{"id":8171,"date":"2014-10-28T00:07:27","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T04:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=8171"},"modified":"2014-10-30T20:17:03","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T00:17:03","slug":"saving-and-stretching-devils-pocket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2014\/10\/saving-and-stretching-devils-pocket\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving (and Stretching) Devil’s Pocket"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Devil's<\/a>
Devil’s Pocket – Behind Naval Home. January 28, 1919. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI have seen a pope, I have seen Julius Erving at the top of his game. I have seen a city administration burn down a neighborhood. I watched Randall Cobb slowly realize he would never become a heavyweight champion, of the world. One night I almost saw myself die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pete Dexter was saying<\/a> his long, gritty goodbye to Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

The night Dexter nearly saw himself die was in 1981, after he wrote a Daily News<\/i> column about a botched drug deal that resulted in murder. The deceased\u2019s brother, according to Dexter, \u201cbartended in Devil’s Pocket, which has got to be the worst neighborhood in the city\u2014maybe anywhere.\u201d And he was angry. But Dexter \u201cthought he could talk to him and work it out, so I went down there\u201d with Randall \u201cTex\u201d Cobb. Both Dexter and<\/em> Cobb nearly saw themselves die that night.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has been our good fortune that Pete Dexter did not die at the hands of those heroes with ballbats and tire irons,\u201d wrote Pete Hamill. \u201cHe has gone on to write some of the most original, and disturbing, novels in American literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn an age when words and storytelling were what counted, not bloviated ranting and raving, claimed Buzz Bissinger<\/a>, Dexter covered \u201cmore ground in 900 words than most writers could cover in 9,000.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI know the city,\u201d wrote Bissinger, \u201cand nobody has ever captured it the way Dexter has, shining his light on these punks and drunks and cops and hollowed-out men and women just hoping to grab on for one more day. Wherever there is loneliness in the city \u2014 and with the withering of its manufacturing and working-class roots, there\u2019s no shortage of loneliness \u2014 Dexter seems to find it.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Dexter also<\/em> found was the sense to appropriate Devils Pocket for the setting of his near-death experience. Doc\u2019s, the bar where Dexter and Cobb had their clocks cleaned, was at 24th<\/sup> and Lombard, a place more accurately called Grays Ferry, or Schuylkill, or possibly even (forgive me) the Graduate Hospital Area and a good half-mile away from Devil\u2019s Pocket, which, at Catherine and Taney Streets, is hard by the southwestern wall of the Naval Home.<\/p>\n

\"Caption\"<\/a>
“The Devil’s Pocket in Philadelphia, January 7, 1911.” (Google Books)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But none of those other neighborhood names fit Dexter\u2019s story as brilliantly as did Devil\u2019s Pocket.<\/p>\n

We can forgive the artistic license. After all, if not for Dexter’s storytelling, Devil\u2019s Pocket might have faded into the same gentrified oblivion where other Philadelphia neighborhood names of character have gone. (Who hears of Texas, Smoky Hollow, Beggarstown and Rose of Bath?)<\/p>\n

Devils Pocket has resonance; it always did. It worked in 1911 with William Paul Dillingham, who focused on Philadelphia\u2019s poor Irish in his study Immigrants in Cities<\/a><\/i>. Dillingham noted the small triangular court called Asylum Place, \u201cpopularly known as \u2018The Devil’s Pocket.\u2019\u201d He wrote of its ten two-story brick houses \u201cpoorly built and in bad repair\u201d overcrowded with a mix of newly arrived and first generation Irish. Residents of Devils Pocket got their jobs at nearby mills, their water from shared hydrants in small back yards where the “dry” toilets were. Just as nearby Gibbons Court<\/a>, drainage at the Devil\u2019s Pocket ran along the pavement.<\/p>\n

Devil\u2019s Pocket had been known as one of those places many Philadelphians heard about, talked about, and avoided. An 1898 bicycle tour (\u201cTrips Awheel,\u201d The Inquirer<\/i>, February 6, 1898) recommended bypassing this \u201cnest of unnameable lawlessness. The bicyclist\/journalist wouldn\u2019t venture west of Grays Ferry Avenue; he heard the stories and gave Devil\u2019s Pocket \u201ca wide berth even in broad daylight.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there\u2019d be no wide berth for Pete Dexter. Even if he had to fudge the coordinates of Devil\u2019s Pocket to help make the most of his<\/em> Philadelphia story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI have seen a pope, I have seen Julius Erving at the top of his game. I have seen a city administration burn down a neighborhood. I watched Randall Cobb slowly realize he would never become a heavyweight champion, of the world. One night I almost saw myself die.\u201d Pete Dexter was saying his long, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}