Philadelphia Noir

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C’mon, Ben Franklin and noir? The Framers and noir? George I-Cannot-Tell-a-Lie Washington and noir? According to the national mythology, and even our local creation tale about William Penn’s “Greene country towne,” Philadelphia Blanc makes a more sensible title for a volume of local stories than Philadelphia Noir. This, after all, is where all of America’s greatness and goodness and idealism began.

Betsy Ross dangling a cigarette from her lip? Abigail Adams two-timing John with a local punk?

You could say that was then, and this is noir.

But you’d be wrong. Read any of the eighteenth-century scholars who love colonial Philadelphia more than their own parents or kids, and you know that some pretty bad defecation was going down in our cobblestoned streets back then, and it got even worse.

By the 1830s and ’40s, Philadelphia’s antiblack and anti-Catholic riots guaranteed a steady number of bashed heads and windows. Readers innocent of the real Philadelphia may want to consult historian Gary Nash’s fine First City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and learn of our antebellum street gangs, “the Moyamensing Killers, Gumballs, Bloodtubs, Scroungers, Hyenas, Bedbugs, Swampoodle Terriers, Nighthawks, Flayers, and Deathfetchers.”

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