©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Home is where the heart is (near slaughterhouse)
by SHAWN HART

Shawn Hart, former Chestnut Hill Local associate editor, now has a brief essay on display on bus shelter posters throughout center city. (Photo by Michael Ahearn)

Ed. Note: Shawn Hart, a resident of Mt. Airy and former associate editor at the Local, was one of 20 Greater Philadelphia area residents whose brief essays about the city have been chosen for publication on bus shelter posters throughout center city until July 23 as part of The Autobiography Project. The project, devised by The Free Library of Philadelphia, is part of the celebration of Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday and of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the most widely published autobiography of all time. Philadelphians were invited to submit memoirs of their own, using no more than 300 words. Following is Hart’s essay:

Home was an eight-block stretch of Howard Street running north from the B&O Railroad tracks at Tusculum Street to the Reading Railroad lines that paralleled Venango. The intersecting streets — Clearfield, Lippincott, Wishart, Allegheny, Westmoreland, Ontario, Tioga — sound now like old battlegrounds and dead generals, but once this grid pulsed with pounding feet, the tramp of doomed cattle, the wails of babies and fire trucks and lunch whistles.

The Artloom Carpet factory adjoining Howard Street racketed around the clock with the incessant shuttle of monstrous looms, creating rugs from a cat’s cradle of colored yarns unraveling from inexhaustible spools. The noise was like blood pulsing in your skull, passing the threshold of pain even in winter when the metal-meshed jalousie windows were closed against the cold.

In summer months, families on Howard Street, hoping to escape the heat of their row homes, would sit mutely on front porches, certain of the futility of speech, awaiting a breeze that might blow away the hot, oil-soaked air from the factory. As a family, we had long since gotten into the habit of hoping for little and saying nothing.

At the northern end of Howard, the Cross Brothers Meat Packing plant processed terror-stricken cattle from boxcars parked on a spur behind Venango Street through manure-encrusted corrals into kill rooms. Here, the knives waited to quiet the bellowing of these incongruous urban herds and permanently close their bulging, white-rimmed eyes.

The smell that choked surrounding streets heaved itself from here, breaching the huge doors of the abattoir (left open during the day for curious boys to crowd around) and leaching through the walls at night when the slaughtering would stop.

Buildings flanked the street shoulder to shoulder, creating a long, malodorous valley lined with slim hopes and old cars, running nowhere.

Nowhere, that is, but home.