Last Saturday, Mayor Rendell and other Philadelphians with hearts in the right places put a seven-foot marker in the right place: 21st Street and Lehigh Avenue, site of Connie Mack Stadium. It belongs there for reasons far beyond historical correctness.
Once known as North Penn, or Swampoodle, depending on whom you talk to, the neighborhood around the old ballpark was once a thriving working-class community. It was parceled into little ethnic pockets: Irish to the east and west, Italians to the north, Jews in nearby Strawberry Mansion. Most residents were employed in the local industries and mills: Midvale Steel, Philco, Exide Batteries, Steel Heddle, the Budd Co., Baldwin Locomotive, TastyKake. Separately, they pursued their dreams.
But they were connected culturally, socially and spiritually by the ballpark at 21st and Lehigh. Nearly every home had its baseball stories. Many ballplayers even lived in rooming houses in the neighborhood. Philadelphia A's owner and manager Connie Mack walked from home to work and back.
In the mid-'50s, changes came. Labor costs began to rise, and some of the industries and mills relocated to the south or the suburbs. Some residents, with more money and more mobility (once they bought an automobile), moved to the suburbs. In 1954, the A's fled to Kansas City. And blacks began to move into the once all-white community. In an era of segregation, conflict followed.
``Riots came in August of 1964,'' writes Bruce Kuklick, author of To Every Thing a Season, a must-read on the old stadium and its neighborhood. ``Black anger was now at the doorsteps of the whites, and a white exodus became dramatic overnight.''
