Search Results for: Today I Saw Deeney

BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a long and boxy old black Cadillac parked on Master Street just west of 17th. Master Street is on the south edge of Pill Hill; up the block towards Jefferson Street young pushers were perched on every stoop with pockets full of Oxys, Percs, and Xanies. They watched the passing traffic for white guys from downtown who might be out cruising on their lunch breaks with fat wallets and runny noses, hoping to cop their medication. Every eye in that crowded corridor between Jefferson and Master Street vied for contact with mine, assuming I […]

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW  a white kid, maybe 12, with dirty blond hair cropped short, pedaling an adult size tricycle with a wooden box between the rear wheels up D Street towards Indiana Avenue. Attached to the back of the graffiti tagged wooden box was a fifteen inch stereo speaker that blared rap music loud enough to shake my windshield. The face of a car stereo was mounted to the front of the box so he could reach down to adjust the volume or skip tracks while coasting along. There was a subwoofer inside the box nestled in […]

BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a hot sun shining down on North Philly for the first time this year. The forecasted high was 82 degrees with nothing but bright blue overhead; compared to the cold spring the city was emerging from, it felt like mid-July. The flavor on the streets was beer, even at 11 a.m. on a Monday. On 25th Street near Dauphin, a young girl in skintight capris, a halter top and a waist-length weave drained a Miller High Life bottle on her front step, her head tilted back 45 degrees and her throat open in full […]

AUTHOR’S NOTE:  Today I Saw was a series of short imagistic non-fiction narratives I did back in 2007.  I didn’t even conceive it as a series for publication, it was really just a bunch of scenes and images I jotted down while doing field work as a social worker. It ran twice a week for a year straight.  Each installment begins with the same phrase, “Today I Saw” because I was literally writing down things I was seeing in the neighborhoods, as I was seeing them each day. BY JEFF DEENEY Today I saw a fire fight break out on […]

AUTHOR’S NOTE:  Today I Saw was a series of short imagistic non-fiction narratives I did back in 2007. I didn’t even conceive it as a series for publication, it was really just a bunch of scenes and images I jotted down while doing field work as a social worker. I was doing intensive community based work with homeless families, and writing about all the crazy things I saw in the field helped me decompress at the end of the day from the stress and pressure I was under at my often emotionally-grueling job. Phawker approached me about writing for them […]

BY JEFF DEENEY Chester is the archetypal once-thriving small American city left to die in the post-industrial flux of globalization. The steel industry, ship building and other manufacturing that used to fuel the local economy have long since evaporated, the city’s population halved since its 1950s heyday. Chester today is largely black and extremely poor. Its economic decline is readily apparent to even the casual surveyor of its housing stock; boarded up, abandoned buildings and vacant store fronts with faded marquees dot the downtown streets. Some homes were neglected for so long that their roofs eventually caved in, causing the […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN]   BY JEFF DEENEY The small pile of stuffed animals on Berks Street, north of 31st, looks neglected even though it’s only been there about three weeks. Some of the dolls are scattered, resting in the garbage-strewn grass plot across the street from the tiny Pleasant Oak Missionary Church. It’s impossible to know whether this memorial, marking a murder that happened back in February, was kicked over or was simply blown askew by a strong wind. These dolls aren’t covered in loving messages from friends and family members like I’ve seen at other sites, and there […]

[Photo by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY On the corner of 57th and Arch, there’s a stuffed Tweety bird lashed to a tree. Large, black letters, “RIP BB,” are written in marker across the the bird’s oversized yellow forehead. Across the street is a dumpy Chinese takeout joint with a crew of corner boys posted up in front of it. It’s a warm, sunny late winter day and there’s a lot of foot traffic on the block. When the camera comes out and we start to shoot the curbside memorial the corner boys point at us, waving to each other […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY What looks at first glance like a makeshift pyramid of stuffed animals outside an abandoned brownstone between 22nd and 21st on Dauphin Street is in fact it is one of Philly’s many street shrines for neighborhood homicide victims. The stuffed animals comprising this shrine are mostly bears of different sizes, shapes and pedigree. There’s writing in black magic marker on the bears that reveals a name: Mook. The same name is spray painted on the front window of the house next door to the abandoned brownstone. “RIP Mook” is scrawled in big, black […]

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a collarless gray brindled pit bull giving lazy chase to another stray on 72nd Street, across from the Paschall Homes. The shaggy dog leading the pit bull jogged past the crumbling houses on Yocum Street, looking back over its shoulder, causing the pit to playfully hop up on his hind legs for a step or two when it did. The proliferation of feral dogs around the Paschall Homes lends irony to the statement spray painted on the facing low-rise brick wall dotted by plywood-covered windows on Greenway Avenue that reads, “Welcome 2 the Zoo.” […]

[Photos by MICHAEL S. WIRTZ/INQUIRER] BY JEFF DEENEY You might be asking yourself, as I initially did, why the Inky’s last installment in their three part series titled, “Homelessness in Philadelphia” focuses almost exclusively on New York. I’m not entirely sure, and while your conjecture is as good as mine, I’ll take a stab at formulating some theories. I imagine that this article was meant to act as a sort of demonstration piece about housing first, which is still relatively infantile in its deployment in Philly compared to other cities. When critics harsh on housing first in Philly, they make […]

BY JEFF DEENEY If you caught yesterday’s comments on the Inky’s big three part series, “Homelessness in Philadelphia,” you know that I felt it wasn’t looking so strong out of the gate. It was another collection of phoned in quotes from the usual suspects who contributed to the paper’s last ten articles on homelessness, some nominal street reporting that read like it was done in a single afternoon and a sensational accompanying photo of a ramshackle shelter, the sight of which anyone who’s ever worked a day in center city already knows all too well, that didn’t provide any extra […]