Below is a recent essay ( 3/31/98) by Dennis Sheridan <digitall@mindspring.com> who originally posted this as a message in the Blues-L email discussion group on a topic unrelated to Maxwell Street. Mr. Sheridan is a journalist and was a social activist in Philadelphia.
Is the reason South Street was demolished, the same reason that Maxwell Street is being demolished? You be the judge.
But Maxwell Street still exists and can be saved with your help. It's not over until it is over!!!
In the late 50s, early 60s, South St. in Phila consisted entirely of junk stores, small eateries, and churches. Block after block of the most depressed and neglected neighborhood in the city. The heart of the center city area was just a few blocks North, and in-between were the coffee houses and clubs that booked most of the folk, blues, and non-mainstream acts that came into the city. Whenever anyone of the black or Southern persuasion came into town, whether to play in a local coffee house or for the Phila. Folk Festival, some of us would host them, taking care of them, getting them a place to sleep and showing them around, making sure they got to where they were supposed to be and keeping them entertained. It was almost a ritual to take performers down to South street for some greens, ham hocks, sweet potato pie - there was no food any artist couldn't get, no matter where they were from. Someone had a hole-in-the-wall who was from the same general area of the country. On Saturdays after dinner and Sundays after breakfast we would just roam up and down South St. listening to the gospel choirs, sometimes having to go inside one church because we couldn't hear their voices from the ones shouting out from the churches on either side - or stopping to check out a street corner group of acapella singers. Often I would be with someone who just saw something he needed for a farm or barn or house back home in one of the junk stores and people left town with some mighty strange bags.
At that time, the poverty and neglect was taken for granted. All we saw walking up and down South St. were the people and the shops and churches, all mixed in trying to survive, making space for other folk, and getting the most joy and fun from life that they could manage. It was culture shock to return in the evening to the coffee house or venue with the rich white kids from the Main Line trying to dig something they'd never understand. Or forget about as soon as they went out the door. All our friends were back down on South St. I remember an old black woman from Mississippi whom I called Mom and she taught me to cook. This woman raised a dozen kids by herself, worked as a waitress in a spiffy downtown diner to help pay the rent on her own small restaurant on South St. She made the finest sweet potato pie you could ever imagine. But no matter how good the food or how cheap the prices, there just weren't enough customers, and the only customers one could get on South St. were in the exact same position. But never were restaurants so happy or the food so good. I remember helping old black men with their piles of junk and furniture, and never has any college or professor taught me more about society and the human condition. Some of their insights and philosophy might have won them Nobel prizes - or at least good book deals - had they been white Europeans. And Oh the churches. And Oh the music. My god, you wouldn't believe the sounds you could hear on a given night up and down the street.
In the late 60s the white power-base decided South St. was an eyesore and an embarrassments to the city. It wasn't even thinly disguised racism. Rizzo stated unequivocally, "The niggers are too close to town." South St. was turned out, ripped down, and yuppyfied in what must still be a world record time. Boutiques and chain stores of every imaginable sort replaced every church, junk shop, and diner. One day a sea of black faces, the next saw only money-oriented whitebread and yuppy kids from the suburbs. Nothing, not one building, not one store, not one person who made up the community one day was there the next. In Phila., this was considered a good thing.
Now I live in San Francisco and find the exact same thing occurred in the Filmore district, where the heart of jazz and blues developed here. But San Francisco differs in that the city fathers in SF told all the residents - in writing - that they were just cleaning things up a little and making the neighborhood better. As soon as all the new construction was done, all of the former residents had rights of first refusal on the new homes and store fronts. But not one, not a single person who lived in the Filmore was ever given any opportunity to return to the Filmore District.
When construction was complete, it turned out that somehow only whites ended up buying the new houses and stores. Overnight, what was the center of Black music culture in California became an upscale shopping district for wealthy white people The Filmore was gone, never to return.
Now, in both cities, are photographs in museums and stores of these old neighborhoods.
The current city fathers and newspapers of both towns spend endless hours going over the history and memory of those neighborhoods and decrying the loss. No one in either of these towns now think that what occurred was a good thing. The point about these neighborhoods and every other street in every other city isn't the good or bad intentions of any city government or any city landowners. It is the history and culture of the city while it was growing and developing.
What looks easily dismissable now suddenly becomes an irretrievably lost heritage that no amount of nostalgia or old photographs will recover. These streets, these rundown buildings, only look bad to those who don't see the life and the people who lived and died in them. Neighborhoods were our society's expressions of how our entire country grew. The bricks and concrete have meaning; we must look at them in terms of our history as a people and a country. God help us if we don't remember the people before us: who they were and what they did.
Dennis Sheridan
1078 Howard St.
Suite 303
San Francisco, CA
94103
Email: digitall@mindspring.com
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