Chapter 7

THE CHOICE TO LIVE DIFFERENTLY

Reimagining Integration at Century’s End

In 2005, Patricia Henning became the newest member of the Germantown Historical Society Hall of Fame. Henning, who moved to West Mount Airy in 1967, was a realtor, a part-time librarian at the Germantown Historical Society, and WMAN’s longest-standing board member, serving from 1968 to 2003.1 Henning also founded the West Mount Airy Neighbors Historical Awareness Committee in the early 1980s, through which she worked to cultivate an active and living history of the community. At her induction ceremony, WMAN executive director Laura Siena spoke of Henning’s commitment to spreading that historical narrative. The neighborhood has thrived not simply because of its long-standing dedication to intentional integration, said Siena, but because of the legacy that has been created through the memorialization of that dedication. “As we have been studied and written about,” said Siena, “we have gained insights into just how rare and precious our community is. Communities like Mount Airy are bucking powerful institutional arrangements when they seek to create different narratives for themselves, narratives which value integration over segregation, community involvement over alienation.”2

As Siena noted, over the previous half century, public representations of West Mount Airy had been an integral part of the neighborhood’s identity formation, serving at once to create internal community cohesion and to attract new, like-minded homeowners to the region. At first, such depictions helped to solidify the community’s reputation for biracial interracialism. In the three decades preceding Henning’s induction to the Hall of Fame, however, as WMAN reoriented its mission away from intentional integration, the representations of West Mount Airy about which Siena spoke took on new significance, infusing younger residents with a consciousness toward early activism through which organizers hoped to galvanize residents going forward.

By the late 1970s, amid economic instability, a rapidly shifting national political culture, new conceptions of community-making, and the internal need for healing, Mount Airy was beginning to take a new shape, moving away from the focus on interracial living of the previous decades and toward a more generalized ethos of diversity.3 As Marilyn Nolen, WMAN executive secretary, wrote in an October 1978 letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin, “We believe that our neighborhood is like the city taken as a whole in being socially, economically, racially, religiously, and ethnically diverse. Diversity, however, as we have seen it in Mount Airy, need not yield division.”4

This rhetorical shift in the neighborhood paralleled larger national trends that saw a retreat away from the race-based pride and self-help that had dominated the fight for racial justice in the latter half of the 1960s. Fearful that these calls for racial separatism and identity-based power would threaten the progress of race relations, institutions began to deploy the language of cultural pluralism, speaking of the need to bring individuals from a diversity of backgrounds together to combat inflammatory racial clashes.5 By the 1980s and ’90s, policymakers, educational administrators, and human resource managers around the country were implementing that tactical shift away from the language of affirmative action and biracial identity politics, favoring instead a celebration of difference and diversity. In West Mount Airy, the strategic turn took place a decade earlier, with the election of Chris Van de Velde; in 1975, in the wake of the WMAN/WMAA clashes, the new president worked to move the mission of West Mount Airy Neighbors away from biracial integration and to instead commemorate the value of a community in which everyone was welcomed.

The institutional rebranding of West Mount Airy both coincided with and fostered a gradual demographic shift in the area, as new groups of people found their way to the neighborhood. By the late 1970s, Mount Airy was becoming attractive to a new and emerging cohort of residents: leftist religious scholars and their students, multiracial and same-sex families, and a new generation of activists seeking to establish community roots in a space long known for its political and social tolerance. These newcomers seemed to validate Van de Velde’s push to broaden the scope of the neighborhood’s reputation, recasting West Mount Airy as a haven for those who chose to “live differently.”6

At first, this influx of new residents enlivened the community. Through the middle of the 1980s, Mount Airy experienced a marked upsurge in both institutional energy and community cohesion. But, as the decade wore on and the tangible effects of the postindustrial recession facing the nation’s urban centers and an increasingly violent war on drugs spread into the neighborhood, instability and mass exodus once against threatened. While newcomers had brought fresh energy into the region, community leaders believed, many lacked the consciousness of intentionality necessary to retain its place as the city’s beacon of diversity and tolerance. In an effort to preserve its viability as a progressive urban space, West Mount Airy Neighbors embarked on a community-wide historical memory project, seeking to merge the neighborhood’s evolving culture of diversity with its historic legacy of intentionality. WMAN saw utility in employing the collective remembrance of the community’s integrationist past as an organizing tool for the future.

Growing up in North Philadelphia’s Logan section, Ellen Tichenor had always known of West Mount Airy as a site of racial tolerance. She went to school with Wendy Schermer, daughter of the famed founder of the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission, and, as the girls became friends, Tichenor grew familiar with the work of the Schermers and the efforts toward integration in the neighborhood. “I thought of George as something of a hero,” she later recalled. “They were doing good, important work over there [in Mount Airy].” Tichenor graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, finding community in West Philadelphia’s Powelton Village neighborhood. Powelton was a hotbed of activism in the early 1970s. “It was an antiwar chanting, folk-music playing, new-age hippie, ever-expanding pot of spaghetti, always enough for anyone who showed up,” Tichenor reflected. The revolutionary in her felt at home there. When she and her husband divorced, though, she felt lost. In the mid-1970s, Tichenor came out as a lesbian. Though her split from her husband had been amicable—they had one of the first pro se divorces in Philadelphia and agreed on shared custody of their two boys—she felt destabilized and confused. “I didn’t know how to shift identities like that,” she later recalled. “It was perhaps the most vulnerable that I had ever been.”7

Not long after, Tichenor joined a women’s radio collective, singing and playing guitar on the local public radio station, and through that she met Sharon. “She was a friend of a friend, living in a lesbian feminist cooperative in Mount Airy,” she said. “We fell in love.” A year later, Tichenor moved into the twin house at 515 W. Carpenter Lane that Sharon shared with several friends. “I didn’t know who I was or what I was looking for,” she remembered. “Mount Airy was the perfect place for that.” The director of the day-care center at the Rutgers University School of Law in Camden, New Jersey, Tichenor moved into the cooperative with a carpenter, a writer, a law student, the director of the University of Pennsylvania Women’s Center, and the director of a collective childcare facility in the area. “Mount Airy felt like a place for liberal, young, hip people,” she reflected. “It was a place for rising professionals who thought of themselves as revolutionary.”8 For Tichenor, the move to northwest Philadelphia served as the spatial manifestation of her new identity; Mount Airy offered her a safe, inviting community as she reoriented her sense of self.

Since the early 1950s, Mount Airy had been home to a small but persistent lesbian community, women who were attracted to the area for many of the same reasons that enticed African American buyers to move in and compelled many white homeowners to remain: affordable homes, old stone architecture, and parks and green spaces. “I liked being on the edge of Fairmount Park,” remembered Laurie Barron, who moved to the neighborhood in the 1960s. “I liked being up where it was a little quieter and greener.” The neighborhood’s reputation for racial justice was a significant draw as well.9 For many such women, the quieter, more residential culture of Mount Airy was attractive because of the lifestyle it afforded. It was a community with a reputation for tolerance, but it also brought with it a sense of independence and privacy; it was a place to purchase a home and start a family. Tichenor echoed such sentiments. “Unlike in Powelton,” she reflected, “we weren’t jumping around from house to house every night. We felt relieved to come home in Mount Airy. There was a sense of ease there…It was like what grown-ups did when they left Powelton.”10 While by the mid-1960s there were a number of lesbian collectives in the community, recalled Barron, “[it was mostly] individuals and couples…moving to Mt. Airy.” Becky Davidson, a longtime resident of Center City and West Philadelphia, described a lesbian “flight” to the northwest. “The Germantown dyke crew,” she said, referring collectively to the northwest Philadelphia community of which Mount Airy was a part, “is very different…. They all have kids, they all like to be near the park, they’re all professional lesbians.”11 The physical character of the neighborhood that had served as a stabilizing force in the early years of transition continued to provide a strong pull for liberal, upwardly mobile buyers through the rest of the twentieth century, helping to ensure the economic stability of the community.

By the early 1980s, West Mount Airy had gained a regional reputation as a gay-friendly community. In 1983, the Philadelphia Gay News proclaimed Mount Airy a “gay neighborhood” in the city. The area, the paper said, was home to a concentration of gay and lesbian residents and professed a strong gay identity. It fostered progressive politics, strong community ties, and a sense of independence particularly important to young lesbian families. “The sense of coming home to quiet is one of the important elements of life for many Germantown and Mount Airy residents,” wrote reporter Marc Killinger.12 For Tichenor, who was interviewed for the article, it was precisely that balance of community involvement, progressive activism, and personal space that drew her to the neighborhood.13 Mount Airy offered “a sense of being able to live with your politics,” she told Killinger.14 The community offered day-care cooperatives, study groups, and community concerts. There were pacifists, feminists, and those committed to economic justice. Sharing the party wall of their Carpenter Lane twin was Jules Timmerman, founder of the Weaver’s Way Food Cooperative. The co-op, which had opened for business in January 1973 at 555 Carpenter Lane, the site of the old Sid’s Deli, boasted five hundred member-households by 1975. Six years later, the store was supporting more than two thousand families with hundreds of additional membership applications to process.15 Mount Airy was an open community, said Tichenor, and that made it feel safe, welcoming, and exciting.16

With its growing reputation as a gay-friendly space and a home for “grown-up Powelton revolutionaries,” Mount Airy’s population of young progressive professionals grew precipitously in the early 1980s, with little visible pushback from older residents. According to Rabbi Linda Holtzman, “Mount Airy, by the mid-eighties, was the place to be.” Holtzman, who grew up in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia and began the process of coming out in the late 1970s, moved to the neighborhood in 1982, not long after she began dating her partner, Betsy Conston. The area was an easy commute to downtown, to Temple University, and to the University of Pennsylvania. It was still a place of racial tolerance, Holtzman later reflected, but that early reputation of racial integration had been transformed, paving the way for a truly diverse community in the 1980s. Within a few years, she said, it was home to a growing gay community and a rising feminist presence, and, equally importantly, an increasingly young and progressive Jewish population. The rabbi, who graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in 1979, wanted to settle in an area with a strong Jewish identity. She didn’t have to look far. In 1982, RRC relocated from Temple University to the suburban neighborhood of Wyncote, located just across the city boundary from northwest Philadelphia. The move helped to position Mount Airy as, said Holtzman, “the Jewish center of the world in Philadelphia…, a beacon for progressive Jews in the city.”17

Founded in 1968, for the first fourteen years of its existence RRC made its home in two brownstones at 2308 Broad Street in North Philadelphia. The school was set up to train rabbinical candidates in Reconstructionist Judaism, a philosophy established in the 1920s by scholar and rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, who advocated that Judaism should be grounded in contemporary cultural and social values.18 As the only Reconstructionist school in the country, RRC brought to Philadelphia a concentration of progressive Jews, all eager to create a community in the city. The problem, recalled Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, was that the school was not relating to the neighborhood.19 By day, students and faculty studied together at the North Philadelphia campus, but each evening they returned to their homes in Center City and Powelton Village. “There was a disconnect,” said Alpert, who graduated from RRC in 1976 and became the first alumnus to take on a full-time administrative role at the college. “Many of us felt that if we were going to make our home in North Philadelphia, we needed to be working with the community, but no one at RRC was doing any sort of intergroup relations.”20

As RRC struggled to situate itself within the local community, many students and faculty found themselves attracted to a developing movement in American Judaism more broadly. The national Havurah (or Fellowship) Movement, born out of the counterculture of the 1960s, brought together young Jews in search of an egalitarian alternative to the hierarchical structures and institutionalized practices of organized religion. In small clusters around the country, students of the movement congregated in grassroots gatherings for prayers, study, and celebration.21 The political and countercultural ideas were central to the organization’s mission. The group decried suburban bourgeois culture, offered sanctuary for members seeking student exemptions from the draft, and sought to recast Judaism as “a revolutionary force…toward liberation [and] greater freedom for the individual and the society.”22 Still, members viewed these ideas through the lens of contemporary Jewish thought. They came together for ritual and prayer, and they engaged in deep study of religious texts and teachings. They called for a renewal of American Judaism, situated within the world in which they lived.

By the 1970s, that Jewish Renewal movement had found its way to Philadelphia and West Mount Airy. As followers began to move into the region, though, the neighborhood’s long-standing Jewish population experienced hints of a generational divide, with new residents struggling to find common ground with the older integrationists of the Germantown Jewish Centre. On one level, the newcomers had been attracted to the region because of its legacy of inclusion. “One thing that was important to me,” recalled economist Michael Masch, who was twenty-two years old when he moved to the neighborhood in 1973, “having grown up in a racially segregated neighborhood in Philadelphia, was to find a place where black and white people could live in a community together.” Still, for Masch and others like him, it also felt important to establish a break from the older residents who had first created and fostered that tolerance. “I’m not sure we even knew what we wanted,” he recalled. “We were people coming out of college in the late 1960s, feeling there couldn’t possibly be anything we would have in common with the institutions run by our parents’ generation.”23

In 1974, Masch and his wife joined a group of other young Jewish couples who approached Rabbi Charry at the GJC about the prospect of starting a minyan, a lay-led prayer group, at the synagogue. Charry’s response, welcoming the group into the community even as their presence pulled members away from the main sanctuary, was, according to Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Julia Cass, crucial to the survival and growth of a cohesive Jewish community in the neighborhood. “The growth of the Havurah Movement in Mount Airy,” reported the paper, “and indeed, the rebirth of its Jewish community in general, is closely tied to the Germantown Jewish Centre in a way that reveals the interdependence of institutions, neighborhoods, and generations.”24 Recalling the neighborhood’s earliest integration efforts, Cass linked the emergence of this new Jewish force in the area to the region’s historic success in merging grassroots innovation with institutional accountability.

It was these complementary forces that created the space for a sustainable progressive Jewish presence in the neighborhood through the end of the twentieth century. In 1981, when Rabbi Ira Silverman became president of RRC, said Alpert, he brought with him a new vision for the community, one very much grounded in the Havurah tradition.25 As one of Silverman’s first acts in office, he invited Rabbis Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Green to join the faculty.26 A short time later, he solicited Rabbi Arthur Waskow to teach there as well. These three men brought with them a new level of cachet to the school. Schachter-Shalomi, an Austrian immigrant who was imprisoned at a detention camp in Vichy France before escaping to the United States, was one of the foremost leaders of the national Jewish Renewal movement. Green, then a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Pennsylvania, was a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and one of the founders of Boston’s Havurat Shalom. Waskow, a prolific writer and activist and the founder of the Washington Havurah, was a nationally renowned champion of leftist causes.27 “These were three very powerful personalities,” remembered Rabbi David Teutsch, an active havurah leader in both New York and Philadelphia who went on to serve as executive director of the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Havurot (later the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation) from 1982 to 1986 before joining the faculty at RRC and serving as president from 1993 to 2002. All three settled in West Mount Airy. “Because of its history as an integrated neighborhood,” said Teutsch, “it was a neighborhood that was attractive to progressives…. By the late 1970s, it was a community that attracted a certain kind of Jew. These men moved there in part because of that legacy of integration.”28 Quickly, recalled Alpert, students began to look toward the neighborhood. “They wanted to live near the star faculty,” she said. “Zalman [Schachter-Shalomi], in particular, was the center of all Jewish change in Mount Airy during this period.”29 “By the early 1980s,” echoed Teutsch, “there was a national Jewish leadership right in West Mount Airy.”30

Just a year after Silverman took office, he also began plans to move the college away from North Philadelphia. In 1982, RRC relocated to Wyncote. The move refocused the Reconstructionist community of Philadelphia away from Center City and Powelton. Mount Airy, recalled Alpert, “started making sense as a place for people to look for housing.”31 In 1986, when Arthur Green took over as president of the college, he began a self-conscious campaign to bring still more members of the RRC community to the neighborhood. “One of the things that was most important to Art,” said Teutsch, “was for people to have a shared living experience. He started to push the college to cluster students and faculty in West Mount Airy.”32 In 1987, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Sedgwick Gardens, an apartment complex at the corner of Sedgwick and McCallum Streets, had become a de facto dormitory for RRC students. “So many of these students are staying in after they become rabbis,” the paper noted, “that it is said that Mount Airy has more rabbis per square mile than any other neighborhood in Philadelphia.”33 This confluence of the relocation of the rabbinical college, the concentration of nationally renowned scholars and rabbis, and the growth of the Havurah and Jewish Renewal movements worked to position Mount Airy as the progressive Jewish epicenter of Philadelphia.

These demographic shifts in the neighborhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s served to complement Chris Van de Velde’s vision of a West Mount Airy predicated on the idea of diversity, rather than biracial integration. And long-standing neighborhood institutions responded, at once working to foster a sense of community for recent transplants and to remain relevant to their new constituents. The Germantown Jewish Centre began offering full-day daycare services in the early 1980s, “telegraphing,” reflected Teutsch, “women professionals and two-parent working households.”34 In March 1981, the Summit Presbyterian Church welcomed activist Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, to speak at a special service.35 Three months later, the church hosted an evening workshop on the nuclear arms race and the international challenges of peacemaking. “From Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” proclaimed the invitation posted in a WMAN newsletter, “leaders in the worldwide struggle for peace and justice will share their perspectives about the escalating arms build-up on the world…. Please come and hear Mr. Clark Smith and together we will begin to understand the far-reaching implications of peacemaking in the world today.”36 That September, the West and East Mount Airy Neighbors organizations launched a collaborative community newspaper, with free monthly delivery to all residents.37 Once again, WMAN saw a need to reorient its mission to maintain its place in the community, and these new programs and initiatives served the long-standing clearinghouse well. In the spring of 1984, as WMAN entered its twenty-fifth year, the organization saw a 43 percent increase in paid membership from the previous year and a 26 percent increase over the average paid membership numbers in May of the preceding six years.38

This rebranding of West Mount Airy began to filter out of the neighborhood as well, as local media outlets started to define the community not as a haven for dignified interracialism but as a reflection of the counterculture coming of age. The neighborhood “is a hotbed of post ‘60s activism,” said co-op staffer Ed Thomas in a 1985 Inquirer article, with the Weaver’s Way Co-op serving as the community’s “social movement.”39 A year later, in an article about the founding of a new community learning center in Mount Airy, staff writer Beth Gillin wrote, “In this liberal laid-back neighborhood, whose inhabitants have been known to furnish vast Victorian homes with little more than peace posters, banana plants, and overflowing bookshelves, intellectual curiosity is a prized community virtue, ranking right up there with saving whales, growing sprouts, and voting in primaries.”40 This new tone both reflected and facilitated the changing demographics of the area; by mid-decade, Mount Airy was attracting more and more young, progressive professionals to the neighborhood.

Of course, WMAN couldn’t—didn’t want to—abandon its integrationist agenda completely. It was on the issue of schools that questions of race consciousness continued to persist in local and regional conversations. In 1982, the Philadelphia Board of Education appointed Constance Clayton as the city’s first black superintendent. Clayton wasted little time in ushering in a new era of school reform, specifically targeting the issue of educational segregation. One of her first initiatives was to implement a program that would direct nearly $5 million annually to schools in mixed-race neighborhoods with disproportionately African American enrollments. West Mount Airy’s Charles W. Henry School, with 80 percent African American students in a community that, according to the 1980 census, boasted a 56–42 percent white-black ratio, was one of the beneficiaries of the new program. The goal of the initiative resonated with the strategy that Beatrice Chernock had employed two decades earlier: “to assure white parents that those…schools provide safe, high-quality education. No buses needed.”41

Henry received funding for free after-school care, learning specialists, computer and math labs, a well-supported music program, additional teachers to reduce class size, and a second full-day kindergarten. This was one of the very first requests from Principal Frederick Donatucci, who also stepped into the role in 1982. “Knowing the realities of this neighborhood,” said Donatucci, “it’s important for us to be able to provide a program that is comparable to what parents can get in private schools, because they’re our main competitor.” In addition to recruiting neighborhood families, the district offered busing to Henry and other participating schools for white children whose neighborhood schools were not part of the desegregation plan.42 “You did what you had to do to keep children who had a choice,” recalled Ralph Smith, Clayton’s chief design strategist. “Basically you had to figure out what the draw was.”43 For much of the next of the decade, the program served to bolster Henry’s white enrollment, galvanizing parental support and drawing local families away from the private schools. By the end of the 1980s, Henry had settled into a 60–40 percent black-white ratio. “The school was becoming a community hub,” recalled Judith Baker-Bernstein, an immigration lawyer and Henry parent, “and that was a wonderful thing.”44

The stabilization of Henry provided an additional boost to the region, particularly for the new waves of young families moving to the area. By 1987, home values in Mount Airy were soaring. “Suddenly,” reported the Inquirer that February, “the neighborhood has become red-hot property. There have been bidding wars over desirable homes, sending real estate skyrocketing…. The neighborhood is now so hot, in fact, that some residents have small fears that Mount Airy’s cherished traditions might, over time, be altered.” In that same article, Bob Elfant, president of Martin Elfant Realtors, described the boom as “a frenzy.” According to Elfant, the demographics of the neighborhood showed signs of shifting. “I do have a little bit of fear—and I think a lot of people do—that Mount Airy, ten years from now, will be a white, upper-middle-class neighborhood.”45

Elfant’s concerns foretold growing anxiety in the community. Some of the neighborhood’s older residents worried that these new homeowners were no longer steeped in the narrative of intentional integration. “Those days,” reported Inquirer staff writer Michael Ruane in 1987, “while still strong in the memory of many residents, are becoming more and more distant from modern Mount Airy…. [There is a] new generation of Mount Airy residents: young, professional, and very successful, still attracted to Mount Airy’s liberal tradition but with a keen eye for investment and architecture as well.”46 When the local housing market was strong, these shifts presented no problems. As the decade wore on, however, and the trying effects of the economic downturn of the early 1980s found their way to the region, long-standing community leaders feared that the “new” Mount Airy was ill-equipped to preserve the stability of the area. Without the institutional memory of the integration project, they worried, the newcomers were unable or unwilling to fight for the neighborhood.

Across the country, the 1980s ushered in a significant departure in American domestic policy.47 Ronald Reagan, elected to the presidency at the start of the decade, ran on a platform of lower taxes and limited governmental intervention. When he took office, the liberalism that had defined the American presidency to varying degrees for the previous five decades began to fray. Thus, at the same time that the nation was contending with the impact of the deindustrialization and disinvestment of the 1970s, Reagan pushed to reduce funding for job training, food stamps, and Medicare.48 Though some experienced significant financial gain during these years, the disappearance of a manufacturing economy resulted in acute crises for cities in the Northeast and Midwest.49 Blue-collar employment rates dipped to their lowest rates in decades. African Americans in urban areas felt the decline particularly sharply. By 1987, the rate of industrial employment among black workers had dropped to 28 percent, down from roughly 70 percent as late as 1970.50

This widespread unemployment coincided with a rapidly expanding drug trade in the United States. In the middle of the decade, new technologies, political and military alliances, and immigration patterns brought crack cocaine into inner-city communities at unprecedented rates. With dwindling opportunities for legal employment, an underground drug economy ballooned. This growing drug trade paralleled a rapid expansion of federal support—financial and political—for drug enforcement. Rising unemployment rates, the introduction of crack cocaine, and President Reagan’s War on Drugs, introduced in October 1982, came together to assert further pressure on American cities. Urban blight persisted and neighborhoods saw increasingly violent clashes in the streets.51

Mount Airy was not immune to these larger national forces. In the late 1980s, the neighborhood began to see rising drug activity and increasing rates of attendant violence. On the evening of March 16, 1989, three people were wounded in a drug-related street shooting on the 100 block of West Weaver Street. The street, according to the Inquirer, had become a known trafficking hub over the previous two years, with dealers congregating on corners and lingering traffic through the night. Curtis Duff, a sixth grader at Henry School, was sitting on his porch when the shooting took place, and was caught in the cross fire. He was hit four times.52 Two months later, two men were found dead in the back parking lot of the Mount Pleasant Arms apartment complex on Lincoln Drive. In the preceding weeks, residents of the surrounding blocks had reported unusual activity in the lot. “It could be a cool spot to hook up with drugs, because you can run up on the railroad tracks and escape if anyone comes,” said seventeen-year-old Sambuka Brown, who lived around the corner from the Arms. Police concluded that the deaths were likely the result of a failed drug deal.53

At the same time, residents fought back over the proposed opening of a forty-three-bed AIDS patient facility at the old Arden Hall at the corner of McCallum Street and Mount Airy Avenue and a sixteen-bed residential treatment center for emotionally troubled youth on Wissahickon Avenue. “It’s grossly unfair for them to dump this kind of problem in a family neighborhood,” resident Barry Zern charged of the AIDS home. “I’m concerned about my children. We have hardly any strangers that come into the neighborhood, and now we are going to have the worst kind of strangers, IV drug users. We never bargained for that.”54 Homeowners expressed concern over issues of safety in the neighborhood, drawing distinctions between the long-standing emphasis on tolerance and the prospect of unseemly encroachment into the community. “This is Mount Airy; we are hardly an elitist crew,” resident Jaki Katz Adler said at a protest of the youth treatment center. “This has been a successfully integrated neighborhood for thirty years. It’s a credit to humanity that everyone can live together. But when it comes to safety issues, that’s another matter.” Others echoed Adler’s sentiments. “I couldn’t care less about housing value,” said George Newman, reportedly one of the most strident opponents of the facility. “I plan to stay in my house and raise my kids. I am happy there, but if there is a physical threat to my kids, I’m gone.”55 The language the residents used in protesting the opening of both facilities evidenced new and growing fears in the neighborhood that outside influences would compromise the security and stability of the community.

As homeowners wrestled over these perceived threats to the neighborhood, city schools began to feel the effects of Reagan’s hands-off economic policies. The desegregation plan that Superintendent Clayton had introduced in 1982 was, by the end of the decade, beginning to come undone. With federal support waning, the state legislature enacted a new school funding formula, cutting per-pupil aid across Philadelphia. Henry lost its math lab, its full-day kindergarten aides, and its learning specialists. The acclaimed music teacher transferred to one of the city’s esteemed magnet schools, where his funding would be safe. The annual school show, which had become a highlight of the academic year for the Mount Airy community, was shut down.56 Across Philadelphia, twenty-three hundred new students entered city high schools in the fall of 1992, twelve hundred more than the school board had anticipated. At Germantown, the feeder public high school for West Mount Airy, classrooms were reportedly filled beyond capacity, many with sixty students or more, and some with ninth graders who were passed through to the high school level after failing seventh or eighth grade. At the lower school level, the Inquirer reported, there were twenty-two hundred students on waiting lists for kindergartens, eight hundred more than the previous year.57

Mount Airy parents who had briefly enrolled their children in neighborhood public schools were once again turning to area private schools, which at the same time were experiencing double-digit inflation in tuition and fees. At the William Penn Charter School, for instance, West Mount Airy resident Louis Natali saw his daughter’s tuition go from $6,680 to $8,150, a 22 percent jump as the girl moved from elementary school to middle school. The increase was nearly 15 percent more than reportedly projected by Penn Charter officials. “It’s a real wallop,” Natali, a law professor at Temple University, lamented. “It is just pushing middle-class people out of that kind of quality education for their children. I think it is important that the staff get paid decent wages, and I am sure it is all related to that, but it makes you wonder.”58 Since the early years of transition in the neighborhood, private and parochial schools had afforded those families who had retreated from the Philadelphia education system the chance to live out their commitment to residential—if not educational—integration. However, rising tuition costs, combined with economic recession and exacerbated volatility at neighborhood schools prompted some to question their decision to live in West Mount Airy.

For the WMAN board, this new cycle of unease once again prompted growing concern over the stability of the region. It was time, they believed, for a reinvigorated campaign geared toward promoting residential cohesion and community building. Unlike previous episodes of volatility, though, when leaders could draw on the work of long-standing residents who had been steeped in neighborhood organizing, in the early 1990s board members feared that the swell of new residents over the previous decade had left homeowners ill-equipped to contend with the external forces asserting power on the area. The recent flurry of in-migration to Mount Airy had, in a sense, resulted in a vacuum of organizational memory, a loss of the intentionality that community leaders believed was so critical to the long-standing viability of the neighborhood.

WMAN felt that in order to stem recent concerns and bring residents together, the organization needed to build awareness about the region’s acclaimed integrationist reputation; if community leaders could teach current homeowners the lessons of the neighborhood’s early organizing efforts, they could merge the region’s historical legacy with its future potential. By documenting the development of the integration project of the 1950s, they believed, they could infuse Mount Airy with a new collective consciousness. In creating a community-wide memory of what had come before, they could provide residents with the analytical framework and organizational toolkit necessary to uplift the neighborhood going forward. In this way, WMAN leaders worked to deploy storytelling as a mechanism through which to re-create sustainable, structural change.

In 1992, the West Mount Airy Neighbors Historical Awareness Committee embarked on a sweeping oral history study of the neighborhood’s past. The committee, established a decade earlier by Patricia Henning, was charged with helping to document the neighborhood’s historical narrative.59 Early efforts of the Historical Awareness Committee had been relatively ad hoc, pulling together programming as opportunities for historical celebration arose.60 But by the early 1990s the group was ready to play a proactive role in reinvigorating the community through deliberate historical representation. That June, the organization applied for more than $15,000 in funding from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. In conjunction with the Pelham Centennial Celebration, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Pelham subsection of West Mount Airy, the committee proposed to collect the stories of some of the region’s earliest integrationists.61 The group, led by WMAN members Vida Carson, Betty Ann Fellner, and Henning, envisioned the project as “a step toward understanding the experiences of the participants—the established residents and the newcomers, those who stayed and those who left, and learning more about the process used by those who intervened to break the all too common pattern of fear, flight, and racial succession in favor of trust, understanding, and integration.”62 Through the oral history initiative, organizers sought to translate the ideals of the midcentury efforts toward interracial living into a roadmap for contemporary community-building.

The committee proposed to commission scholars and experts, to employ transcribers and interviewers, and to purchase recording equipment in order to collect the stories of thirty past Mount Airy residents. Their grant application highlighted plans to include “ordinary” citizens, in addition to community activists, and committed to ensuring racial, gender, and religious diversity among the participants. According to the original proposal, following the initial interview process, the committee would select the fifteen “best” interviews for professional transcription and indexing.63 There was no indication of how such ranking would occur.

Although the grant application focused on the importance of reclaiming the stories of the past, the language in the proposal hinted at additional motivations for the initiative. “The potential value of the project,” the statement said, “reaches beyond Pelham and Mount Airy, because it will attempt to shed light on what actually happened during the 1950s at block meetings and neighborhood coffee klatches that succeeded in calming fears of many residents and began the process of developing a community built on trust. The success of those efforts set the tone for all of Mount Airy in the intervening forty years. This is an opportune time for Mount Airy to revisit that legacy.”64 With instability growing and uncertainty lingering about the future viability of the community, Mount Airy activists saw the remembrance of the early efforts to create “a community built on trust” as a crucial tool in recalibrating the neighborhood going forward.

In the fall of 1992, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission responded to WMAN’s request with the allocation of $3,000 in support.65 With funding in hand, organizers began to finalize interview subjects and publicize the project. “From the 1950s on, there were assaults on many neighborhoods across the country,” said committee member Betty Ann Fellner in a December article for the Mount Airy Times Express. “When they were ‘threatened’ with integration, people left in wholesale numbers. That’s typical,” said Fellner. “Mount Airy is not. What happened? Why is it that this neighborhood has such an extensive history of maintaining integration?” These subtle language choices—of maintenance over creation, of present-tense sentence construction over past tense—were critical in framing the oral history project as an effort toward renewal and rejuvenation, rather than solely commemoration. “Young people need to know how the neighborhood came to be,” said committee member Vida Carson in the same article, “especially today, since there is so much racism. It’s important for young people to know that this can be done, that it has to be done” (emphasis in original).66 The very act of sharing such stories, the committee seemed to say, would be sufficient to empower and energize residents, to compel them toward neighborhood rejuvenation.

In the months that followed, the group selected twenty-seven people who had lived in the community in the early 1950s. According to reports, the committee worked hard to get a wide cross-section of the community. All told, there were ten men and seventeen women. Fourteen were black, and thirteen, white. Six were Jewish, and twenty-one of various Christian denominations. The list included teachers, homemakers, judges, realtors, and social workers. There were human rights specialists, clergy members, politicians, and bank tellers.67 But even as the group sought out those “ordinary citizens” whom WMAN had described in the original grant proposal, the interviews that ultimately made it from tape to transcription were with some of the most vocal and active members of the community.

There was Don Black, who moved to the neighborhood with his wife, Vivian, in 1951 and served for decades on various committees of WMAN and other local community organizations. There was Joseph Coleman, the first African American president of the Philadelphia City Council, and Marjorie Kopeland, past president of the Henry Home and School Association and one of the founders of the neighborhood’s Allens Lane Arts Center. There were Shirley Melvin and Doris Polsky, twin sisters who started one of the first female-owned real estate agencies in the country, to drive out blockbusting agents from the neighborhood. There was Jeremiah Wright Sr., the integrationist pastor of Grace Baptist Church.68 And finally, there was George Schermer, founding president of the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission, who moved to West Mount Airy in 1953 and was critical to the success of the neighborhood’s effort toward residential integration.69 Taken together, these personal histories told a carefully constructed story of activism, intentionality, and public engagement.

Certainly, the oral history initiative did capture the narratives of some of the less prominent members of the community. Patricia Henning interviewed Frank Harvey, a white man born at his grandfather’s Mount Airy house in 1922, who spent his entire life on W. Hortter Street. Harvey recalled white residents leaving after the introduction of black homeowners into the neighborhood, but he recounted more memories of attending local church services and frequenting area bars than of engaging in community organizing.70 And interviewer Vida Carson spoke to Gladys Norris, an African American woman who moved to West Mount Airy as an adult in 1955 on the recommendation of her brother-in-law, a prominent attorney in the city, and had no recollection of many of the key neighborhood organizers and integrationist institutions.71 But such stories as Harvey’s and Norris’s never made it from tape to paper; instead, the histories that were transcribed were those of the neighborhood’s most active leaders and organizers, the ones who situated themselves on the front lines of the fight for genuine interracial living.72

These decisions on transcription selection and editing resulted in a narrative very much tailored to the goals of the Historical Awareness Committee and of West Mount Airy Neighbors more broadly. The group presented a community that was, in a sense, homogeneous in its diversity, a neighborhood drawn together by the activist ethos of its residents and by the mutual benefit and satisfaction they received from that mission. As a November 1993 progress report read:

People interviewed told us that they felt enriched by the inter-group associations they experienced here…. Children received an education in inter-group relations, interpersonal growth, that they would not have gotten elsewhere…. Over and over people spoke of certain personal qualities of the residents that made a difference, that promoted good inter-group and interpersonal relations, such as: respect for one another, open-mindedness, progressive attitudes, graciousness and courtesy, a sense of social justice and fairness, hope and optimism, trust and good will…. Virtually everyone interviewed said that the decision to move to Mount Airy, or to stay in Mount Airy, was a good one…. They said they had no regrets, but some expressed dismay at some negative changes that have occurred in the neighborhood [in recent years].73

The project summary offered an impression of historic Mount Airy as a community made up exclusively of people of good will, of people who were enriched by living there, of people who never regretted moving into the neighborhood. Here, the community was a place and a group of people that believed that their work was vital to the creation and maintenance of a democratic society.

Project coordinators made clear the lessons that the Mount Airy of the 1990s could learn from the historic efforts toward integration in northwest Philadelphia; they highlighted the role that the experiences of the neighborhood’s earliest activists could play in pulling the neighborhood together in the current moment of instability. As the report continued:

One name came up over and over again. That name was George Schermer…Friends of George Schermer like to tell stories about going on camping trips with the Schermers, and they tend to recall how at the end of their stay at a campsite, George would provide a little lesson about the fact that they had to find some way to improve the site, to make it better than they had found it. Well, George and the other good citizens of Mount Airy in the 1950s applied that same campsite philosophy to Mount Airy. That’s not a bad thought for us to keep in mind as we move into the second century of the Pelham neighborhood. From time to time we might reflect on this and ask ourselves if we are being sufficiently good stewards on the legacy we enjoy in this community today…Many see the Pelham Centennial Celebration as a catalyst in pulling people together, energizing a new spirit of participation, and reawakening awareness of the kind of diversity we have here in Mount Airy.74

The Historical Awareness Committee, through careful editing and deliberate presentation decisions, played a critical role in shaping the historical narrative of the community. With WMAN serving as the mediator in the storytelling process, the West Mount Airy Oral History Project curated the story of a neighborhood born out of democratic impulses and lived racial justice.75 Though individual interviewees did discuss issues of economic exclusivity, complicated identity politics, and subtle power struggles, the public account that emerged was one of neighborly good will, meaningful friendship, achieved liberalism, and, perhaps most significant, strong leadership. In distilling individual interviews into a seamless narrative, WMAN emerged as the stabilizing force in the community. As the invocation of George Schermer’s camping trips indicates, through the oral history project West Mount Airy Neighbors leaders developed a consciousness of the past that cast themselves as central to the neighborhood’s success and viability. In the hands of the long-standing organization, the story of the community became the story of the unflinching guidance of WMAN through the latter half of the twentieth century. Through this carefully managed telling, the group ensured that it would retain its position in the community going forward.

Of course, WMAN often did serve as the voice of the neighborhood; the organization was the central clearinghouse for West Mount Airy, and over the first forty years of its existence, it was, indeed, a moderating force for the community. By casting the Oral History Project narrative as such, however, WMAN, in a sense, uncomplicated a very complicated story. Lost were the stories of WMAA and cycles of decline; lost were the cries of Uncle Tom and the heated exchanges between Cecil Moore and Raymond and Sadie Alexander; lost were the controversial policies of Beatrice Chernock and the death of Samson Freedman. The collective consciousness that emerged out of the West Mount Airy Oral History Project was one that minimized historical tensions within the community and threats and challenges from outside. Here, by crafting such a sanitized history, WMAN offered current residents a model for successful community organizing—but it perhaps failed to provide them with the tools to withstand the inevitable trials of long-term stability in the future.

Throughout 1993, members of the Historical Awareness Committee took their findings into the community, offering presentations throughout the region about the neighborhood’s integrationist past. On January 12, 1993, they spoke to ninety residents at the Lutheran Theological Seminary. On March 31, historian (and project participant) Dennis Clark lectured to seventy-one people at the Lovett Memorial Library, an event captured on tape and disseminated throughout the area. In September, they held a teacher workshop for twenty-one educators at the Cook-Wissahickon School. In November, they held two events for a combined 136 audience members, on interfaith service and neighborhood history. Although the numbers were relatively small, the committee was succeeding in spreading the findings of its study to neighbors and residents throughout the Mount Airy community.76

By the middle of the decade, there emerged subtle hints that these efforts were beginning to create a new consciousness, throughout the city, about the neighborhood’s integrationist past. In a January 1993 Inquirer article chronicling the centennial of the Pelham section of the neighborhood, Patricia Henning situated the origins of the West Mount Airy efforts toward interracial living in the years following World War II. “In 1951,” said Henning, “people here say, Pelham became the first area of the city to be successfully racially integrated, as African American doctors, lawyers, and judges began buying homes. Residents and churches organized to get people to sit down and talk and develop a community that was open to change.”77 A year later, in March 1994, Inquirer reporter Roxanne Jones wrote, “In the 1950s, when most of the nation’s neighborhoods were trying to discourage integration, a small group in West Mount Airy was working against the tide to encourage it.” Jones described in detail the efforts of WMAN in effectuating grassroots change, and once again cited Henning. “It drew upon the religious roots and fellowship of man,” she said, to urge support from residents.78 Whereas the 1980s saw features on West Mount Airy that spoke of the community’s reputation for diversity as timeless, painting racial tolerance there as a truism rather than a historical process, by the mid-1990s local coverage returned to celebrating the early intentionality and activism toward interracial living.79

In 1998, three scholars published an article on West Mount Airy in a special issue of Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, examining “racially and ethnically diverse urban neighborhoods.”80 Here, Barbara Ferman, Theresa Singleton, and Don DeMarco chronicled the community’s early efforts to create an integrated space, and while much of their research drew on secondary literature and analysis of census data, the authors also made use of both the transcripts and reports of the Oral History Project and the Inquirer articles of the mid-1990s.81 In assessing the effectiveness of organizing in Mount Airy, Ferman, Singleton, and DeMarco cited the region’s institutional and communal historical awareness as a key factor in the neighborhood’s success. A self-consciousness toward integration—and the ability to translate that self-consciousness about the past into meaningful lessons for the present—became a key step in the process of integration itself, wrote the authors.82

The narrative created by the West Mount Airy oral history initiative thus entered into public, scholarly, and policy conversations on the community’s integrationist legacy. The WMAN board invoked a sense of institutional authority to create an officially sanctioned memory of the neighborhood’s past, seeking to celebrate the historic effort toward interracial living, and to position the organization as the keystone of that effort. In this way, oral history became a dynamic vehicle through which to assert control over what came before and to call for community-wide grassroots change in the future. Here, neighborhood leaders worked to build a self-perpetuating engine, whereby this mindfulness of the past would foster engagement in the present, thus maintaining a sense of both economic viability and tolerance within the community. By promoting the narrative of the oral history project, the WMAN Historical Awareness Committee sought to bring new like-minded people into the community and orient them toward intentional living, thereby carrying on that sense of stable diversity.