Not all Jews were cheap, was the subtext of these testimonials, not all Negroes were ignorant and dangerous. When Irish Americans wanted to establish their bona fides in regard to blacks and Jews, they would say something like ‘I was standing on the corner in the rain, and this very nice Jewish girl came up and gave me her umbrella,” or “A very nice colored man gave me his seat on the bus.” These anecdotes were transmitted with a sense of befuddlement at the gallantry of the ethnic benefactors in question, leavened by a ham-fisted self-congratulation at being progressive enough to give credit where credit was due. With people with less education, often comes issues of race, something else he wrote vividly on:

The boys who survive growing up in rough neighborhoods are the ones who become cunning, who see trouble coming and either befriends its practitioners or get our of their way.” Photo by Raul Vega “The mythology of urban survival asserts that boys from bad neighborhoods grow up to be tough, but in my experience, boys who grow up to be tough sooner or later get flattened by boys who grew up to be tougher or who have more tough boys in their entourage. “ was here to protect working-class people from their own worst instincts, to shield the proletariat from fads, whimsy, flights of fancy, lapses of sanity.” Īnd with poverty, also comes sentiment on violence: In looking back at his own childhood, he put out a great deal of perspective on the cyclical nature of poverty, something that reminded me of another book I read a couple years ago. I wanted to share some that have the most relevance to those interested in urban development - and strong writing. Some of those passages kept me reading, in addition to his perspective (however bitter, though, I suppose, he softens in the closing chapters). But Queenan has a quick pen - the likes of which has won him the praise of all the big writing critics we’re supposed to respect. A lot of contemporary Philadelphia writing is.

Queenan writes of chasing dreams that he felt he could never find in Philadelphia.įind ‘Closing Time’ on Google Books. The son of an abusive drunk and a withdrawn mother. Joe Queenan, the Irish Catholic, self-styled Horatio Alger character of northwest neighborhood East Falls, writes the king of these stories, from what I’ve read, in his 2009 childhood biography called Closing Time.

My reading of choice tends to be contemporary Philadelphia non-fiction - its true stories, histories and cultural anthropology.Īcross nearly all of this writing from the 20th and early 21st century is a very unexpected theme: someone growing up angry and put-on in some forgotten neighborhood and developing a very hateful relationship with their city.

Closing time by joe queenan