I got a call one morning that they needed another guy for a crew they were putting together to do a piece of work in North Jersey. They told me to come down to Kensington and meet them at Kellis’s Bar. I walk in there a couple of hours later all decked out in my suit and tie ready to go to work, but I must be early or something, ’cause none of the guys I’m supposed to meet are there. So I order a drink and check things out. There’s a couple of guys there I think I recognize, but I stick to myself for the time being. I had only been there once or twice before, but know it’s a favorite of the guys in the crew. The joint is right under the Frankford El at Kensington and Allegheny and gets a lot of traffic. It’s nothing special, just your basic shot-and-beer joint for local factory workers and transients who want to get lubricated.
Then a funny thing happens. A guy comes in and half the joint walks out. I mean, some of them don’t even bother to finish their drinks or pick up their change off the bar. Something like this you got to take notice of. He’s a big guy, pretty mouthy, and he seems to know everybody. And everyone knows him. The guy orders a beer and tells the bartender he’s gotta make a call. So he’s on the phone a couple minutes and then comes over to where I’m sitting and without saying a how-do-you-do picks up some of my change that’s on the bar and starts putting it in the phone slot. I don’t pay it no mind, but after another minute or so he does the same thing. Now, I’m looking at this guy who’s paying for his call with my money.
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 and 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 Civil 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.
The postwar period, however, disclosed the stark human and manufacturing trends that would ultimately drive Kensington into a long, steady social and economic decline. Returning veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill and began to recognize possibilities beyond Kensington’s borders; new housing developments like Levittown offered an affordable suburban lifestyle; more and more industrialists moved their businesses south to avoid aggressive trade unions and high wages; and minorities began to encroach on the once exclusively white neighborhood. Once again, Kensington was under siege, but the majority of residents struggled on as they always had. Tough, stoical, and fiercely independent, most Kensingtonians seemed oblivious to the prevalence of alcoholism, the astronomical high school dropout rate, the foul factory odors and soot-belching smokestacks, the endless noise from train yards and manufacturing plants, and the limitations of their tiny, postage-stamp row houses.
As Paul Melione, a 78-year-old barber and life-long resident fondly recalls, “Kensington in the 1950s was a nice place to live and raise a family. You could walk down the street with your wife and kids and shop on the avenue in comfort. It was a great place to live.”
“GOOD, CLEAN, HARD WORKING PEOPLE LIVED HERE,” says Paul Green. “They were church-going people, mostly Irish. It was one of the best neighborhoods in the city.” Green, now in his late eighties, has been a witness to Kensington’s variable fortunes for most of the twentieth century. As proprietor of Economy Shoes on Kensington Avenue just below Allegheny, he has observed the area’s highs and lows from the storefront window of a family business that first opened its doors in 1915. “Friday nights were really something back then,” says Green. “It was family night and everybody was on the avenue. And they were all shopping. It was wonderful.”
The shopping under the noisy El line was so good that it was not uncommon to find residents who had never ventured into center city Philadelphia, two miles away. The neighborhood was self-contained and relatively safe; for many working-class families, it had everything you could ever want. “It was a great place to grow up,” recalls Bob McClernand. “Nobody had a lot of money, but we managed to get by. It was a close neighborhood; everyone knew each other.”
“You never had any problems there,” says Gil Slowe. “You could leave your keys in the car and it would still be there when you got back. Folks washed their front steps and took pride in everything they did.”
“It was a very good neighborhood,” adds John Kellis. “Even late at night hundreds of people would walk the streets. The avenue was busy; people were shopping.” In other words, there was no need to leave the area, no need for the Bradys, O’Donnells, and Gallaghers to travel to the large department stores downtown like Gimbel’s, Lit Brothers, and John Wanamaker’s, or the fancy Chestnut and Walnut Street shops like Jacob Reed, Bonwit Teller, and Nan Duskin.
The businesses on Kensington and Allegheny Avenues—“K&A” to most Philadelphians—were the axis of Kensington’s commercial district. Jack Bell’s, Al’s Toggery, DiNelli’s, Mike the Tailor, Flagg Brothers, Thom McAn’s, and Father & Son were just a few of the men’s haberdasheries and shoe stores on the avenue. Six-foot-six, 300-pound “Uncle Miltie” Fields ran a popular sporting goods store that always offered a good deal on Chuck Taylor canvas sneakers. The Levin and Rosenthal families sold home furniture. Moe’s Meats was said to have the best cuts of beef east of Broad Street. Morris Auto Parts, a shop for serious car enthusiasts, sold a surprisingly large number of sturdy, arm-length screwdrivers nicknamed “brutes” that some in the neighborhood found indispensable in their unusual line of work. Woolworth’s and Kresge’s 5&10s attracted neighborhood children, and the entire family enjoyed outings to the Midway, Lafayette, and Iris movie theaters (the Iris always offered military servicemen free admission). Restaurants such as White Castle, Horn & Hardart’s, and the Majestic Diner, drug stores such as Samit and Sun Ray, Lee’s photo store, Shalo’s baby shop, a couple of Army/Navy stores, the Acme food market, and a host of other businesses were also present on the avenue and heavily patronized.
In short, for most Kensingtonians the neighborhood offered everything you could ever want—especially jobs. “If you had just lost your job, you could walk from factory to factory and get another job the same day,” recalls Paul Melione. “The place was loaded with jobs; factories were making rugs, lace, clothing. Everything was being made here. The plants were everywhere.” Philco, for example, which manufactured televisions, radios, refrigerators, and many other home appliances, was located just a few blocks from K&A and employed more than 18,000 workers in a complex of nine large factory plants.
But some men in the neighborhood were not enamored with an assembly-line job’s long hours, monotony, and 60 bucks a week with periodic layoffs; some men longed for more and were willing to cut corners to get what they wanted. “They lasted a month,” recalls Gene Pedicord. “They couldn’t take the regimentation.” “They didn’t want to work,” says another observer. “They didn’t want to work at all. They just wanted to hang on the corner day and night,” and still “have the girls, cars, and clothes.”
As Jimmy Moran neatly puts it: “You go in a bar after a long day at work and see a couple good-lookin’ chicks sittin’ together and you think about buyin’ them a drink, but all you got is a dollar and change in your pocket. Next thing you know, a guy from the neighborhood, a guy who ain’t done an honest day’s work in months, pulls up in a Cadillac, walks in with an expensive suit on, drops a hundred-dollar bill on the bar, and buys the girls a few drinks. Right off the bat, the game’s over. It wasn’t too hard to figure out. If you wanted the cash, the clothes, the cars, and the girls, you had to do something other than bust your hump on a lousy assembly line in a dirty, stinking factory. You had to become a burglar.”
And for most, once you had become a successful second story man, there was no turning back. For row house Kensington boys who grew up in the shadow of smelly rug and textile mills and watched their fathers struggle all their lives in low-paying factory jobs, thievery—and the good life it brought—was tough to give up. Even when pressured by family members to get out and clean themselves up, the lifestyle and perquisites were just too appealing. Many found themselves, like Georgie Smith, having to forcefully educate loved ones about the facts of life.
“I told my wife to get in the car,” says Smith of the unique and poignant excursion. “I said, ‘We’re going for a ride.’ She wanted to know where we were going, but I told her we’re just goin’ out for a ride. I kept quiet after that. For the whole journey, I kept my mouth shut.
“She had been bothering me about it for a long time. Over and over again, she’d be pestering me to stop doin’ what I was doin’. ‘Why do you have to break the law? Why do you have to break into houses? Why do you have to live the life you do? Why can’t we live like other people?’
“Well, I get her in the car and we drive into the city and I’m still not saying a word. She doesn’t know what’s up, but she soon calms down, bites her lip, and just looks out the window at the scenery. After a while I get to Kensington and start driving real slow. I just take it real easy going up one street and down the other. The streets are dirty and filled with trash and garbage. Kids, dirty and unkempt, are yelling and screaming. There’s shabbily dressed people with vacant, beat expressions on their faces sitting on their front steps looking at us, and the houses are tiny matchboxes with no character, no nothing.
“This goes on for some time; I’m in no hurry. Just one street after another, and I’m not saying a word. Neither of us is. I drive her under the Frankford El, pull by some of the factories like Craftex, Robert Bruce, and Philco, and take her on a good number of streets the average nine-to-five, lunchpail-carrying factory worker calls home.
“I just got fed up with all the nagging one day and took her for a ride. We lived in a nice community in the suburbs, my kids went to a good suburban school, and we had nice, established neighbors who kept their homes immaculate. But she was on me all the time to give up what I was doing and stop associating with the guys I was hanging with.
Finally, after nearly two hours, my wife says she’s seen enough, we can go home. For a good, long time after that, she didn’t bring up what I did for a living. I didn’t even have to say a word that day, but she got the message all right.”