David Goodis (Temple ‘38) had his picture taken with Bogart and Bacall when the film Dark Passage (1947) was in production. It was his novel that was being filmed, and he had been rewarded with a fat contract to write screenplays. He failed to produce. Not only his writing but his personal demeanor were found unsound. He wore threadbare, black-dyed suits into the jackets of which he’d sewn upscale labels; he slept on a friend’s couch rather than rent an apartment; he made pratfalls down flights of steps in efforts to induce lawsuits. This David would refuse party invitations from beautiful women and, instead, drive to South Central L.A. (with a cap pistol on hand) attempting to find enormous women who would inflict upon him the sharp edges of their tongues, and maybe other scintillating objects. In the early 1950s, David Goodis returned to his parents’ home on North 11th Street in Philadelphia’s Logan section, where he wrote paperback crime novels for Fawcett Gold Medal and The Lion Library1. In format, these productions were more book-a-zines than books proper. They evolved from the pulps, had illustrated covers by painters who got their start working for detective, western, and men’s magazines, and were touted by Hollywood-tested blurb teasers. On sale at locations which also carried new and back date magazines, they appealed to popular curiosities, fears, resentments, and wish fulfillments. Goodis’ titles–Street of No Return, Of Tender Sin, The Moon in the Gutter, The Blonde on the Street Corner, Somebody’s Done For, Black Friday–reinforce the cover illustrations. The package suggested to readers that it was worth investing a quarter for the page-turner ("This Street of Prostitutes, Workers, Dope-pushers, and Lost Souls"; "The Street Never Lets You Go"; "They Gave Him Back His Badge–and Sent Him down into the Brutal Throbbing Heart of the Slums). You wanted midnight streets with ashcans in the gutters? Snarling winos, cats and dogs in the alleys? Sneering teenagers in leather jackets on the steps of the tenement houses, from the windows of which leaned red-lipped girls in tight blouses with a defiant hunger in their faces? From these familiar cliches must have seeped vibrantly prurient, intensely personal fantasies, or they would not have sold. Cassidy’s Girl (1951) sold over a million copies.
The parcel of Philly real estate known as Goodisville is permanently blighted. The writer heightens the nightmare dangers of the industrial neighborhoods he describes: menacing gangs, derelicts, thieves, rapists, tenement buildings, row houses, wooden "shacks," bars, ratty warehouses, dank alleys, rubbish-strewn vacant lots, and cobbled streets. It’s an archetypal asphalt jungle.
The majority of the novels were set in Skid Row, the Delaware River docks, Kensington, Southwark, and Port Richmond. Three of these areas are truly lost to contemporary Philadelphians. Working class Southwark is now Queens Village, most of which is increasingly upscale. Dock Street, overlooking the waterfront and once the center of a sprawling and cacophonous produce market, is now the location of independent film theaters, and of the Society Hill Towers apartments. Skid Row fell to redevelopment plans over thirty years ago; the derelicts, the fleabag hotels, and the Sunday Breakfast Association have long been unlamented. Goodis chose these neighborhoods and their people to describe in stories that were not only a mirror of his inner despair, but also threw a clear light on what life was like down there. The novels are socially, politically, and psychologically acute. What did a tightly-wound, reclusive Jewish writer from a middle class area of North Philly make of these now extinct hard-boiled areas of the industrial city, where gang boys grew up to become racketeers or their minions, heavy industry bought the breadwinner’s labor, and the churches preached patience, loyalty, and sacrifice? He saw what he saw in himself, and what those who rank him among the best noir crime writers see in his work: compulsions which people of all classes keep circling around as moth to flames, and which they must find a way to endure, if they are not fated to fall into the fire.
Southwark (now Queens Village) is one of Philadelphia’s oldest places of continuous habitation. It boasts Old Swedes Church, a military vantage point called The Shot Tower, and some of the compact London-style town houses with their dormer windows that impressed Goodis’ French biographer when he visited in the 1970s. Bordered generally on the north by South or Mifflin Streets, on the south by Snyder or Washington Avenues, on the west by Seventh Street, and on the east by Fourth Street or the Delaware River, Southwark in Goodis’ time was a working class area where dock workers and stevedores lived with their families. At first a ship building center, it grew after the Civil War on the strength of immigrants who were able to walk to work on the river. Many of Southwark’s Jews, Poles, Hispanics, Italians, Russians, Lithuanians, Lebanese, and Irish first saw America at the Washington Avenue dock. At sugar refineries, alcohol and distilling plants, the vast produce terminals along Dock Street, slaughter houses, power generators, lumber and salt companies, machine shops, iron foundries, railway yards, and steamship berths, residents labored for themselves and their families, establishing multi-generational roots. The waterfront at Southwark was a place of hard work, hard drinking, and rough and ready resourcefulness. In the earlier years of the 20th century, Delaware Avenue featured many bars for the sailors and stevedores. A few barkeeps raised fighting dogs and roosters for underground gambling venues. When wind and rain sent the river into the Avenue, the men could earn free booze by helping bail out saloon cellars2.
Southwark did not follow the usual progression of inner city locales from upscale to commercial to slum. It began, and stayed, lower middle class, blue collar, and industrial. This is how Goodis knew it, although by the 50s its social cohesion was breaking down. After World War II, factories wished to expand but could not find the space, unless they took over large structures such as churches, which they could do only after their congregations moved away, so that family breadwinners could find work. Many candy, grocery, and cigar stores were shuttered as the decade wore on3. The 1950 census is revealing. The score of tracts into which the area was divided indicate varying conditions. Census tracts in the south and central parts of Southwark were still functional, if declining, working class areas, with incomes dependent predominately on jobs in factories and on dockside and construction labor. Mean income was almost up to the city wide level, although percentages of home owners, and of centrally heated residences, were significantly below, except in the south central neighborhood. But the tracts just south of South Street, and to some extent near the river, were another story. These were the areas where many African Americans resided. (About one quarter of the whites was foreign born.) In the waterfront areas between South and Mifflin Streets, unemployment was 10% (it stood at 6.3% city wide). In northern Southwark just south of South Street and east of Broad, over 80% of dwellings lacked central heating, while further to the east, 40% lacked it. City wide, 92% of homes had this amenity. As for income, the small census tract between Washington and Ellsworth reported a median average yearly income of only $1125 (city-wide, the figure was $2869); the African American tracts directly to the north reported a median of no more than $20004. It should be noted that Blacks were important in the more stable Southwark communities as well, making up between from about 10 to 30 percent of the population.
Philadelphia police statistics show that Southwark (the Second [Police] Division) ranked second highest in 1950 arrests. The total was 1123, with nearly half of those for vice and gambling offenses5. In 1959, Southwark’s 33rd police district totaled 3041 arrests, the 5th highest number in the city, with 1401 of these for "drunkenness." The area did not experience a relatively large number of major crimes, but vices, especially gambling, alcohol abuse and attendant offenses, such as disorderly conduct and assaults, were rampant6.
By the late 1950s, when the upscale Old City was being planned, officials disingenuously began to worry about this off-putting "strip of blight."7 They sensed that working class folks, with their shabby clothes, insularity, and consequent bad temper and worse manners to newcomers, did not sort well as neighbors for a prime consumer group of upwardly mobile young adults. In the early 1960s, three high-rise skeletons of Southwark Plaza began to surround Old Swedes Church. The Bulletin wrote about the residents of Washington Avenue and Christian Street between 3rd and 5th Streets being annoyed by a neighborhood "eyesore." The newspaper meant the deteriorating state of the Union Burial Grounds, not the new high rises8. With modern apartment houses upgrading the neighborhood, that neglected historical site was finally being attended to, as an attraction to their new tenants.
Sensitive to being a writer about his native city, Goodis uses real names of major thoroughfares, sections, and landmarks, but not of the locations on which his characters live and work. For example, Delaware Avenue becomes Wharf Street or River Street. The Street of the Lost (1953) is called Ruxton. Starting at the freight yards at 8th Street, it sidles snake-like down to 6th, and runs straight for two blocks before curving again and dead ending smack against a warehouse. Across the alley from where the protagonist, Chet Lawrence, lives with his wife and in-laws, there is an African American community. And Ruxton, since it is in Goodisville, "glimmered and glistened like a snake, . . . wet with saliva and phlegm and urine and spilled wine and whisky and homemade powerhouse." The street’s families live in wooden dwellings and share it with poolrooms, taverns, and--for guys who still had dough after the wagering and the drinking--at least one cat house.
Ruxton is pitilessly hard boiled. So is Vernon, where, in The Moon in the Gutter (1954), Stevedore William Kerrigan lives with his alcoholic brother, his roustabout father, and two women who with their breasts, waists, and butts fully "packed" into their large frames meet Goodis’ criteria for seductive. The women are his father’s 3rd wife Lola and her aptly-named daughter Bella. Both are bad-tempered, fat, belligerent, and quick with their fists, as is Chet Lawrence’s old friend Bertha ("you wanna fight someone, fight me"); Ruxton Street’s madam, 400 pound Tillie; and Chet’s sister in law Connie. Taking the first floor so the upper stories can be rented, the Kerrigans are the fourth generation of their family to live in the three-story wood frame house, which must have been built when the seafaring trades were the area’s mainstay. They are fated to go through life "on a fourth class ticket." So are their neighbors, "Armenians, Ukrainians, Norwegians, Portuguese, and various mixed breeds." Puerto Ricans and African Americans live on Vernon also. "Dirty-faced kids play in the gutter"; bottle gangs and prostitutes are as common as the saloons; rackets flourish in opium, gambling, and rotgut bootleg.
There is no Vernon Street in Southwark, but there is a Fernon, between Taker and Morris but narrower than those, although similarly residential and still multi-racial. East Fernon runs from Broad to Front Street, intersected near Fourth by Dickinson Square. "The poet of the losers" exaggerates as well as dramatizes the degrading conditions which characterize his settings. Contemporary citizens of Southwark, the Northern Liberties, Kensington, and Port Richmond who spent their lives working, raising families, and maintaining the integrity of their neighborhoods would justifiably be upset if they read his books. But if so, the poverty and neglect he describes in an American inner city in the two decades after World War II is, as we