What Chester Makes

“1 Killed, 8 Wounded at Teen Party.” The headline on HuffPo said it happened in Philly. Others on the web located it in a “Philadelphia suburb.” Only a few accurately pinpointed it in the city of Chester.

I grew up outside of Chester. My mother was born and raised there. It was a place we went to shop in the days before malls; from the municipal parking lot you could either walk up Seventh St. to the stores or (my preference) take the back way via a suspended footbridge over Chester Creek. My folks bought me clothes at Speare Brothers and my mother shopped at Weinberg’s, then maybe we’d have lunch at the Candy Kitchen or a soda at the Woolworth’s counter. Back in the days before sports figures earned big bucks, local baseball star Mickey Vernon (my second-cousin) worked at a Chester haberdasher during the off-season. A buddy and I might take a bus in to catch a movie at one of Chester’s four theaters. I went to college in Chester and for a couple of summers worked at a bank from which I could walk downtown to have lunch at John’s Doggie Shop, then maybe shop for records at Sears. I bought my first good guitar, a Gibson I still own, at a music store in Chester owned by the father of a friend of my aunt – six (or fewer) degrees of separation usually worked. A couple buddies of mine got apartments there after high school – it was no big deal then. It was just your typical small American city.

But shortly after I got out of college in 1970, Chester went into a long death spiral. Stores started relocating to suburban malls and shoppers started staying away. Soon the stores that hadn’t fled, failed. White flight followed. My grandmother and aunt still went in to patronize the York Store, a favorite outlet for bargains, but joked that they were the only white people shopping. Even though I continued to live in an apartment in the refined First Ward for another three years, I drove to the train station in Swarthmore for my commute to Philly (easier than hiking or busing to Chester’s) so rarely went downtown anymore. It had gotten to the point where you wouldn’t really want to. And just when everyone thought things couldn’t get any worse, the shipyard closed and they did.

For going on forty years, Chester has been a blight on the landscape: unemployment, poverty, structural decay, gang violence. (Even when I was in high school, we knew better than to attend an away football game with Chester High because its students were given to, let’s say, “intimidation.”) Some time back, more than ten years ago, my brother and I drove through downtown Chester on a Sunday morning when it was quiet and seemingly safe. It felt eerily like a ghost town, streets narrower than I recalled, metal grates pulled down over some storefronts, others empty, graffiti everywhere. Now I can cruise Chester with street-view on Google Maps and barely recognize anything. Efforts have been made to revitalize the city – a casino, a soccer stadium – but I doubt they’ve improved its citizens’ quality of life if the murder rate of the last couple of years is any indication. (A recent posting on Chowhound sought recommendations for a luncheon venue after Widener University’s graduation, wondering if there might be a place in Chester. The poster was obviously from out of town.)

When Obama whistle-stopped down to DC for his inauguration, the train didn’t stop at Chester. But I wonder if he got the message. There is – or at least was – a big sign visible from the train when you pulled into or out of the station: “What Chester Makes, Makes Chester.” (You can google on it.) Now that its chief product is violence, that message is no less true.

What happened in Tucson was unexpected and quickly politicized as a 2A issue. What happened in Chester was...well, what happens in Chester. But it points up the easy availability of firearms as much as the misery of that city.

And, as with Tucson, the fact that it made national headlines isn’t likely to change a damn thing.