PART 2
THE NEIGHBORHOOD NOVEL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE INNER CITY

5
Exposition: South Street and the Neighborhood Novel

South Street runs east and west between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers at the southern edge of Philadelphia's Center City (see figs. 5 and 6 for locations referred to in part 2). It runs as well through a textual city constructed by a body of literature that engages imaginatively with the transformation of American urbanism in the decades after World War II. The South Street milieu is a contact zone where different Philadelphias meet: the nineteenth-century industrial city and the late twentieth-century, postindustrial metropolitan region; the old neighborhoods of South Philadelphia and the business, government, and upscale residential core of Center City; white and black Philadelphia and different arrangements of white and black in different periods.^[1] The writers whose work converges on South Street explore the social and literary implications of urban processes that shape city life: the constantly negotiated fit between people and place that constitutes neighborhood, the dynamic interplay between local and metropolitan orders, the redevelopment of property that puts the landscape in motion under the feet and over the heads of city people. The postindustrial inner city took shape along South Street in the 1950 and 1960s, and continues to take shape today, in a complex of persistences and successions that structure a literature as well as a social landscape. Having traditionally formed both an edge where different orders meet and a spine along which neighborhoods take shape, South Street cuts across Philadelphia in ways that lay bare the structure and shaping processes of both the city of fact and the city of feeling.

Neighborhood has been the organizing principle of South Philadelphia's social history, and the central problem of that history is the relation of neighborhoods' local orders to the metropolitan orders headquartered in Center

City's office towers and City Hall. The constitutive relationship between people and place creates a neighborhood, a complex artifact always balanced between formation and dissolution. South Philadelphia, which is separated from Center City by South Street, has traditionally been the ground of ethnic neighborhoods—principally Irish, Italian, black, and Jewish but also Eastern European, Hispanic, Laotian. Local forces like investment in homes, businesses, and institutions, individual and communal responses to interventions from outside the neighborhood, and face-to-face exchanges of ideologies and worldviews can pull a neighborhood together or apart as they affect the relationship of people to one another and to place. The same is true of metropolitan forces as varied as the regional real estate market, the city's position in national and international flows of people and resources, and the exercise of governmental power—all of which shaped the postwar history of the neighborhoods of South Philadelphia. These neighborhoods, descended directly from the industrial neighborhood order, still crowd right up to South Street from the south: the once white-ethnic enclave of Queen Village, now heavily gentrified, on the eastern end of South; black neighborhoods with nineteenth-century roots (and post-World War II trauma in the form of high-rise housing projects) in the center and west; the Irish preserves of Grays Ferry and Schuylkill (increasingly gentrified) on the far western end. At midcentury, before five decades of renewal and redevelopment, the urban villages of upper South Philly extended north of South in a ragged front into Center City, but the southward expansion of Center City has rolled back what is left of them. Today, the renovated townhouses and rowhouses of Center City's service-professional neighborhoods reach down to South Street from the core of high-rise workplaces and residences and in some places extend south of South. In the late 1950s, Philadelphia's City Planning Commission envisioned a solid mass of "healthy housing extending from river to river and meeting the core cleanly without a layer of blight between," a vision of gentrification as civic "health" that is being fulfilled as the redevelopment of Center City fills in the remaining pockets above South.^[2]

The problem of neighborhood has also been the organizing principle of South Street's postwar literature. In part 2 I will examine five novels that map the South Street contact zone: Jack Dunphy's John Fury (1946), William Gardner Smith's South Street (1954), David Bradley's South Street (1975), Pete Dexter's God's Pocket (1983), and Diane McKinney-Whetstone's Tumblin g (1996). (For the sake of brevity, I will call these novels "the South Street literature," by which I mean "literature that explores the world of and around the South Street contact zone." Two of the novels are set on South Street proper; two in neighborhoods just north of it; one in a neighborhood deep in South Philadelphia.) These novels fall into various generic categories-there are family narratives, white-ethnic declines, novels of black community (at least one of

which is labeled a "protest" novel), and more than one story of the making or unmaking of urban intellectuals—but they are also parts of one composite text. The novels share so many formal and thematic characteristics that the conventional disciplinary division of South Street literature into "black" writing (novels by Smith, Bradley, and McKinney-Whetstone) and "white" writing (novels by Dunphy and Dexter) would do violence to what is clearly one profoundly unified body of work telling one larger story shared by black and white neighborhoods, writers, and characters. The various pieces of the story encompass a larger landscape and a larger set of narratives including slavery, black migration, and ghettoization on the one hand and European immigration, Americanization, and the decline of the urban village on the other, but these landscapes and narratives flow together in the South Street literature to form a story of postindustrial transformation told on the scale of family and neighborhood.

The South Street literature is a relatively local canon; it has not commanded the kind of national attention devoted to the Chicago realists or the Harlem writers to be discussed in part 3. Some of the South Street novels have circulated more widely than others, but none of them has a place in anyone's notion of a postwar urban canon. Why, then, have I chosen to devote part 2 to the composite story of postindustrial transformation via South Street and the work of Jack Dunphy, William Gardner Smith, David Bradley, Pete Dexter, and Diane McKinney-Whetstone rather than via, say, Ralph Ellison, Anne Petry, Saul Bellow, and the rest of the usual suspects (to the extent that the still-formative field of postwar urban literature has produced usual suspects)? First, the South Street contact zone offers a unique perspective on the drama of local and metropolitan orders in conflict, a drama absolutely central to the story of postwar urbanism. That tension between orders is particularly revealed on South Street because, unlike other urban places more typically traversed by literary criticism, South Street touches all three conventional elements of the postindustrial social landscape as it developed in Northern industrial cities—the redeveloped downtown, the second ghetto, and the white-ethnic enclave. South Street thereby offers a chance to study the emerging postindustrial inner city in compact microcosm. Second, the South Street literature's derivative and generic qualities allow me to generalize the argument and the narrative of this study. The South Street literature manifests a number of generic connections not only to the texts discussed in parts 1 and 3 but also to a larger, national urban literature that includes the decline and the protest novel, influential sociological studies, crime stories, seminal policy debates about planning and renewal, and the works of the "usual suspects." Those bodies of writing flow together in the South Street literature in ways that suggest a more general convergence, a way to read a broader range of urban texts together under the rubric of postindustrial transformation. Finally, the relative obscurity of the South Street novels constitutes part of their value in generalizing my argument. Readers of urban litera-

ture are forever cobbling together such local canons in their heads: for example, Cleveland stories, or subway stories, or, to go farther afield to a Western analog of the old industrial cities, the literature of California's old fruit-picking centers. Part 2 seeks, via the South Street novels, to connect that largely submerged mass of the urban-literary iceberg to the parts that typically ride above the critical waters—like the Chicago of the neighborhood novelists and the Harlem of the urban crisis.

This chapter, then, will serve to introduce the South Street literature and to sketch the history of South Street. These two frames, literary and historical, will organize the readings of the novels made in the two chapters that follow.

A South Street Literature

South Street has attracted urban intellectuals in a variety of disciplines. Social scientists, especially those affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania just across the Schuylkill, have been drawn to South Street by the area's complex social landscape, in which a variety of races, ethnic groups, social classes, and neighborhood types can be found in a close but segmented mix. If there is no "Philadelphia School" of sociology with the hegemonic status enjoyed by the Chicago School in the early twentieth century, Penn, Temple, and other Philadelphia institutions have produced a distinguished body of urban social science.^[3] Part of that work has been the social scientific mapping of the neighborhoods around South, producing studies of black urbanism—beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois's distinguished early work, The Philadelphia Negro, and including Roger Abrahams's studies of urban folklore initiated in Deep Down in the Jungle —and white-ethnic neighborhood formations.^[4] City planners serving progrowth forces, whose thwarted schemes to turn South Street into an expressway were crucial to the postwar history of the area, have produced innumerable representations of South Street as it was and as they wanted it to be. Residents, business owners, lawyers, professors, and others who opposed the city planners have produced their own counterliterature of studies, polemics, and alternative plans. Together, these nonliterary representations add up to an account of the social, economic, political, and cultural forces that shape the inner city and are shaped by it.

I will draw upon this account later in this chapter in assembling a historical portrait of postwar South Street, but my task in this section is to introduce the account of South Street composed by the literary intellectuals who command my primary attention. Since World War II, the South Street area has inspired novelists, especially first-time novelists. Some were homegrown: Jack Dunphy grew up between the wars in the Irish urban villages of South Philly, William Gardner Smith in black South Philadelphia during the 1930s and 1940s. Some writers were attracted from elsewhere: David Bradley came to the University of

Pennsylvania from a small Pennsylvania town in the 1960s and found his way to South Street when college life proved disappointing; Pete Dexter, raised in South Dakota, found the material for his first novel in South Philadelphia when he worked as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News. Diane McKinney-Whetstone was both homegrown and an outsider: she was still very young when her parents left South Philadelphia in the 1950s and moved to West Philadelphia, where she grew up, but she returned to South Philadelphia in her first novel. Four of the five South Street novels are first novels—and the exception, Smith's South Street (his third), was published when its precocious author was all of twenty-seven years old—which suggests that the South Street milieu has convinced young writers (and publishers) looking for good material that they have found the makings of stories worth telling.

Together, they have rendered those stories—that story, in aggregate—in a body of work that explores the literary implications of the inner city's postwar transformation. The South Street writers confronted South Philadelphia and Center City—and, most important, the contact zone where the two regions meet—as a place from which literature can be made. Their response to it is also a response to the problems that faced Nelson Algren at midcentury: how and who to write about the changing inner city.

How to write about South Street? The answer has come in the form of novels—more precisely, "neighborhood novels"—shaped formally and thematically by showing how the conditions of a particular historical period or moment throw urban communities into crisis. The notion of neighborhood is essential to these novels and to the ways they hang together as a group. "Neighborhood," like genre, is a fluid term: it suggests both a quality of civic life and a bounded area larger than a household but smaller than a district. The term is also at least slightly inflected with positive content: especially for city people surrounded by strangers, to think of someone as a neighbor acknowledges an obligation or regard not necessarily extended to everyone they encounter. I will, then, provisionally define a neighborhood as an urban place occupied by a community of people who regard themselves as a community, who share clear ideas of the place's boundaries, who regard the people in the surrounding areas as members of separate communities, and who might plausibly encounter one another in the course of the weekly round. The people of a neighborhood maintain the quality of neighborhood via these shared assumptions and activities. A neighborhood can be as small as a block, although it is rare that an individual block becomes distinctive or insular enough to discourage its residents from regarding people on any of the adjoining blocks as neighbors, and a neighborhood can be very large—if (as is the case with Hyde Park in Chicago or Park Slope in Brooklyn) the contrast with the surrounding areas is relatively great and the general sense within the neighborhood of living in an indivisible geographic and social unit is relatively great. Neighborhood, then, is a quality as much as

it is an artifact, and it is mutable and slippery. Growing up in Chicago, I would never have thought of the people on the other side of Jeffery Boulevard as my neighbors, but I would today if I ran into one of them next week in Ulan Bator or at a scholarly conference. Let us sum up this struggle with a greased concept by concluding that neighborhood is the first geographic and conceptual level of urban community beyond the household, embracing both loved ones and strangers, and as such it is a basic unit of urban community.

Neighborhood novels concern themselves with the local conjunction of people and place that makes up a lived urban order, attached to a particular piece of urban terrain. The problem of neighborhood, of defining and sustaining a particular way of life on that terrain, becomes an organizing logic for these novels, leading them to consider how a particular equation of people and place can over time be made, broken, contested, shifted. Neighborhood crises take place in space: problems of boundary and incursion arise at the neighborhood's borders, the fit between local and metropolitan orders shapes the neighborhood in relation to the city around it. The crises take place, as well, in time: dramas of succession, rise, and decline lead to narratives about change over time; crises of reproduction, in which the neighborhood succeeds or fails in perpetuating itself into the next generation, lead to narratives about the precarious persistence of orders. The urban intellectuals who move through the South Street novels as characters also consider parallel crises in the writing of the neighborhood, dramas of reproduction and representation in the literary sense. The irruption and resolution (or lack of resolution) of these various social and literary crises help to organize these novels generically, to make them "neighborhood novels" devoting significant, patterned energies to depicting and accounting for the human orders that infuse a particular urban space with meanings, thereby turning it into a place.

Each South Street novel concerns itself with describing and accounting for the status of a neighborhood within the social landscape it constructs and imagines two sets of reasons for change: the local neighborhood order's internal logic and city-structuring metropolitan forces typically operating beyond the characters' (and sometimes the novel's) horizons of perception. Each novel's ability to imagine and figure these forces tells us something about the historical moment of its writing. Dunphy's John Fury and Smith's South Street map the late industrial neighborhood order at midcentury. John Fury, like Algren's Man with the Golden Arm, bends a 1930s-vintage account of the neighborhood order's erosive internal contradictions into a midcentury narrative of that order's decline, told in the novel as the passing of the "horse-and-wagon" Philadelphia built by Irish immigrants. Smith's South Street neighborhood must resolve divisive internal disputes in order to confront a complex of external pressures typical of the early 1950s: tension between a rapidly growing black population and white ethnics, increasing agitation by blacks for equal civil rights, the redraw-

ing of racial and political boundaries in the changing inner city. Bradley's South Street and Dexter's God's Pocket, written in the 1970s and 1980s in the aftermath of the urban crisis that was brewing at midcentury, provide epilogues to Dunphy and Smith. Bradley's black South Streeters sustain the vestiges of community against a background of urban renewal and redevelopment, a powerful transformative impetus operating at a scale that dwarfs the neighborhood. The people of Dexter's God's Pocket, an anachronistic survival of the white-ethnic urban village tucked between South Street and Center City, respond with violence and bewilderment to incursions from "outside" that point up the neighborhood's increasingly ghostly presence in the postindustrial city. McKinney-Whetstone's Tumbling returns in the form of historical romance to Smith's social terrain, the black neighborhoods bracketing South Street during the 1940s and 1950s, imagining (as did Smith) a vital community that heals its internal wounds, this time by resisting the external threats of urban renewal and gentrification.

The neighborhood novel does not, of course, confine itself to the formal problem of representing neighborhood and the thematic problems of neighborhood raised by crises in the local order. As it frames and works through these problems of neighborhood, the neighborhood novel erects a flexible structure that can encompass corollary matters ranging across the variety of subjects intersecting with urbanism. (If it sometimes seems that post-urban crisis American culture tends to restrict that range of subjects to one—race—it bears noting that the mapping of racial conflict on the inner city has become a way to discuss freedom and moral order, market forces and social good, individual rights and responsibility to a community, and other large, vexed questions traditionally associated with city life.) Typically, neighborhood novels assemble a local context from a set of exemplary characters, families, pieces of urban terrain, and so on, generalizing outward from this context of neighborhood to broader notions of place, peoplehood, politics, history, and so on. Neighborhood thus provides a manageable vocabulary and scale with which to condense a city, a region, a people, a set of principles into an expressive setting and a system of individual characters.

The South Street literature, continuing the project of the Chicago neighborhood novel into the postwar era, uses the frame of neighborhood to consider the postindustrial inner city. In the 1930s and 1940s, Farrell, Wright, and Algren took up the genre of neighborhood novel developed in the nineteenth century by European and American realists and gave it powerfully influential form. In their hands, the American neighborhood novel came definitively to be about industrial urbanism as it was lived at street level in the urban village and Black Metropolis. The South Street novels share much with the Chicago neighborhood novels: an interest in those people who have the least protection from the effects of urban process; an emphasis on the disjuncture between urban process

at the grand scale and the circumscribed horizons of neighborhood types; a tendency to argue (especially, in the South Street novels, via the successes and failures of writer-characters) for a literature of observation on the sociological model. John Fury, written before Algren's Golden Arm and in the long shadow of Farrell's influence on representations of the urban Irish, follows most closely on the Chicago model, proposing a modest formal extension of the genre with its exaggeratedly spare prose style. Smith's South Street, written at midcentury by a young writer uncomfortable with Wright's equally powerful influence over representations of urban blacks, begins to push the neighborhood novel toward representation of postwar urban transformations. (One can group Smith's book, in this regard, with Anne Petry's The Street [1946] and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man [1952], a picaresque novel that collapses into an apocalyptic neighborhood novel.) The rest of the South Street novels develop subtexts in Dunphy and Smith as they push the neighborhood novel into its postindustrial phase, engaging with the revised inner city that succeeded the Chicago tradition's congeries of industrial villages.

The striking recurrence in the South Street literature of particular formal and thematic strategies reinforces one's sense that the novels form a collective engagement with a changing city, a single composite story spread among several texts. Although the South Street novelists do not seem to have read and influenced one another, the answer to the question of how to write the inner city is remarkably consistent as one reads through the half-century of prose spanning John Fury and Tumbling.^[5]

The South Street novels are structured around family narratives and their problems of community and reproduction. These novels make families the building blocks of neighborhoods—families occupy the rowhouses, build the city, produce the next generation—and family crises become clear figures of neighborhood crises (as in Golden Arm, in which Vi's two families encapsulate the urban village's generational decline). In every novel, marriages are collapsing, barren, sexless, cursed with bad feeling or ill health or poor luck. Bad offspring pervade the literature, threatening to bring a family, a neighborhood, an urban people to ruin as they fritter away their inheritance. The only sons of steady-working men will not work (John Fury, God's Pocket ), marking the terminus of working-class traditions rooted in the industrial village. Upwardly mobile daughters grow away from parents (John Fury, Tumbling ), threatening to bring down the neighborhood with them: this is most clearly dramatized in Tumbling, in which one independent-minded daughter's pathological plastereating habit, not to mention her plan to sell her rowhouse to the city so it can build a highway, literally undermines the structure of the neighborhood. In Smith's South Street, three brothers aspire to sustain and lead a black community through perilous midcentury transitions, but their position of leadership is deeply undercut by their inability to form or sustain families. Bradley's South

Street, the only novel in which marriage dramas are not central, is also the novel with the least traditional notion of neighborhood, and part of its project is precisely to depict a vital community, surviving in the aftermath of two decades of neighborhood-breaking urban renewal, that does not conform to traditional notions of community. Yet even Bradley deploys the marriage strategy in important, conventional ways: his portrait of a childless community robbed of past and future rests significantly on two marriages in crisis (a preacher's and an ex-prostitute's); his account of an urban intellectual's engagement with the inner city takes the form of a poet's shuttling between two opposed domestic arrangements.

The South Street novels also share (again with Golden Arm) a habit of constructing expressive cityscapes that fit the travails of a few characters into larger accounts of urban peoples caught up in the sweep of history. The cities constructed in these novels are signifying forms, and in each of them one can read the history of a people and a place. The rowhouses of South Philadelphia, small and packed end to end in block-long fronts, consistently serve as a figure of an urbanism rooted in the industrial neighborhood order. A stock narrative line is compressed into the rowhouse form: migration (from Europe or the American South), skilled manual work, family formation, saving, commitment to traditional neighborhood institutions (church, tavern, school), an expectation of upward social mobility, and a countervailing expectation that neighborhood is a crucial value that must be preserved not only against outside influence but also against interior forces of dissolution like upward social mobility and generational drift. This is the baseline map of urbanism on which all the South Street novels build their stories of postindustrial transformation. All of them map the rowhouse world and its churches and taverns (Bradley, again, foregrounds the churches and taverns but removes the rowhouses to show the extent of the social damage caused by renewal); all of them use expressive cityscapes—scenes of demolition, collapse, construction—to show how rowhouse urbanism weathers the shocks of urban process. Some of the novels (especially God's Pocket and Bradley's South Street ) also extend their signifying landscapes beyond the neighborhood to sketch greater Philadelphia's postwar history: high-rise housing projects tell the second ghetto's story of migration, conflict, and containment; the groomed precincts of Rittenhouse Square and Society Hill impress the principles of age-old social distance and postwar gentrification upon interlopers from South Philly; Center City's brooding City Hall and towering skyscrapers are the seats of metropolitan power from which anonymous managers, hidden from view, guide the city's transformation.

Always, the encounter of individual characters with the cityscape connects the novel's plot lines to the larger web of histories readable in that cityscape. This tendency is dramatized in a kind of scene repeated throughout the South Street literature: the "runaway," in which a character is borne against his or her

will through a familiar landscape made strange until fetching up against some kind of limit. Whether it be a runaway horse and wagon tearing through South Philly until it reaches the railroad tracks (John Fury, Smith's South Street ), a bus ride through a ruinous landscape that ends at the Schuylkill Expressway (Bradley's South Street ), or a chase on foot after a refrigerator truck until it collides spectacularly with a city bus (God's Pocket ), each runaway sums up the relationship between a character's individual will exercised at the local scale and infinitely more powerful, impersonal processes operating at the metropolitan scale—processes that shape the fates of characters and the neighborhoods and urbanisms they stand for. (Tumbling, the lone exception, helps to prove the runaway rule. The closest it comes to a runaway is a traumatic memory of a brutal abduction and gang rape in rural Florida rather than an urban scene, but the novel is unique in the South Street literature for explicitly imagining the exercise of personal will as securing the neighborhood against the effects of impersonal processes like redevelopment. The lingering trauma of the rape, like the lingering threat of the planned highway, is expunged as the neighborhood heals itself.)

The runaway gathers together the formal strategies and themes that unite the South Street literature. It typically marks a crisis in family narrative: John Fury has a vision of a runaway wagon at his first wife's deathbed; the runaway wagon in Smith's South Street goes out of control when Slim, a neighborhood hero, passes the reins to his young nephew. The runaway takes the reader through a landscape that links characters to larger historical narratives: Bradley's protagonist surveys the results of urban renewal from his bus window; the chase after the truck in God's Pocket surveys a long stretch of South Philly before ending in a crash that raises echoes of the Majcineks' wreck. In each runaway scene, a character confronts the neighborhood, the metropolis, and the relationship between them that forms the South Street literature's main theme. This clash or fusion of scales, local and metropolitan, imparts a dreamlike quality to the runaway, the sense of a familiar place rendered strange in a moment of vertiginous insight.

These moments of insight—of reading urban form and grasping the big picture—are significant departures for the characters involved, episodes in which a coal wagon driver (Fury), numbers writer (Slim), or mob-connected truck driver (Mickey Scarpato in God's Pocket ) does the kind of work that urban intellectuals do. For other characters in the literature, though, reading and writing the city of fact is a full-time job: the South Street literature devotes significant energies to imagining what kinds of urban intellectuals are made or broken by the South Street milieu. The South Street novels' answers to this question of "who writes the inner city?" fashion a composite portrait of the urban intellectual's relationship to the inner city during the postwar era of transformation and crisis. The presence of writer-characters in three of the novels—

both South Streets and God's Pocket— is another repeated element binding together the South Street novels into a larger whole.

Writer-characters move through the literature, confronting urban change with the same sense of bewilderment and crisis evidenced by other characters trying to comprehend the disturbances in their familiar worlds. These writer-characters' dramas of reproduction and representation raise a set of literary-historical problems for them that also faced American urban intellectuals after World War II: who are the urban intellectuals equipped to take up the task of representing the transformed inner city, what should they write, and what constitutes their training and authority to do that work? Both South Streets plot on their neighborhood maps a story in which the postwar social landscape produces an urban intellectual suited to the task of representing it. Smith's protagonist Claude Bowers struggles to make sense of the inner city at midcentury, to decide on the right course and lead his neighborhood (and, by extension, urban blacks in general), to understand and write about black Americans in a time of migration and growing political awareness. Bradley's poet-hero Adlai Stevenson Brown, buffeted by forces of redevelopment and urban crisis that gutted South Street in the 1960s, struggles against sociological dogma and his own middle-class social trajectory to stay on South Street at all, to sustain access to the neighborhood characters, rats, roaches, and garbage that constitute the subject matter of his post-apocalyptic poetry. Dexter's God's Pocket provides a gloss on the story of Nelson Algren's literary exhaustion by plotting the failure of an urban intellectual, a burnt-out shell of a newspaper columnist named Richard Shellburn, to understand the relationship between enclaved survivals of the industrial city and the postindustrial city that contains them.

The stakes in the struggle to represent the South Street milieu are high: writer-characters in the South Street literature tend to succeed or die. Claude Bowers and Adlai Brown fight their way to productive vantage points on the inner city, but Claude's brother Philip, an aspiring novelist, is killed by an aggrieved young man with a rock, and Shellburn is beaten to death by a mob incensed by his phrasing of a decline narrative. The violence visited upon writers in the South Street literature conveys a sense of the upheaval and drama associated with the act of observing and writing about a city in constant, feverish motion. As powerful forces mold the changing social landscape around South Street—eroding older forms of urbanism and enabling new ones, raising the stakes on neighborhoods and individuals—the characters who aspire to make sense of the complex relations among people, place, and process run the risk of writing the wrong thing or failing to write anything at all. Violent little parables of literary life, in which urban intellectuals confront their subject in the streets, identify the South Street literature as caught up in the same urban processes—the same networks of interest and contest—that shaped the South Street of fact.

Writers are not the only victims of violence in the South Street novels, which are awash in beatings, punchouts, knifings, rape, gang fights, riots, and all manner of domestic violence. This pervasive violence does more than mark the South Street literature as conventionally urban and American, it also constitutes a pervasive metaphor of the violence of urban process: family members war against one another as conflicts sweep through the household and the neighborhood it represents in microcosm; neighborhoods war against one another as the social landscape shifts beneath them; social classes and class fractions struggle over land on the edge of Center City; temperatures rise and tempers grow short as older and newer urbanisms crowd against one another. Much, but not all, of this violence is inflected by racial difference, as any reading of postwar urban history would lead one to expect.^[6] From workplace fights (John Fury, God's Pocket ) to gang wars and full-scale riots (Smith's South Street ), a pattern of violence marks the contact between black and white Philadelphia in the novels.

That pattern of violence marks racial division in the South Street literature's city of feeling and refers to such division in the Philadelphia of fact, but it helps to unite the "black" and "white" South Street novels into a single literature. Scenes of racial violence, and the very assumption of strict separation that underlies them, are part of the stitchery that binds together the South Street literature's patchwork of white-ethnic declines and narratives of black community into the larger story of postindustrial transformation. The pattern of racial violence shared by the novels—like the shared patterns of family narratives, expressive cityscapes, runaway scenes, writer-characters, and local-metropolitan tensions—is another measure of literary likeness. This does not render the South Street literature as some kind of postracial utopia; for the most part, in fact, the white South Street authors write about white characters, black authors write about blacks, and each novel stays in its own generic neighborhood. But the South Street literature demonstrates how "black" and "white" genres of urban literature, like black and white neighborhoods in the social landscape, can be parts of a greater whole—even if the people who police their borders do not want them to be.

The violence of the South Street literature also reflects the conflict and dislocation running through South Street's postwar history. The South Street writers have been inspired by observation of a social landscape in dramatic, even violent, motion.

South Street and Greater Philadelphia

The forces shaping South Street's postwar history flow into the neighborhoods from downtown. Postwar city planning in Philadelphia, codified in the

City Planning Commission's Comprehensive Plan (1960) and supplementary Plan for Center City (1963), begins from this basic premise:

The well being of Center City Philadelphia is basic to the well being of the entire Delaware Valley region.

Center City must always remain the principal place for doing business, much of which, after all, depends on person-to-person contact; for purchase of those special things which give richness to our lives and for those great cultural activities which set the tone of our contemporary civilization.

In addition, Center City serves as the springboard from which waves of revitalization spread outward as suburban families are reattracted to urban living.^[7]

In 1960, Philadelphia's City Planning Commission delivered to Mayor Richardson Dilworth and the City Council its comprehensive plan, a "blueprint for the Philadelphia of tomorrow." It envisioned "a new kind of city, its beginning already in evidence, which is within the financial and physical means of Philadelphia's people to bring to full realization in the remaining decades of this century."^[8] The plan undertook to structure Philadelphia's engagement with forces shaping postwar America, remaking the city in ways that would allow it to compete successfully with other cities and, more important, with its own booming suburbs. The principal struggle would be against the decentralization of capital and the increasing tendency of private investors to look elsewhere than downtown for economic opportunities. Recognizing that "the term 'Philadelphia,' as customarily used today, refers to a complex reaching far beyond the City proper," the plan outlined strategies for retaining and attracting business, jobs, and middle-class taxpayers that would otherwise be lost to the suburbs.^[9] Putting the plan into action would cost the city at least $3.5 billion, but the alternative was decline and slow death.

The city the plan envisioned took shape around a vigorous downtown serving its historic function as the center of the Delaware Valley region's networks of business, government, and culture. ^[10] The plan framed its principal arguments as a case for "revitalizing" Center City in order that it continue to attract capital on every level: corporate investment, upscale residence, the suburban family's consumer dollars. Mustering historical support for—or anachronizing the image of suburbanites commuting downtown to work, shop, attend a concert, or eat out, the plan invoked William Penn's colonial-era Philadelphia as "the seat of a great rural region, farmed by large landholders, each living on his own farm," who "looked to Philadelphia not only as a market for their goods and a source of supply, but also as the center of much of their social and cultural activity."^[11] The plan sought to make certain that Center City Philadelphia, occupying the site of Penn's original city, sustained itself in this traditional relation to its region well into the next century.

The plan for Center City, a second volume devoted to the comprehensive plan's key Center City component, detailed the massive transportation network and physical redevelopment required to remake Center City: "A basic policy which underlies the Center City Plan is to provide the limited core area with the richest possible series of interrelated transportation facilities serving all parts of the region and encouraging the concentration of all major region-oriented activities within walking distance of these transportation centers."^[12] More than half of the comprehensive plan's total expenditure would go to fund an elaborate system of expressways designed to carry traffic from the region's furthest reaches (and beyond, via the interstates) into Center City, where new parking facilities and rail stations would absorb the cars and commuters. The flows of cars from periphery to center would intersect with three progressively larger highway rings—the Center City, Five Mile, and Ten Mile loops—cut through the metropolis. This complex transportation network would channel people and money into a new urban core of tall office buildings, refurbished shopping strips, major cultural centers, pedestrian walks on the rivers, and fashionable residential areas like Rittenhouse Square and Society Hill. Bracketed east and west by the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, buffered from lower-income residential areas to the north and south by the Vine Street and Crosstown expressways, Center City would be a showpiece central place, a self-contained walking city for the next century.

This 1950s-vintage vision of a "limited core area" was realized in important and lasting ways; however, it is crucial to the story of South Street that the plan was not, and probably never will be, executed in its entirety. In particular, many components of its expressway network were never built—among them, notably, the Crosstown Expressway, which would have erased South Street from the map (figs. 7 and 8). The rise of suburban centers rivaling, rather than subsidiary to, Center City made for less periphery-to-downtown traffic flow than the plan expected. Also, the plan's ability to pay for itself rested on overly optimistic projections of growth in inner-city population, economic vigor, and a continuing and stability-encouraging "reasonable balance of income groups, family sizes, and races."^[13] The erosion of Philadelphia's tax base, combined with the formation in the 1960s of local groups opposed to urban renewal projects, weakened the public sector's ability to complete those projects. Government-assisted private development in the "limited core area," like office towers and shopping complexes, continued to flourish, but necessarily public-sector projects (like the Crosstown Expressway) ran into unforeseen difficulties.

The plan made clear that the private sector, not city government, had the leading role in their partnership. Although the plan had been assembled by a government agency, its authors noted that "much that is in it already has been planned or built by private initiative, and many of its ideas had their origin in the minds of professional or business men."^[14] Two alliances, forming the two main

elements of the progrowth coalition, were behind this exercise of private initiative in the public sphere. First, in 1951, the postwar Democratic alliance of latter-day Progressives, trade unions, blacks, and the party's white-ethnic "rowhouse regulars" defeated the Republican machine that had dominated Philadelphia since the city's political consolidation in 1854. The Democratic alliance's tenuous network of common interest soon began to dissolve under the multiple pressures of industrial decline, a changing calculus of racial and ethnic politics, and the discrediting of the urban renewal agenda, but while it lasted the Democratic alliance provided political support for a second, private-sector alliance of planners, bankers, lawyers, and other business and professional interests committed to fostering downtown redevelopment.^[15] Elite activist business groups like the Citizens' Council on City Planning (CCCP) and its successor, the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM), undertook, in close cooperation with city government, to reshape the city's physical plant, transportation networks, and governmental order for a postindustrial age. The City Planning Commission's two-volume plan codified the vision of the CCCP and GPM.^[16] The plan continued to serve as a blueprint for postindustrial Philadelphia into the 1980s, and further redevelopment proceeded in keeping with the plan's concentration on Center City.^[17] Although planning-oriented reform mayors held office from 1951 to only 1962, the coalition of interests represented by CCCP/GPM continued to determine the shape of redevelopment. Private dollars, not governmental administrative decisions, had the ultimate say in the success or failure of necessarily cooperative redevelopment projects, and private investors heavily concentrated their commitment of capital in Center City projects.^[18]

The progrowth coalition felt that Philadelphia needed to take such drastic measures to ensure its future economic and social viability. One of the nineteenth century's great manufacturing centers, Philadelphia took mature industrial form in the period 1880-1930, bequeathing to the twentieth century a cityscape of loft buildings, warehouses, narrow streets and alleys, two- and three-story rowhouses, an aging port and rail network. Like industrial Chicago, Philadelphia in this period was a city of urban villages: a patchwork of ethnic blocs grouped around factory workplaces, the whole surrounding a downtown government center and ringed in turn by streetcar suburbs. Again, as in Chicago, a common reliance on manufacturing and the brokering influence of the entrenched political machine (Republican in Philadelphia; Democratic in Chicago) stabilized this distinctively industrial urban system.

Philadelphia's manufacturing economy was especially reliant on small manufacturers of nondurable goods—as opposed to the vast plants that characterized heavy industry in Chicago or Detroit—a condition that only increased the speed and effects of postwar deindustrialization. Small manufacturers were particularly responsive to the notion that the relative cost of doing business, from taxes to union wages, in the inner city had become too high: they were less tied

to place than larger manufacturers (who tended to make significant investments in fixed equipment and real estate), and smaller businesses tended to place a premium on paying lower wages. Between 1955 and 1975, Philadelphia lost three out of four of its manufacturing jobs, a particularly sharp fall within a general decline of manufacturing in America's older industrial centers after World War II.^[19] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, with decentralization of capital and population clearly in evidence during the great suburban boom, the plan's authors saw themselves entering into a crucial competition with the suburbs and other cities for remaining manufacturing jobs and the industries of the growing service sector.

Philadelphia, like Chicago, had matured as an industrial city, and postindustrial transformation reshaped the city's fundamental arrangements of people, resources, power, and space. John Mollenkopf's general assessment of this transformation, applied earlier to the case of Chicago, is worth repeating here: postwar change "dismantled the mosaic of blue collar ethnic segmentation which developed within the occupational and residential order of the older industrial cities."^[20] Again, as in Chicago, the progrowth coalition worked to reconcentrate capital downtown, revaluing land in and around Center City. On the southern fringe of Center City, South Street came to be poised on an edge created by these processes: between the decline and contraction of South Philadelphia's industrial-era neighborhood order and the postindustrial refashioning and expansion of Center City.

In the 1950s and 1960s, South Street became an "inner-city" thoroughfare in a distinctively postindustrial sense of the term. As was the case in postwar Chicago, a substantial black migration from the South to Philadelphia in the 1940s and 1950s combined with the outflow of money, whites, and middleclass blacks to the periphery to set the stage for the transformation of Philadelphia's inner city. The new black Philadelphians entered the citydrawn by manufacturing, especially defense, jobs available during and just after the war—at a time when, as one account puts it, "many Philadelphians were looking outside of the city for both their housing and their employment."^[21] At the same time, Philadelphia's established black communities were becoming destabilized by population growth, changes in the structure of job opportunities, and redevelopment. Economic and cultural constraints on blacks helped to confine them to the inner city, which in the 1950s and 1960s began to take on distinctive postindustrial form: white-ethnic enclaves, redeveloped core, and second ghettos. South Street traversed this emergent landscape, the three principal terrains of which met along the thoroughfare.

Forming a traditional spine for Philadelphia's most established and relatively affluent communities of blacks, South Street touched upon a Black Metropolis of nineteenth-century vintage, black neighborhoods shaped to fit into the industrial city's mosaic of urban villages. Straddling the central portion of South

Street, especially, were solidly respectable neighborhoods in which black middle- and working-class families owned and patronized local businesses, attended churches and clubs, and saved to buy rowhouses. This established order underwent a series of upheavals as the Crosstown Expressway plan drove down property values and Center City moved south into the real estate "vacuum." Beginning in the 1950s and increasingly in the 1960s, with the entire area under the threat of being gutted by the planned highway, South Street's preexisting black neighborhoods eroded significantly. Those who could moved out, and a new population with nowhere else to go drifted into flophouses, furnished rooms, and condemned buildings that proliferated around central and western South Street. The breakdown of South Street's prewar black neighborhood order in the 1950s and 1960s left a mishmash of survivals—enclaved remnants of the old order, housing projects, transients—that seemed at the time to augur the formation of the second ghetto. The city did erect high-rise housing projects, the second ghetto's signature form, just below South Street in the 1960s, but the proximity of Center City and its southward movement obliged public and private authorities to prevent the second ghetto of South Philadelphia from developing on the same scale as in North Philadelphia.

Black South Philadelphia had been part of an ethnic and racial patchwork in which white ethnics predominated. Forming the northern edge of South Philadelphia, South Street touched white-ethnic neighborhoods, relics of the urban villages of crowded rowhouse blocks that had been shaped during the decades of peak European immigration before 1920. In the 1960s, these neighborhoods came to be seen as aging white enclaves squeezed between second ghetto and gentrified core. As Center City expanded south after the war and black neighborhoods along South Street were thrown into upheaval, many of South Philadelphia's white ethnics moved away from South Street: farther down into the heart of South Philly, to other, more stable neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia, or to the suburbs. This unraveling of the urban village in a generally prosperous, suburbanizing period was part of a larger historical process of acculturation: as the descendants of European immigrants continued to negotiate the complex generational process of shedding immigrant-ethnic status, they followed the general flow of capital and opportunity away from the old neighborhood. The comprehensive plan, drawn up before the urban crisis took the form of a racial crisis in the mid-1960s, admitted that there would be aggregate outflow from inner-city areas (and tacitly admitted that whites would be the ones moving out) but could not conceive of such movement at the scale and pace it assumed in the 1960s. Expanding black neighborhoods and the panic associated with riots and crime (and, on South Street, the dislocations attendant upon the Crosstown Expressway scheme) accelerated this movement into what has been called white flight—shorthand for the elevation of push factors (getting out of the inner city) over pull factors (entering America's subur-

ban middle class) in the departure of white ethnics from the inner city. Some merchants on South Street, white and black, came to support the Crosstown plan, hoping to cut their losses by selling out to the city.^[22]

The pressure on both white-ethnic and black communities around South Street was coming from Center City. Forming the southern edge of Center City, South Street ran along the border of one of the nation's showcases of downtown redevelopment: not just the office towers and large municipal buildings that house business, government, and cultural centers but also elite residential neighborhoods with access to restaurants, shops, and other cosmopolitan attractions. Rehabilitated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses and Society Hill's trio of skyscrapers, designed by the celebrated modernist architect I. M. Pei and built in the early 1960s, became architectural symbols of stylish downtown living. Philadelphia's chief planner, Edmund Bacon, likening the Pei towers to Pope Sixtus's obelisks in Rome, saw them as defining the new Center City's image and articulating the successful integration of past and future cityscapes: the towers were formally sensitive to "the delicate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures that form their foreground on the west and south, yet at the same time they serve as a powerful articulation point in relation to the fast movement on the Delaware Expressway dominating the sweep of the regional flow of the Delaware River."^[23] The towers marked the heart of the postindustrial metropolis defined by expressways and "regional flow," but they also acknowledged the historical richness of the preindustrial and industrial layers of cityscape uniquely available to Center City's residents. Similarly, the style of life pursued by this new, preponderantly white workforce of professionals, managers, and office workers in service industries constituted a kind of postindustrial urbanism distinct from the white-ethnic, black, and bohemian urbanisms that it simultaneously displaced and drew upon for cosmopolitan texture.^[24]

By the early 1970s, the industrial city was becoming a persistent but succeeded component of the postindustrial landscape around South Street. The old neighborhoods around South Street were not yet redeveloped and gentrified by Center City's service professionals, yet it was clear that they would be in time. They could no longer be identified as industrial villages, but the physical, social, and cultural orders typical of those villages were still in evidence. The old neighborhood order was in disarray, but the new order was not yet in place. South Street occupied yet another edge position, this one between phases of urban change.

The key to South Street's postwar history of change is an unbuilt expressway. South Street did not appear on the comprehensive and Center City plans' maps and views of the future. In its place, an expressway would form the southern verge of Center City, feeding cars into Center City and connecting 1-95 on the east to the Cobb's Creek Expressway farther to the west across the Schuylkill

(figs. 7 and 8). The planned South Street expressway—which had different names over the years but is best known as the Crosstown—would also serve to divide Center City from the variously gritty, seedy, and solid neighborhoods of South Philadelphia: the commission intended that the "Vine Street and Crosstown Expressways will reinforce the margins of Center City to the north and south."^[25] The decision to build the Crosstown along South Street, made in the 1950s and reversed in the 1960s, became the great determining fact of South Street's history from that point on.

South Street has a longer history than do most American streets, extending back to the 1682 survey commissioned by William Penn for the purpose of establishing the city, of which it formed the southern edge.^[26] Philadelphia's blacks, particularly the black middle class, had established themselves around South Street in the nineteenth century, and since the 1850s there had been a concentration of Jewish merchants on South, especially between Second and Fifth streets.^[27] Along with Girard Avenue to the north of Center City, South was one of the main shopping streets for industrial Philadelphia's wage-earning populations. The intricately layered and intermixed Polish, Italian, Jewish, black, and Irish populations of South Philadelphia made for a heterogeneous shopping strip, with ethnic businesses and enclaves strung along South "like beads on a string," in the words of urban planner Denise Scott Brown.^[28] Although some of its industrial-era merchants sold to a fashionable carriage trade drawn from aristocratic Rittenhouse Square just to the north (a trade that was diminished by an early wave of suburbanization in the 1920s), the whiteethnic and black neighborhoods of South Philadelphia provided South Street with its principal constituency.

The Great Depression, World War II, and postwar suburbanization combined to diminish South Street as a shopping street, especially as residents in surrounding neighborhoods moved out, but South was still a lively commercial strip in the early 1950s. A regional trade of ethnic shoppers returned to patronize favorite stores from the old neighborhood, and, especially west of Broad Street, South Philadelphia's growing black population used South Street as its principal commercial avenue. Denise Scott Brown argues that after World War II South Street "could, in fact, be called the main street of Philadelphia's center-city black community."^[29]

If the urban planner Brown saw South Street as the commercial backbone of at least one community, the City Planning Commission's blueprints for the future conceived of it as the border of Center City—in planning parlance, an "edge" rather than a "seam." Starting in the late 1950s, as the threat of the Crosstown put a stop to local investment in the South Street area, owners of homes and businesses sold out, prospective buyers from the neighborhoods looked elsewhere, many stores closed, and only a few businesses opened to

replace them. Center City's encroachment from the north accelerated the breakup of upper South Philadelphia's neighborhood orders, leaving the area's decreasing population older, poorer, and more black.^[30] This typically early1960s limbo between slum clearance and redevelopment became a lasting condition for South Street over the next two decades because the Crosstown, an idea that had transformed South Street, was never built.

A loose but increasingly effective alliance of neighborhood representatives and urban professionals opposed the expressway, one of many such local blocs formed in response to urban renewal projects throughout urban America in the 1960s. Black leaders from neighborhoods around central and western South Street made a rough common cause with representatives of two preponderantly white groups: the proprietors of new arts-and-crafts shops and cafés on eastern South Street, known to some as "the South Street Renaissance" and to others as "the hippies"; and a crew of lawyers, professors, and planners interested in fighting City Hall. A 1964 riot in North Philadelphia and recurring rumors of impending violence in South Philadelphia lent new urgency to both the city's case for a southern buffer for Center City and the continuing exodus of businesses and taxpayers from the neighborhoods around South Street. But the Crosstown's opponents raised difficult questions about the highway's displacement of 5,000-6,000 mostly poor people, the scarcity of affordable relocation housing, and the wisdom of placing another visible barrier between City Hall and black neighborhoods.^[31]

By the late 1960s, the national mood had turned against urban renewal as it was conceived in the 1950s, and the increasingly sophisticated anti-Crosstown forces could draw upon a growing national and local critique of urban renewal's equity and efficacy.^[32] Robert Mitchell, a University of Pennsylvania professor who had been one of the transportation plan's original architects in the 1940s and 1950s, argued against the Crosstown in 1967, describing it as a relic of the transportation-obsessed planning of the 1950s that neglected "the social aspects." In 1970, a consultant hired by the city reported that the Crosstown would be underutilized and overpriced and that its necessity had been predicated on drastic overestimates of population increase and retail employment downtown.^[33] Despite these authoritative judgments, and even though other highways to which it was supposed to connect were never completed, ambitious planners and developers were still periodically reviving the Crosstown proposal into the 1970s, and neighborhood organizations were still successfully opposing them.

In 1968, members of the anti-Crosstown coalition asked the architectural firm of Venturi and Rauch to draw up a counterplan for South Street that codified their ideas. The firm, which in the late 1960s and 1970s became one of the most important influences in the field of urban planning, had a historical connection to South Street: Robert Venturi's parents had made their living selling

produce from a South Street storefront, and Denise Scott Brown, the architectural firm's principal planner and Venturi's wife, has said that in the firm's fledgling period "the fruit business supported the architecture business."^[34] Brown, who was in charge of drawing up the South Street counterplan, saw herself as part of a new generation of planners, influenced by populist critics of traditional city planning like Herbert Gans and Jane Jacobs and opposed to the 1950s model of the "value-free technician" working in a social vacuum. She argued that, in the absence of "governmental and societal commitment to social programs . . . Bauhaus ideals as well as our most recent large-scale architectural urbanistic dreams will be used as they were on South Street to betray rather than support the social concerns from which they sprang." Her counterplan envisioned South Street as the "strip center of a vital commercial, cultural, civic life" supported by programs to increase local employment and ownership of businesses and homes. Brown saw  South Street as positioned within the metropolis to serve local clienteles (blacks, remaining white ethnics, Center City urbanites) and a regional market of ex-South Philadelphians returning to the inner city from the suburbs for weekend shopping.^[35]

The contest over the Crosstown, codified in metropolitan plan and local counterplan, was a contest between two visions of South Street as a relic of industrial Philadelphia. If the anti-Crosstown forces prevailed in their argument that South Street was the spine of a community or communities, it was, from the point of view of the preexisting neighborhood formations, a qualified victory. By the 1970s, more than twenty years of disinvestment, uncertainty, and decay had emptied storefronts, destabilized the surrounding neighborhoods, and dispersed the regional shopping trade. On its eastern end, South Street, bracketed by Society Hill to the north and Queen Village to the south, was becoming a commercial and entertainment strip for the new Center City urbanites. In the center and west, Center City was extending feelers—"urban pioneers" fixing up old houses, landlords stockpiling properties for the coming revival—into what had been the hearts of black and Irish neighborhoods. "Precursors of the yuppies," Brown writes, "were approaching from both ends and the centre."^[36] The city, having done everything possible to discourage landlords from investing in the blocks around South Street, stepped up enforcement of building codes to encourage those landlords to sell out to Center City urbanites and the speculators who facilitated their southward movement.

If the pro-Crosstown forces failed to build a clear southern bulwark for Center City, the threat of the Crosstown helped to lower land values and open the way for the urban pioneers and fixer-uppers who gradually moved the zone of gentrification down to and past South in the 1980s. A character in Tumbling, discussed in chapter 7, goes so far as to argue that the city never intended to actually build the Crosstown, that the expressway plan was never more than a way to clear the ground for the affluent householders of Center City. As Center

City in the 1990s fills in the areas around South Street and extends south toward Washington Avenue, expanding beyond the limits the planners drew for it with the Crosstown plan in the 1950s, it absorbs a revived South Street. The main shopping street of South Philadelphia's industrial villages now provides food, clothing, books, entertainment, edgy merchandise (a condom store, body piercing), a "historic" industrial infrastructure of"atmospheric" brick walk-ups widely regarded as congenial to arts-and-craft uses, and strollers' ambience to service the consumer profiles of postindustrial urbanism.

The two chapters that follow examine the South Street literature's imaginative engagement with this city in transition. Chapter 6 situates John Fury and Smith's South Street in a midcentury moment of incipient transformation; chapter 7 traces the literary reverberations of that transformation through the 1970s (Bradley's South Street), 1 980s (God's Pocket), and 1990s (Tumbling).

In what follows, I will shuttle back and forth between more local and more global scales of analysis in at least three ways. First, the relationship of South Street to the city of Philadelphia, the problematic fit of the local to the metropolitan, commands a good deal of my and the authors' attention. In their novels, the tension between local order and city-structuring process always informs the problem of neighborhood, both literary and social. Second, I will ask individual texts to speak to the composite text I assemble from the novels and satellite documents—histories, plans, maps. Among other things, this allows characters and figures to participate in the composite postwar narrative and to move through the composite city of feeling, traveling in edifying ways beyond the horizons of their historical moment or the text in which they appear. If at times it seems that I am being "unfair" to a novel by introducing characters and ideas from other texts into it or by expanding upon the blind spots in its imaginative range, I do so in the service of tracing and reading the larger narrative to which all the texts contribute.

Third, the discussion that follows will suggest various ways in which stories of South Street and Philadelphia have meaning that can be applied to other cities and their literatures. By the early 1960s, Philadelphia enjoyed a national reputation as a model for how cities might navigate the stresses and traumas of postwar urban change. National magazine stories and professional journal articles on urban renewal featured Philadelphia's reform mayors, its "business community," and its celebrated chief planner, Edmund Bacon. Martin Meyerson observed that "no municipal reform movement more captured the imagination of observers, both nationally and locally, than did that of Philadelphia . . . during the mid-fifties and early sixties."^[37] To the extent that the story of Center City is exemplary (as success or as failure, depending upon whom you might

ask and when), representations of South Street might also be exemplary, suggesting resonances with representations of the multiple and particular localities that add up to urban America. The readings of the South Street literature that follow in the next two chapters argue, among other things, that narratives of white-ethnic decline and black community formation are inextricably entangled with one another—both formally and in their relation to a shared urban history. That generic entanglement, traced on the terrain mapped by the South Street literature, suggests in microcosm the stormy and fruitful encounter of white-ethnic and black urbanisms that has been at the center of postindustrial life in America's old industrial capitals.

6
Urban Village and Black Metropolis: John Fury and South Street

Ah, she said and she sank to the pavement. It's all over with us, she said.
Jack Dunphy, John Fury

South Street, great blood vein of a people.
William Gardner Smith, South Street

The postwar South Street literature begins with two midcentury novels that, like Algren's Man with the Golden Arm, imagine the industrial neighborhood order in crisis: Jack Dunphy's John Fury and William Gardner Smith's South Street. Both Dunphy and Smith grew up in South Philadelphia, absorbing the material for their novels from the Irish urban village and Black Metropolis in which they respectively lived. They shared roots in an industrial city that at midcentury was already showing signs of transforming into something new and strange—the postindustrial inner city. Smith's neighborhood, pushed by the influx of Southerners in the 1940s and the stirrings of a postwar initiative to win social justice for urban blacks, seemed at midcentury to be on the brink of an explosion. Dunphy's, still conforming at midcentury to the template of the immigrant ethnic village, was just beginning to feel the effects of a diffusion and contraction that would accelerate in the 1960s. The two authors, both of whom read widely from an early age, also shared an engagement with the Chicago neigh-

borhood novelists: Dunphy's spare, prose-poetic style glossed James T. Farrell's definitive portrait of Irish industrial urbanism with enough novelty to attract Farrell's displeasure; Smith set out to write protest novels that would develop the literary possibilities of social critique beyond what he called the "wooden, Dreiser-esque" example of Richard Wright.^[1]

Jack Dunphy, born in Atlantic City in 1914, grew up poor in St. Monica's parish, an area of particularly narrow streets and weathered rowhouses deep in South Philadelphia. His father was a linotype operator; his mother kept house. As Dunphy and his siblings described the Irish urban village to Gerald Clarke, a biographer of Dunphy's longtime companion Truman Capote, "the residents of those drab little row houses regarded themselves as members of a clan and held in fine disdain anyone who wanted to leave for the wider world outside." The making of an urban intellectual can be a violent process under such circumstances, especially in a neighborhood suspicious of boys who like opera and books more than sports. Dunphy's sister Olive tells of an episode in which a local boy taunted her bookish brother Jack, shouting "Come on down and play, Mary" until Jack threw down his book, "leaped over the porch railing and attacked him, smashing his head again and again against the sidewalk."^[2] Dunphy left high school to work in factories but found his way out of the industrial grind through dance. After studying dance, Dunphy toured with the Balanchine company in South America, performed at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and had a small part in the original Oklahoma on Broadway. He served in the army in Europe from 1944 to 1946, the year John Fury was published. A self-taught writer, and inspired by a reading of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, he had begun writing the novel years before while on tour in South America. John Fury was the first, and by most accounts the best, of his several books, setting the pattern for subsequent novels' examination of Irish Catholic family life.^[3] He also wrote plays, but his modest career as a writer after John Fury took place almost entirely in the shadow cast by Capote, his companion of thirty-five years. After separating from his wife, the dancer Joan McCracken, Dunphy met Capote in 1948, and they were together until Capote's death in 1988. Dunphy died in 1992. Dance, writing, and Capote took Dunphy a long way from South Philadelphia: to New York City's high life, to extensive travel in Europe, and to Sagaponack on Long Island, where the Nature Conservancy's Capote-Dunphy Preserve memorializes their resting place.

William Gardner Smith, born in 1927, grew up in family homes on Ninth Street, Wilder Street, and Twentieth Street, all within the black neighborhoods of South Philadelphia that bracketed South Street. His stepfather earned modest pay as a custodian, and the family had to make do in a climate of poverty. Smith reminisced in print about stuffing newspapers in the holes in his shoes,

losing belongings when a firetrap house burned down, and going to war as a member of the local street gang against the Irish gangs of Grays Ferry, the Italians across Reed Street, and other black gangs.^[4] Educated in the Philadelphia public schools, he was an early reader and took early to writing as well: he was producing copy for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's leading black newspapers, while still in high school; and he wrote his first novel, Last of the Conquerors, at the age of twenty upon his return from an eight-month tour of duty with the army in occupied Europe. South Street was his third novel (following Anger at Innocence) and his greatest critical and popular success. By the time of its publication in 1954, he had been living in Paris for three years, settled into the community of expatriate American black artists that included prominent urban intellectuals Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes. He lived in Paris, working for Agence France-Presse and writing one more published novel (The Stone Face ), until his death in 1974. He left Europe for only one extended period—to serve as an administrator of state television and the Institute of Journalism in Ghana, another meeting place for expatriate black intellectuals, from 1964 until Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup in 1966. He also made two short visits to the United States, for a month at the height of the urban crisis in 1967 and again in 1968, gathering the materials for his last book, a journalistic account entitled Return to Black America (1 970).^[5]

Dunphy and Smith, two homegrown South Philadelphia talents who went far afield into the literary life, initiated the exploration of larger subjects in their South Street novels. Dunphy's exploration of the urban village's inner life in John Fury provided the template for one of the central themes of his artistic and personal life: the shock of Irish Catholic urban villagers' encounter with a wider world of high culture, wealth, and models of family and morality far removed from neighborhood norms. That theme finds fittingly confusing expression in the interpolation of an invented priest in crisis, a fictional character who seems to be a double of Dunphy, into Dear Genius, Dunphy's otherwise nonfictional account of his relationship with Capote. Smith's local exploration of the Black Metropolis in the postwar moment of protest and growth established the starting point for a literary and journalistic career dominated by the theme of urban black Americans' engagement with a larger world: the possibilities suggested by European race relations and culture; the postcolonial possibilities, suggested by Ghana, for reconstituting black locality under the auspices of black internationalism; the responsibility of black intellectuals to apply the lessons of Africa and Europe to the American inner city. Those themes were given final expression in Return to Black America, in which a much-changed Smith returns after sixteen years abroad to find his old neighborhood transformed by the urban crisis into a nascent postcolonial nation besieged by imperial America.

Dunphy's and Smith's literary journeys begin in the industrial neighborhood order of South Philadelphia at midcentury, the world given imaginative life in John Fury and South Street. This world, on the verge of postindustrial transformation, attracted and focused the attention of these two homegrown urban intellectuals: in that sense, it produced them, bringing them to literary maturity just in time to imagine its passing.

John Fury (1946)

The composite story of the postwar South Street literature begins deep in South Philadelphia with a white-ethnic decline. As the way of life native to the industrial villages of South Philadelphia began to contract, unravel, and disperse, versions of white-ethnic decline predictably appeared. John Fury, set in St. Monica's parish, imagines the decline of an urban people's way of life—that of prewar Philadelphia's Irish Catholic industrial workers—through the failure of John Fury, a close-mouthed and serious-minded "steady working man," to sustain his family and his way of life into the next generation. Spanning a period of perhaps thirty years that begins roughly at the turn of the century, from Fury's young manhood to his death at fifty-four, the novel proceeds as a series of family dramas: Fury's marriage to his first wife, Mame; the launching of their household and family; her death of consumption; the souring of Fury's second marriage; the familial shocks and separations as his daughters marry and his son goes bad; Fury's expulsion from the home, leading to his death. Fury dies after falling from his front steps while attempting to batter down his front door with an iron pipe, his second wife, Bridget, having locked the house against him in a dramatization of familial collapse.

In the novel's final lines, Fury's literal fall, culminating that of his family, further generalizes itself as the figurative fall of a people. His death sends a kind of impulse through the neighborhood—up two blocks on Twenty-third Street from Seigal Street to the corner of Moore Street^[6] —where it seems to transfix Mrs. Harrigan, a neighbor also driven into the streets and bewildered by the collapse of her household:

Ah, she said and though it pained her what she felt and though she held herself with the pain, her fist clenched hard and her fist's knuckles blue, jammed between her sagging breasts, she smiled.

Ah, she said and she sank to the pavement. It's all over with us, she said.^[7]

In those final lines, the novel completes its argument for Fury as an exemplar of a particular people caught in a particular place and time.^[8]

John Fury frames the microhistory of Fury's decline within an imagined historical moment—or, more precisely, within a heavily freighted myth-historical

moment: the passing of a horse-and-wagon Philadelphia in which people like John Fury, exemplar of the Irish who came to America to build its industrial cities, could work and raise families that sustained their way of life. A paragraph-long preamble to the novel, offering in miniature the kind of historical concordance that City on the Make supplies for Golden Arm, suggests in portentous mock-epic tones that John Fury is about this slipping into the past of Fury's Philadelphia. Introducing a novel of what happened when the city had been built and begun to change, the preamble concludes by describing the fate of the Irish in urban America: "they landed and a shovel was placed in their hands or a hammer or spade and they built Boston and New York and Chicago and Philadelphia. And in the evenings they walked home in the leaning shadows of the gray stone to their one room or two rooms and fell into bewildered sleep."^[9] The preamble thus promises a novel about the home life of these immigrant laborers, which John Fury surely is, but it also puts in motion a historical narrative. When the kind of work required by that earlier moment of city building is done, the way of life defined by that kind of work begins to fall to pieces along long-standing internal fault lines, much as does Fury's second marriage.

As a decline narrative, John Fury has a rich sense of the past and in fact projects a postwar moment of decline into the prewar past, but it has very little corresponding sense of the future as anything more than the extended decay of past and present. Familial barrenness serves as the central metaphor of this sense of winding down to a terminus. Even though Fury's daughters, Lizzie and Katie (both borne by his first wife, Mame), produce children into the next generation, Fury's family proves barren in the sense that it cannot reproduce its patriarch's way of life. Lizzie marries well and leaves the neighborhood, climbing toward a middle-class life in North Philadelphia; Katie marries badly, to a lace-curtain snob who reviles her family and eventually breaks with them in their last stages of violent decline. Fury's second marriage produces a son, John Jr., a drunkard and idler who sponges off his indulgent mother, will not work, and does not marry. Fury's only son, his father's physical duplicate but otherwise his antithesis, appears to be the end of the Fury name and the history of migration, neighborhood-based urbanism, and city-building hard work associated with it.

This familial barrenness comes to light in a series of emotionally and physically violent conflicts staged for the most part in Philadelphia's signature domestic landscape—the plain, orderly interiors of two-story rowhouses. Familial collapse as the collapse of an entire people's way of life takes final form in the paired figures of Fury and Mrs. Harrigan, each of whom is driven from a troubled rowhouse home to fall in the street. The argument that the Fury family stands for a people, that their inability to reproduce their way of life stands for a people's inability, is made clearest in those moments in which the novel takes to the streets of South Philadelphia.

John Fury plots its narrative on a high-industrial cityscape in the streets

south of South: modest rowhouse blocks, railroad tracks running down Washington Avenue at grade, horse-and-wagon traffic intermixed with cars and trucks. Fury's revealing walks through this world allow the reader to discern the meanings legible in its form. Denied work at his trade-—driving a coal wagon—by the foreman at his old job, Fury walks south on Nineteenth Street from Washington Avenue to his daughter Katie's house on Roseberry, a narrow side street. Fury's passage through it allows Roseberry Street to speak its message, to the reader if not to him:

It's [sic] houses smothered close together, jammed two stories high, and with small wooden porches hung on their fronts, looked like stony red-faced criminals serving a life sentence. Stuck together and dependent one upon the other, they seemed to live in constant fear that someday and somehow one would be pardoned and leave and so jeopardize the rest of them. They stood then, those square red bricked houses, and there were many of them in Philadelphia, tortured row upon row of them, doing penitence and allowing life with its worn semblance of freedom to crowd within them.

Only in summer with the sun beating upon their roofs and with the screaming of all the children and the women's nagging tongues did they seem to sag one row toward the other. Then, and who can blame them, did they appear to say, Let us fall all together. We have stood long enough. (219)

In moments like this, the cityscape argues for generalizing Fury's failure. Driven from his home and unable to work, Fury walks in the street with the two foundations of his way of life collapsing beneath him. Roseberry Street's fanciful collapse takes the form of rowhouses falling, because one "leave[s]" or because they "fall all together." The collapsing houses enact the implications of Fury's crumbling household, and the communal character of the collapse images the classic case for the way an ethnic neighborhood "goes," despite and because of its sense of solidarity: first one household, then all at once. The figure expands to include many similar blocks of Philadelphia and the neighborhood order for which they stand, the way of life they "crowd within them." In this way, the houses on Roseberry Street speak for the passing of an urbanism exemplified by Fury's household. It is therefore fitting that the bitter argument that marks this family's final, irrevocable collapse occurs at Katie's house on Roseberry, at a christening party.

That collapse begins early in the novel, just as, the preamble implies, the eventual collapse of the city-building immigrants' way of life is fated from the moment of their arrival. Fury's life goes wrong when his first wife, Mame, dies young. Standing outside the door of her bedroom at the moment of her death, he has a vision: "Suddenly with train whistles screeching, he felt himself racing his horses alongside the Washington Avenue tracks and beating the horses to go faster and faster and holding in one sweating hand the leathery reins

which kept stretching away from him." The reins continue to elongate and the train rushes past, "far up the tracks and his horses and wagon after it, leaving Fury stumbling behind dragging in the last of the long leathery reins" (51). When he returns to himself, she has died.

In that runaway scene, as in the moment of Fury's death, the novel elegizes the immigrant-ethnic urbanism made by Irish industrial workers. Fury's race with the train is not about the industrial train replacing the preindustrial horse, a progression familiar from Westerns. After all, the pervasiveness of trains in the Chicago literature reminds us that the railroad is an integral element of the industrial city inhabited by characters as different as John Fury and Sister Carrie. Rather, the race with the train provides an image of arrival at an urban limit, a moment we encounter throughout the literature of South Street in which some underlying and life-shaping urban logic impresses itself in palpable form on a character moving in the cityscape. The race with the train, like the replacement of the coal wagon by the "motorized truck" that helps put him out of work, allows Fury an insight into the impotence of his individual will: the order of work and family crowded within the rowhouse world depends not on his ability as working man, husband, and father to sustain it but on vast urban-industrial processes of technological change and business as usual that rush on and leave him behind. There may be individuals exercising their considerably more powerful wills to guide such processes, but they are hidden from the view of people like John Fury, whose experience of change is of seeing through the "worn semblance of freedom" to the metropolitan processes that shape life in the neighborhoods. The period in which his services were required having ended, the industrial city rushes on to the next thing, leaving him holding reins that do not control anything. Like Algren's Chicagoans—although none of those two-bit hustlers qualifies as a steady worker—Fury comes up against an iron logic expressed in the built form of the city's rail lines, which defeat him and delimit his world. In the parallel failures of family and work, figured in the scene of Mame's death via the hallucinated juxtaposition of domestic interior and industrial cityscape, the novel encapsulates the human dimensions of an urban order and its passing.

John Fury, then, is a standard white-ethnic decline, a generic sibling of Golden Arm and a forerunner of many, many declines to follow (including God's Pocket, discussed in chapter 7). Like Golden Arm, John Fury draws upon the language and themes used by the Chicago neighborhood novelists to represent industrial urbanism: a narrow landscape that expresses both social constraint and the characters' restricted understanding of their place in the urban system; violent familial collapse that dramatizes the injuries of class; individual will crushed or twisted to self-destructive ends by the encounter with powerful economic and cultural forces. Like Golden Arm, John Fury refits that prewar repertoire to the purposes of a postwar formula, the white-ethnic decline

that turns from social critique to something more like elegy. One can perceive signs of that refitting in Dunphy's prose style.

John Fury's formal innovations mark its relation to a literature of industrial urbanism  defined for many readers by a fellow chronicler of the Irish in America, the Chicago neighborhood novelist James T Farrell. The volumes in Farrell's massive Studs Lonigan trilogy were canonical Chicago neighborhood novels, occupying the center of an established tradition of representing the world of the Irish and European "new immigrants" and their descendants in the urban village. Dunphy, writing in the 1940s, played off the expectations raised by working Farrell's literary turf.^[10] Showing the influence of Gertrude Stein, Dunphy turns Farrell's flat, descriptive "sociological" style into a kind of prose poetry by ostentatiously stripping it down to the bone: leaving out many commas, quotation marks, apostrophes, paragraph indentations, most of the main plot points, and about 250 pages of the naturalistic period detail one would expect in Chicago neighborhood novels, John Fury seems to expect that readers can fill in the details from their generic knowledge of Irish-American and proletarian narratives.^[11] That process helps to give the novel its elegiac charge: the worn familiarity of the industrial city of feeling, like that of industrial urbanism in general, marks its arrival at the end of the line. Farrell did not appreciate the intimation of decline or the backhanded acknowledgment of influence, finding John Fury's "relative brevity" and "impressionistic, sketchy manner" unfit for its subject. Predictably, he understood that subject to be not an elegy for industrial urbanism but rather another attempt to critique it in the manner he helped codify in the 1930s. "If [Fury] is to be presented as a passive victim of exploitation," he argued, "then the story would demand a fuller and broader use of detail, a use of detail which would bring more of his working life into the narrative."^[12] Farrell wanted those 250 pages back in the novel. So did Jack Conroy, another writer of Farrell's and Algren's circle, who seconded this opinion in a review that identified Dunphy's "typographical effects" (which smacked of "surrealistic or ultra-modernistic writing") as "an annoying impediment" to telling the powerful, familiar story of the "poverty-harried Celt."^[13] These reviewers registered discomfort with the signs of a generic progression: Dunphy was machining the older orders of the proletarian novel into the decline, and some Chicago neighborhood novelists did not like the signs of change in their literary neighborhood.

Those signs of change in the city of feeling paralleled changes in the city of fact. The industrial neighborhood order of South Philadelphia was still in full flower in the late 1940s, but postwar transformations were already on the horizon. One salient aspect of those multiple, interconnected changes was the growth of the black inner city. Conflict at the boundaries of black and whiteethnic neighborhoods was as old as racial prejudice but also as new as the postwar migrations of people and capital that put the social landscape of the inner

city in motion. Violent struggles between white ethnics and blacks in postwar South Philadelphia were some of the most obvious signs of a deeper, thoroughgoing change in urbanism that embraced both whites and blacks, both urban village and Black Metropolis.^[14] By the same token, the pattern of racial violence traceable in all of the South Street literature indicates an appreciation of the violence of urban process shared by novels of white-ethnic neighborhood life and novels of black neighborhood life.

Following the tracery of violence, one can see how the story of decline enters into conversation with complementary stories figuring the black inner city's postwar expansion and transformation, a process that became evident to observers in the 1940s and 1950s and eventually became the central matter of the urban crisis in the 1960s. One episode in John Fury opens a narrative link between the white-ethnic decline and the stories linked to the second ghetto's growth and maturation told by Smith, Bradley, and McKinney-Whetstone (and the authors discussed in part 3): early in the novel, on the day Mame gives birth to their first child, Fury knocks down a black driver who cuts in ahead of Fury's wagon at the company stable. The black driver responds by slashing Fury with a razor, after which another white driver takes away the razor and gives the black man a beating. In that violent moment—and in the judgment of Bridget's brother Thomas that Fury is an obstacle to her social advancement because he "never has a word t'say but goes around thrashin niggers" (79)—John Fury suggests how we can begin to move through the narrative of white-ethnic decline into the complementary acts and extended landscape of postwar South Street's composite drama. John Fury, like John Fury, has no interest in black urbanism-the black character is there only to be beaten—but the contours of John Fury's story fit with those of black characters in the South Street literature to follow.

South Street (1954)

If John Fury is about the gradual end of a people's way of life, William Gardner Smith's South Street, published eight years later in 1954, wants to be about the persistence and internal cohesion of community. If John Fury sees a neighborhood in decline—and even, in the novel's darker moments of insight, collapsing all at once—then South Street wants to see a neighborhood regenerating itself and reaffirming the continuing connection of people to place as it grows. Mapping a self-sustaining black community that resolves crises of internal division in order to meet the external threat of attack from John Fury's people, South Street takes up the problems of neighborhood raised by the midcentury battles fought at the boundaries of America's inner-city neighborhoods and workplaces. The growth of the city's black population and expansion of

black neighborhoods, the initial stages of contraction and unraveling in the system of white-ethnic urban villages, and the conflicts that arose out of these linked processes were all part of the larger transformation of urbanism after the war. The progrowth coalition of business and government responded to that larger transformation with the blueprint for postindustrial Philadelphia embodied in the comprehensive plan, which included the Crosstown scheme. Published just as the progrowth coalition was making plans that would drastically reshape Center City's (and thus South Street's) future, South Street occupies a historical moment that inflects the novel with a special irony. Projecting the future of the black inner city from a late-1940s template, the novel imagines its local heroes assuring black South Street's place in the industrial neighborhood order. But that arrangement of orders, John Mollenkopf's "blue-collar mosaic" undone by postindustrial transformation, was already breaking up under pressure from forces operating at the metropolitan, even the international, scale.

South Street takes place in an early stage of the overlap between the smaller and relatively stable prewar black neighborhood order and the second ghetto that would take mature form by the early 1960s. In the northern industrial cities, Philadelphia and Chicago prominent among them, the second ghetto was shaped by a volatile mix of factors: massive in-migration of Southern blacks during the war years and after; continuing residential racial segregation, leading to enormous population pressure in black neighborhoods; the economic and physical redevelopment of inner cities in response to deindustrialization and suburbanization; and politically charged efforts to respond to this urban racial crisis with government-funded slum clearance, relocation, and housing projects. South Street maps a neighborhood in which some of these transformative circumstances have begun to converge but have not yet coalesced into a new order.

The novel shows us a South Street that seems to fit the prewar model of Philadelphia's most established black neighborhoods. The middle classes are invested in the area for the foreseeable future (a condition encouraged by the strictness of forced residential segregation); there is a thriving commercial strip of black-owned stores, clubs, bars, and other businesses; the modest industrial-era housing stock is privately owned, low-rise, and for the most part well maintained. Despite the presence of classic 1950s juvenile delinquents, men and women stroll through the neighborhood at night with no particular fear of violence, and the only instance of drug use takes place among middle-aged jazz musicians. This older Black Metropolis, similar to Bronzeville on Chicago's South Side, was one among the ethnic villages ("like beads on a string" along South Street, in Denise Scott Brown's phrase) that made up industrial Philadelphia's neighborhood order. Deindustrialization and suburbanization, which had such a powerful influence on the postwar erosion of white-ethnic neigh-

borhoods, exerted an equally powerful but drastically different effect on black neighborhoods: as jobs and capital were redistributed toward the metropolitan periphery and its downtown center, inner-city blacks found it difficult to redistribute themselves as freely. They found themselves penned behind the second ghetto's "invisible walls."

The novel tells us, often in awkwardly informative asides, that historical pressures leading to the formation of the second ghetto have begun to transform the neighborhood and its relation to the city:

Since the great influx of workers from the South to defense plants during the war, the usual Negro sections of the city had become intolerably congested: even the wholesale transformation of houses into rooming houses, and the letting of rooms in private homes, and the building of housing projects (Government financed) on vacant ground, had done almost nothing to ease the situation. So, slowly, the Negro areas had been pushing outward, encroaching on territory formerly exclusively for white people; and those of the white population in this threatened area who could, hastily packed their bags and moved much further back, away from the "front lines." Some could not move. Between these, and the pressing Negroes, grew up conflict.^[15]

The parenthesis, "(Government financed)," is an awkward digression within a paragraph that awkwardly digresses from the novel's plot. The novel stops what it is doing, which is showing us a melodramatic feud between two major characters, to tell us about sociohistorical developments in midcentury Philadelphia. Written in the early 1950s and from an expatriate's perspective, South Street comes equipped to imagine the old neighborhood under strain, not the place it will become. The writers its characters invoke by name—poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Willard Motley, the early Chester Himes, and especially Richard Wright—are writers of the Black Metropolis. (Writing about the second ghetto, Himes later became a very different writer indeed.) The in-betweenness of the novel's historical moment finds expression in the gap between what the novel can show—how it can imagine its city and what it has precedent for showing—and what it can only tell us about the still-emerging postwar inner city. The language to represent that emergent inner city, especially its black neighborhoods in the throes of transformation, was still developing at midcentury. The novel's awkwardnesses are not just part of its tone and its charm—they are marks of its literary-historical moment.

Although South Street takes note of developments that will lead to the second ghetto's formation, it is still a novel of the Black Metropolis, and its spatial and political imaginations express that orientation. Embodying the external threat to South Street in young white-ethnic toughs very much like John Fury Jr., South Street turns its back on Center City to attend to the dynamics of

neighborhood in South Philadelphia. It concerns itself with relations between the industrial city's neighborhoods, a subject condensed in black South Street's violent encounter with the Irish of Grays Ferry. Center City does receive mention as a seat of power, but only in the abstract as the locus of machine government, the function of which is to help contain black South Street's expansion and autonomy. South Street, mapping a community in order to plot its campaign for self-preservation against other elements of the industrial neighborhood order, is therefore not positioned in time or space to conceive of the terrific blow about to take black South Philadelphia in the back in the form of the Crosstown Expressway plan. Not, of course, that the novel, or any work of fiction, is obliged to anticipate or prepare for such a blow from the city of fact. However, the novel's place in the South Street literature's composite narrative of postindustrial transformation creates opportunities to read it against a larger backdrop, including a future obviously unavailable to its author. Also, we are encouraged to read South Street in relation to its historical moment for two reasons that form main lines of analysis in my reading of the novel.

First, South Street's story of three brothers finding the means to ensure their neighborhood's integrity into the next generation—a passionately local, parochial subject—is undermined not only by what we know of the novel's historical moment but also (as I argue later in this chapter) by a line of counterargument within the text itself. Winding through the story of the three Bowers brothers' struggle to resolve linked family and neighborhood crises is a critique of the resolutions they accomplish. South Street suspects that forces beyond the imagination or control of its heroic urban-intellectual protagonists will render their triumph contrived and temporary. The subsequent history of South Street develops that theme in ways the novel could not imagine.

Second, the question of the relation of literary writing and literary intellectuals to their historical moment was at the center of Smith's work. South Street thinks at length about the black intellectual's relation to the inner city he represents, a subject Smith expanded upon in a critical essay—published in Phylon— on Wright, Himes, and the black intellectual's "duty" to avoid "social detachment."^[16] The story of Smith's heroes the Bowers brothers is about the formation of engaged black intellectuals suited to the task of representing the postwar inner city, and one of its governing themes is the problem of constructing a city of feeling from materials provided by the city of fact. We are therefore encouraged to perform a similar reading of the novel against the city of fact upon which it drew. Written during the great postwar wave of ghettoization and suburbanization, but more than a decade before that wave would crest in American cultural and social life during the ghetto-centered urban crisis of the 1960s, the novel's account of a crisis (ironically) resolved in the black inner city asks to be read against its historical moment.

The Neighborhood Reproduction Drama

South Street proceeds by shifting among the subjectivities of a large network of characters as they move through a landscape of streets, homes, and bars centered on South Street. It is a novel of long walks and long talks, with some of the principal walkers and talkers being Lil, the neighborhood's most coveted woman; Lil's boyfriend Slim, a successful hustler employed by the Italian numbers syndicate; the Old Man, an unspecified political machine's local black functionary; and a broadly archetypal blueswoman called simply the Blues Singer. At the novel's center are the Bowers brothers: Claude, a nationally prominent writer and civil rights activist; Michael, a Negro nationalist firebrand; and Philip, a would-be poet. They form a miniature character system around which the others revolve. The novel's various family and neighborhood crises—couplings and uncouplings, struggles against the Irish of Grays Ferry, problems of sustaining the neighborhood into the next generation—are resolved by the temporarily exiled Claude's return to South Street. Walking on South Street at the novel's dramatic climax, he returns to the neighborhoodbased identity that enables his intellectual work, throwing off the moral and intellectual paralysis that has threatened him during his self-imposed exile from the neighborhood: "endless, baffling Time and endless, terrifying Space? One could, should, be aware of them, in wonder and in awe. But one could not live in their contemplation; one could not live according to their all-paralyzing commentary. One lived—whether one wanted to or not—in the bounded time and the bounded space of one's own life and one's own world" (310-II). Having ventured into the larger time and space of the metropolis, Claude returns to the "bounded" time and space of the neighborhood to avert a riot at the novel's end. This exercise of leadership marks him as a fully engaged urban intellectual with the power and responsibility to protect his "own world."

Like John Fury's, the Bowers brothers' family history (further condensed, as with Fury and his no-good son, in the paternal line) encapsulates that of a people, extending from the moment of their father's lynching in the South to their various struggles to make a viable future for themselves in the urban North. Claude's romance with Kristin, a white classical musician, and his climactic decision to choose South Street over her; Michael's romance with black nationalism, unsatisfyingly consummated with acts of violence; Philip's romance with bohemia and highbrow detachment, which ends abruptly with his violent death—these narratives of family crisis and the making of inner-city intellectuals structure the novel as each brother tries to make sense of the neighborhood and his place in it. Each brother seeks a synthetic understanding of the kaleidoscopic bits and pieces of urban experience presented by the novel's episodic form and shifting subjectivities. Philip dies trying; Michael fails but helps Claude to succeed.

South Street's action extends through the streets above and below South Street, into Center City, to distant Philadelphia locations, and briefly as far as New York and Montreal, but South Street forms its spatial backbone and center. Specifically, the novel's South Street extends roughly ten blocks east to west, from about Twelfth Street (east of which were predominantly white-ethnic neighborhoods) to the three-way intersection of Grays Ferry Avenue, Twenty-third Street, and South. That intersection forms the community's best-defined border, marked by a post against which Claude Bowers leans, drinking a beer, "staring off, alone, thinking, dreaming, toward Grays Ferry" (171), the novel's white-ethnic terra incognita. Although there were white-owned businesses and white shoppers on this stretch of South Street in the 1950s, and although a rich variety of ethnic groups lived cheek by jowl in the areas around it, South Street renders South Street as an all-black space ending abruptly at a clearly marked border with an unmapped and homogeneously Irish Grays Ferry.^[17] This simplicity of spatial form and racial scheme allows the novel to pursue complexity where it wishes to—in the inner life of the black community it selectively assembles.

That community takes shape on the pavements of South Street. The novel opens with the first of many street scenes: "It was a hot Saturday in July, and South Street was crowded: people promenading, vendors with their wares, streetcars clanging, automobiles crawling slowly and honking their horns. The brown pedestrians wore, for the most part, no coats or ties; their shirts were open at the neck and their sleeves rolled up above their elbows. Slim burned in the heat, walking slowly" (3). The pedestrians we can see are brown (and, apparently, male); if there are whites, they do not rate a mention. Here, the crowd indicates the neighborhood's vigorous good health—the commercial liveliness of a good business day, the robust health of working people. Similarly, the figure of the crowded street in other scenes indicates cultural vigor, a viability of tradition and community. South Street's spring festival, especially, serves as a ritual of renewal in which the crowd ratifies the neighborhood's status as a community. Although "no one in the neighborhood knew exactly when, or under what conditions, the custom of having a festival had originated," the montage of marching bands, dance bands, beer drinking, politicians courting votes, speakers invoking "'the days of our forefathers"' (139), and contestants for the Elocution Prize reading poets of the Harlem Renaissance arrives at a moment of communal plenitude and integrity:

They listened, then, the audience—listened, even the youngsters, as they shuffle danced to the music which was the soul-beat of a people:

I hate to see that evenin 'sun go down

dancing, and the old people and the young, with cold beer running down their throats, and the knowledge of the neighborhood which was the world and the peo-

ple who were the universe, and fish burning tongue, and ice cream cold, and Holiday. (142-43)

The novel argues that South Street forms the spatial ground of this people's being, just as the blues forms its spiritual ground. In roping off the street and dancing in it, the crowd enacts the connection between the quality of neighborhood—proceeding from a shared way of life—and the neighborhood as a place in which that shared life takes form.

The "knowledge of the neighborhood which was the world" requires urban intellectuals who can grasp and articulate that knowledge. Their job, performed by the Blues Singer in the festival scene, is to reinforce and reproduce the neighborhood order by reminding the crowd that it is a self-contained, unified entity—"the people who were the universe." The festival passage achieves final refinement in a chaos of sharply defined impressions—"and fish burning tongue, and ice cream cold, and Holiday"—that somehow contain within them the meaning of neighborhood. Those who would take up the responsibility of representing the neighborhood, in both the literary and the political senses, must give form to those bits and pieces of neighborhood content. In doing so, these representers impart coherence to the neighborhood. There is, of course, a global component to this local responsibility: the bonds of race and social class, culture, and history that make the people of South Street a people are the same bonds that make black Americans a people. The intellectuals who wish to represent the neighborhood aspire to represent a race. Three candidates, the three Bowers brothers, aspire to that responsibility as writers.

If the crowd stands for a people, the Bowers family narrative both encapsulates that people's story and produces candidates for the task of writing it. Claude makes the case explicit in his own writing: "'A nation throws up its heroes, in whom are concentrated all of the group ideals, the group feelings, the group courage. The hero is himself nothing; he is a focal point, a galvanizer of the energies already latent in his people; his voice is not his voice at all, but their voices concentrated. And anything the hero does or says—it is they, his people, who do or say it"' (91). The Bowers family narrative considers the relation of three brothers—writers, intellectuals, potential leaders—to the notions of place and peoplehood conjoined in the term "South Street." Through a series of movements back and forth between South Street and other terrains, and by articulating the brothers' various relationships to the crowd on South Street, their stories are made to exemplify three versions of crisis in the formation of urban intellectuals accredited to represent the black inner city. In working out the writer's place in the world of South Street, the Bowers brothers provide a triple structural spine running through the novel along which its fragmentary forms and meanings—its writing—arrange themselves.

The aspiring poet and bohemian Philip, the youngest, proves himself inade-

quate as an urban intellectual by insisting on separating literature from South Street. The novel makes this clear by cross-cutting between South Street and the indeterminately located apartment in which Philip ("one of the two Negroes present") meets his circle of "actual or aspiring writers, painters, teachers or the like." The men of this group, "with coats off and sleeves rolled up," make a pale bohemian imitation of the shirt-sleeved South Street crowd presented in the novel's opening scene. They reach a rough consensus on the separation of the intellectual from the social order and historical circumstances embodied by the crowd, especially when "social stress and strain" compel him to "escape the convulsions and violence" of his historical moment. They agree that the intellectual "has always been detached from the mainstream of society" (87-88). Their endorsement of "detachment" marks their conclusion as precisely the opposite of the position that Smith took in his Phylon essay on the responsibilities of Negro writers, and South Street deploys its energies to demolish the misguided ideas of Philip's associates.

Their conversation, joined in midstream and departed in midsentence, forms a separate chapter significantly bracketed by two neighborhood vignettes that identify Philip as the wrong kind of urban intellectual. The preceding chapter describes how Lil's father had over the years made a habit of entering her room at night, culminating in an attempted rape, which Lil resisted by braining him with an ash stand—echoing Lutie Johnson's culminative act of violence in Ann Petry's The Street. The chapter following the intellectuals' discussion consists of three short paragraphs, reminiscent of Native Son's opening scene and markedly closer than the rest of the novel to Wright's starker setting and tone, in which a nameless tubercular woman, living in a South Street tenement and abandoned by her drunken husband, discovers a rat in her child's crib: "she felt the hideous biting and squirming in her hand, then she dashed the rat, with all her strength, against the wall" (90). Philip's notions of detachment, presented as an inability to accept the social and historical hard facts of South Street as the ground of his intellectual being, cut him off from Lil and the nameless woman. Were he the right kind of urban intellectual, Philip would know that his calling should be to speak their stories, in the manner theorized by Claude's notion of the hero, practiced by the Blues Singer in her music, and practiced as well by Petry and Wright in the novels to which South Street apparently refers via ash stand and rat. Philip's failure to recognize that calling, to understand the neighborhood's "bounded space and bounded time" as limits to be crossed at his peril, render him and South Street of no sustaining use to one another. That he dies just before his wedding day helps mark him as a barren element of the Bowers line, in that sense the John Fury Jr. of this family drama.

Philip's relation to the crowd must therefore ring false. Moving through it during the festival, he enjoys a mistaken feeling of connectedness: "He had never felt such strength before: moral and physical. He felt himself expand. . . .

Now, new-born, a new Philip moved in the world! He was with people now!" (149-50). The tinny, facile quality of this realization undercuts the moment, however, and Philip draws precisely the wrong conclusion. He feels that to be "with people" he must throw over his literary self: "Had that been life, the immersion into books, into endless discussions, into Freud, into Kafka, into Dostoievsky?" (147). Because he understands writing as removing himself from the neighborhood, his subsequent and inevitable return to literature, in the form of a retreat to his circle of literary friends and a library job, entails a complementary distancing from South Street. Philip's straying from home takes the spatial form of an ill-advised walk to the borders of Grays Ferry, where he fatally encounters a hard fact in the shape of a rock thrown by an Irish youth from the other side of the frontier. He is the first but not the last urban intellectual in the South Street literature to get hit in the head for misunderstanding his relation to the social landscape and the stories it houses.

Michael, the middle brother, "breathe[s] Negro nationalism" (193) and doles out, rather than receives, physical punishment. The family's advocate of direct political action, he writes speeches, not poetry. Unlike his brothers, Michael leaves South Street rarely and briefly and usually with violent results: he punches out a white man on Market Street in Center City; he leads punitive expeditions against the Irish youth gangs of Grays Ferry. Michael's violent tendencies point up his great weakness as an urban intellectual—an inability to grasp that South Street means a way of life to be nurtured and sustained by articulating its internal logic, not just territory to be defended. The faction-ridden Negro Action Society he founds never becomes a significant force because he cannot recognize, make coherent, and invoke the bonds of community that must underlie the kinds of political action he aspires to direct.

Michael, however, shows a nascent promise as an urban intellectual, a promising fit to the social landscape in which he moves, that Philip never does. Michael's capacity for direct action, combined with his eleventh-hour reconciliation with Claude (the brothers having broken over Claude's marriage to Kristin), suggests that Michael, while yet misguided, might grow under Claude's influence into a viable leader. This future takes embryonic shape in the initial raid on Grays Ferry, when Michael joins forces with teenage gang members to retaliate for an Irish gang's attack on a black man. The political leader working hand in hand with gang members was to be one of Smith's enduring dreams. Sixteen years after the publication of South Street, having come from his home in France to survey black America in crisis, Smith articulated that dream at greater length in his nonfiction work Return to Black America. He saw a possible politicization of youth gangs as "one of the most significant phenomena I noted during my tour of the United States," suggesting to him a new convergence of interest among political leaders and violent young men around defense of the community. One gang member he interviewed imagined a fan-

tasy scenario that reads like a racially politicized variant of that in Sol Yurick's teen-gang epic The Warriors: the gang member envisioned a "'federation of gangs. All the black gangs in Philadelphia. Then, there ain't gonna be no more gang fights. Just one black army.'"^[18]

To Smith in the late 1960s, Michael would appear in retrospect as an early visionary, anticipating by more than a decade this transformation of youthful delinquents into actors in the arena of racial politics. In a sense, Michael is prepared and "saved" for such a future by a protest novel of the 1950s written at a time when that future, the urban crisis of the 1960s, could be conceived in only germinal form. However, the time for Michael's brand of leadership has not yet arrived in the world of South Street. His potential productivity, his capacity to lead the neighborhood in defending and reproducing itself by harnessing the energies of its youth, takes misguided form in the raid on Grays Ferry, which in turn leads directly to Philip's death: an Irish boy nursing a beating from a gang raid decides to get even by throwing the fatal rock. In that sense, Michael kills Philip.

The novel's climax is the return of Claude, the oldest Bowers brother, to South Street. Having left the neighborhood's circle of community to be with Kristin, he has been living with her in her studio near the city's edge. Although Claude has resisted the pull of South Street, Philip's death makes clear to him the necessity of his return. Claude's decision to commit himself anew to South Street asserts itself as the event that organizes and makes sense of the many bits and pieces—narrative threads, shifting subjectivities, fragments of anecdote and imagery—that make up the novel's portrait of South Street. Walking on South Street after Philip's death and his own break with Kristin, Claude understands that meaning must be pursued "in the bounded time and the bounded space of one's own life and one's own world, within the bounded nature of one's spiritual core." That is, he feels himself to be placed: "This was his blooded world, his cross, his love, his challenge—South Street" (311).

In Claude, South Street ultimately possesses an intellectual embodying Claude's own model of the race hero, singularly equipped to synthesize and express the experiences and needs of the people he encounters on his climactic walk—"an old man with white hair; couples chuckling; . . . a youth, with pork-pie hat and wide-legged trousers" (310). This reverse generational progression of age, coupling, and youth suggests in shorthand the range of South Street's character system: the Blues Singer and Michael, the juvenile delinquents and the Negro Action Society, Lil and the nameless tubercular woman, an old manual laborer who tells Claude about Marcus Garvey and a young law student who tells Claude that he wants to try cases before the Supreme Court —a line extending all the way back to the South and the Bowers brothers' martyred father. The novel's succession drama ends with the emergence of a figure who can effectively represent the neighborhood. Claude combines the formal

sophistication of Philip's aesthetic impulse and the social engagement of Michael's political imperative. Each element cancels the other's negative charge—Philip's social detachment, Michael's blindness to culture as the key to community—so that only Claude can encompass and speak for the way of life rendered schematically as the novel's character system and the street on which it is deployed. Claude, the only Bowers brother whose writing has reached a wider audience, is therefore the only character who can stop the self-destructive riot brewing after Philip's death: "'I tried to stop it,'" Michael says, "'but no one listened to me. They listened to Claude. They always listen to Claude"' (305—6).

South Street's last line offers an image of the neighborhood's continuing vitality: "The Blues Singer threw back her head and opened her mouth and began to sing" (312). That portrait of the most "organic" of urban intellectuals doing her cultural work—reinforcing the cultural ties that bind—clinches the novel's argument for South Street as a sustaining conjunction of place and peoplehood. The critical internal division represented by Michael's feud with Claude has resolved itself, and the Bowers family romance has resolved the neighborhood's crisis of reproduction by putting Claude in a position to represent South Street and lead it into the next generation.

The Counterargument

Looked at from another angle, however, the resolution of this crisis smacks of irony and incompleteness. After all, if family narrative provides the central metaphor of the community's reproduction, the Bowers brothers prove to be if anything more barren than the Furys: Philip dies before he can marry his fiancée; Michael's grim courtship of Philip's erstwhile fiancée, Margaret, who worships Claude, promises to remain loveless; and Claude, the only married brother, makes leaving his wife, Kristin, the condition for his return to South Street. The male Bowers line (about whose mother we know nothing) has purified itself through crisis and sacrifice but has not formed a subsequent generation of family groups. If the neighborhood's crisis of reproduction seems to end in resolution, with Claude on South Street and the Blues Singer singing, the male Bowers family's crisis of reproduction—which has been offered to us as the microcosm of a people's—ends in a kind of Pyrrhic spinsterhood, with no prospect of producing even the next batch of Bowers men.

Kristin provides a key to the novel's counterargument, which unravels the Bowers family narrative's argument for reproduction and continuity. Claude's solution to the novel's central problem, leaving Kristin, does not succeed in the fantasy project of erecting a hermetic barrier around the closed communal circle of South Street. Lines of what Michael and even Claude would understand

as "outside" influence persist in shaping life on South Street, a state of affairs that the novel acknowledges in several ways.

Kristin is one of several whites who move through the festival crowd, each representing a significant external influence that modifies or threatens the ideal of a self-sustaining, all-black South Street. The Italian gangster Pete, who dances with Lil at the street festival before taking up with her, represents the shadow government of organized crime. He underpays and abuses Slim and the other black numbers writers and finally has Slim, who is Lil's boyfriend and one of South Street's leading figures, beaten for insubordination. Similarly, the city's mayor (who opens the festival) and various policemen represent legitimate government. Paralleling Slim's fealty to Pete, the Old Man's authority on South Street proceeds in large part from his fealty to white politicians downtown. Like Pete's humiliation of Slim, episodes of police harassment and brutality—one of the issues around which Michael's Negro Action Society tries to organize neighborhood opinion—make it violently clear that metropolitan authority shapes the inner life of South Street in important ways.

It is, however, the gentle violinist Kristin, not the powers represented by gangsters or police, who poses the greatest threat to the Bowers brothers' reconstituted South Street. That the novel's climactic moment boils down to Claude's choosing South Street and the crowd over Kristin marks her as the novel's central problem. This is a curious framing of the problem for at least two reasons. First, the novel presents her as its only racial innocent, unable to see color as anything more than an aesthetic category: "Her problem was simple—she could not understand the great uproar that arose out of the color of a skin . . . Why, brown was a beautiful color, for all that, and, looking over groups of Negroes, noticing the infinite variety of shades—of textures, even—she had often felt a positive envy that her skin was a colorless white!" (204). Second, she endorses the Bowers brothers' vision of black South Street as a vital, closed circle. While she moves among the "groups of Negroes" in the festival crowds on South Street, her subjective experience catches the bits and pieces of imagery that make up the building blocks of a community: "Her eyes caught everything: 'beautiful' faces, odd-angled dancers, a man in ecstasy playing the saxophone." Her response to these raw materials of neighborhood endorses the novel's argument for South Street as the incarnation of a thriving way of life: "Life! There was life in the air of South Street." Watching the crowd dance in the street, she feels a "sharp wave of pain that she was outside of this nation of people, a stranger looking on" (146), ratifying by her discomfort the self-containment and boundedness of peoplehood—she sees a "nation"—that this dancing has been posited to mean.

Without color prejudice, attracted by the neighborhood's folkways, Kristin aspires to acceptance by the crowd. When the Blues Singer invites her to join

the dancing crowd on South Street, Kristin feels that "for this moment—she belonged" (146). Just at the moment when Kristin feels that she has stepped within the closed circle of black community, the novel marks her as its central problem. The mark takes the form of a wink. The Blues Singer winks at Claude from behind Kristin, an unreadable gesture (mockery? conspiratorial good will? irony?) until it is rhymed later in the novel with another wink at Claude, this one from a white newsvendor who has previously made clear his disapproval of Claude's marriage to Kristin. Near the end of the novel, having decided to leave Kristin, Claude stops at a red light not far from her studio: "the newsvendor at his stand suddenly caught Claude's eye and winked and waved. Claude looked at the newsvendor. With a slight smile, he waved back. He remembered, now, from where it was that he knew the newsvendor" (308). How does the memory of the Blues Singer's wink allow Claude to "know" the newsvendor, a minor character who exists in the novel only to react unpleasantly to the idea of interracial marriage? In order to understand how Claude's marriage to Kristin unites the newsvendor and the Blues Singer, who is the living embodiment of black community, we need to understand how Kristin threatens South Street. The novel's characters discuss at least two ways to formulate an answer, and the history of South Street suggests a third.

Michael Bowers argues, in the protest novel's clankingly analytical register, that Kristin is a white American above and beyond anything else she might be: "Is Kristin a woman of steel? Is her spirit wrapped in some new alloy which is absolutely impervious to all the superstitions about us that are held by her society, her parents, her friends?" (227). Following this reasoning, her manifest racial innocence and saintliness are therefore all the more pernicious in that they might encourage Claude to forget the unalterable social fact of her whiteness. She threatens South Street, in Michael's view, as an agent of white America, and Claude's marriage to her would therefore denature him as an urban intellectual by driving a wedge of difference between him and his people. The newsvendor's and the Blues Singer's winks endorse this logic of strict separation: the two find common ground in seeing Claude's place as South Street and Kristin's as anywhere else.

In the end, Claude does not accept Michael's argument in full, remaining convinced that Kristin lives, as her brother puts it, "in a vacuum," a world of music and form in which color has only an aesthetic meaning, but he accepts Michael's essential point. Claude concludes that his liaison with Kristin inevitably creates distance between him and the neighborhood. The novel suggests a historical reason for Claude and Kristin's inability to find an apartment near South Street or in any black neighborhood: newly arrived Southern migrants have crammed these neighborhoods so that "some families of four or five were living in a single room at rents as high as those charged for houses" (87). The Blues Singer's wink suggests a more important thematic reason that

Kristin cannot live on South Street: the circle of community Kristin encounters at the festival remains closed to her. Unable to rent an apartment together in a white neighborhood, either, Claude and Kristin therefore have to take up residence in her studio, which lies at the edge of the city in a largely undeveloped area—a spatial expression of the artist's detachment from social order in which Philip misguidedly believes. Claude finds himself living in a place that is not a neighborhood, a spatial vacuum to match the racial vacuum in which Kristin lives, far from the South Street milieu that he will finally come to see as "the bounded time and bounded space" of his "own life" and his "own world." Choosing Kristin would eventually drive Claude, South Street's leading intellectual and an influential voice in national and international discussions of race, from America altogether. He and Kristin are in fact planning to flee to Canada when Philip's violent death forces Claude's return to South Street.

These two explanations of what Kristin represents—Michael's strict construction of her as white America and Claude's looser construction of her as unfortunately not black and thus not of South Street—lead to the same point: Claude's marriage to Kristin constitutes a major crisis in the Bowers family narrative and thus (by the novel's logic) in that of the South Street neighborhood and the black America it stands for. Kristin's entry into the Bowers line would necessarily explode the fantasy of a hermetic, self-reproducing black world, a fantasy promulgated by people like Michael, enacted by the crowd in the street, and argued for in the novel's final image of the Blues Singer making the special music of a self-contained people. Claude seems to resolve the crisis by his return to South Street, where Kristin cannot follow, making it possible to again imagine an all-black Bowers family, an all-black South Street, a closed circle of community and culture.

The continuing presence on South Street of white men like Pete and the police, however, seriously compromises this community's hermetic integrity. The sight of Pete dancing in the street with Lil at the festival, precisely on the sacred ground and at the key ritual time of the novel's construction of a self-contained black world, suggests that the novel knows itself to be imagining an ideal of racial separation it cannot sustain even as fantasy. In that sense, even though Claude leaves her, the crisis caused by Kristin (also seen dancing in the street) continues to point up the inadequacy of the Bowers family narrative's proposed resolution by showing that the reconstituted fantasy of a self-contained black South Street is dangerously parochial. The fantasy blinds itself to lines of force and influence that extend across the borders of that local world from the metropolitan orders operating at a greater scale beyond it.

The gendering of the Bowers family narrative speaks to this point. Given that the South Street community's drama of leadership and succession takes the form of a family narrative, a childless all-male resolution asserts its own incompleteness. The character of Margaret helps to underscore the point, as the

three Bowers brothers orbit tellingly around her: she rejects Philip, worships Claude from afar without success, and, although she finally takes up with Michael, she appears dissatisfied with his strictly political passions. The novel's female characters, more generally, suggest the limitations of the male characters' authority to sustain and reproduce the neighborhood order. Lil, having attacked Pete with a razor to avenge the beating he gave Slim, immediately leaves town for good (heading out on a Chicago-bound train, again a parallel to Petry's Lutie Johnson) because she knows South Street will not shelter her from Pete's cronies. The Blues Singer, high on heroin, curses the Old Man as a transparent fraud: "Your whole goddamn life's a lie! Open your goddamn eyes! Face it!" (289). Just as his hollow sexual advances fail to conceal his age and timidity, the Old Man's air of political insiderhood fails to mask the impotence of a local functionary controlled and disdained by City Hall. Lil and the Blues Singer, then, suggest that Claude, having finally arrived at a moment of heroic plenitude by eliminating Kristin, remains blind to the ways in which white people still shape black South Street.

If the gendering of South Street's succession drama undercuts the Bowers brothers' victory, then Kristin's extratextual "return" to South Street further reveals the futility of regarding her elimination from South Street as an exorcism of outside influences. As a type, she figures in a succession drama, extending far beyond the novel's horizons to the present day, in which the southward march of Center City's new postwar population made it impossible to sustain even the myth of South Street as a locally self-determining conjunction of place and peoplehood.

We might see Kristin as a far advanced outrider for an approaching army who, rushing into the "void" left by the Crosstown plan, would remake South Street in the 1970s and 1980s as downtown Philadelphia's "alternative" main street. Their way of living, an urbanism built by pointedly non- or postethnic service professionals and artists (Pete is an Italian gangster; Kristin, a violinist, is just white), was still in its nascent stages in the 1950s. In 1954, the year South Street was published, the City Planning Commission and its powerful mentors in the private sector began work on what was to become the comprehensive plan.^[19] The plan envisioned a Center City designed to attract the more cosmopolitan element of the growing service sector's largely white professional workforce, people who would live conveniently near to the office towers in which they worked, the universities in which they taught, and the upscale businesses they would own and support. Center City's "secondary uses, such as small restaurants, specialty stores, and galleries," would thrive in concert with a new generation of housing—new apartment houses, rehabilitated rowhouses, and town houses forming the plan's desired "band of healthy housing extending from river to river and meeting the core cleanly without a layer of blight between."^[20]

To establish the advance outposts for this order, there had to be pioneers much like Kristin, an adventurous, open-minded, mildly bohemian artist with a rich, perhaps patronizingly aesthetic appreciation of lively streets and black culture. Were they to remain together, she and Claude—a musician and a writer, probably with young children—would have been ideal buyers for a rowhouse that needed work on a transitional block somewhere near South Street.^[21] If they weathered the racial tensions and disinvestment of the 1960s, they would have been natural leaders for the neighborhood-based anti-Crosstown coalition that eventually scuttled the expressway project. But by depressing property values and increasing the rate of decay, abandonment, and turnover of building stock, the Crosstown plan helped to make possible the gradual southward movement of the new inner-city urbanites to South Street. The unbuilt Crosstown made it possible for them to colonize much of South Street in the 1970s and 1980s as their local commercial strip—upscale on the east, atmospherically "gritty" further west.

Old neighborhood hands like Kristin and Claude would no doubt decry the coming of "yuppies" and wax nostalgic for a lost golden age of community, but today's South Street is the product of a process begun in part by people sharing Kristin's sensibilities and background. Mounting a defense of the Black Metropolis in transition, South Street posits Kristin as an interloper to be banished, but the novel's counterargument opens the way for her return and the larger drama of succession that return suggests.

South Street and Greater Philadelphia

Seen in its historical moment, in the shadow of Center City and the second ghetto, Claude's epiphany on South Street—"great blood vein of a people" (310)—seems dwarfed by the scale of forces at play in the metropolis. His return to South Street pales in light of our knowledge that in the following decades significant breaks will occur in the connection of people to place that the novel so passionately and selectively constructs—a connection the novel asks Claude, the model urban intellectual, to sustain into the future. The Bowers brothers, principals of the novel's argument, share an inward communal turn and a limited sense of political geography—figuring "white" territory as Grays Ferry rather than Center City or the suburbs—that, while surely appropriate to the neighborhood boundary disputes of midcentury, seem naively parochial in light of the forces already in motion on South Street. The novel's counterargument presents those forces—embodied in Kristin, Pete, and the Mayor—as in fact not external even to the mythic neighborhood formation constructed by the novel's argument. The Citizens' Council on City Planning and the Greater Philadelphia Movement came into being to influence the outcomes of vast metropolitan processes like suburbanization and redevelopment, a drastic reshap-

ing of the city as part of a significant spatial redistribution of capital and population. These are not "outside" forces; rather, they operate at a grander scale than that of the neighborhood, and South Street shows that the Bowers brothers remain unequipped by their unrelievedly local sense of neighborhood to grasp this fact in the way that Lil and the Blues Singer do.

Read against the scale of time and space on which the comprehensive plan pursues its vision of the metropolitan future, Claude's epic struggle to return to the local becomes a retreat. Let us return once more to his climactic walk on South Street, when he concludes that this return provides a way to throw off moral and intellectual paralysis by stepping within a charmed communal circle: "endless, baffling Time and endless, terrifying Space? One could, should, be aware of them, in wonder and in awe. But one could not live in their contemplation; one could not live according to their all-paralyzing commentary. One lived—whether one wanted to or not—in the bounded time and the bounded space of one's own life and one's own world" (311). The grotesquely inflated language makes us wonder, here and elsewhere, whether South Street is being pretentious or poking fun at its characters' pretensions, but it is clear that Lil and the Blues Singer have suggested a deflating irony that extends to Claude as well. Without a grasp of the scale at which South Street's future was at that moment being determined—and, in fact, retreating from any understanding of that "baffling," "terrifying" scale—Claude is an urban intellectual destined to receive a nasty surprise from his historical moment.

Looking back to John Fury and forward to the coming upheavals of the 1960s, we might begin moving toward subsequent acts of South Street's composite drama by imagining South Street's historical moment more broadly. We can read the novel as carrying us from horse-and-wagon Philadelphia, the industrial city in which Smith's and the Bowers brothers' South Street thrived, to the eve of a round of race riots ignited by stresses of the postwar period in which that industrial neighborhood formation would suffer from disinvestment and disruption. That historical sweep is figured in a runaway wagon episode similar to Fury's vision at Mame's deathbed.

In the novel's first chapter, Slim's nephew Joe (later to receive a terrible beating from the Grays Ferry Irish) loses control of a horse pulling a wagon loaded with his friends. The runaway wagon makes a tour of the neighborhood, west on Carpenter and north on Nineteenth, at the last with its wheels caught in the streetcar tracks, before Slim regains control. Read with Fury's vision, which depicts a personal defeat that John Fury expands into a communal and generational one, the scene takes on new meaning. The defeat is again communal—with passengers aboard—and familial and generational, as the transfer of reins from Slim to his nephew Joe produces chaos. The wagon caught in the streetcar tracks, like Fury's wagon racing along the railroad tracks and like

Algren's bewildered survivors contained by the El structure, images a people arriving at an urban limit. Like Fury's vision, this episode suggests that the passage of time, the unfolding of a future in the urban space delineated by the horse's route, will go hard on the community invested in that piece of terrain. Slim gets the reins back from Joe, but a deeper lack of control is foreshadowed: "outsiders" beat Joe, but Slim will be reminded of the arrangements of power within the neighborhood by a beating from his boss Pete, and in the aftermath Slim's girlfriend Lil will be forced to leave the city entirely.

The novel's final chapters introduce a still-germinating urban crisis, as Claude and Michael head off a riot brewing in the aftermath of Philip's death. The reader has been told that the riot has its origins in tensions particular to the moment: population pressure at the borders of an increasingly overcrowded ghetto, organized and violent teenage gangs, new currents of black nationalism. Claude and Michael must stop this riot before it destroys the neighborhood. (By the late 1960s, however, Smith's Return to Black America follows the logic of urban crisis in depicting the intellectual's duty as transforming the self-destructive riot into a well-planned insurrection, in large part by harnessing the violence of youth gangs.) South Street, then, wants to balance runaway urban process with local control as its community of characters effects a passage from horse-and-wagon Philadelphia to the postindustrial inner city on the sacred ground of their neighborhood.^[22]

If John Fury "never has a word t'say but goes around thrashin niggers," we might say something similar of Michael Bowers, amending the phrase to reflect his incessant speech making and altering the racial epithet to describe whites. Rather than the raids on Grays Ferry, it is Michael's attack on a white man in the heart of Center City that points the way to the next phases of the South Street literature's composite drama.

Out walking on Market Street, Michael and Philip happen upon an argument between a white man and a black man, and, without ascertaining the issue at hand or what either party has to say, Michael pushes through the bystanders and levels the white man with a sucker punch. That moment of casual violence visited upon a white man on Market Street by a black man from South Philadelphia represents the Center City planners' worst nightmare, an obverse face of the cosmopolitan Center City urbanism so invitingly sketched out by the comprehensive plan. Unlike the sharply delineated frontier at Grays Ferry Avenue, South Street renders the border between Center City and South Philadelphia as vague and permeable. Philip and Michael wander up to Market Street for a movie and a bit of unscheduled racial violence; Philip and Margaret

also stroll up to Market Street for a movie and walk back through Rittenhouse Square, "past the pleasant streets, then across Lombard and South again, and on into the gloomier neighborhoods" (21).

Philadelphia's planners intended the Crosstown Expressway not only to carry traffic but to form Center City's clearly defined southern boundary, to "reinforce the margins," helping to produce "a clear and forceful image of a desirable physical environment, related to some definite physical symbol."^[23] A product of the 1950s, the plan thought primarily in terms of traffic flows and of elegant design on the grand scale. Reinforcing the margins of Center City should not be read as a transparently coded rationale for building the expressway to keep black people (and other South Philadelphians) out. But as the 1960s wore on, and especially after Philadelphia's riot of 1964 helped to usher in the urban crisis, planners and business activists on one side and anti-Crosstown forces on the other did come to see the Crosstown as just such a social barrier. The plan was not ready to consider (and never mentioned) the fear of criminal violence, whether in the form of riot or mugging, that would during the urban crisis of the 1960s become a principal figure of inner-city social pathology and a principal rebuttal to the plan's vision of the urban future.

Racial violence, and violence in general, has been a favored means of representing postindustrial urbanism, the abrupt emergence of which was attended not only by violence in the streets but also by parallel wrenches and dislocations in the city of feeling. Michael's punch, and its repercussions in the novel and in the composite narrative recounted by the South Street literature, is charged with the deep-sunk force of postindustrial transformation. The further consequences of that transformation, coming into view as the postindustrial inner city matured in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, are sketched by the three novels that make up the South Street literature's postindustrial phase.

7
The Literature of Postindustrial South Street

The street lay like a snake sleeping; dull-dusty, grayblack.
David Bradley, South Street

Reading the South Street literature from midcentury into the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, during and after the playing out of the transformations still on the horizon at midcentury, one sees a mixture of persistence and succession in both literary form and urban order. Even though the language changes, sex and violence become abundantly more explicit and carry more and more of the burden of meaning, and, most important, fifty years of urban history leave marks on plot and landscape, many of the literary forms familiar from John Fury and Smith's South Street persist. Neighborhood novels continue to explore the tension between the metropolitan and the local via family narratives, expressive landscapes, runaway scenes, and the presence of writer-characters struggling to make sense of the neighborhood in crisis and its relation to the metropolis. In spite of the enormous changes wrought by postindustrial transformation, elements of familiar neighborhood orders persist as well. The semidesolate black community of David Bradley's South Street, blasted by urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, still sustains in its bars and churches the vitality identified by William Gardner Smith. The rowhoused white-ethnic enclave of God's Pocket, fiercely struggling against the grain of urban change, descends directly from John Fury's immigrant-ethnic industrial village. Tumbling returns to Smith's Black Metropolis to trace a black family's and a black neighborhood's struggles against history in the form of the Crosstown Expressway plan. Bradley's South

Street, Pete Dexter's God's Pocket, and Diane McKinney-Whetstone's Tumbling spin out the human meanings of the urban transformation still impending in the midcentury novels: their unifying context is the tension between persistence and succession of urban orders during the maturing of the postindustrial inner city.

Unlike Jack Dunphy and William Gardner Smith, both of whom grew up in South Philadelphia's industrial neighborhood order and left it to pursue the literary life in faraway places, their three successors converged on postindustrial South Street from all over the map. Neither Dunphy nor Smith had a college degree (Smith dropped out of Temple University to write full-time), and both served in the armed forces, a standard route to middle-class status for children of the working class in the 1940s. Their three successors all have college degrees and did no military service. Dunphy and Smith wrote their way out of the neighborhood into a wider world; their three successors began their literary careers by writing their way into the neighborhoods of South Philadelphia and the bony substructure of urbanism to be found in them.

David Bradley, born in 1950 and raised in a minister's family in the small town of Bedford on the edge of Pennsylvania's soft-coal country, crossed the Schuylkill River to South Street in the late 1960s. Uncomfortable with life as a black undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he found no satisfaction in the company of politically engaged black students or in studying the stock portraits of "pathological" ghetto life offered by the booming field of urban studies, he found his way to the downscale community of South Street's bars. In the wake of almost two decades of disinvestment and neighborhood erosion, the seedy, transient quality of western South Street's flophouses and bars was a long way from the Ivy League campus, and Bradley could get there in fifteen minutes' walking. He began writing South Street, his first published novel, while still an undergraduate. His second novel, The Chaneysville Incident, a meditation on history and race—via an account of the Underground Railroad—that has been widely acclaimed and regarded as a more "mature" work, returned to the setting of small-town Pennsylvania.^[1]

Pete Dexter, who is white, came from even further afield to find the material for his first novel in South Philadelphia. Born in Michigan in 1943, raised in Georgia and South Dakota, fitfully educated at the University of South Dakota, having driven a truck, worked construction, sorted mail, and tried to be a salesman, he found his way into reporting in Florida and ended up at the Philadelphia Daily News in the 1970s. The often-repeated story of how he took up novel writing as a serious vocation turns on a beating administered to him—and a friend, the catcher's mitt-faced heavyweight boxer Randall "Tex" Cobb—by a group of bat- and tire-iron-wielding readers. They were displeased with a column Dexter had written about a drug-related murder in their neighborhood, a small enclave known as Devil's Pocket located below South Street on the extreme western edge of South Philadelphia. As Dexter tells it, the blows

that broke his back and hip were less life-changing than those to his head, which altered his sense of taste permanently. Now that alcohol "tasted like battery acid" to him and he no longer had any desire to spend his spare time in bars, he had the equivalent of several workdays' extra time per week on his hands and devoted it to finishing his first novel and writing several more.^[2]God's Pocket, that first novel, is set in South Philadelphia and culminates in the fatal beating of a reporter. That beating resembles the one Dexter suffered, but Richard Shellburn, the character in the novel, does not resemble Dexter: Shellburn has run dry, and the men who kill him are in a sense helping him to give up the struggle of writing; Dexter, on the other hand, became a prolific novelist in the 1980s and 1990s, shifting among regions (South Philly in God's Pocket and Brotherly Love, the Wild West in Deadwood, the small-town South in Paris Trout, Florida's swamp country in The Paperboy ) and subjects (although returning often to racial conflict and the inner lives of working people), garnering awards (including the National Book Award for Paris Trout ), a wide readership, and the inevitable invitations to write screenplays for Hollywood movies. In Dexter's autobiographical account of the making of a reporter into a writer, the blows visited upon him in the street literalize the shaping influence of the city of fact on the city of feeling: one can almost picture him taking notes as his antagonists hammer away.

Diane McKinney-Whetstone, born in the early 1950s, moved away from South Philadelphia when she was a small child. Her parents, responding to rumors of the Crosstown plan, sold the family's rowhouse at Sixteenth and Fitzwater in the 1950s and bought a larger house on Chestnut Street in West Philadelphia, part of the postwar exodus of the black middle class from South Philadelphia to what they hoped were more stable neighborhoods. Her mother was a native South Philadelphian, raised in Queen Village; her father came north from Atlanta in the 1940s. The family prospered in Philadelphia: their catering business on Catharine Street did well, and the father got into Democratic politics, eventually serving two terms in the state Senate. Diane McKinney-Whetstone got her college degree from  the University of Pennsylvania, started a career as a public affairs officer for the federal government, and came to fiction writing through a class at Penn, a writers' workshop, and enthusiastic reading in the black urban canon (Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, Naylor). Tumbling, her first novel and indeed her first attempt at a sustained writing project, began as a contemporary story, but she found herself pulled back to the 1940s and 1950s by period detail and her parents' memories of the old neighborhood.^[3]

Unlike the first, this second generation of South Street writers was not homegrown. Their convergence on the neighborhoods of upper South Philadelphia from various directions reinforces two important points about the relation of writers to the neighborhoods they map. First, the relation is not a matter of

breeding. Writers do not magically grow from the places and the people they represent in their neighborhood novels. Writers make their way to their subject by various routes through the social landscape and their reading and training, and the encounters of all three writers discussed in this chapter with the postindustrial inner city have been conditioned by some of the same forces that shape the neighborhoods in their novels. Second, the neighborhood is as much a starting point as a destination, even for writers who come to it from somewhere else. All three of the books discussed in this chapter are first novels, and Bradley and Dexter have gone on to write considerably more celebrated books about places and people far removed from the South Philadelphia neighborhoods mapped in their first novels. (McKinney-Whetstone has just embarked on a promising career; at this writing, she is at work on a second novel, set in West Philadelphia in the 1960s.) The South Street literature has been a kind of staging ground in which urban intellectuals take credentialing first steps into literary life. The novels imagine those steps as fraught with the possibilities and danger native to the postindustrial inner city—Bradley's poet-protagonist gets knifed, Dexter's reporter gets killed—so that the work of urban intellectuals forms part of the novels' dramatic action. All of the novels consider explicitly or implicitly the relationship of the urban intellectual to the social landscape, itself in motion, in which he or she moves.

South Street (1975)

David Bradley's South Street, like Smith's novel of the same name of twenty-one years before, opens with a pass down South Street ending, in the second paragraph, at a bar.^[4]

The street lay like a snake sleeping; dull-dusty, gray-black in the dingy darkness. At the three-way intersection of Twenty-second Street, Grays Ferry Avenue, and South Street a fountain, erected once-upon-a-year by a ladies' guild in fond remembrance of some dear departed altruist, stood cracked and dry, full of dead leaves and cigarette butts and bent beer cans, forgotten by the city and the ladies' guild, functionless, except as a minor memorial to how They Won't Take Care Of Nice Things . . .

There was no one on the corner where Grays Ferry met Twenty-second and Twenty-second met South: the police, spying any of the local citizens, assumed they were there to rob the liquor store or the food market, and ran the duly convicted offender away. But a little way downtown, near the junction of a nameless alley and South Street was a dim entranceway, a hole in the wall with a thick wooden door hanging open, and out of it came belches of heavy-beating jukebox music and stale tobacco smoke.^[5]

Smith's street has changed in the intervening years. The crowds of shirt-sleeved

"brown pedestrians" are gone; the war with the Irish of Grays Ferry seems to be over; Smith's bright, populous day has given way to gray-black, depopulated evening. The three-way intersection at Grays Ferry Avenue and South Street (Bradley makes Twenty-second, rather than Twenty-third, the cross street) serves not as a frontier in space but in time—marked not by the post that separated black South Street from Irish Grays Ferry (a boundary consecrated with Philip Bowers's blood) but by the fountain that separates an age of Nice Things and ladies' guilds from one of garbage and liquor store holdups.^[6] Claude Bowers, drinking his beer and looking dreamily down the avenue into Grays Ferry, would never even think of tossing his empty in the fountain; his counterpart in Bradley's novel, the poet Adlai Stevenson Brown, idly tosses empty bottles wherever he pleases or "airmails" garbage bags from his window into the alley, where they burst and add their contents to the detritus collected there. The "great blood vein of a people" has become "a snake sleeping": the street, and the representative urban intellectual to be found on it, has molted in significant ways in the two decades since Claude Bowers's neighborhood-affirming walk down South Street.

Bradley's South Street, being a subtly efficient novel beneath its tendency to sprawl, suggests in its third paragraph a reason for the change: "The traffic light at the intersection changed. A flood of cars accelerated away from the corner, their lowered headlights reflecting in pools of the soft tar of the street" (6). One of these cars runs over a stray cat, leading to an extended scene of miscommunication, built around the phrase "some cat," in which the patrons of the "hole in the wall" bar (Lightnin' Ed's) understand the car's driver, a well-intentioned white man, to mean that he has just run over a black man in the street and wants a shovel with which to hide the body in a garbage can. On Smith's midcentury street, "brown pedestrians" dominated the traffic; cars, with racially unspecified drivers, crawled along honking their horns. On Bradley's postcrisis street, a "flood of cars" rushes through the void, carrying white people to distant metropolitan destinations. Although the Crosstown Expressway was never built, South Street has been reshaped by metropolitan imperatives, embodied in the suburbanite's murderous car, that the Crosstown was intended to serve. The novel's opening episode closes with the driver leaving the scene: "As the car accelerated, turned the corner, vanished into the night, the bloody remains of the cat dropped off the fender and onto the street" (9).

One can imagine a neighborhood novel written after the 1960s that shows the success of local resistance to urban renewal and redevelopment, a novel about a changing neighborhood's ability to reproduce itself and determine to some degree its own future. Tumbling, discussed below, is that kind of novel. Bradley's South Street, set primarily on South Street's most run-down and least conventionally neighborly western end, is emphatically not such a novel, undertaking instead to figure the "bloody remains" of South Street—what is left after

Smith's neighborhood has been run over and left, back-broken, for dead by the comprehensive plan. These remains, surprisingly, are yet twitching with the vitality of neighborhood, although the Bowers brothers' fantasy of hermetic and self-sustaining localism has been exploded by two decades of engagement with large-scale processes of urban change.

Bradley's South Street twitches as well with literary vitality. Like Smith's novel, Bradley's takes form around the problem of placing the right kind of urban intellectual on South Street so that he can do the work of representing it. When we read the two novels together, the poet Brown becomes an extension and in some ways a critique of the Bowers brothers. Bradley wrote his South Street novel in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after the Crosstown plan, the urban crisis, the redevelopment of Center City, and other elements of Philadelphia's postindustrial transformation had made it clear that forces operating on the metropolitan scale could overwhelm Claude Bowers's intensely local notions of neighborhood. Adlai Brown's central task and achievement, as the protagonist of Bradley's South Street, is to negotiate the play of historical forces and urban processes on both the metropolitan and the local scales in such a way as to place himself, an urban intellectual with pen in hand, within the transformed but still-vital neighborhood order of South Street. So positioned, Brown is ready to enter into conversation with a variety of American culture makers, from television news producers to the urban sociologists that Bradley read and despised at the University of Pennsylvania, who have since the urban crisis of the 1960s portrayed the black inner city as a "pathological" ghetto defined by the absence of those community-building orders that give the quality of neighborhood to an urban place.

Opening in a wasteland but finding its way soon enough to the music and smoke of Lightnin' Ed's, the novel immediately asserts one of its fundamental premises, which we might summarize as an updating of Smith's phrase to read: "Life! There is still life in the air of South Street!" We might read its complicated character system and several threads of narrative, some more or less integrated into larger stories and some resolved in relative isolation from the others, as designed to accrue the quality of neighborhood, the texture and depth of a way of life. The coming to South Street of Adlai Brown, a bad poet but an accomplished drunk; Brown's feud with the pimp and hustler Leroy Briggs; the troubles between Rayburn, a janitor, and his wife, Leslie, who leaves him for Leroy; the intertwined sorrows and little victories of the ex-prostitute Vanessa and the veteran prostitute Big Betsy, the wino Jake, and Leo, owner of Lightnin' Ed's; the fall of the shifty Reverend Sloan and the moral salvation of Sloan's successor Brother Fletcher by Leo the barman—if all these pieces are not made to add up to a single culminative moment like Claude Bowers's return to South Street, they do weave loosely together to suggest the messy vitality of a community subsisting where at first glance there seem to be only ruins and casualties.

This neighborhood takes spatial form around what one reader has aptly described as the novel's "three social and cultural centers": Lightnin' Ed's bar, the Elysium Hotel (Leroy's headquarters), and Reverend Sloan's (and ultimately Brother Fletcher's) Word of Life church.^[7] The majority of the novel's characters move from grubby walk-up apartments in the area's decaying industrial-era building stock through desolate streetscapes to Lightnin' Ed's or the Elysium, where they drink and mix with the others, returning home to fight, fornicate, and perform other closely detailed bodily functions. If Smith's largely faceless crowd has dispersed—one gets the sense that the named characters of Bradley's novel form a significant proportion of South Street's remaining residents—the interweaving paths of the remaining few in their ceaseless travel up and down South Street create a spare but complex network of community.

William Gardner Smith's South Street community took shape over and against an outside order expressed spatially by the clearly delineated border with Grays Ferry. If Kristin proved over time to be the greater "threat" to black South Street, it was still Grays Ferry that embodied a neighboring "outside" terrain against which Smith's South Street cohered. Bradley's South Street borders the high-rise Philadelphia of Center City. The boundary between South Street and Center City, left vague and permeable in the geographical imagination of Smith's novel, becomes crisply delineated in Bradley's. Crossing it is almost a bodily experience. Walking south from the redeveloped upscale preserve of Rittenhouse Square, Brown enters the buffer zone between Center City and South Philadelphia, "the half block of dilapidation that preceded South Street." The change happens without modulation, "like the snapping of a switch, the crossing of a threshold." It feels "as if, crossing the visible border, Brown left something like a piece of luggage in a coin locker, and on the other side he picked up the piece of luggage he had deposited there at his last crossing" (143-44). Compare this to the mild frisson felt by Philip Bowers as he makes the exact same crossing in an earlier period: "A gentle depression flitted briefly across Philip's heart; it was banished as soon as he pressed Margaret's hand."^[8] Brown and Vanessa do more than hold hands, and, rather than mitigating the force of this threshold sensation, Vanessa's body reminds Brown of the poverty and decay that define South Street as a distinct place. "'You wanted to know what I thought about when I looked at you,"' Brown says after she reads some of his poetry. "'There it is.'" Vanessa answers: "'Yeah. Garbage. Rats. Roaches. Drunks. Jesus, Brown"' (192).

Movement across the sharply defined threshold dividing South Street from Center City allows the novel's terrain to make available explanations for the forms it takes, especially through its imagining of metropolitan forces shaping South Street. Bradley's novel laughs off the local "threat" from white ethnics with the device of Leroy's unfounded worry that an "Italian army" of Brown's supposed allies will invade South Street at any moment, but the novel takes

very seriously the power of city-shaping forces concentrated in Center City banks to arrange the novel's world. In other words, it reverses the priorities of Smith's novel by turning its back on Grays Ferry and the other white-ethnic remnants of the industrial neighborhood order to attend to South Street's encounter with Center City.

The key figure in this regard is Rayburn, a hard-drinking and relentlessly cuckolded janitor who cleans the executive suites of a bank in a high-rise office building on Market Street. First, Rayburn's walks to and from work reveal the novel's split streetscape: a declining foreground of dilapidated or demolished industrial-era buildings against a prospective background of high rises under construction. On Fifth Street, for instance, "an uneven lane of cobblestones and trolley tracks that dated from sometime before the Civil War," a demolition project clears the "blight" of the post-Civil War industrial city from the flanks of redeveloped Society Hill. A giant wrecking crane dominates the scene, and "there was no traffic now except for the dump trucks trundling away loads of rubble from the buildings being razed in an urban-redevelopment project. . . . Beyond the hulks of the houses was a pit where a high-rise apartment building would one day stand" (18-19). Second, the Center City bank at which Rayburn works suggests the logic ordering this landscape, the concatenation of interests and motives driving the remaking of Center City Philadelphia. The novel's split cityscape expresses a simplified vision of the postindustrial city: high rises and rehabilitated housing on one side of the split, the surviving unrehabilitated building stock of previous eras on the other. For Rayburn, the service economy means crossing the divide to clean toilets in the workplaces where professionals handle information for a living. Images of Rayburn at the bank after hours —on his knees in the bathrooms of the executive suite, lounging at the president's desk while fantasizing emptily about having power—make clear South Street's relation to the logic structuring this new city. The pattern of decisions pursued by the big downtown banks in the 1960s, which invested in Center City projects and disinvested from marginal areas like South Street, plays a crucial role in remaking the city and thus in shaping life on South Street.

The neighborhood's political, social, and economic relation to the metropolis is not in question: Center City and the suburbanites who drive to it have run over South Street and left it for dead, and the people of South Street are almost completely without power. As Bradley described them in an interview, "Their lives were terrible—they just lived with the situation and made the best of it."^[9] If Bradley's novel wants to show how they improvise a community in these circumstances, it does not have any illusions about that community's power to determine its own destiny. The active, unresolved problem that makes the novel go is the literary, not the social, problem of neighborhood: the poet Brown has to find a way to the South Street neighborhood—so that he can write about it-

through a postindustrial metropolis seemingly bent on frustrating his literary project.

Placing Brown

The central problem of Bradley's novel, to the extent that it has one, strikingly resembles the literary problem of neighborhood in Smith's novel: an urban intellectual, the poet Brown, must be placed on South Street. This involves getting him out of a high-rise apartment and embedding him within the low-rise neighborhood textures of South Street in such a way that he can begin to write about it. It also involves Brown's abandoning Alicia, who, although she is black, is the novel's Kristin: Brown must stay away from South Street in order to be with Alicia, a well-to-do educated woman associated with the University of Pennsylvania, who plans to help him meet editors and get published. He therefore trades her for the unlettered Vanessa, who could not care less about his poetry but lives amid the rats and roaches of South Street he wants to write about. The resolution of the problem built around Brown intertwines with the novel's principal narrative lines and their resolutions: Rayburn finally breaks with his wife Leslie, who is then run out of town by the pimp Leroy as part of a new austerity program in the wake of his troubles with Brown; the wino Jake, who has been looking into Brown's background for the barman Leo, serendipitously turns up evidence of the Reverend Sloan's criminal past, causing Sloan's replacement by the humble Brother Fletcher; Brown's commitment to South Street, and thus to Vanessa (whose body we have seen rhymed with the street's physical form), coincides with Vanessa's ultimate success in achieving a long-sought-after orgasm; and so on.

However, unlike the placing of Claude Bowers, the placing of Brown on South Street does not present itself as an order-producing or -reproducing moment—organizing around it both the text's various pieces and its neighborhood—to which the novel has been building. Bradley's South Street arranges itself only loosely around the narrative spine formed by the placing of Brown, who is, after all, just a struggling poet who drinks too much. Brown's ambition to represent South Street stops at the limits of the representational. He does not aspire to the cultural and political representativeness that equips Claude Bowers and in some ways even Michael Bowers to speak for, rather than about, a people. Seen against the character system of the Bowers brothers, Brown appears as rather an inversion of Philip, a writer with purely literary ambitions pursuing precisely the enabling connection of literature to South Street that Philip failed to cultivate. If Brown in a sense replaces the wino Jake on South Street— since Jake's death frames Brown's final move to South Street—that replacement yields explicitly literary results: we see Brown at work rewriting a foul-

mouthed doggerel "pome" that Jake recited to him. South Street makes no argument about succession or representativeness in the progression from Jake to Brown (unless one argues that Brown, if he succeeds as a writer, will, like Kristin and Claude Bowers, be a good candidate to buy and renovate a brownstone in advance of the coming gentrification). Brown's presence on South Street does not bind the neighborhood's generations into a continuing line as Claude's purports to do.

There are, in fact, no generations to speak of. Unlike John Fury, William Gardner Smith's South Street, and the other South Street novels, Bradley's South Street does not employ the family narrative form to consider its neighborhood. The coupling of Brown and Vanessa does serve as the principal figure for Brown's placement on South Street, but the novel does not take up questions of succession, generation, and rise and decline typical of family narrative. The convention of good sex, rather than good children, indicates the fruitfulness of Brown's consummated arrival on South Street. This anomaly in the South Street literature makes a certain historical sense: Bradley's novel, written out of close (if selective) observation of South Street's older neighborhood formations in their moment of greatest disorder, imagines a South Street suspended in the present. The neighborhood's past has been erased by urban renewal projects and related dislocations; its future is still to be determined by flows of capital directed from Center City. Unlike Smith's, Bradley's novel does not conceive of its central problem's resolution as an event ordering or indicative of South Street's future. There are couples and households in crisis in Bradley's novel, and those crises are resolved in ways that indicate the neighborhood's continuing vitality—Brother Fletcher regains his wife's respect by taking over the church, Brown regains his self-respect by choosing Vanessa over Alicia—but these families and couples do not offer a model of generational succession. If Smith's novel is equally childless (pointing to the Kristin centered counterargument's undermining of the Claude-centered argument for self-sustaining community), it at least explicitly imagines a generational progression and puts forward leaders to guide the community into the future.

By crossing the river to South Street, then, Brown enters into a spatially bounded network of stories and characters—a neighborhood formation—that he has no ability to order, not (yet) even in his writing. That crossing, however, begins to make Brown into an efficacious urban intellectual. The kitchen drawer full of poems and notes in his South Street apartment suggests that he will in time evolve the representational skills required by his subject matter, the fragment of black inner city at the heart of postindustrial Philadelphia's social landscape.

Brown crosses and recrosses the Schuylkill, passing back and forth between urban worlds, until he crosses it for good in the novel's last scene. The threetowered form of Alicia's high-rise apartment complex encapsulates the world

he leaves. This "trio of high-rise apartment buildings that erupted from the asphalt like acne blemishes" (45) calls to mind I. M. Pei's triple high-rise centerpiece for the Society Hill development, one of the earliest and most widely applauded efforts to remake the residential landscape of Center City for a population of new urbanites. The novel places that distinctive three-tower complex—a form that signified redevelopment for many Philadelphians in the 1960s—on Spruce Street west of the Schuylkill, near the University of Pennsylvania campus, where no such private development with that distinctive monumental form existed. By "moving" the three-towered form from the eastern edge of Center City to the western edge, by melding Center City and Penn, the novel neatly schematizes its split Philadelphia along the single axis formed by South and Spruce streets. Brown, as a black urban intellectual, is thus "always" on South Street, even when separated from South Street proper by the river, the change of street name to Spruce, the high-rise remove of Alicia's apartment, and association with the university that forms one of the centers of the city's postindustrial economy.

In shuttling between three-towered Philadelphia, where he lives, and South Street, where he drinks, Brown has literally to turn his back on South Street to reach Alicia's building: "He walked to the corner of Thirty-third, contemplating an accident of the city's geography: on his left was South Street; on his right, the same street was Spruce. Brown looked to his left. Then he turned the other way and began to move west on Spruce, breaking into a jog as if he were in a rush to get away from the intersection" (45). The city's geography forces him to decide between antithetical options, propelling him "in a rush" away from the uncomfortable point where both confront him. The retreat to Alicia's apartment, however, produces a crisis for Brown as a writer. Although he is figuratively still on South Street, he finds himself engaging with the city at a grand metropolitan scale, the scale available to the information-handling classes who get their training at universities and inhabit luxury high rises, that denies him access to the raw materials of his subject matter. The crisis can only be resolved by the opposite movement, back across the dividing line to South Street and the local scale, where those materials can be recognized and confronted.

Brown's move to South Street happens as a series of steps away from the understanding of the city to be gained from Alicia's apartment. High up on her balcony, Brown on two occasions looks out upon the city's geography. His first survey takes in refineries to the south, Fairmount Park to the north, and Center City to the east (both Fairmount Park and Center City being showpieces of Philadelphia's postwar refashioning) but averts itself from South Street: "Brown's eyes wandered slightly south, along Spruce Street until it reached the Schuylkill. He snorted and turned away" (47). His second survey from the balcony, two days later, essays the opposite course, forgoing the panoramic view and narrowing itself to the Spruce-South axis. Brown's gaze follows a bus

headed east on Spruce "as it creeped across the bridge and dipped down onto South Street. Brown stared after it as it gradually lost itself in traffic." The effort to follow the bus from his elevation as it disappears into the street-level fabric of South Street makes the whiskey he has been drinking turn to acid in his stomach, inducing a powerful wave of nausea. He lets "the bottle fall away, twenty-four stories, to shatter beyond recognition in the street below" (96). The next and last time Brown surveys this view, he does so from the modest elevation of the South Street bridge—an intimate vantage point almost within the streetscape itself—and when he leaves the bridge it is to walk east, descending into South Street itself for good.

Brown's movement between landscapes constitutes not only a shift from redeveloped core to ghetto but also a shift in scales, from the generality of metropolitan Philadelphia to the locality of the street. The expansive geography available to him from Alicia's balcony obscures from view his (and the novel's) literary subject, expressed as South Street's detritus-strewn streetscape. He wants to "write poems about rats and roaches and garbage" (327) and in so doing to write about what Alicia's doorman calls the "sorry-ass niggers that couldn't afford nothin' else" (46), but he cannot see the street from Alicia's balcony: the bottle he throws from Alicia's balcony passes from view as it moves to the scale of the street, ending up "beyond recognition in the street below." Brown's shuttling between landscapes produces an incapacitating dissonance between the metropolitan and local scales and between the violently antithetical worlds of the three-towered apartment complex and the garbage-strewn neighborhood street. His nausea, triggered by an attempt to see South Street as part of the landscape made available from Alicia's balcony, expresses a kind of authorial vertigo produced by this dissonance. Brown's only literary ambition or capacity is to write about South Street. Presented as a strict neighborhood realist who must literally keep his subject matter in view in order to write about it (much like Nelson Algren, who always maintained that "the only way I can work is up close"), he must cross the river once and for all to gain access to the material that constitutes his subject matter.^[10]

In the novel's last scene, Brown's final crossing of the South Street bridge takes the form, familiar in the South Street literature, of a runaway and arrival at an urban limit. Having promised a doubtful Vanessa that he will return to her and South Street, Brown walks a block up to Lombard Street to catch a westbound bus to a cocktail party at Alicia's apartment across the river. To get back to Alicia's he must cross the significant South-Spruce divide, returning to three-towered Philadelphia. From the bus, Brown catches stroboscopic views of South Street through gaps in the gentrifying landscape of Lombard Street, indicating that Brown finds himself poised one last time between the two urban worlds. The appearance on the bus of the janitor Rayburn, soiled and stinking from a night's drinking, ushers in the novel's final crisis. Rayburn, whose fan-

Figure 5.
 Philadelphia. University of Wisconsin Cartographic Laboratory.

Figure 6. 
Detail map of western South Street, 
including portions of Center City and South Philadelphia. 
University of Wisconsin Cartographic Laboratory.

Figure 7.
 Philadelphia expressways as proposed in 1960.
 The planned Crosstown Expressway is at lower center.
 University of Wisconsin Cartographic Laboratory.

Figure 8.
 "The Image of Philadelphia," from the  Center City Plan.  An idealized view looking west from the
 Delaware River toward the Schuylkill River. The planned Crosstown Expressway forms the left
 (southern) border of the view; I. M. Pei's trio of Society Hill towers is in the left foreground.
(From Edmund Bacon,  Design of Cities,  p. 249.) GBQC Architects. Reprinted with permission
 of GBQC Architects.

tasy life revolves around leaving his unfaithful wife and going far away from South Street, tells Brown that this time he means to leave for good: "'I gots to be flyin'. I got ma transfer.' He held it up. 'You see, I'm on my way"' (339). Brown responds, "'I see,"' and, suddenly seeing clearly the danger of transferring or separating from South Street, decides to get off the bus, which has by now crossed the river by the South Street bridge and arrived at the traffic light controlling entrance to the Schuylkill Expressway.

In that moment, Brown's bus ride has reached an urban limit, with the postindustrial expressway updating a function served by the industrial railroad tracks in the runaway wagon scenes in John Fury and Smith's South Street. A carefully choreographed sequence has carried Brown through the novel's signifying split landscape to the place where the Crosstown would have begun; just beyond is the place where South becomes Spruce. The Schuylkill Expressway marks the point where Brown's will, operating at a local street-level scale, intersects with the metropolitan-scale forces—figured by the expressway in this scene, the high-rise office towers in others—that shape the city in which he moves. Brown makes the driver let him out, although there is no official stop there, and walks back across the river to South Street. Brown's success in placing himself on South Street takes the form of a final decision not to cross the dividing line. Unlike Fury and Slim on their runaway wagons, Brown exercises his will to stop the runaway and get what he wants. The difference is that what he wants is to write, not to safeguard and sustain the neighborhood's way of life: in fact, the more spectacular the decay of the old neighborhood's way of life, the better for a poet who seeks out the romantic ruins of dying urban orders. Like Kristin, another artistic proto-yuppie and a fellow connoisseur of urban grit, Brown has to work hard to get inside the ambit of his urban limit, to enter the neighborhood landscape. Thus his failure to recross that limit can be presented as an important exercise of will. Brown has learned the lessons taught by Kristin and the South Street literature's previous runaways, though: unlike Claude Bowers, Brown returns to the South Street neighborhood equipped with a rich sense of its limits as constituted by, rather than shutting out, the metropolis.

The Accreditation Drama

Brown's climactic return to South Street clinches South Street's argument about the writer's relation to the postindustrial city it has imagined, presenting South Street as the place that enables and produces the literature of neighborhood. The three-way intersection at Grays Ferry Avenue and South Street serves as yet another kind of boundary, in this case between not writing and writing. It marks the place where literature—this novel itself, as well as Brown's access to his subject matter—begins as we repeat the movement of the

novel's opening scene in a descent eastward into South Street from the South Street bridge. Having gotten off the bus and begun one last descent from the bridge as the novel ends, Brown will pass through this airlock and enact once more his move into the local scale, the streetscape richly strewn with fetid details (versus the unwritable, because invisible, streetscape below Alicia's balcony), and the neighborhood order marked by the outpost of Lightnin' Ed's just off to his right. He will pass, therefore, into the novel's literature-producing landscape, the place that determines his ability to write even about the rest of the city, which only has meaning in relation to South Street—reversing in literary terms the lesson of conflicting urban scales, which is that South Street's meaning and social fate depend on its relation to the metropolis. South Street thus puts forward an argument for South Street as enabling and accrediting a specific kind of inner-city intellectual—a realist writer—that Brown will struggle to become (and that Bradley, by virtue of writing the novel, can lay claim to being). The novel thereby extends the South Street literature's project of imagining the formation of urban intellectuals suited to the task of writing the inner city. The novel's climax occurs when the poet Brown, turning back at the expressway, saves himself—not the neighborhood.

The problem of the novel is not the survival of a neighborhood but the question of whether and how Brown will write. Voices in the novel link the "wrong" kind of writing to urban sociology, canonical in the 1960s (and since then), that labeled black inner-city neighborhoods as ghettos defined by pathologies and lack of sustaining order. The critic Albert Murray has derided this stock portrait of the second ghetto—an antineighborhood, antithetical to the immigrant-ethnic "ghetto of opportunity"—as "social science fiction," written by and for people steeped in conventional wisdom, that serves to reinforce the most addled and sensational myths about cities and race.^[11] Both Alicia and Vanessa accuse Brown, a poet, of being a sociologist or anthropologist of the participantobserver type associated with the Chicago School's inquiry into city life. The imputation here is that he is writing social science fiction, and the charge leveled against him is one of inauthenticity: if Brown continues to see South Street from the perspective of a slumming researcher, the kind of distanced view available from Alicia's balcony, then he will not write South Street as anything other than a set of sociological truisms and stock images of pathology and disorder.

The question of authenticity provides the dramatic tension in Brown's climactic bus ride, during which he significantly encounters an acquaintance: Earl, "a thin, well-dressed black man" reading the New York Times Book Review, a kind of updated version of Philip Bowers's literary cronies. Earl's greeting, "'Hey, brother, I hear you been way down in the jungle, as the sayin' goes'" (336), echoes the title of Roger Abrahams's Deep Down in the Jungle (1964), a scholarly study of black urban folklore collected in the marginal

neighborhoods around South Street. This book first directed Bradley's interest to South Street, and its emphasis on African survivals in a thriving neighborhood culture would seem to promise just the kind of portrait of black community that Bradley sought in response to the period's standard sociological portraits of the black inner city.^[12] Indeed, Bradley has suggested that one motivation for writing about South Street was to find a position opposed to the emphasis of sociologists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan on ghetto pathology. "The book was sort of a reaction to my sociology professors" and "sociology à la Moynihan" Bradley said in 1990.^[13] But Bradley did not see urban folklorists like Abrahams as allies in this project: their efforts to identify a peculiarly African or African American brand of community in the black inner city nettle Bradley, who has often spoken against the folklorists' naive antiurbanism and their tendency to see African survivals preserved in amber where he sees a living urban heterogeny. ^[14] (Criticizing Abrahams's naiveté in particular, Bradley claims that several people on South Street assured him they told Abrahams whatever he wanted to hear about the African roots of verse forms and Southern folk life in order to keep flowing the wine he provided.)^[15] Earl's greeting, then, throws him together with both the folklorists and the social pathologists against whom Bradley, the disgruntled University of Pennsylvania undergraduate, saw himself as writing South Street. Earl's "jungle" image condenses both standard, often opposed, understandings of the ghetto: the social pathologists' (ghetto as opposed to civilization) and the folklorists' (ghetto as primal Africa). Brown, therefore, must get away from Earl, which he does when he gets off the bus.

Brown represents that elusive third position Bradley sought: more sophisticated than the folklorists about the shaping forces and deceptions of the metropolis, more attuned to the quality of neighborhood than the social pathologists. The novel indicates Brown's attainment of that position in a series of figures of violence and sexual prowess. The point of these depictions of Brown's bodily engagement with the landscape is to establish him within the network of exchanges that constitutes the South Street community, not on Alicia's balcony with Earl and other readers of Moynihan or Abrahams.

South Street, extending Algren's fetish for writing "up close," wants to say that Brown is part of the world he observes, a relation to his "material" that makes for authenticity in what he writes. Earl, by way of contrast, takes pains to separate himself from the physical manifestations of South Street: he is prissily appalled by the stinking-drunk Rayburn, and he is unable to understand why Brown has left Alicia's body and Alicia's Philadelphia for Vanessa's. "'I heard a sacrificin' yourself to your art,"' Earl says on the bus, "'but that, brother, is takin' that shit too far"' (337). Brown pursues precisely the physical engagement with South Street that Earl avoids. Brown's habit of airmailing garbage bags from his window into the alley marks him as a resident, rather

than an observer, of South Street. Contributing his share of garbage to the garbage-strewn streets marks Brown not just as a man who writes about garbage but also as a "producer" of garbage, a man helping to generate the raw materials and landscape—the city of fact—that constitute his literary subject. Since Brown (whose sexual politics, like the novel's, makes Nelson Algren seem like Simone de Beauvoir in comparison) sees Vanessa as South Street personified, sex with her becomes a figure of intimate bodily engagement with South Street—her long-awaited orgasm serving in this case as a predictable assurance of authenticity. Brown makes a detailed exchange of materials with South Street: drinking its liquor and delivering in exchange his own juices (urinating and vomiting in the street, having sex with Vanessa); writing its garbage and contributing his own in return.

Brown seems to be marking South Street, as would a dog, as his literary territory, and in turn South Street marks his body and thus his prose with the signs of an intimate engagement. Walking to the bus stop before his last ride, Brown sees South Street as "a knife cut slicing across the city, a surgeon's incision, oozing pus, stitched with numbered streets" (336). The knife cut on Brown's chest, legacy of an earlier disagreement with the razor-toting Rayburn, incarnates the street on Brown's body with the authenticating sign of violence (which, as I argue in part 3, took on new importance in representing the inner city and the place of urban intellectuals in it during the urban crisis of the 1960s; and which, as Pete Dexter's iconic story of beating and literary rebirth demonstrates, has become a staple of urban intellectuals' credentialing stories). Rayburn's razor, inscribing the "knife cut" on Brown himself, ratifies Brown's assertion that his move to South Street is more than a research project. Defending himself against Alicia's characterization of his move to South Street as "'a quest for reality in the capital-H heart of the capital-G ghetto with the capital-P people,' " Brown says, "'It's not a research project. And the middle of the ghetto isn't real. You don't cut with the side of a knife. Only the edge is real. And this is the edge' " (123). Insider access to that knife cut writ large as South Street accredits Brown and enables him to write past received clichés—"the middle of the ghetto"—into unmapped literary territory. The writer needs to get at this "surgeon's incision" in the urban fabric, where the metropolitan meets the local, because it reveals the structure of urban process and social fact underneath. The gaps and scars that make the landscape ugly, like the knife cut that makes Brown's body ugly, are openings from which flow history and literary possibilities. With Brown's entrance into this landscape, the futility of writing about or even looking at South Street from the metropolitan perspective of Alicia's balcony gives way to productivity, yielding the kitchen drawer crammed full of poetry about garbage, collected in bars and alleys, and written on garbage (paper bags and paper napkins). It follows that when Rayburn, the author of the knife cut on Brown's chest, appears on the bus, Brown is reminded

of the proper relation between poet and street and returns once and for all to South Street.

Bradley's South Street places Brown on South Street so that he can write about a place, as Bradley did. Like William Gardner Smith, Bradley deploys his character system on a piece of terrain to make the conjunction of place and peoplehood, but Bradley's sense of place is conditioned by two decades of urban change. While Claude Bowers places himself, however problematically, in a community with borders to defend and a generational structure by which to further itself, Brown places himself in an urban limbo ("the middle of the ghetto isn't real") variously figured as void, edge, and incision. Claude Bowers mounts a defense of the Black Metropolis just as urban renewal, the civil rights movement, and the kinds of violence associated with riots and drugs were taking shape on its horizon. The poet Brown moves to South Street in the aftermath of Claude's future, after the failures of urban renewal, the breaking of neighborhoods by redevelopment, and the flight and desolation accelerated by the urban rioting Claude tries to prevent. But if the prewar orders of the Black Metropolis have entered into steep decline in Bradley's novel, the second ghetto has not taken standard "social science fiction" form. Bradley gives us the churches and bars and troubled homes that traditionally constitute a community in the neighborhood novel, and in his South Street milieu there are no projects, no drugs, and only one gun (Leroy's, and he does not use it). The neighborhood is in that sense a late survival of an older inner city of feeling that Bradley stubbornly opposes to the stock second ghetto pathologies formulated in the 1960s by writers of the urban crisis as different as Moynihan and Claude Brown (discussed in part 3).

If Bradley's South Street is in a curiously suspended and contradictory state, emblematized by the juxtaposition of churches and bars with the gaping holes dug for the foundations of high-rise apartment buildings to come, it is a productive one. The credentialing of Brown as a poet—by his movement onto South Street, by his flight from the campus across the river, by his rejection of social science even as he employs methods identified by other characters as social scientific—makes literature out of the process by which Bradley became a novelist. South Street imagines and argues for a process by which the inner city produces urban intellectuals. The inner city's signifying landscape and aging, uneducated population equip both Brown and Bradley—young, educated outsiders from across the river—to write its stories.

God's Pocket (1983)

Pete Dexter, like Bradley, spent a good deal of time in the bars of South Philadelphia, and his tongue-in-cheek accounts of the beating he received in Devil's Pocket—he calls it "the greatest bar fight in the history of South

Philadelphia," which took place in "the worst white neighborhood in America"—both poke fun at and conform to the codes that signal the credentialing of the poet Brown. If a knife cut across the chest is supposed to indicate close engagement with the city of fact, then how much more deeply do a broken back, a broken hip, ninety stitches in the scalp, and a changed sense of taste propose to inscribe Dexter's relation to South Philly on his body? God's Pocket (1983) moves the South Street literature's composite story back to the white-ethnic enclave and the decline, but the master story of postindustrial transformation—and the meditation on the urban intellectual's place in the landscape—retains its formal and thematic shape with remarkable consistency.

God's Pocket, an imaginary little neighborhood that Dexter places on Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-seventh streets around Lombard, just north of the extreme western end of South Street, is a composite of Philadelphia's white-ethnic enclaves. Its residents, insular people of Irish and Italian descent, work in construction, at the local refineries, for the city or the mob. They drink in old-style bars like the Uptown and the Hollywood, where people "sit around and argue about the Eagles or the Flyers or the niggers . . . the things everybody agreed on." They live in dark, narrow rowhouses with "two bedrooms, one bath, four Touch Tone Princess telephones."^[16] God's Pocket, then, stands for Devil's Pocket, Tasker, Whitman, Two Street, Fishtown, and other tight little enclaves descended from the world built by people like John Fury: the industrial neighborhood order's immigrant-ethnic villages. Like Bradley's "moving" the Pei towers to Spruce Street to conflate Center City and Penn, Dexter's "moving" Devil's Pocket from south of South to north of South places it right on the line where South Philly meets Center City, an encounter between declining enclave and a new urban world that will give rise to the novel's culminative act of violence.

The industrial moment has passed, and the Pocket is an anachronism in the postindustrial landscape. The financial hub and gentrified neighborhoods of Center City are just to the east, the campus of the University of Pennsylvania just to the west; the suburbs beckon to those who want to move and can afford it, and the expansion of the black inner city since World War II has created a permanent sense of crisis in the Pocket. To show how the industrial neighborhood order has been succeeded, the novel surveys the landscape of North Philadelphia, which was once a vast congeries of white-ethnic neighborhoods much like South Philly and is now dominated by the city's most notoriously immiserated second ghetto. Riding to work on a bus headed south down Broad Street through North Philadelphia, a black construction worker named Lucien Edwards notes that "someone had done a lot of good work in North Philadelphia once." As a bricklayer, he has a professional appreciation for the "good work" apparent in the surviving nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rowhouse architecture of North Philadelphia, which once housed immigrant-ethnic

neighborhoods much like God's Pocket. As a skilled tradesman who makes things, he stands for an older notion of "good work" that has been in short supply for the black residents of North Philadelphia since they supplanted the white ethnics who left, along with most of the factory jobs, in the decades after the war. The white ethnics who remain in the inner city, in places like Fishtown in the north and God's Pocket in the south, see themselves as embattled and surrounded. Lucien can see the newer definition of"good work" from the windows on the other side of the bus: he likes to watch women on their way to the campus of Temple University, an enclave of professionals and aspiring professionals distinct from the neighborhoods around it and the menial service work their residents can secure. Like Penn, Temple is part of the higher education complex so crucial to a postindustrial economy based on intellectual labor and high technology. Twenty minutes later, the bus having passed through Center City and entered South Philadelphia, Lucien can compare the "good work"—meaning both the jobs and the architecture—suggested by North Philadelphia's rowhouse architecture to the Southwark Homes housing projects, part of the second ghetto built after World War II to lock the expanding black inner city in place.^[17] He decides that his wife, who prays every morning for the destruction of a white race bent on corraling and exterminating the black race, must be right about the projects: Southwark Homes, a cluster of forbidding towers crowded with people cut off from economic opportunity, "couldn't be no accident" (20).

God's Pocket, then, persists in an urban landscape that has been drastically and purposefully changed, and the Pocket's residents are embalmed in the insularity and xenophobia encouraged by this dissonance. The novel's plot is set in motion when Lucien brains Leon Hubbard, a twenty-four-year-old good-fornothing from the Pocket, with a lead pipe after Leon flies into a rage about "working for niggers" and goes after Lucien with a razor. Leon, an unemployable psychopath fueled by pharmaceuticals and paranoia, had the job only because his stepfather, Mickey Scarpato, is "connected"—he hauls meat for the local mob. Leon's death attracts the attention of Richard Shellburn, the city's best-loved newspaper columnist, who falls instantly for Leon's mother, Jeanie. At the end of a long, fantastically plotted chain of events, the two main protagonists have been banished from the inner city: Mickey is holed up in Palatka, Florida, waiting for the mob's enforcers to come for him, and Shellburn is dead—killed by patrons of the Hollywood Bar who took exception to the wording of his column about Leon Hubbard. Lucien and his foreman, a white Southerner named Peets, get back to work laying bricks but conclude that they have grown old.

God's Pocket, then, is a decline narrative, baroque to the point of self-parody. As in Man with the Golden Arm, a sense of doom pervades the novel, its sources just beyond the characters' range of perception. "'Some strange shit's goin' around,'" says Arthur "Bird" Capezio, Mickey's supplier of stolen meat,

whose electricity keeps going out and whose traditional mob protectors are getting killed and slapped around by young turks on the make. "'Everywhere. I ask but, you know, it ain't on my level or something"' (59). The "strange shit" in question is, in this case, the generational collapse of the Philadelphia mob. Organized crime, like the ethnically based machine politics to which it is tied, flourished in the urban villages of the industrial city, but the sons and nephews of the old mobsters are running the business into the ground. Holed up in Florida with Bird at the end of the novel, Mickey is not even sure the mob will have the wherewithal to find him. "In the old days, you wouldn't of had to wonder" (278). The decline of the mob is part of a larger collapse of the industrial city's orders, a gradual slide readable throughout the novel's social landscape and character system. Lucien and Peets—hard-handed, steady-working, reticent men on the model of John Fury—seem to be the last two skilled manual laborers in a city full of cheap crooks, soft-handed layabouts, and other nonproducers. Like everyone else in the novel, they are childless. Like Golden Arm, John Fury, and even Smith's South Street (in its self-critical moments), God's Pocket imagines the decline of an urban order as a family narrative that ends in barrenness. The many families of the book produce no children (except Leon, who dies), and the only inheritors of the old neighborhood are destructive bad sons on the order of John Fury Jr.: the sons and nephews who kill the old-time gangsters; and Leon Hubbard, who combines the shiftless violence of John Fury Jr. with the simpleminded uselessness of Golden Arm's Poor Peter Schwabatski.

According to the patrons of the Hollywood Bar, "Leon was what the neighborhood stood for. . . . 'He was just like everybody else in here' " (79). Sharing none of the conventional virtues of his antecedents and all of their vices, Leon is an embodiment of the Pocket in steep decline, and the black-comic returns of his corpse to the street from the grave figure the Pocket's historical situation: it is dead, but it mimics the activity of life. Leon dies early in the novel, but his body keeps getting up and hitting the streets. First, the undertaker dumps him in the alley when Mickey loses the money for the funeral at the racetrack; then, after Mickey has temporarily stored the body among stolen sides of meat in the back of his refrigerator truck, a traffic accident deposits Leon on the streets once more. The resourceful residents of South Philadelphia steal all the free meat lying around in the intersection, so that by the time the police arrive "the only meat left on the street was Leon"(213). Leon is meat, and Mickey, who drives a refrigerator truck in a land where the electricity is going out, knows that "anywhere meat went bad, it never smelled the same"(139). When Leon is finally given a funeral, Mickey extends the spoiled-meat metaphor of generational decay to the whole Pocket: he discovers that the funeral home "had that same stale smell as the Hollywood. It never occurred to him before that the smell belonged to the people as much as the bar"(243). Leon, the bad son who

stands for the Pocket, has spoiled; the mob's stolen meat spoiling in Bird's freezer indicates the unraveling of the old criminal order; the industrial-vintage urbanism for which God's Pocket stands is getting old and going bad.

God's Pocket narrates the decline with materials familiar to a reader of the South Street literature. It is a neighborhood novel that uses figures of family and landscape to show older orders in collapse, and it features a runaway scene that combines those representational strategies. Mickey, needing money to bury Leon, decides to sell the truck to Little Eddie, a used-car pirate whose Automotive Emporium sits among lines of rowhouses near Third Street and Emily deep in the fabric of South Philadelphia. One of Eddie's employees takes the truck for a test drive without Mickey's permission, and Mickey chases after him on foot, seemingly impelled by a need to watch over Leon's body. It is a dreamlike and unclearly motivated chase, in which Mickey follows the truck in traffic through South Philadelphia—up Third, all the way to Fitzwater, almost to South—at times almost close enough to touch it. At Fitzwater, the truck collides with a city bus just after Mickey stumbles and falls. The chase eerily repeats the horse-and-wagon runaway in John Fury: Mickey, disoriented and defeated in the landscape, futilely tries to keep up with an inscrutable process larger than himself. He is not sure why he is chasing the truck, only that he has to. That futile, bewildered passage through the landscape is again paired with familial collapse: Fury is at his dying wife's bedside, about to lose the family structure that stands for a neighborhood order; Mickey is chasing his dead stepson Leon, the incarnation of the Pocket, who ends up in the street anyway.

Like everyone else in the novel, Mickey tries to make sense of what is happening to him and establish control over it. Chasing the truck, he blunders through an eviction scene, crashing through the furniture on the sidewalk while a woman holding a child "began to cry 'Stop' over and over. He didn't know who she meant, but he knew how she felt" (210). Like John Fury, Mickey cannot get urban processes to stop long enough for him to impose order on his experience of them. In his dash up Third Street through the rowhouse landscape of South Philly, he passes through the stage set of decline—people bewildered in the street, crying "Stop" as the world changes around them—and arrives at an urban limit: Leon and the old mafia's "meat business," two figures of God's Pocket and the declining urbanism it evokes, are the detritus left over after a crash (like the one that broke Sophie Majcinek's body, family, and neighborhood in Golden Arm). The local family drama is part of the larger drama of urban process. At the center of both is Leon, who goes bad despite Mickey's efforts to stop the process.

Richard Shellburn, the newspaper columnist, also finds himself chasing after a sense of control and losing ground. God's Pocket shares with John Fury a notion of how to write about the white-ethnic neighborhood—the decline— and engages the question of "who writes the inner city?" also raised by Smith

and Bradley. Shellburn is one of several writer-characters (and the only white one) moving through the South Street literature. He is an urban intellectual charged with the task of representing Philadelphia by gathering material from the city of fact around him and constructing a city of feeling infused with meanings that sell newspapers. Shellburn, then, is like Mike Royko—although he is closer to Jimmy Breslin in his empurpled style and closer to Herb Caen in the nearly universal adulation he commands until his disastrous run-in with the people of God's Pocket. Like the Bowers brothers and Adlai Brown, Shellburn faces the problem of finding a productive relationship to the postwar city; like Philip Bowers, his failure kills him.

Shellburn is a writer in crisis who has had nothing new or interesting to say for twenty years. Getting by on recycled conventional material while he drinks himself to death, he has been writing what his readers want to read. He cranks out appeals to civic pride from an insider's perspective: "I love this city . . . not the sights, the city. I loved her last night, and I love her this morning, before she brushes her teeth, knowing she snores" (69). He tells stories of neighborhood decline populated by frenzied criminals and extravagantly innocent victims: "The old man had eyes as sad as the dog's. He looked into the empty rooms where he and his wife had lived their lives, quiet lives, and wondered what had happened to his neighborhood, that children would come into the house and beat up an old man for his money. 'At least they didn't hurt Hoppy,' he said" (12). His occasional paint-by-numbers representations of blacks and Puerto Ricans—the latter are "a spirited and proud people" summed up by neighborhood portraits of "burned-out houses, wine bottles, rats, naked children"—are careful never to alienate white-ethnic readers. If he writes a column criticizing the police for their treatment of Puerto Ricans, for instance, he will be sure to write one later in the week ("The Loneliest Job," or "Down Any Alley") that lionizes the police and other white-ethnic icons "for walking around a wino instead of kicking him" (70). He also writes columns decrying the coming of "the New Journalists," a vague category of younger reporters from "places like Florida" who threaten to ruin the local newspaper business in unspecified ways. These "New Journalists" are not the literary-journalistic movement of that name, identified by Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, that did change the practices of American newspaper reporting; rather, they seem to be "new" and threatening simply because they are urban intellectuals who have no trouble writing the postindustrial city and do not know or care much about places like God's Pocket.

Shellburn is losing touch, as Nelson Algren did, with the postindustrial city. Like Algren, Shellburn imagines himself to be the last good writer in town, an endangered species in a changing literary-historical ecology. Like Algren, Shellburn looks to the industrial neighborhood order—or, in the early 1980s, to survivals of it—for inspiration and his ideal readership. Looking out the

window of his Center City office, Shellburn sees South Philadelphia, "where the city started. When he looked at a map, he could see how something must have tipped over there and spilled out in two giant stains, the northeast and northwest parts of the city. The source was South Philly. When it came up, he would say he could look out his window and see the people he wrote for" (72). South Philly is the starting point for Shellburn's city of feeling, as it is for Adlai Stevenson Brown's: it is the place that produces writing and readers. In that sense, South Philly produces Philadelphia for Shellburn, hence the image of the rest of Philadelphia as stains poured from South Philly. That image of spilling also captures a demographic movement underlying Shellburn's writing: the movement of white ethnics to the northeast and far northwest portions of Philadelphia since World War II is part of the story of neighborhood decline in South and North Philly that forms an essential component of his stock in trade. Shellburn thus echoes Algren in subject and even in style: Shellburn's ode to Philadelphia as a woman who shares his bed echoes Algren's comparison of loving Chicago to loving a woman with a broken nose;^[18] phrases like "Down Any Alley" share Algren's tendency toward the sentimental universal. Shellburn raises the specter of Algren because he is similarly burned out, an urban intellectual running out of things to say about a city that seems strange to him.

God's Pocket, in keeping with Smith's and Bradley's dramas of placing the writer in the neighborhood, defines this urban intellectual's relationship to the changing inner city by putting Shellburn in a signifying landscape. For all his talk of communing with the people, Shellburn is comfortable only in postwar America's two favorite refuges from the inner city: his Lincoln Continental, "the safest place he had in the city" (70), and his suburban property on Chesapeake Bay, where he half-heartedly plans to build a house and settle down. He does not seem to belong in the inner city anymore. At one end of the social scale, he does not belong in the exclusive, heavily redeveloped Center City neighborhood of Society Hill. During his brief and ill-fated marriage to a socialite—who had planned to gain hegemonic leverage in Philadelphia's social scene via this "cultural juxtaposition" with a regular guy—he lived in a Society Hill townhouse, but the marriage collapsed and he moved out. At the other end of the social scale are the black and Hispanic neighborhoods of North Philadelphia, and Shellburn sends his legman Billy to do his reporting there. Unlike Adlai Brown, who has to see his material up close to write poetry, Shellburn does not really need to do any reporting to trot out the rats, roaches, and naked children of generic ghetto reportage. Billy's diligence allows Shellburn to insulate himself from the inner city, to avoid his readership. When Shellburn finally confronts those readers in God's Pocket, somewhere between Society Hill and North Philadelphia on the social scale, they are toting baseball bats and looking for blood.

In a darkly comic rendering of the urban intellectual's relationship to his subject and readership, Shellburn is beaten to death in the street by expert readers to whom he wishes to pander. Shellburn's column on Leon Hubbard's death uses the decline to conflate the reporter's grievances with those of the Pocket's residents: "Until the coming of the New Journalism . . . you only got to die once in this city, even if you came from God's Pocket. . . . There was a time . . . when a 24-year-old working man could die once, have the event noticed in his local newspaper, and then move on to his reward, without the complications of an additional death" (255-56). Shellburn's account repeats City on the Make' s strategy of positioning writers like himself alongside the decent working people of the old neighborhoods. Both groups have had indignities visited upon them by "the New Journalists": his own paper reported Leon's death at the construction site and the body's reappearance in the truck accident as two different deaths, a professional embarrassment to Shellburn and a social embarrassment to Leon's mother. Shellburn stands up for "the working man" here, his standard pose. What is it about the column, then, that sparks a wave of angry phone calls to the paper, leading to Shellburn's ill-fated peace-making trip to the Hollywood Bar?

Shellburn is guilty of two major offenses. The first is generic. In his column, he portrays Leon as the type of all the "workingmen of God's Pocket"— "small, dirty-faced, neat as a pin inside," just like the rowhouses in which the simple people of God's Pocket live. Leon and the rowhouses look the same because they are both exemplars of a way of life imbued with the dignity of hard work and simple, blue-collar pleasures, like a "drink at the Hollywood Bar or the Uptown, small, dirty-faced little places deep in the city" where the good people of the Pocket argue "about things they don't understand. Politics, race, religion" (257). As the callers and Billy explain, Shellburn is telling the wrong kind of decline here. Dirty hands is the appropriately clichéd image of hard work; "'Dirty-faced is you don't take a bath"' (264). Shellburn has equated God's Pocket with the generic North Philadelphia of his columns, where the people are soiled by poverty and pathological culture rather than honest hard work. The people of God's Pocket also do not want to hear that they do not understand politics, race, and religion. In their preferred story of decline, they are not ignorant anachronisms adrift in a world that has passed them by; rather, they are traditionalists clinging to a proven set of political, racial, and religious beliefs in an increasingly incoherent and valueless world populated by maniacs like the children who attack defenseless old people in Shellburn's columns.

Second, by constantly making Leon's death fresh and more absurd, Shellburn, like Mickey Scarpato, is guilty of telling the Pocket that it is not so much in embattled decline as dead—and grotesquely, comically dead at that. Since Leon is held up by the Hollywood's patrons as everything the Pocket stands for, and the novel offers the recurring presence of Leon's body in the street as a

comic figure of the white-ethnic enclave's zombielike state of life after death, the newspaper and Mickey are telling the neighborhood a joke it does not want to hear. Early in the novel, after the foreman Peets lies to the police and claims Leon was killed in a workplace accident, a "fat kid" named Dick objects to the details of the newspaper's account of Leon's first death. "'They put it like that in the Daily Times,"' complains Dick, "'everybody in the whole fuckin' city sees it, thinks we're a bunch of jerk-offs down here. Walkin' around fallin' off shit all the time"' (100). Dick's animus against the newspaper seems to proceed from a sense that the paper, operating on a metropolitan scale far beyond that of the neighborhood, broadcasts the Pocket's demise as an undignified comic whimper—a matter of "fallin' off shit"—rather than a bang in which the old order makes a last stand against chaos. It is Dick, bat in hand 170 pages later, who announces to the crowd at the Hollywood that Shellburn has "'come down here to get fucked up"' (270). Mickey tries to stop the beating, fails, and is forced to leave the Pocket. The neighborhood has thus punished and eliminated Shellburn and Mickey, both of whom are responsible for holding up a mirror to a living corpse.

"'What the fuck?"' asks Mickey as the crowd closes in on Shellburn, "'Over something he wrote?"' (271). God's Pocket makes the writing of the inner city part of the violent action of the novel. Shellburn, like Mickey in pursuit of his truck, is another of the many characters adrift and disoriented in the signifying landscape of the postindustrial inner city. Like fellow writer-character Philip Bowers, killed by the fathers of the mob at the Hollywood Bar, Shellburn dies violently because he is improperly suited to the task of reading the social landscape through which he moves and representing it on paper. "The truest thing in the world," for Shellburn and other urban intellectuals committed to writing from close observation of the world around them, "was that you showed who you were" in writing a column. "It was almost incidental, what you had for issues. But how you saw things, how physical things went into your eyes and what your brain took and what it threw back, that told who you were" (255). Shellburn's literary relationship to the city through which he moves is nearly exhausted. His electricity, like Bird's, is going out; he is spoiled meat, pale and gray and soaked with bad chemicals. God's Pocket finally puts him, as dead as Leon, on the street in the Pocket, as if to suggest that his sense of how to be an urban intellectual is as parochial and limited as the neighborhood's sense of itself. In the end, the embalmed neighborhood and the doomed urban intellectual deserve one another.

Tumbling (1996)

There is no runaway scene in Diane McKinney-Whetstone's Tumbling. The only scene that comes close to the runaway's out-of-control movement through

the landscape of the novel occurs when Noon, the main female character, remembers being dragged into the woods and raped by devil worshipers when she was growing up in Florida. That buried trauma generates much of the novel's family narrative: she has never consummated her marriage to her husband, Herbie, a circumstance that drives him to cheat on her with Ethel, a jazz and blues singer; Noon and Herbie, who want a family, adopt two girls left on their doorstep several years apart, and various dramas unfold around the maturing of these two girls, Fannie and Liz. At the same time, a second plot line expands the family narrative into one of neighborhood crisis: as the girls mature in the 1950s, city planners and other bureaucrats begin maneuvering to clear the ground for a planned highway (the Crosstown), threatening to uproot and disperse Herbie, Noon, and their neighbors. The equation of urban renewal with rape—parallel violations of the neighborhood's and the individual's body and spirit—is consistently made in critiques of redevelopment. The South Street literature is rich with images of redevelopment and urban change in general as assaults on the body, from the imagined collapse of anthropomorphic rowhouses in John Fury to the equation of vacant lots and streets to missing teeth and knife cuts in Bradley's South Street. Tumbling, then, is a neighborhood novel built around family narrative, an expressive landscape violated by processes of change, and the problem of the local versus the metropolitan, all squarely in keeping with the South Street literature's formal and thematic tendencies. But there is no true runaway scene in Tumbling, a novel about the successful exercise of personal and communal will to resist and even reverse urban processes that threaten the integrity of individuals, the family, and the neighborhood. In the end, the therapeutic structures of family and neighborhood allow Noon to make peace with her memories and thus with Herbie (good children and good sex indicating the family's and neighborhood's vitality), and Noon helps lead the neighborhood's fight against the expressway. The novel ends with echoes of proletarian strike melodramas: "They would not be moved. No way, no way."^[19]

Tumbling returns to the Black Metropolis mapped by William Gardner Smith. McKinney-Whetstone did not read Smith's novel before writing her own, but there are striking similarities of setting, plot (substitute the war against the Crosstown for the war with Grays Ferry), and character (down to the resemblance of the jazz singer Ethel to Smith's Blues Singer). As in Smith's novel, the first lines of Tumbling introduce a vital segment of the industrial neighborhood order occupied by black working people who own and care for their urban world:

The black predawn air was filled with movement. Its thin coolness rushed through the streets of South Philly, encircling the tight, sturdy row houses. In 1940 the blocks were clean and close. The people who lived here scrubbed their

steps every morning until the sand in the concrete sparkled like diamond pins. Then they went to work mopping floors and cooking meals for rich folks, or cleaning fish at the dock, or stitching fine leather shoes or pinch-pleated draperies at the factories on the north side. Some answered phones or crumpled paper for the government. Some tended house and nursed babies. A few were really nurses. One or two taught school. (3)

Herbie and Noon are exemplars of this time and place. He is a redcap at Thirtieth Street Station, doing the low-end, manual service work often done by blacks for the railroad, that backbone of the industrial city's infrastructure. She keeps house with a rigor that the novel's opening identifies as unique to time and place, participates with special vigor in the spiritual and social life of the church, and otherwise does her part to sustain the neighborhood. Like other working- and middle-class people in the neighborhood, Herbie and Noon own the modest rowhouse in which they live. (McKinney-Whetstone leaves the exact location of their home vague, but it is on Lombard, probably around Ninth Street.) The cobbled-together quality of the family—Liz is Ethel's orphaned niece and, unknown to all but Ethel, Fannie is Herbie and Ethel's daughterhelps to identify it as a microcosmic element of the neighborhood: the ties that bind Herbie and Noon and their daughters go further than blood into the sphere of community obligation. Ethel's anonymous contribution of money for the girls' upbringing makes even the family's economic life into a neighborhood project. The family and the rowhouse neighborhood for which it stands will be thrown into disarray by the forces that turned the world mapped by William Gardner Smith's South Street into the postcrisis world mapped by David Bradley's South Street.

The expressway plan threatens to break down the neighborhood's structuring orders. Neighbors begin selling their homes, businesses close, the transitional landscape of vacant or rundown rowhouses begins to mix in with the neat-asa-pin remnants of the neighborhood's older order. The pressure driving the change is both external and internal. Not only does the downtown- and suburbcentered logic behind the plan bring the metropolitan into conflict with the local, but the federal and private money behind the plan flows into social cleavages already present in the neighborhood and exaggerates them. Noon's minister, who has been trying to help her mend her marriage with Herbie, takes payoffs from the city that distance him from his congregation. Fine Willie Mann, a local heartthrob who works at the neighborhood's most important nightclub, becomes an operative of the progrowth coalition in order to pay off outstanding debts. Willie Mann's romances with both of Herbie and Noon's adopted daughters cause trouble in the family, creating a rhyme between seductions of the body and of capital. The razing of a church marks the gravity of the threat: the overwhelming political and economic power behind the expressway plan, the

compromising of community leaders like the minister, the removal of institutional structures that reinforce the neighborhood's cohesion. Addressing the bewildered congregation in the ruins of the church, Willie Mann explains that all the progrowth coalition wanted "was your space" (314). The destruction of the way of life rooted in that space will be both a strategy to clear the space and a result of clearing it.

The neighborhood, then, is faced with a crisis of reproduction familiar in the South Street literature, and that crisis is given fullest expression through the familiar strategy of mapping a family's relationship to the landscape in which it lives. When Fannie and Liz begin college, embarking on the trajectory into middle-class life mapped for them by their hard-working parents, they move into a rowhouse around the corner from Herbie and Noon, who buy it from a neighbor driven out by rumors of the Crosstown plan. The parents' investments in the neighborhood and in their adopted daughters converge in this rowhouse, so that the family and neighborhood narratives come to a head together when Liz (who has been sleeping with Willie Mann) considers selling it and clearing out of the neighborhood. Liz is the novel's candidate to join the ranks of bad offspring in the South Street literature. Not only does she want to sell the house, but she is literally tearing it down from within: her evocative plaster-eating compulsion becomes a full-blown madness as the novel proceeds, so that when her family finally breaks into her room near the end they find an entire wall gone. As in John Fury, the rowhouses that stand for a neighborhood order are about to fall, first one at a time and then all at once.

Tumbling, however, is unique in the South Street literature in imagining a resolution of neighborhood and family crisis in which both sustain themselves into the next generation. The therapeutic resolutions multiply interconnectedly. Noon works through her sexual block (with the anonymous help of Ethel) and saves her marriage with Herbie. Noon and Herbie begin having sex all over the house, a kind of ritual that anoints the rowhouse with the signs of the family's (and thus the neighborhood's) order-reproducing good health. Liz tries to kill Fannie with a hammer, reaches the breaking point, repents and admits she is on the path to self-destruction, and returns to the fold of the family for help. The catastrophically bad daughter becomes a good one. The enraged congregation stones Willie Mann with the rubble of their church, driving him back to his lair beneath the Club Royale, another ritual that demonstrates Noon and her neighbors have committed in earnest to the fight to save the half-bulldozed neighborhood.

These resolutions are gathered under the rubric of individual and communal will triumphing over the seemingly ineluctable processes that have always buffeted characters in the South Street literature and in urban literature more generally: the rhyming flows of capital and hormones. The key moment in that tri-

umph comes when Fannie, who has a kind of second sight, discovers that not all of her visions of the future must come true. She has a lustful vision of giving in, as her sister Liz has, to the seductions of Willie Mann, but when the moment of truth arrives she finds the power to reject him. The lesson she learns is that, while human will cannot change the course of "birth and death and storms and luck of fortune," it can shape the course of desire and power. Jeanie, an older neighbor who speaks the language of civil rights and community action, advises Fannie, "You always had control of your own will. . . . Strong will. Will stronger than Willie Mann . . . . You got the power to make your vision not true" (254). At the novel's end, Jeanie and Noon are prepared to lead the neighborhood in the political contest of wills with Willie Mann's puppeteer, Philadelphia's progrowth coalition. Tumbling, then, is a story of runaways narrowly averted: Noon mends the damage done by the rape; Fannie asserts control over her body and life; the family and neighborhood resolve that they will not be moved.

What resolution—necessarily temporary, since there will no doubt be more South Street novels to come—does Tumbling provide for the composite story of postindustrial transformation told by the South Street literature? The answer is twofold and draws together two principal lines of development that organize the literature. First, Tumbling is an epic in the sense that it imagines the beginning of a new formation: the postindustrial black middle class. Herbie and Noon are paragons of the industrial neighborhood order, but their daughters are not. College educated, holding property given to them by their parents, one likely to be a designer (Liz) and the other some kind of creative intellectual (Fannie, who has the makings of a writer), the two daughters are on track to become higher-end service professionals from a neighborhood that traditionally provided service workers only at the lower end of the employment ladder— toters of bags, cleaners of rich folks' houses and offices. At the novel's end, the daughters' upward social trajectory is firmly rooted in their parents' neighborhood and in the migration-to-elevation narrative traditionally compressed in the figure of the rowhouse. Identifying the Black Metropolis as the source and model of black social mobility, turning the Black Metropolis into a "ghetto of opportunity," Tumbling counters the stock image of the dead-end second ghetto as a place from which the black middle class has fled.

Second, Tumbling also contains the elements of a decline narrative: internal and external threats to the neighborhood, metropolitan change threatening local arrangements, the sense of one period giving way to the next. Historical markers like Murray's hair pomade and Jackie Robinson's arrival in town suggest larger historical groundswells that form a context for local dramas. Discussions in the novel of "the up-and-coming Cassius Clay [and] the demise of Lady Day" intermix with and double discussions of "South Street, the way it used to

bounce in the old days before all the talk of the highway had people closing up shop" (220). If Cassius Clay has come to the attention of black South Street, then Muhammad Ali and the urban crisis—and the eclipse of both the Republican integrationist Jackie Robinson in the era of black power and of Murray's hair pomade in the days of the afro—cannot be far behind. If Billie Holiday is gone, then the soul divas are in the wings, ready to provide the soundtrack of social upheaval in the 1960s. South Street as Herbie and Noon knew it has lost its bounce because the Black Metropolis, rooted in the nineteenth-century city, is reaching the end of its period. That decline parallels the decline of the white-ethnic urban village, as both elements of the social landscape are swept up in postindustrial transformation. Like the white-ethnic decline, the narrative of the Black Metropolis in decline is driven by prosperity (Liz wants to move somewhere "better") as well as by Algren's great subject: the relative powerlessness of the neighborhood in the face of capital and people in motion. The silent bells of the razed church in Tumbling, a silence that warns Noon of the gravity of her situation, are close cousins to the church bells playing the requiem in Golden Arm.

The two elements, the emergence of the postindustrial black middle class and the decline of the old neighborhood, are in a kind of creative tension in the novel. As in Stuart Dybek's Chicago writing, in which the declining order is always part of and paired with an emergent order, the novel's magical realist elements tend to occur where that tension is strongest. Fannie has a prophetic vision in which she sees "no road" in the future—that is, no Crosstown Expressway—only "brick houses, bright, new, red brick" (173-74). On the one hand, this is a vision of the neighborhood sustained into the future. Fannie evokes an old-neighborhood mysticism of seeing eyes and working roots extending back into the Southern cultural heritage, traditionally identified as the source of shared, community-shaping traditions like the black church and the blues that have been so important in the urban North. On the other hand, Fannie's vision points up the historical irony lurking in the novel's periodization. Tumbling ends in the early 1960s at a moment, perhaps the last moment, when the novel can still imagine the old neighborhood proceeding relatively intact into the next generation. If we turn to the history of South Street, we can see that, even though the struggle against the Crosstown was eventually won, Willie Mann is the true visionary in explaining that ground will be cleared for a new urban order. Today there are new and newly refurbished brick rowhouses in the blocks around South Street between Queen Village and Broad Street, just as Fannie envisioned them, but the old neighborhood—as a full-blown complex of people and place adding up to a way of life—is long gone. There are still some well-scrubbed rowhouse blocks and parts of blocks occupied by workingand middle-class black families, and the big AME church remains, but the land-

scape tells the story of urban crisis and postindustrial transformation. Above South, preponderantly white service professionals are paying top dollar for rowhouses in Society Hill and west of it; below South, "urban pioneers" looking for a better deal or grittier texture than Society Hill or (increasingly) Queen Village can offer are extending the line of renovation and gentrification west from Queen Village and south from Center City. South of South, just east of Broad Street, the Martin Luther King Plaza projects, erected on the bulldozed site of Philadelphia's oldest black neighborhood, form a moraine left when the second ghetto flowed over the Black Metropolis. Tumbling ends just at a moment when the people of the novel's neighborhood can imagine the world as they know it weathering the world-changing processes—not just redevelopment but also social mobility—now inscribed in the transformed landscape.

One can see throughout Tumbling the marks of this journey backward from the 1990s through the veil of the urban crisis to the period before it. Characters in the novel speak anachronistically of "lifestyle" and "gentrification," words popularized during and after the urban crisis as part of the lexicon of postindustrial urbanism. The generic "tangle of pathology," popularized by Moynihan and other students of the ghetto in the 1960s, is present in the fragmentation of families, but the novel reinterprets this fragmentation as a sign of communal strength: that Herbie and Noon raise Fannie, the child Herbie had with Ethel, is a sign of a strong neighborhood sharing fundamental values. More important to the novel's organizing ideas, one can see in it a powerful impulse to rewrite William Gardner Smith's period in light of David Bradley's. In the 1950s, Smith trained the political impulse of the protest novel on the problems raised for urban blacks by the postwar migration and the emergent second ghetto; in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bradley was attracted to South Street after the crisis precisely because the people there, having been run over and left for dead in the 1960s, "had absolutely no power" but struggled nevertheless to sustain their sense of community. McKinney-Whetstone imagines Smith's neighborhood girding itself to fight the "right" war—against the coming of the second ghetto and the service professionals, not Grays Ferry—that is already lost in Bradley's novel. The external threat against which the black neighborhood must fight, a project that requires the neighborhood to resolve its internal tensions, comes not from the white-ethnic urban village but from the progrowth coalition. The two-dimensional white antagonists who briefly pass through the novel are not white-ethnic toughs or old-time political bosses—they are bureaucrats who answer to the city and the faceless private interests who need to clear away the industrial city's orders. Tumbling passes back through the veil of history to the moment when people like Herbie and Noon and Diane McKinney-Whetstone's parents decided to move out of the old neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, hastening the separation of the black middle class from the second ghetto as it

formed. In a novel of traumas unearthed and healed, this return to the historical fork in the road serves as a kind of therapeutic fiction: a return to a place where the decline of the industrial city meets the epic of the postindustrial city's emergence, a place where one can recover a healthy model of efficacious community before the fall.

There is a gap between the generations of South Street literature. The reader jumps from the two midcentury novels to novels of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The gap comes in the 1960s, the moment in which the complex of changes in postwar cities of fact and feeling gathered momentum and coalesced as "the urban crisis." To borrow David Bradley's reptilian metaphor, urbanism sloughed off its old form and revealed its new one in the decades after World War II, and the urban crisis of the 1960s was the moment in which American culture spotted the snake and started screaming. The South Street literature weaves together two principal narrative lines that shaped the urban crisis—the decline of the industrial city and the emergence of the postindustrial metropolis—and considers as well the pressing problem of how to tell, and who can tell, the stories of urban orders in decline and on the make. The South Street literature also suggests how this larger context of urban transformation contains and qualifies the distinctions of race and gender (white and black literature, male and female authors) that provide the literary-historical pigeonholes in which postwar literature has been conventionally sorted.

But the South Street novels, as a group, pass over the urban crisis itself, presenting a set of before and after accounts that bracket the 1960s, so we are obliged to move on to another city and another neighborhood to fill in the gap. We got to Philadelphia and the South Street literature from Chicago, the quintessential industrial city and the cradle of an industrial literary urbanism that influenced Dunphy, Smith, and, more generally, the writing of the twentiethcentury city. The continuities of literary form and theme between the Chicago writing in part I and the Philadelphia writing in part 2 suggest the more general application of my account of material and textual cities transformed. Part I primarily explores the literature of decline and the white-ethnic urban village; part 2 pairs the decline with complementary stories of persistent and emergent urban orders and puts the old neighborhoods (white and black) in conversation with the redeveloped downtown. Part 3 continues on to New York, to Harlem, to examine the principal ground of the urban crisis. Turning to accounts of the emergent second ghetto and the postindustrial urbanism it has so powerfully dominated, part 3 completes this study's spatial survey of the postindustrial inner city of feeling. Part 3 completes, as well, this study's historical account of

the postwar period: from the incipient decline of the industrial city that inspired Nelson Algren's best work, through the traumas of juxtaposed persistence and succession that drive the South Street literature, to widespread recognition and representation of the postindustrial inner city's emergence as not the end of the world but rather the stormy arrival of the urban future.