidewalk. As you walk by you can look in and see most of the street's male population (those over twenty-five, anyway) tipped back in chairs drinking beer and watching sports on TV. The whole cave is lined with shiny hubcaps, old pieces of carpet, Flyers pennants. I've never seen any woman within six feet of the place, which is a long distance on St. Joseph's Street. It reminded me as nothing else has done so far that I'm an outsider here. On the other hand, the women who've lived here for years walk way around the cave doors, too; maybe this makes me one of them after all.