Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [1]
Betsy Ross dangling a cigarette from her lip? Abigail Adams two-timing John with a local punk?
You could say that was then, and this is noir.
But you’d be wrong. Read any of the eighteenth-century scholars who love colonial Philadelphia more than their own parents or kids, and you know that some pretty bad defecation was going down in our cobblestoned streets back then, and it got even worse.
By the 1830s and ’40s, Philadelphia’s antiblack and anti-Catholic riots guaranteed a steady number of bashed heads and windows. Readers innocent of the real Philadelphia may want to consult historian Gary Nash’s fine First City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and learn of our antebellum street gangs, “the Moyamensing Killers, Gumballs, Bloodtubs, Scroungers, Hyenas, Bedbugs, Swampoodle Terriers, Nighthawks, Flayers, and Deathfetchers.”
You’ve only heard of the Phillies?
When local officials expanded Philadelphia in 1854 by merging its two square miles with the hundreds of small towns around it—creating the 135-square-mile municipal behemoth it remains today—the move came largely out of desperation, the need to control a crime scene gone wild.
And how far we’ve come! Nash’s colorfully named gangs are the spiritual ancestors of today’s “flash mobs”—hundreds of no-goodnik, dumb-as-a-doornail teens (with, we suspect, not-so-hot grades), who congregate somewhere in Center City at the flash of a global Twitter message and start beating the crap out of normal passersby.
Yes, it sometimes happens in Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love, not far from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.
America’s first great city, first capital, and first industrial metropolis contained from the beginning the mix of poor workers and elite culture, of ethnic enclaves and religious intolerance, of easy skullduggery and flesh-pot possibilities, that led Lincoln Steffens in 1903 to famously rule it “corrupt and contented.” Colonel William Markham, deputy governor of Pennsylvania from 1693 to 1699 (and William Penn’s cousin), was the first official on the take, hiding pirates at one hundred pounds a head, including Captain Kidd himself. We’ve had many similarly devoted public servants since.
In the early innings of the twenty-first century, Philadelphia needs no PR help as a noir town, not when some of our own best and brightest call us “Filthydelphia” (and not just for the residents who take jump shots at garbage cans and miss). Remember Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), with John Travolta smoothly recording vehicular murder on Lincoln Drive? And Witness (1985), with its affront to Amish decency in the Men’s Room of 30th Street Station?
Creepy stuff happens here. The city’s attractions, aside from Independence Hall, the National Constitution Center, and standard guidebook stuff, include more dope joints, brothels, larceny lairs, and related dens of iniquity than Fodor, Frommer, and Fielding could handle even if they pooled coverage (that is, if they ventured into the alternate reality that bourgeois travel guides consider hands-off). Actually, even some of the guidebook stuff is pretty dark. Try the Mutter Museum, with that tumor extracted from President Grover Cleveland’s jaw, the liver shared by the original Siamese twins. How about the barely furnished Edgar Allan Poe House, with the basement from “The Black Cat”?
Philadelphia noir is different from the mood, the sensibility, the dimensions, of noir encountered in more glamourous American cities. With the national spotlight long since gone—the federal government fled to Washington, the national media navel-gazing in New York, the glitter of the movies permanently in L.A. (even if M. Night Shyamalan fights for our spookiness)—we don’t live a