VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: A Town Without Pity

[Photos by JEFF DEENEY] EDITOR’S NOTE: This first ran on Phawker on August 26th, 2008. Sadly, it’s become no less current in the two years since we first published it. BY JEFF DEENEY For the next few weeks, the focus of Valley of the Shadow will shift to Chester, Delaware County. In 2008, Philadelphia experienced a significant reduction in homicides. That has not been the case in Chester. In fact, this month Chester saw six homicides in a single week, which for a city of only 35,000 is a staggering number. Before starting in on a series about Chester I […]

BEST OF: Our Favorite Albums Of 2009

LA ROUX — s/t The only reason I came to know of La Roux is because my disgruntled friend, Sam of Manchester, England, wouldn’t stop going on about how much he hated the album. We were going over sets for our next DJ event in Tokyo, discussing what kind of music to scrap and what to keep. “I can’t stand them,” he said of the British duo, “but Tokyoites eat it up. Throw it on, and they go nuts.” His eyebrows were furrowed, as always, forming a permanent scowl. “More proof that Japanese people have the shittiest taste in music,” […]

REWIND 2008: The Year In Obama

[EDITOR’S NOTE: New and improved, with more content than ever!] Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Obama in the White House, the Democrats in control of Congress and the motherf*king Republicans down in flames. If this is a dream, we don’t wanna wake up. Join with us now as we stroll down the memory lane of our in-house commentary and analysis on the 2008 Presidential election (for our complete coverage CLICK HERE). Like Same Cooke prophesied in 1963, a change has come. Truly a once in a lifetime moment in this American life. […]

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: The Lord Is My Shepherd

BY JEFF DEENEY The economic development plan to save Chester hinges on building a major league soccer stadium at the foot of the Commodore Barry Bridge. The $500 million dollar revitalization effort would include transforming Chester’s heavily industrial waterfront into a verdant river walk and building hundreds of thousands of square feet of new office space and condominiums. The coalition pushing for the development plan, KickStart Chester, have a website where you can watch the radical transformation of the vast, neglected vacant lots the stadium will sit on into an artists rendering of what the project will look like upon […]

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: Town Without Pity III

BY JEFF DEENEY There’s a street memorial on the corner of 10th and Tilghman Street in Chester so large that from a distance it looks like a growth engulfing the tree it sits under.  The memorial commemorates the night in April, 2006 when Carl “Bo” Johnson was shot and killed by a Pennsylvania State Police trooper.  The trooper was in Chester as a part of Operation Trigger Lock, a state run program aiming to sweep illegal guns off the streets.  The trooper responded to a call of shots fired in the area of the notorious Bennett Homes housing project and […]

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: No Prayer For The City

BY JEFF DEENEY My interest in Chester’s gang problem that resulted in this week’s City Paper article “Home Turf”  began a couple months back when I stopped to gas up a rented U-haul at the Sunoco station on 9th and Kerlin Street on the city’s Westside.  I had just moved some stuff into a storage facility off I-95 in nearby Chester Township and was on my way to return the truck.  I pulled up to the pump and went to pay cash at the register.  In the two minutes that I was gone some punk came along and spray painted […]

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: Town Without Pity II

BY JEFF DEENEY The memorial standing at the intersection of Green Street and McIlvain on Chester’s Eastside was erected to commemorate the anniversary of 19 year old John Strand’s death. Strand was shot in the chest after a street corner confrontation in the early evening of August the 7th, 2007 and died on the sidewalk as paramedics attempted to resuscitate him. I found Strand’s memorial while en route to the site of another homicide that just happened two blocks away. A piece of white poster board including loving messages from Strand’s mother, brother and other friends and family was propped […]

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: A Town Without Pity

[Photos by JEFF DEENEY] BY JEFF DEENEY For the next few weeks, the focus of Valley of the Shadow will shift to Chester, Delaware County. In 2008, Philadelphia experienced a significant reduction in homicides. That has not been the case in Chester. In fact, this month Chester saw six homicides in a single week, which for a city of only 35,000 is a staggering number. Before starting in on a series about Chester I sat down with someone acquainted with the city’s underworld, a former junkie and mid-level Delco drug runner called Cupcake. Cupcake spent the better part of 10 […]

TODAY I SAW: Hope In The Ruins

BY JEFF DEENEY Chester is the archetypal once-thriving small American city left to die in the post-industrial flux of globalization. The steel industry, ship building and other manufacturing that used to fuel the local economy have long since evaporated, the city’s population halved since its 1950s heyday. Chester today is largely black and extremely poor. Its economic decline is readily apparent to even the casual surveyor of its housing stock; boarded up, abandoned buildings and vacant store fronts with faded marquees dot the downtown streets. Some homes were neglected for so long that their roofs eventually caved in, causing the […]

AFTER INNOCENCE: Why The Caged Bird Sings

BY JEFF DEENEY Hearty and much-deserved congratulations go out today to Nick Yarris, whom the Inquirer reports received a heaping settlement in his wrongful imprisonment lawsuit against Delaware County. You might remember Yarris from the searing 2006 documentary, After Innocence, which profiled wrongfully convicted men exonerated by the nonprofit Innocence Project, a national coalition of legal clinics that advocates for the release of prisoners who can be conclusively proven innocent by DNA evidence. Yarris got tangled up with the law as a young drug addict in the early ’80s and through a series of unfortunate circumstances and bad decisions (which […]

CURRENTLY HOMELESS: A Few Good Men

  BY JEFF DEENEY A recent study indicates that some 200,000 American war veterans are currently homeless. Some 1,500 of those are Iraq War vets. The homeless services field has been anticipating the arrival of Iraq War vets in shelters and drop in centers across the nation since the war started. When I worked for the Philadelphia Committee to End Homelessness we regularly discussed how to handle the impending surge of vets that were bound to show up in the day center at 802 N. Broad. As of my departure from that agency a couple months ago we still hadn’t […]

CENSUS: Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Deader

BY JEFF DEENEY A lot of noise erupted in the media yesterday about what the new census poverty numbers mean. I thought it’s was a little soon for a victory lap, though Bush and the Red State regions of the blogosphere were quick to I-Told-You-So. “Poverty Numbers Decrease Substantially” was the headline on Drudge. Bush said, “More of our citizens are doing better in this economy, with continued rising incomes and more Americans pulling themselves out of poverty.” However, the fact is that the numbers mean different things for different regions, all of which are made up of different kinds […]

TODAY I SAW…

BY JEFF DEENEY “Today I saw…” is a series of nonfiction shorts based on my experiences as a caseworker serving formerly homeless families now living in North and West Philadelphia. I decided not long after starting the job that I was seeing so many fascinating and disturbing things in the city’s poorest neighborhoods that I needed to start cataloging them. I hope this bi-weekly column serves as a record of a side of the city that many Philadelphians don’t come in contact with on a daily basis. I want to capture moments not frequently covered by the local media, which […]