Hostile City Living

For rent, cheap

Basement



The Hole

Gary Heidnik being led to court

Holly Maddux's mummified body in a steamer trunk

Ira Einhorn mugshot 3/28/79

"The Flyers of that era redefined the sport of hockey in a positively negative way, forever cementing in the minds of many that hockey was a game played by brutes who did nothing but beat each other senseless with their sticks and fists. At the literal center of this orchestrated mayhem was Robert Clarke, then known as Bobby, or "Clarkie" to the local morons. Clarke was an impresario at the "stick and move," which you probably think of as a boxing term, but as it pertained to Clarke referred to the art of gutting your opponent with your Sher-wood and then running away. The fistic action was provided by thugs such as Dave "The Hammer" Schultz, a guy whom we really should thank and not criticize, because the classic movie "Slap Shot" was conceived with the Hammer in mind." Lloyd Darlow

"In July 1976, the American Legion held a convention at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia to celebrate the country's bicentennial. Within two days after the start of the event, one veteran after another became ill with an acute pneumonia illness. Ultimately, 221 patients were stricken, and 34 patients eventually died of this mysterious epidemic which came to be known as Legionnaires' Disease."
Garrett, Laurie. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994.

The streets are safe in Philadelphia, it's only the people who make them unsafe.
- Frank Rizzo

The Mutter Museum

Philadelphia
"I had my first thrilling thought in Philadelphia."
"...when I was there it was a very sick, twisted, violent, fear-ridden, decadent, decaying place."

"Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me. It's the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time."

"It all started for me in Philadelphia because it's old enough, and it's got enough things in the air to really work on itself. It's decaying but it's fantastically beautiful, filled with violence, hate and filth."

"The house I moved into was across the street from the morgue, next door to Pop's Diner. The area had a great mood - factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters, the darkest nights. The people had stories etched in their faces, and I saw vivid images-plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows, walking through the morgue en-route to a hamburger joint."

"We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street, and the chalk marks around where he'd lain stayed on the sidewalk for five days. We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen."

"I lived at 13th and Wood, right kitty-corner from the morgue; That's real industrial. At 5:00 there's nobody in that neighborhood. No one lives there. And I really do like that. It's beautiful , if you see it the right way."

"Yes, [Philadelphia is] horrible, but in a very interesting way. There were places there that had been allowed to decay, where there was so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world. It was fear, but it was so strong, and so magical, like a magnet, that your imagination was always sparking in Philadelphia...I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and I get ideas, I hear the wind, and I'm off into the darkness somewhere."

- David Lynch

Philly was in desperate times. It was a city where, as I discovered watching the local news, people were slaughtered on the streets when the sun was shining. The second day I was there, three eight-year-olds were shot on the street corner outside the place I had almost rented in West Philly. The third day I was there, a garbage truck split in half on the street outside our new apartment, and nobody came to clean up the mountain of rotting filth for a week.… What’s more, all the windows in our apartment, no matter which direction they faced, stared out at brick walls. I was home at last."

—Jim Knipfel, Slackjaw