Dead End Street Read Online Free Page A

know. I don’t either, really, and I’ve lived here a lot longer than you. What I was thinking is that you could go through the development records and see if there is anything on the original gift. And in addition to that, you can pull what we have about North Philadelphia.”
    â€œI know enough to stay out of the place,” Shelby said firmly. “Apart from that, that’s a job for a researcher.”
    â€œI know—if we move forward with this, which I haven’t promised, I was thinking it might be a good project for Lissa. But for now, just see if you can find anything on the property in our files, will you? I’m going to go see it this afternoon, and maybe after that I’ll have a better handle on things.”
    Shelby sighed, mostly for effect. “All right, I’ll check on it. What’s the address?”
    â€œ387 Bickley Street, in the city.”
    Shelby wrote a note on a pad. “It’s not some gorgeous decaying mansion, is it?”
    â€œI’m told it’s a row house, minus the rest of the row. Kind of like the last tooth in an old neighborhood’s mouth.”
    â€œMy, you have a way with words. You want to grab lunch first?”
    â€œSure. I’ll need my strength. I’ll meet you back here at noon.”
    I went back to my office and sat at my desk, thinking. I was not a native Philadelphian. Although I had lived and worked in or around the city for more than a decade, I wasn’t intimately familiar with the histories of the individual neighborhoods, though I could give a pretty fair summary of the history of the city in its earliest years. But for the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, I had little to offer. I knew vaguely that some areas had once been home to prosperous industries, and that their workers had lived nearby. I also knew that such neighborhoods, in Philadelphia and many other major cities, had their own life cycles; that the industries had become obsolete and closed, or had migrated to the suburbs during the last century, leavingbehind neighborhoods that had declined slowly and inexorably. I had a feeling I was going to see one of those today.
    I grabbed a couple of books about Philadelphia history from my shelves. Leafing through them, I found a useful list of major manufacturing establishments in the earlier twentieth century. I was surprised to see that sugar refining topped the list by a wide margin, until I remembered that the Jack Frost refinery had once occupied a substantial piece of land just the other side of the Schuylkill River. Now long gone. If I recalled correctly, it had been shut down in the 1980s. Iron and steel mills ranked next—also gone. The rest of the list made interesting reading: it included paper, leather and textile makers, meatpacking, ice cream—that made me smile, because Breyers Ice Cream had been founded in Philadelphia right after the Civil War and was still making ice cream products. The city’s northeast district had consistently been one of the most populous since the nineteenth century.
    I felt mildly embarrassed as I read along. I knew about the early settlement of the city, along the waterfront, and its gradual migration inland as the city grew, but much of my knowledge ended with the construction of City Hall, finished in 1901, which was kind of hard to miss. I had never had much cause to pay attention to the rise of industries and their shifting distribution, and had given little thought to the impact of those changes on the inhabitants of various parts of the city. Did that make me a snob? Concerned only with the rich and important citizens and what buildings and artifacts they’d left behind? It seemed that I was not doing my job, or not all of it.
    Shelby and I went out and grabbed a quick sandwich, and then returned to our respective desks. I did a little more reading, so at least I could ask the right questions during our excursion. At five