The Lost Endearments of A City on Fire

Kensington Avenue beneath the Market–Frankford El, the street littered with debris and shadowed by the elevated tracks.

While I was in high school, it was mandatory for each student to have a certain amount of service hours per academic year. Those hours only began to increase the more we went up a grade. During my sophomore year, I got my credits for the required hours by going with my grandfather to the soup kitchen down in Kensington called St. Francis Inn. My pop has always been a very religious man and had been going to the kitchen for many years. The place for me felt transactional at first —“I’ll go here and then I’ll get my required hours.” I’m still not the most religious person by a long stretch, but going there unearthed things I wasn’t aware of – things of the city I had lived in possessed or was capable of.

My grandfather picked me up one day to go down to the Inn. This year I only needed 16 hours of service, and I thought I would sweep them under the rug by going for 8 hours two Sundays in a row. We made a right at K&A (Kensington and Allegheny Avenues), considered the heart of the open-air drug market and homeless crisis in Philadelphia. I looked out the window, listening to whatever type of Irish music my fresh-off-the-boat grandfather had been playing, watching a rougher side of the city pass us by. 

We stopped at a traffic light. A woman, easily in her early 20s, was leaning against one of the graffiti-covered buildings half asleep. She looked like she hadn’t showered in days. Two syringe needles were sticking out of her pale-skinned, dirt covered arms. I looked to my grandfather who only shook his head. As I looked back at the girl, a scruffy looking man who was walking up the road had made it to her. He looked her up and down, then reached for her arm. He took one of them out of her arm, examined it for a second, then walked up the road as if he found a souvenir on the floor – not something that was just protruding out of a person’s arm. The light turned green and we continued back down the road. 

A woman lost between the cracks had dropped down the dark path of heroine addiction. I sure don’t know where she came from or what she was like before she decided to stick a needle in her arm to feel whatever crap would end up rushing through her veins. No one deserves a thing like that. 

I’ve seen a lot of crazy, sad and humbling stuff from the few times I had gone to that soup kitchen. That woman was probably the worst of the situations I saw there; watching the line of 100 or so individuals coming up to grab a breakfast pastry or a turkey sandwich for lunch definitely takes second place. These people, good or bad, have reached their lowest and are just trying to fill their bellies for the day so they don’t starve to death. 

It’s not just the kitchen, though: situations like this happen throughout every part of the city, in the very infrastructure. I saw two people overdose before I even reached middle school. I was just being a curious kid wandering the streets of my hometown out of boredom. Didn’t ask to see it; still saw it. 

Violence is something that was, and sometimes still is, always riddled through the day to day. I remember a shooting where someone was shot in the stomach while out in the woods for St. Patty’s day. I knew people who were there when it happened. In the past year alone, a bullet passed through both feet of a girl while at a local recreation center. The two occurrences happened in the Northeast region of Philly alone and show simple glimpses of what happens around the entirety of an asphalt jungle. 

The wildest thing, from what I can tell, is how quickly we forget. Bad things happen all day, every day. Goldfish memory kicks in for those bad things – acts of violence, the results of drugs, the decaying parts of an urban area, etc – until it turns into a distant memory or a fading thought that you start to question if it really happened to that extent. 

It did happen that way, and that gravely; it’s just ‘not important’ anymore. 

The stories that result in a success seem to have one thing in common: if it bleeds, it reads. That’s a common phrase in journalism, but it can be applied to anything – movies, novels, lessons, life, etc. The bad seems to always outshine the good. It’s not the evil you find fantasy, but the bad you find in back alleyways or drug riddled sectors. The bleeding comes in the form of devastating facts that seem to burn through that moral compass of right and wrong as you try to make sense of what was really going beneath the trash riddled surface. In a city, it’s like a constant burning fire of bad that seems to be lit.

People make observations and opinions of those bad things. We can only see our perspectives. Applying those perspectives in metropolitan areas is hard because you're seeing one person's thought process compared to the millions of people who reside there. The flames of all the bad makes us put it out to protect each other and our own self image, putting out the endearments in the process. The things that truly make us human in a world engulfed. 

The lost endearments of a city on fire, right? 

Written by: Sean Musial