selective are the men about the women who will bear their children? Do they “choose” their children’s mothers with care, or do they just end up together by chance? Let’s turn to the stories of Tim O’Brien and John Carr. These men have never met, yet their lives have amazing parallels. Both are as Irish as the shamrocks proudly displayed on the marquees and in the windows of their neighborhood’s pubs—the Starboard Side Tavern, Dempsey Irish Pub, Shannon’s, Bob’s Happy Hour—and in the front windows of homes. Both Tim and John grew up in Greater Kensington, northeast of Center City Philadelphia, where tattoos and bumper stickers, like the bars and front windows, often feature symbols of ethnic pride. This area was an eighteenth-century industrial suburb that now encompasses the very economically and ethnically distinct Philadelphia neighborhoods of Kensington, Fishtown, and West Kensington. Tim and John were both raised by single mothers and have had little contact with their fathers since childhood. Both dropped out of Kensington High in the tenth grade due to utter lack of interest in school. Both have been touched by the area’s feverish drug trade—John as a dealer and Tim as a user. Finally, both became fathers at a young age and in the context of exceedingly fragile, short-term relationships with girls they “stole” from their friends.
Kensington proper, where John resides, is enmeshed in a slow and bitter battle between its older inhabitants—the Irish and the Poles—and the newcomer Puerto Ricans, Asians, and African Americans, though whites are still the largest ethnic group and make up almost 80 percent of the population.7 The nonwhites, whom John and many fellow Irish Americans view as “intruders,” began permeating the northwest boundary between Kensington—the poorest majority-white neighborhood in the city—and the largely minority neighborhood of West Kensington in the 1980s, gradually eroding the de facto Berlin Wall of Kensington Avenue. This frightens young men like John, for across that divide lies West Kensington, once also a relatively stable, working-class, and staunchly white area and now 70 percent Latino and 20 percent black. It is also the poorest and one of the most violent areas of the city; the correlation between the area’s changing complexion and social and economic conditions is one many white Kensingtonians take as causation.
John grew up just east of that line on the 1900 block of East Hagert between Jasper and Emerald Streets. Brick two-story row houses are tucked in here and there along the denuded street, dwarfed by multistory shells of textile mills that still create a decaying corridor five blocks long—the formerly proud homes of Albion Carpets and the Bedford Fast Black Dye Company at the corner of Hagert and Jasper, Job Batty and Sons Carpet Yarn and William Emsley and Brothers’ Washington Mills at Hagert’s intersection with Emerald, William Beatty’s Mills one block farther on at Coral Street, Annot’s Steam Power—later Standard Rug—between Coral and Amber, the Weisbrod and Hess Brewery on the corner of Amber Street, and many more.8 Several are abandoned, though some have been converted into smaller manufacturing concerns or affordable live and work spaces for struggling artists. Built in the late 1800s, these are Dickensian four-to-six-story red brick affairs—some embellished with arched window openings and other fancy brickwork and topped with tall chimneys. Some area mills are still crowned by rusted iron water receptacles proudly bearing a defunct company’s name. Neighborhood lore has it that in the turn- of-the-century golden era, one could walk down any one of Kensington’s industrial streets like East Hagert and find a job in fifteen minutes. But more than fifty years of deindustrialization have taken a severe toll.
Any old-timer in John’s neighborhood will tell you that as the jobs have fled, so has much semblance of social order. Middle-school kids sell drugs openly in broad daylight on major thoroughfares; John’s street bears the mark of the addictions the trade spawns. At the base of Hagert Street, on the corner of Kensington Avenue, is the Saint Francis Inn, a soup kitchen well known for serving meals to the area’s neediest, including the worst of the addicts. And just across the street, Inner City Missions offers drug referral and substance abuse counseling. The mean price of the neighborhood’s homes sits at just under thirty-five thousand dollars, and given the low value and the very poor condition of so many of the narrow brick dwellings, lifelong residents have been known to simply abandon their houses to squatters or leave them to children or other relatives as cheap starter homes.9 There are still enough stalwart white working-class residents in the neighborhood to keep its primary parish, the impeccably maintained century-and-a-half old Saint Anne, pulsing with parishioners—six hundred to seven hundred on a typical Sunday.10 This fortresslike Romanesque Goliath and its parish house, graveyard, and school commandeer a wide swath of the beleaguered Lehigh Avenue, another of the neighborhood’s old industrial streets and its northern boundary.
Tim was raised in a very different area of Greater Kensington, just south of Norris Street on the 800 block of East Thompson, in the more respectable Fishtown section, once the center of the shad fishing industry. Fishtown now houses families a bit too proud to live in Kensington proper: police officers and firefighters, along with nurses and other health care employees and craftsmen of various kinds—electricians, stone masons, plumbers, sheet-metal workers, teamsters, and skilled construction workers. It also claims an increasing share of young college-educated professionals with a taste for “authentic” urban living. The housing stock is the same aggressively plain red brick monotony of two- and three-story row homes that bleed into Kensington. So, eager to claim a separate identity from their Kensington neighbors to the northwest, residents carefully demarcate the area with potted plants and flower boxes, the occasional crisp metal awning, glossy new aluminum screen doors, manicured side lawns, decorative garden benches, and other flourishes that complement a streetscape neat as a pin. These outdoor environs host impromptu gatherings of residents who while away summer nights on lawn chairs chatting idly with one another.
Back in Kensington proper, we have our first conversation with John late on a weekday morning on his day off. The five hundred fifty dollar a month apartment he shares with a roommate—a female stripper—is simply furnished; the front room, where we settle on a couch and a chair, is dominated by an oversized television but is devoid of other decor. Coming up hard, John says he came to despise both of his parents. John’s mother worked as a cop until recently, when she was suspended without pay pending investigation of a charge of police brutality. While she waits for the official adjudication of the charge, John’s mom, whom he characterizes as a “bum,” has been collecting welfare—illegally, it turns out, as she’s also working full-time as a security guard. His father is a diesel mechanic who lives in central “PA,” but John hasn’t seen him in more than ten years.
John joined more than seven in ten of his classmates when he dropped out of Kensington High, one of the worst performing schools in the city.11 This white youth was lured away from the tedium of school and into the work world at sixteen by a minimum-wage job at McCrory’s, the now-defunct dollar-store chain that was all that remained of the local five-and-dime giant by the late 1990s. After that John worked one “chicken shit” job after another until landing his current position tinting everything from car windows to plate glass, which he got through a friend of his uncle. The summer he turned eighteen he was still working the chicken-shit jobs but had another source of income as well. He and a friend had turned a casual street-corner drug business into a modest empire, setting up shop in a cheap rental apartment where they and their “partners” could deal undetected day and night. John claims he was making money hand over fist and “blowing it” by buying drinks and weed for anyone who would party with him. While the business lasted only a couple of months—things with the police quickly got too “hot” to continue—he remembers it as a glorious time.
In the midst of that Mid-Atlantic summer haze, John met his baby’s mother, seventeen-year-old Rayann, through a friend he hung out and partied with in the neighborhood; she was his friend’s “girl.” When she started hinting that she wanted him and not his friend, John claims he steered clear out of loyalty. “I didn’t want to have nothing to do with it,” he insists. The neighborhood rumor mill claimed otherwise, though. Soon, John’s friend “heard some shit and started talking shit saying he would kick my ass.” Furious at his friend’s assumption of betrayal, John resolved,
