Bridesburg

A Philadelphia police officer who wound up near Newark, N.J., instead of Bridesburg when transporting a rape victim is not likely to face disciplinary action, police officials said yesterday. Investigators were reluctant to discuss the incident but said Officer Margo Grady took a child and mother from the 23d District in North Philadelphia to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital to be checked after reporting a sexual assault Saturday night. After the child was examined, Grady was ordered to bring the child and mother to the Special Victims Unit at the Frankford Arsenal in Bridesburg.

When Monsignor Bernard Witkowski of Bridesburg joins Pope John Paul II concelebrating Mass in Poland Monday, it will seem like old times. The Polish-speaking pastor of St. John Cantius Catholic Church on Almond Street has been traveling to Poland for such meetings since 1976, when he met the future pope as Karol Wojtyla, the dynamic cardinal of Krakow. "I never thought about him being a pope, but I knew he was an outstanding man, hearing him talk, with his command of language," said Witkowski, 64, before his midweek translantic flight.

For a generation, residents of Bridesburg and Port Richmond, two of the city's most tightly woven communities, have lived in the shadow of Interstate 95 and the Betsy Ross Bridge. As crickets chirp lullabies in neat suburban cul-de-sacs, working-class families in these riverfront rowhouses are serenaded by idling big rigs and the rattle of walls shaken by thundering trucks. "Sometimes you wonder, when you hear the rumble, if it's going to knock your house apart," said Harry Engasser of Plum Street in Bridesburg.

Services will be held today for Stephanie Jesiolowski, matriarch and community "cornerstone" who didn't fear taking a chance and, along with her husband, opened what might have been Bridesburg's first flower shop almost 50 years ago. The lifelong resident of Bridesburg died Thursday. She was 79. The Jesiolowskis opened their business, Ideal Florists, in 1950 in their home on Thompson Street near Orthodox, just a half block down the street from where "Stephie" was born and raised.

John Pezak, 84, of Bridesburg, a former sheet-metal worker, government employee and state legislator, died of congestive heart failure Sunday at Immaculate Mary Nursing Home. He had been in declining health for five years. Mr. Pezak was born in Mayfield, Lackawanna County, and grew up and was educated in the nearby town of Jessup. He left school at 16 to work, first as a mine laborer and later as a store clerk, huckleberry picker, labor recruiter and meat-cutter. He came to the Philadelphia area in 1940 and was a sheet-metal worker in shipyards in Camden and Philadelphia.

As if Philadelphia isn't losing employers fast enough, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation now is chasing them away. PennDOT says it needs to build long-delayed access ramps to Interstate 95 in Bridesburg, even if it means that companies in the path of the bulldozer have to move - or even shut down permanently. City officials are supporting the ramps - not the companies. Already closed is Patrick & Sons a 47-year-old family-owned metal forging plant that employed six workers.

For three years, a small industrial area just south of the Betsy Ross Bridge has had the dubious distinction of registering the highest airborne levels of lead contamination in the nation. Air-quality monitors have frequently registered up to 12 times the allowable amount of lead in emissions from a smelting plant near Delaware and Castor Avenues. Emissions have been considered so serious that workers at the neighboring Philadelphia Gas Works were issued masks and told they could leave work if they felt they were being exposed to pollutants.

'TOO GOOD' TO LIVE WITH HARD-WORKING BRIDESBURGERS? I am enraged at the letters about the Bridget Ward issue, but one particularly. Someone said Ward did the right thing in moving out of Bridesburg because she was too good for that "racist" neighborhood. My parents grew up in Bridesburg, children of parents who worked their fingers to the bone. My grandparents sacrificed all they could and more for their family. My parents are the same way. My mother, Kathleen, has been working a full-time job in addition to raising her children properly, which is more than a job in itself.

Cheers to Bridget Ward, who finally left Bridesburg. I would have left after the first incident. Not out of fear but I wouldn't want my offspring exposed to such enormous ignominy. Bridget, come back among your own (human beings) and sit back and watch these hatemongers drown in their cesspool. Because sooner or later, you'll read about them turning on one another. JEAN PRINGLE Philadelphia Once again, my "so-called" black leaders had an opportunity to redeem themselves by demonstrating their ability to handle the Bridesburg incident.