Rocks through Windows
By Michael J. Carroll
It was New Years night 1981 when the rocks came crashing through the windows of our Kensington apartment. We had returned from the movies after seeing the Martin Scorsese film “Raging Bull,” the story of the tortured Bronx boxer Jake LaMotta, who did his best to destroy himself and everyone around him, especially everyone he wanted to love him. We found our friends sweeping up glass and keeping a wary eye on the street below.
It turned out it was an honest mistake on the part of the stone throwers. They had heard Spanish spoken by our guests and mistakenly assumed they were Cubans from the Mariel Boatlift that brought thousands to the U.S. in 1980.
In fact our guests were Mexican friends visiting the City of Brotherly Love for the holidays. There were very few Mexicans in Philadelphia then and the stoners had probably not yet developed a position on the Mexican Question. Maybe they would have behaved better with better information. Probably not.
The police wrote a report. There was not a lot of law enforcement time and effort expended and no arrests made. It was Kensington after all. No one died and no one was hurt, at least not physically hurt.
We had to do something, so we quizzed the corner boys. They gave up a name and we paid a visit to the row home of one of the stone throwers. He was a jerk but in the light of day, not a very scary one. His thin pale mother was a hard-working single parent doing the best she could with teenage children spinning out of control.
The family offered something between explanation and justification. They had lived in another Philly neighborhood where they were the minority. They said their own windows had been smashed and they were forced to flee. We could understand that, couldn’t we? We tried to follow the twisting connection between their stones and ours, but it was not so easy.
They agreed to pay off our damages in monthly installments. The kid actually made a few payments before he disappeared.
Stone throwing stories were not so unusual in the bad old days and this episode was mild compared to some. The infamous Albert street incident happened a few years earlier and a few blocks away when a Latino family moved into a house on the wrong side of the El, only to be run out by racist vandals shortly after arriving. They not only threw bricks and stones, they tore the house apart as a lesson to both the folks who tried to move in and the owner who tried to rent or sell to them. Stones were preferable to firebombs, which were not tossed often, but
when they
were, often to deadly effect.
In those same years Sylvester Stallone was in the filming his hit Rocky movies set in Kensington. the saga of another boxer, unlike Jake Lamotta, a middle of They told make believe boxer, a Kensington underdog who beat the odds. Rocky told a warmer kinder truth with no stone throwing, and no psychotic Raging Bull. Two different neighborhood tales, both with some truth, both with some dreams and some nightmares.
Times change. Neighborhoods change. Even people sometimes change, they say. The bad old days have faded some. You can walk around lots of old Philly neighborhoods now, hear Spanish spoken, and see black and brown faces along with white ones.
I checked the directory address of the apartment where the rocks flew thirty years ago. The family living there now is named Baez.
Michael Carroll