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.