Center City Philadelphia is home to the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and a new Constitution Center whose opening ceremonies, in the city’s time-honored tradition of self-inflicted wounds, featured a scaffolding that fell down and almost killed a U.S. Senator on national television. Center City is also home to the country’s oldest hospital and oldest Jewish cemetery, an astonishingly lovely City Hall built in the French Renaissance Revival style, and a huge convention center that hosts very few conventions because members of unions that work there have had highly publicized fist fights on the convention floor over jurisdictional issues, and occasional confrontations with convention exhibitors who attempt to play scab by moving their own tables and chairs without union assistance.
Society Hill, which is flat as a pancake, is another Center City treasure. As recently as the nineteen-fifties it was just another rundown part of town, and the federalist gems that abound here served mostly as boarding houses. During World War II, when the city experienced a brief burst of post-Depression prosperity based on ship building at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and the free-spending of sailors on shore leave, they functioned as bawdy houses as well.
This was the era when a local cop named Frank Rizzo, who would later become
one of America’s most colorful and controversial mayors, got his “Cisco Kid” nickname. He got it by wearing two guns, cowboy style, when busting through the front doors of this district’s houses of ill-disrepute while the houses’ occupants left by the back doors and waited patiently outside until the press had departed and they could get back to work.
When the city’s powerful real estate interests finally decided this boarding house-bawdy house image needed to be refurbished, the tool that enabled the process to begin was a name change. Some unheralded local genius pointed out that a lot of housing stock here resembled, in a run-down sort of way, similar housing stock in Boston’s flourishing Beacon Hill. Philly’s Tenderloin flatlands were dully rechristened Society Hill and the rest is real estate history. Today, only the most senior senior vice-presidents and the best-connected lawyers can afford one of this flat hill’s fully restored Federalist gems.
Of course, while the Center City housing of Society Hill around Fourth or Fifth and Locust streets is very pricey indeed, you go a little north or south, or into the higher numbered streets closer to Broad, and things change rather dramatically. These areas are still nice, mind you, and often even charming. But you’ll find more starter dwellings than I-did-it-my-way show pieces, along with a fair number of still funky digs accommodating the housing needs of University Of The Arts students.
Though less upscale, this precinct is in many ways more interesting. Between Tenth and Twelfth streets there’s a strong gay presence. Nearby there’s a three-theater theater district, a few dozen restaurants of varying quality, the predictable dating bars, and numerous outposts or satellites of Jefferson University Hospital, an institution that seems intent on one day devouring the entire area and turning it into a medical campus.
For those who fancy urban walking tours and off-beat city design, Center City offers another fascinating attraction. A slew of alley-like streets lined with narrow row houses, many of which were constructed about the time Washington was being invaded by the British during the War of 1812. Maids, footmen, gardeners and stablehands who didn’t merit upstairs rooms in the dwellings of local nineteenth century aristocrats once occupied these row houses. These days they are largely owned by young professionals.
Down one of these charming alleyways, Irving Street, strolled a nondescript sort of person of average height and weight, with dark blond or light brown hair, eyes that might have been brown though they could also have been green or blue, with no visible scars or tattoos. His attire was equally unmemorable. Some kind of jacket, jeans, brown shoes that could be loafers but then again maybe not.
That’s how this individual would probably have been described by anyone who actually noticed him. Which wasn’t likely, because he was careful to be here in the early afternoon after garbage men and mailmen had done their thing, when lunchtime passersby had largely cleared out of the area, and when most people who actually lived on Irving Street were at work. It was also a time when this stroller’s tipster at the Roundhouse had told him that Bernie Kahn would be occupied for a few more hours by police interviewers.
The man stopped in front of Kahn’s Irving Street row house and let drop a quarter he had been idly flipping as he walked. He bent over as if to pick it up, leaning close to Kahn’s front door as he did so. Very quickly, with no wasted motions, a tube of Super Glue came out from a jacket pocket. Gobs were surreptitiously smeared in the door’s lock along with tiny bits of metal, permanently sealing the tumblers. Other gobs were smeared along the rim of the door’s mail slot, sealing that as well.
As quickly as it had come out, the Super Glue was returned to the man’s pocket. He picked up the quarter he’d dropped on the sidewalk and looked around as if he were seeking another lost coin. After a few more seconds of phony searching he shook his head in a gesture of feigned exasperation at his non-existent loss and walked away.
Though these theatrics were almost certainly unnecessary the man did them anyway. It was an extra precaution taken by someone who was by nature exceptionally cautious. It was also part of a routine he had mastered over the years, a routine he had come to enjoy for its own sake, something he was convinced gave his work another layer of professionalism. As he turned the corner of Irving onto Ninth Street he thought:
‘Bernie, Bernie, Bernie. Why do I have to go to all this trouble? You can’t win. Figure that out and life gets easier for both of us.’
