Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  I still don’t say a thing, but I’m starting to get an idea who this guy is by the way people are deferring to him. I’m thinking this character, and he’s a pretty good size, must be Charlie Devlin. I had heard about this guy for years but had never met him. Devlin is this infamous Kensington head thumper and occasional burglar who loves to mix it up. I’d heard about these classic three-hour-long bare-knuckle brawls he often got himself into. I’m thinking to myself, this is gonna be interesting.

  Some guys at the bar are watching what’s happening and one of ’em comes over to me and says,”You work with Jack, John L., and Effie, don’t yah?”

  I say, “Yeah, that’s who I’m waiting for.”

  He tells me not to take offense with what’s happening. The guy lifting my coins is Charlie Devlin, and it’d be best for my health if I don’t antagonize him. “I’ll straighten it out,” he says to me.

  I grab this Good Samaritan by the arm and tell him, “Hey, thanks for the warning and all, but I can take care of it myself.”

  The guy musta thought I was nuts, ’cause I ain’t even five-nine and Charlie is this big lug with a well-known reputation for kicking ass and destroying people. What none of ’em know, however, is that I’m carrying a piece with me. I had already killed a couple people and had no hesitation about using it on this asshole. Most of those K&A burglars never took a gun along on a job, but I did on occasion, and I know I’ll use it on that crazy motherfucker if he’s dumb enough to start something with me.

  Before I know it, Devlin comes back over and scoops up the rest of my change off the bar and walks back to the phone. “Hey, what the hell you think you’re doing,” I yell at him.

  He turns and says, “You talking to me?”

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “That’s my money you’re taking. How about using your own money if you wanna make a call?”

  Now it don’t take an Einstein to figure out that Devlin isn’t used to being challenged like this in one of these Kensington bars, and he walks back over to me stern as shit and says, “That was my money I picked up off the bar.”

  “The hell it was,” I fire back.

  He now puts his ugly mug within inches of mine and says, “Okay, jerkoff, let’s take it outside.”

  Now I’m thinking to myself, I just came down here to meet some guys, do a couple pieces of work in North Jersey, maybe if I’m lucky make a few grand, and get out. But it now looks like somebody’s gonna get hurt, and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be me. I figure I’m gonna have to kill this dumb son-of-a-bitch. But that’s the way it was in those Kensington bars. You could go in for a quick beer and end up fighting for your life. Some of those neighborhood joints were like gladiator schools, which is one of the reasons I tried to stay out of them.

  Fortunately, this guy who had come over to warn me about Charlie steps in front of Devlin and explains to him that I’m okay. That I’m friends with Effie and the guys and I’m about to go on the road with a crew from the neighborhood. Devlin looks at me suspiciously, asks if that’s true, and takes on a whole new attitude when he learns I’m working with some of the more respected burglars from the neighborhood.

  The guys at the bar who are watching this little episode unfold probably thought I was a lucky fool who had just escaped a serious beating from Charlie, but in reality Charlie Devlin nearly got whacked that day. If he had touched me, I would have shot that crazy gorilla right in the head.—GEORGE “JUNIOR” SMITH

  THE VERBAL CONFRONTATION at Kellis’s Bar that day between Junior Smith, a handsome, preppy-looking burglar who would eventually become an accomplished contract killer, and Charlie Devlin, a legendary bar-room brawler who would quote Shakespeare as he beat your brains out, was typical Kensington: bold, brazen, in-your-face audacity backed up with gallons of guts and bravado. Most K&A guys—certainly the many burglars, roofers, and cops who grew up there—had no reverse gear. Their parents, peers, and long-established community tradition taught them to hold their ground and never back down.

  Though that first meeting between Smith and Devlin at Kellis’s had all the makings of your typical Kensington bar-room bloodbath, the encounter ended peaceably. However, at the JR Club, the Crescent, the Purple Derby, and a dozen other neighborhood watering holes menacingly patrolled by the likes of Cocky O’Kane, Porky McCloud, Leo Gillis, Billy McKenna, Frankie Wetzel, and Joe Cooper Smith, blood was often poured out as freely as alcohol. And Kensington, like its predatory bars, wasn’t for the faint of heart. You had to be tough to survive.

  LOCATED ALONG THE DELAWARE RIVER just two miles northeast of Philadelphia’s City Hall, Kensington in the 1950s was a bustling collection of heavy industry, commercial strip businesses, and tiny row houses that fronted thimble-sized backyards. A struggling, Dickensian mill town in the nineteenth century, postwar Kensington was dominated by aging factories, congested streets, polluted air, and a deafening elevated transit line that bisected the community. Trees were practically nonexistent, exceeded in scarcity only by the area’s few litter-filled parks and playgrounds. Religious institutions, on the other hand, were numerous and structurally impressive, but the formidable front doors of Ascension of Our Lord (Irish), Nativity BVM (Irish), Visitation of Our Lady (Irish), Saint Adalbert’s (Polish), Mother of Divine Grace (Italian), and Our Lady Help of Christians (German) were open only to their own. Though they were all Catholic, each ethnic group had its own specific house of worship.

  The inhabitants of Kensington took on the characteristics of the Spartan landscape that surrounded them. Firm-jawed and tight-lipped, with dark, penetrating eyes and frozen expressions, the people had a look about them—one that said, “Get the fuck out of my face, fella. I don’t take shit from nobody.” They projected an unforgiving, tough-as-nails nature, a personal rigidity that to outsiders appeared both proud and intimidating. As Peter Binzen of the Philadelphia Inquirer.ommented in his book on the neighborhood, Kensington was “home to a hundred thousand proud, irascible, tough, narrow-minded, down-to-earth, old-fashioned, hostile, flag-waving, family-oriented ethnic Americans.” First-, second-, and third-generation Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Hungarian, Jewish, and English immigrants all settled there, but the Irish dominated, causing the soot-gray working-class neighborhood to be perceived throughout the city as a bastion of sullen, surly, and suspicious Irishmen. It also had—and some would say earned—the image of a community grounded in intimidation and ruled by menacing tough guys doing shady things. Others would argue that Kensington’s Irish Catholics had every reason to be suspicious and tough-minded; their lot over many generations in the City of Brotherly Love had not been an easy one.

  Kensington was founded in 1730 and named after an elegant section of London by Anthony Palmer, an Englishman and Barbados sea captain who purchased 191 acres of land north of Philadelphia’s eighteenth-century boundaries in a district known as the Northern Liberties. In its earliest days, during the colonial and Federal periods, Kensington attracted immigrants for whom fishing and shipbuilding provided the stepping-stones to economic survival. Immigrants from Ireland’s Protestant community arrived first, were quickly assimilated, and became shipwrights and fishermen. Over time, many adopted the anti-Catholic, Nativist attitudes of those who arrived earlier.

  Irish Catholic immigrants soon followed but found a less hospitable welcome. Desperately poor and in need of work, they were gradually introduced to the “contract system” and for the most part became weavers who worked alone on hand looms in their small homes and boarding houses in the western part of the district.

  Life for the more affluent, however, was still centered on the river. A local legend claims that Charles Dickens—who visited Philadelphia in the 1840s— named the area “Fishtown” because of the Delaware’s abundance of shad and the large number of people employed on the river. In reality, the waterfront area at the juncture of Gunner’s Run and the Delaware River was called Fishtown long before Dickens ever came to America.

  As Kensington’s population increased an
d its physical boundaries expanded to the north and west, the area’s inhabitants hoped that the establishment of their own political jurisdiction would end the periodic strife between religious and ethnic groups. By 1820 Kensington had broken off from the Northern Liberties to become a separate and distinct municipality, but the decades preceding the Civil War were to be fractious and violent ones. Like other large colonial cities, Philadelphia was witnessing the first disquieting bursts of industrial development. The rapid growth of the factory system would have a considerable social impact on workers in general, and Irish Catholics in particular. New immigrants already confronted a long list of hardships: the need to adapt rural Irish sensibilities to a strange urban setting, ethnic intolerance (including “Irish need not apply” signs on factory gates), religious bigotry in the public schools and elsewhere (leading eventually to the development of parochial schools), and the lack of adequate police protection. As factories and textile mills sprang up in Manayunk, Frankford, Holmesburg, and dozens of other small towns situated along rivers and streams around Philadelphia, the inefficient production of goods in one’s home declined rapidly, adding a new burden to newcomers seeking jobs as weavers.

  During this period, Nativist English and Irish Protestants in volunteer militias and fire companies repeatedly squared off against Irish Catholics, hoping to turn the “alien, papist, anti-democratic” tide. Religious leaders were often at the center of the crisis, and many “pledged themselves to an unremitting ideological war on popery.” More secular interests joined the fray; even publishers promised, “No theme in these textbooks... [is] more universal than anti-Catholicism.”

  This inflammatory situation resulted in a series of bloody Kensington revolts between 1820 and 1850. Violent street brawls and all-out riots lasted for days as the toll of dead and injured mounted and burned-out buildings, several of them churches, littered the landscape. An 1828 riot that took the better part of a week to contain began in a Kensington tavern when one inebriated customer made disparaging remarks about “bloody Irish transports.” The anti-Catholic riots of 1844—ostensibly over which version of the Bible was to be read in public schools—resulted in 15 deaths and 50 injuries before 5,000 troops managed to quell the disturbance. A grand jury empanelled to investigate the riots and packed with anti-Catholic “Know Nothings” blamed the turmoil on the usual suspects. Embattled Irish Catholics quickly learned that the police and courts were unavailable to them and not to be trusted.

  Law-abiding Philadelphians were shocked by the recurring violence and demanded a prompt resolution to the social conflagration. As one appalled citizen commented at the time, “This is the fatal evil of Philadelphia—that the riotous and disorderly are convinced of the lukewarmness and timidity of the respectable part of society, and so they take full swing upon every occasion that arises.”

  Though there were numerous religious and economic problems, to many the crux of the matter was law enforcement’s fractured organizational structure and inability to maintain order. Most towns outside the city, like Kensington and Southwark, had either little to no police protection or overly aggressive departments that were poorly disguised street gangs (the streets of Moyamensing, for example, were policed by a gang called the “Killers”).

  Consolidation of the city with its rapidly growing outlying districts had often been suggested as a way to enhance public safety, but petty political squabbles always prevented legislative action. By the 1850s, however, Philadelphia was in desperate need of more land for expansion, an extended tax base to pay for increased city services, administrative and bureaucratic simplification, and a competent police force to maintain law and order in the hinterlands. The embarrassing and deadly riot of 1844 galvanized public opinion. In February 1854 the Pennsylvania legislature passed and the governor signed a long-sought Consolidation Act that brought surrounding districts into the city and gave Philadelphia its present boundaries. Although a critical jurisdictional conundrum had been solved, Irish Catholics had little reason to celebrate. As one scholar assessed the situation, the Irish were still the most “thoroughly stigmatized white men in America,” still confronted with “a labyrinth of social and class barriers” designed to thwart their progress in the city.

  Yet Kensington continued to grow. Poverty, disenfranchisement, and famine back home drove tens of thousands of Irish to America—75,000 came to Philadelphia alone between 1839 and 1855, and many of them settled in Kensington. Concurrent with this influx was the rapid growth of Kensington’s industrial base, due in large part to the area’s close proximity to Philadelphia and its resilient workforce. Carpet manufacturing, for example, began there in 1830. By the start of the Civil War, Kensington could claim well over a hundred rug mills employing several thousand workers. The nation’s first textile mill was established there and would eventually become the long-time hub of America’s fabric trade. Kensington would also become home to the country’s largest lace and hat factories. Shipbuilding, fishing, coal hauling, and pottery, chemical, and glass factories were all centered there and continued to flourish into the late nineteenth century. Organizations like the Salvation Army established their national headquarters in Kensington.

  Despite lingering religious, racial, and ethnic tensions, some in the community prospered, allowing self-satisfied Chamber of Commerce types to proclaim Kensington an “enterprise dotted with factories so numerous that the rising smoke obscures the sky, the hum of industry is heard in every corner of its broad expanse. A happy and contented people, enjoying plenty in a land of plenty. Populated by brave men, fair women and a hardy generation of young blood that will take the reins when the fathers have passed away. All hail, Kensington! A credit to the Continent—a crowning glory to the City.”

  Not everyone, however, shared this glorious vision of Philadelphia’s largest working-class community. Nineteenth-century industrial innovations created unprecedented advances in productivity and enormous wealth, but also vast social disruption and despair. For many in Kensington, poverty became a terrible and familiar fact of life. Unskilled factory workers received 78 cents a day in 1854, and newspapers carried advertisements for girls to work in match factories for $2.50 a week. Handloom weavers—at the bottom of the economic ladder— usually received a subsistence wage that periodic strikes did little to improve. The onset of large-scale factory work added a new pattern of servitude that widened the gap between owner and worker, accelerated downward mobility socially, economically, and geographically, and left the employee feeling anonymous even though he was now laboring shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other workers. The constant struggle to survive took its toll, and the devastating results could be easily measured. In 1856, for example, “two-thirds of the insane in the state hospital in Philadelphia were Irish born.” (A century later, Kensington led the city in juvenile delinquency and was second in venereal diseases and tuberculosis.)

  The long hours, low pay, periodic tribal warfare, and old European customs contributed to the growth of another business—the neighborhood taproom. The Irish had a long-established “reputation for alcoholic intake,” and the saloon provided “an oasis of camaraderie for the worker, the unemployed, the troubled, and the calculating.” As the nineteenth-century author John F. Maguire sadly proclaimed on his visit to America in the 1860s, “Drink, accursed drink is the cause why so many Irish in America fail.” By the early twentieth century, Kensington was saturated with drinking establishments. Most residential blocks contained at least one bar, and some were said to have as many as a half-dozen. Incredibly, one seven-square-block area had 196 saloons. Appalled, two dozen churches initiated an anti-saloon campaign in 1916, but their efforts were less than triumphant. For decades to come, Kensington would be burdened with the explosive mix of tough, often angry, working-class men frequenting local gin mills and beer halls.

  Despite the relentless poverty and many hardships, Kensington grew rapidly: 7,118 residents in 1800; almost twice as many by 1830; more than 50,000 by the end of the Civ
il War. At the start of the twentieth century, Kensington’s population would top 200,000. The area’s stunning growth was primarily due to one thing—work.

  New immigrants and workers from across the country desperate to find jobs quickly learned that the best opportunities in Philadelphia were to be found in Kensington. Factories, warehouses, dry-docks, and other commercial establishments cluttered the mixed industrial/residential landscape and produced everything from delicate chocolate mints and fancy lace curtains to ball bearings and Flexible Flyer sleds. Three factories alone—Cramp shipbuilding, Disston saws, and Stetson hats—employed over 10,000 people. Though furniture, dye, and appliance companies all flourished there, the textile industry dominated the scene in terms of the number of plant sites and employees. Craftex Mills, Quaker Lace, Bromley Mills, Keystone Knitting, Beatty Mills, Art Loom, Robert Bruce, and Rose Mills were just a few of the over fifty textile mills that established themselves in Kensington.

  By the 1920s, with a population equal to that of Washington, D.C., Kensington had solidified its position as one of the great industrial centers in the world and America’s leading producer of carpets, hosiery, tapestry, knit goods, felt hats, and large ocean-going vessels. In short, Kensington was the economic engine that made Philadelphia a leading, if not the preeminent, manufacturing city in the United States.

  Subsequent decades, however, would prove considerably less kind to this vital community. From the 1930s on, domestic and international events placed Kensington’s socioeconomic health on a geopolitical rollercoaster whose valleys became ever deeper and more difficult to climb out of. The Depression threw thousands of Kensingtonians out of work. Scores of banks, factories, and businesses closed, with only soup kitchens and apple stands to replace them. Hopelessness pervaded the community until World War II injected a dose of manufacturing excitement back into it. Factories and shipyards were reopened with lucrative government contracts, businesses on the avenue—that is, Kensington Avenue—once again had cash-paying customers, and taprooms were filled with upbeat, optimistic workers.