For a tiny band of Philadelphians, the MOVE confrontation has never ended.
All they need do is step out onto their block - Osage Avenue, ground zero for the lethal city bombing and fire May 13, 1985. Up and down the street, homes sit empty and decayed.
"It's not over, not by a long shot," said Ernest Hubbard, 67, one of a group of holdouts who have refused city payments to leave. "You don't forget it, because there's always something to remind you every day."
And for a time, when the ashes were still smoldering, just after the bodies of children were hauled out of the rubble, it seemed as if the entire city would never get the smoke out of its nostrils.
But a quarter-century after the disaster, which left 11 dead, 61 homes destroyed, and 250 people homeless, its legacy is uncertain.
For some, including Hubbard and his neighbors, the day remains unshakable in their minds.
"This unprecedented action by the city on Osage Avenue and on the MOVE members will, I think, forever be etched in the memory of the city and the nation," said Andre Dennis, the lawyer who represented MOVE leader Ramona Africa in her successful 1996 lawsuit against the city.
But for others, the disaster has faded from memory - and perhaps even from meaning.
"It kind of exists in its own strange zone," said playwright Thomas Gibbons, whose drama 6221 is named after the address of the MOVE compound.
MOVE was "so singular and so unique that what happened with them didn't really reverberate in the city or have any impact."
Certainly, among the far left and right nationwide, MOVE has been eclipsed by other deaths and other causes - Waco, Ruby Ridge, Mumia.
In the Philadelphia region, the fading imprint of the disaster seems to reflect MOVE's peculiar nature and Philadelphia's response to it.
While the cult was primarily African American, the disaster seemed to spawn little long-term racial tension, quite possibly because those whom MOVE victimized were also African American.
It certainly helped that the mayor and the managing director on May 13, 1985, were black. Indeed, even though W. Wilson Goode had presided over Philadelphia's most deadly municipal mishap, black voters rallied strongly behind him in 1987, when he won reelection.
It helped, too, that the MOVE Commission set up to investigate the disaster acted as a kind of domestic "truth and reconciliation" panel, swiftly holding televised hearings, publicly grilling Goode and his cabinet, dispelling rumors, and affixing blame.
