BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a crowd of boys and girls playing with their Christmas toys in front of a dingy brown brick three-story low rise at the Bartram Village projects in the southwest. A couple of the little boys got remote control monster trucks and were making them zip along the concrete path that winds between the clusters of apartment buildings. One boy in a brown parka with a fur lined hood made his truck duck under the low railing made from black-painted metal pipes that follows the entire length of the path. The truck wildly bounded along […]

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW an ambulance slowly snaking east through heavy traffic on Allegheny Avenue. It came to a stall halfway through the intersection with Kensington Avenue, where traffic stood clogged, cars line up from nose to tail. The ambulance driver loudly laid on the horn and cleared a narrow path to sneak through. Once out from under the El the ambulance swung around, making a u-turn and pulling up right to where I was standing on the northeast corner. When the EMTs got out they looked around, trying to spot the person who made the 911 call. […]

  BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW two 16-ft. moving trucks parked back-to-back in front of Mantua Hall, their loading ramps extended so they almost touched each other. Every day is moving day now. The building is slated to be emptied by the end of the year, and while most families have already left there are still some stragglers waiting for the Philadelphia Housing Authority to approve their new scatter-site placements. PHA is paying for the families to relocate, so the moving trucks come in pairs and when one leaves another arrives. The process is orderly, and as efficient as […]

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a powder blue-and-white pickup truck pull up to the curb across from where I stood, mid-block on a side street near 29th and Dauphin in Strawberry Mansion. The truck’s cab was piled with scrap metal and appliance parts, precariously held in place by a single length of corded yellow rope. I had been standing around, waiting for someone and making small talk with a neighbor for a minute before the truck stopped and parked. The house over my left shoulder was boarded up and abandoned. The house directly behind me had a storm door […]

  BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a long line of people waiting to turn their cell phones in at the Criminal Justice Center. That’s the first stop on the way to criminal court; everyone stands in a line that snakes through the lobby for five minutes before handing over their phones to a white guy in jeans and a sweatshirt who stands in front of a big box with hundreds of sliding compartments. He’s usually listening to classic rock radio but today he was singing the Eagles fight song while furiously snatching phones and handing out numbered plastic chips […]

  BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a young white couple with two small kids, arguing underneath the 60 bus shelter at Frankford and Allegheny. Dad wore a white hooded sweat jacket, patterned with red-outlined skulls. The skulls were arranged arbitrarily, like they were piled on top of each other. He wore construction boots air brushed with graffiti tags along the uppers. His girl wore a Rocawear winter jacket that had a tight, knitted waist and fur around the hood. She had on skin-tight jeans that her redheaded children, one boy and one girl, clung to. Her complexion was pasty […]

  BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a one-eyed cat with no tail, blocking the entrance to a unit in Bartram Village, a low-rise housing project in the Southwest. When he saw me coming he looked back at me defiantly until I started up the steps; he was slow to jump into the garbage-strewn grass, walking off with a limp. As the cat walked away, I could see that the tail wasn’t missing so much as it was torn off. A shred of it remained, stuck up in the air at an odd angle. Bartram Village is a sprawling complex […]

  BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW a mountain of garbage stacked on the flat landing outside the front doors to Mantua Hall. There were bags filled with rotting garbage and piles of discarded clothes. There were bed mattresses tossed at angles on top of all the bags. There was busted up furniture pushed to the edges of the pile and left to soak in the rain. It was impossible to tell if the trash heap was a sign of progress or regress; these could be things discarded by families moving to new Section 8 housing in advance of the […]

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW two young black girls walking on 52nd by Kershaw Street, just south of Master. One girl had her hair cropped so close it was nearly shaven, and she had no bra on under her skintight turquoise top. The other girl had braids and was a little thick; her shape pushed out from under the edges of her similarly form-fitting chocolate colored outfit. They crossed 52nd Street in the middle of the block, and as they walked out into traffic they entwined hands, not caring who knew that they were lovers. The short-haired girl was […]

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW new black magic marker tags scrawled on the sidewalk outside Mantua Hall. “Tre Six Gangstas,” read one, “36th Street Mafia” read another. There’s a ledge outside the front doors to the housing project tall enough to sit on, and there were seven or eight Tre Six boys kicking back on the ledge and mobbed on the steps leading to the front door. It was early Friday evening, so I assumed they were getting ready to serve the payday party crowd that would start rolling through at any minute. One of the boys had shoulder […]

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW another of the 9th Street methadone clinic’s finest, perusing the perfume selection at the Rite Aid on 12th and Girard. She was a tall, stick-skinny white girl, her cheeks sunken and pale skin pulled taut across her cheekbones. Her eyes weren’t even open when she reached to grab a bottle off a shelf in the front of the store facing the register. Instead of closing her hand around the bottle and picking it up, she pushed it until it fell on the floor. I expected it to shatter, but apparently cheap perfume bottles aren’t […]

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW the words “Da Bottom” and “36th St.” written in black magic marker on the front door to Mantua Hall. The door is made from stainless steel and has a scratched-up window that looks over the lobby past the security guard’s window. There’s another identical exit door with the same words scrawled on it on the other side of a partition. It swings open and a tired looking, deathly skinny women walks past, dragging two dripping bags of garbage behind her. Mantua Hall is one of the last of a dying breed; it’s a high-rise […]