writing and thinking about. It braids together strands often examined separately by social science, exemplifying the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces at play in the most ordinary lives and how powerful structural forces transforming cities, social structure, and national economies play themselves out in individual experience.
One of these moments happened a year or two after my family and I moved from Toronto to Philadelphia. It was the late spring or early summer of 1979 or 1980. I was mowing our small front lawn, which is raised a few feet above the sidewalk. Brick walls, punctuated by concrete front steps, line the block. A few yards down the street, an African American man whom I guessed to be in his thirties leaned against a car, occasionally walking up and down the block and resting on a wall. He was clearly disoriented. I watched him for some time, wondering what to do. Should I call the police? No, they might beat him up (Philadelphia police were reputedly tough on black men). Should I go in the house and get my dog and then go talk to him? After about half an hour, I was disgusted with myself. This was a fellow human being in trouble on a bright, warm afternoon. Why was I so hesitant—even afraid?
I approached and asked if he needed help. He asked for a glass of water, which I fetched. Then he said he was trying to reach his brother’s apartment; the address belonged to a building around the corner. He was a Vietnam vet. He had been to the nearby VA Hospital, where he had been given either the wrong amount of medication or the wrong medication, which had left him disoriented. He had stopped in the bathroom of a church but forgot to retrieve his bag, which held his wallet. He did not know where he was. I took him to his brother’s apartment; later that evening he rang our doorbell to thank me. For what did I merit thanks, I wondered.
The most disheartening part of the episode followed when I told friends and neighbors about it. Their response—that I deserved praise—seemed exactly wrong, given my long hesitation, and only underscored the distance, fear, and ignorance underlying the response of even liberal professionals and the separation of Philadelphians by class and race. So much had come together in the incident that I did not understand, but I could not find a single book that offered a comprehensive history of post–World War II American cities and explained what was then called the urban crisis. The issue was much on my mind; it was one of the factors that influenced me to take on the directorship of the undergraduate Urban Studies Program at Penn shortly thereafter and create a course that would look holistically at modern American cities. Over more than twenty years, I have taught the course many times, understanding more at each iteration, but never really the whole story.
Herbert’s trial, which took place more than two decades after the incident on my street, also encapsulated what I had been struggling to understand and write about. Converging on the histories of Herbert and Shorty, although I was missing many details, were deindustrialization, white flight, racial segregation and concentrated poverty, the failures of urban education, a job market that excluded an extraordinary share of black men, the ravages of drugs, the importance of the informal economy, and a criminal justice system that in practice values the lives of black men less than mine or those of my family and friends. If I could gather more details, I thought, perhaps I could make real—more concrete—the subjects of my research.
But it is more than a matter of making experience concrete. Most research and writing plucks a thread from the fabric of experience. Historians and social scientists write about the welfare state, unemployment, single-parent families. They focus on particular problems and policies. When looked at from the experience of men like Herbert and Shorty, however, the borders of these distinctions melt into one another. Real lives do not divide into neat compartments. How to capture that lived reality is the challenge. I hoped that learning and thinking more about the men and the trial would bring me closer to an understanding.
Urbanist Mike Davis, in his book Planet of Slums, talks about the dramatic growth of social isolation in cities around the globe, most notable in Third World cities but clearly visible in the United States as well.7 I had been reading Davis’s book before the trial. With it in mind, the events laid before the jury brought powerful confirmation of its thesis. The events took place a few miles from my home. Similar confrontations, hardly meriting notice in the press, happen all the time even closer. Other than the frisson of fear they occasionally engender in respectable citizens, they might as well be in another city. An invisible veil reinforced in suburbs by gated communities, in cities by security systems, police, and segregation, separates comfortable Americans from what happens on West Oakland Street. They don’t know, and they don’t really want to. But they should. That is why the story of this mundane trial matters.
Ignorance results in stereotypes, which in turn breed contempt and easy dismissal of “the undeserving poor.” It reinforces the racial and economic segregation that turn far too many Americans into second-class citizens. It lets us celebrate an alleged renaissance of American cities, con ve niently forgetting vast swatches of empty factories, sites of buildings returned to fields of weeds, boarded-up houses, and lives stunted by poverty right in the shadow of shiny new office towers. The attempt to expand the meaning of Herbert’s trial and to reconstruct its context is, therefore, not an academic exercise or merely a quest for personal understanding. It radiates outward, provoking questions that should trouble all Americans. We owe ourselves—not to mention Herbert and the memory of Shorty—nothing less.
I needed to talk to Herbert. I had to know more about at least one of the men cast as leads in this awful story. His attorney kindly contacted him to ask if he would talk with me. He agreed.
I had arranged to meet Herbert on Friday, June 8, 2007, at 12:30 where he lived on Hartshorn Street. I arrived early and drove around the neighborhood, both to get a sense of it and to locate some places for lunch. It is a North Philadelphia neighborhood just a few blocks south of Temple University Hospital. Hartshorn is a narrow street (about the width of one car) of old row houses. A number of vacant lots dot the neighborhood where houses have been torn down on adjacent streets. A small convenience store stands on the corner of Hartshorn and Grove. It was doing a brisk trade. The day was hot, and lots of people were hanging out on stoops and in the street. I had more than a little trepidation after parking the car on Grove Street and realizing I had to get out and walk to Herbert’s front door with all eyes on me, this strange white guy with a blue short-sleeve button-down shirt and a backpack over a shoulder. It felt like walking into a scene from The Wire.
A small iron gate blocked the steps of Herbert’s house from the street. I unlatched it and rang the bell. A woman, probably in her sixties, answered and asked me in. Herbert was in the living room; he had forgotten it was Friday. But he remembered I’d called, and he put on a shirt. The room was small, cluttered with overstuffed furniture, lived in. When I asked Herbert where he would like to eat, he said let’s just go for a ride. Later he told me that his landlady, who wanted to be more than a landlady, stuffed him with food and gave him a hard time if he didn’t return hungry. But once in the car he wanted to head to Fifth and Spring Garden, the neighborhood where he had grown up. He had in mind a diner that had closed some months prior—I had forgotten it was no longer open. As we headed south and east, my cell phone rang. It was William Gray, Herbert’s attorney, who wanted to make sure we had met and were getting along. We ended up at Fifth and Girard at a small restaurant on the corner. I took pleasure when Herbert, a professional driver, praised my parallel parking. The restaurant worked well—cool, with a corner booth, vacant, quiet, and clean. Herbert said he had been eating there for fifty years, although not recently.
Herbert ran into trouble with the law in New Jersey. For about twelve years since retiring, he had been running an informal hack business based at the corner of Grove and Hartshorn. One day before his fatal encounter with Shorty, he drove a woman to New Jersey thinking she was going for a job interview. She turned out to be a pickpocket and was nabbed by the police. He was also blamed, although he had not left the car. To make matters worse, he made an illegal U-turn and got caught by the police. The New Jersey parole authorities confiscated his license and were holding it until he paid his fine, which was about three thousand dollars—an im mense sum for him. He hoped to have it paid off by the end of the year.
