by Nathaniel Popkin
April 27, 2007
There is The Skyline and all the little skylines. There is steel and there is brick. There are deals and there are people.
People are funny.
Forever, it seems, there has been a hardware store on Tenth Street between Manning and Locust, just behind the brutalist Jefferson Alumni Hall
building. Washington Square Paint
and Hardware opened in 1979 at 247, where the senior Coffee Cup is now, and a few years later moved to a handsome old-school mercantile building at
257.
You recognize the store by the brooms and trash cans displayed neatly under the awning.
I woke up this spring to find not only Washington Square Paint and Hardware but also 10th Street Hardware: two where there was one, double the caulk
and all kinds of fun. Only
Washington Square, whose owner John McIntyre I'd recognized from years of walking by, had moved to 243, closer to Locust. 10th Street Hardware now
occupied the old Washington
Square store at 257.
A little skyline has changed a little bit.
No cranes, but brooms, now marigolds and pansies. This is a story of human ambition, fairness, hope, and friendship. It's a story of two men who
worked together for over two
decades. Now they both want to sell you nails.
John says he fired Troy ("For his mistake," quips Troy.). Troy says they were partners. A City Paper article cites them as co-owners. But
Troy's boyfriend Steven owns
257 and in response he evicted John and gave Troy the space to himself instead. Maybe John always had doubts about their partnership. Maybe he feared
Troy's ambition. All I know is
they are two men with bright expressions and busy stores. John tells me about his long neighborhood involvement -- he's treasurer of the McCall
Elementary Home and School
Association (his adopted sons -- "good Philly boys" -- are in grades two and four). Maybe he tells me this because he feels defensive about what's
transpired. Troy, for the
record and not wishing to sound critical of John, doesn't want to put details "in the paper."
"Come back in a month," he says.
But I don't need to. It doesn't matter. The point is that this is how the little skyline -- really most of the city -- constantly changes, on our
backs, as we as human beings
negotiate, get angry, fall in love, curse and fight and prance. John is able to stay on the block because long ago he'd made friends with the owners
of 243, where two half-moon
balconies dress the awning. The Shicks were using the first floor as a warehouse for their emporium in Chinatown. Before that, when the Horn and
Hardart's bakery was just across
Locust Street, his store was the H and H second-day shop.
You know this block because of what's always been there -- the Locust Bar, the 10th Street Pour House, the Greek travel agency -- and yet despite this
wonderful, heavy
Phil-inertia, it is always evolving. Not with thrusts of steel and glass, but pride and fear and long, long hours making do.
Now, once more on Tenth Street you can buy your patio petunias, absent since a spate of ill-fated plant stores failed a few years back. Now you don't
have to drive up to Second
and Girard for Benjamin Moore paint. Now take your choice, but don't -- don't -- head down to Delaware Avenue.
–Nathaniel Popkin
nrpopkin@gmail.com
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