Goodisville

By Jay Gertzman 

Recently I have had occasion to travel on SEPTA's Trenton line. Between 30th St and Bridesburg the tracks pass through several landscapes that relect what is left of mid 20th-century industrial Philly.  The buildings are waiting patiently in all their stoic decay for a great photographer to give them immortality before wind, heat, ice, cold, or bulldozers write finis. 

Factories: some seem to have been recently painted, and look fine until you find the shattered or missing windows. On a siding stand freight cars that will never be unloaded. Some outbuildings have been reduced to a single crumbling wall. 

I think of the ghost of Blazer, from Fire in the Flesh, as scurrying around behind one. The in-your-face grafitti is fat, wavy, irrational, absolutely fucked. It might as well be a language conceived on the moon, it is so foreign to the iron-clad Fordism when those buildings' assembly lines were in operation.

Row houses of course, still occupied, with the ones on  corners shaped like triangles if the intersection of streets is angled . Once streetcar suburbs, they suggest, with little touches, a dream of greater status that the working class or office workers aspired to. The shape of the tiled roofs or bordered windows suggest a long-superceded version of the American dream. But the general uniformity would be perfect for families of thieves like those in Black Friday or The Burglar.  

Some street corners are the best remaining models for where the piano player worked, killed a  bouncer in a fight, and was protected from the cops by the regulars. 

There's a mom-and-pop store or two, not much taller than the guys who hung out there c. 1936 staring at the street corner blonde. The buildings determine the horizons of guys like Ralph, Dippy, and Lenore the fat blonde. 

Vacant lots, mostly mud and discarded fast-food wrappers, and, near Bridesburg, a gigantic scrap yard with automobiles awaiting final compacting. 

A high school with a roof gym, and a billboard. "God Bless America, Our Troops, and Constitution." Now that's noir. I wish I could read the code of the grafitti.

Antidedicated (or reversededicated or undedicated or counterdedicated) to the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and the Interstate Highway System which destroyed the World of David Goodis.

Text and photos by Aaron Finestone

Philadelphia noir writer David Goodis placed his best writing in a city that is no more, the place cultural historian Jay A. Gertzman calls Goodisville. 

Covering Skid Row, Society Hill and Southwark, Goodisville ran to the Delaware River. It is the setting of Cassidy's Girl (around Dock Street) and Moon in the Gutter(Southwark).

 The Goodisville waterfront was paved with sunken cobblestones and crossed by railroad tracks. It was home to buses converted to diners, ships, tug boats, fire boats, barges, decaying piers and rotting warehouses. 

The death of Goodisville took about 20 years. Beginning in the 1950's Skid Row was cleared. The food distribution activities at Dock Street were moved to South Philadelphia and Society Hill was redeveloped. Delaware Avenue was paved with asphalt. In the 1960's Southwark was cleared for I-95. 

The final destruction came at the time of the Bicentennial, when Delaware Avenue was rebuilt, new railroad tracks were laid, and the exciting, living waterfront was converted into the pretty and boring Penn's Landing. 

On a day, probably in the summer of 1975, I walked down Delaware Avenue to what was become Penn's Landing. I photographed the rebuilding of Delaware Avenue and the laying of new railroad tracks. By the 1980's, Goodisville was finally dead. Delaware Avenue had become Columbus Boulevard. 

I proceeded south of Washington Avenue, where my greatgrandparents set foot in America, to the setting of Moon in the Gutter, to photograph the surviving waterfront activity. 

Around New Year's day, probably 1976, I visited the church yard of Gloria Dei (Old Swedes' Church) in the heart of Goodisville. How many Goodis characters lived secret lives here we will never know.