A personal project

Joe Queenan's arms are outspread in wonder. In the small, vacant corner lot in the eastern part of East Falls, there are two cars parked and, maybe, room for a third.

The lot stands amid mostly stucco-faced rowhouses at the corner of Cresson and Bowman. Across the street are the tracks for the R-Whatever headed for Someplace-Elsewhere Queenan never could dream of going when he grew up here.

"It couldn't have been this small. For heaven's sake, this is where I learned about life. Len's Clothing couldn't have fit in here," says Queenan. "On the other hand, why would anyone ever come here?"

While Queenan is talking about Len's, the store at which he was a gofer several days a week from the time he was merely 8 until his early teens, he could have been emoting about the Philadelphia neighborhoods of his youth.

Queenan has written about growing up in working-class Irish American Philadelphia in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily in the Schuylkill Falls housing project, about eight blocks from this corner, in Closing Time: A Memoir (Viking, $26.95). He will talk about the book in the Skyline Salon of the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library, 1901 Vine St., at 1 p.m. Sunday. The event is part of the 2009 Free Library Festival.

Closing Time mostly explores the relationship between Queenan and his father, a hard-drinking, job-losing, well-read, often-abusive relic of his time. The Queenans - Joe has both an older and a younger sister - ended up in the projects because his father lost jobs at an alarming rate and drank seemingly incessantly. He strapped the kids with his belt at any minor indiscretion. But somehow he knew Shakespeare and Sinatra and the details of the Punic Wars.

It has taken Queenan, 58, a few decades to sort it all out. He is a successful writer - living since his early 20s in New York and its suburbs - mostly of satire, primarily in high-glare magazines like GQ.

But when he looks over the rise where his family's now-imploded Schuylkill Falls apartment stood, he is a conflicted boy again.

"See over there," he says, pointing toward a hazy visage of Liberty Place and the Comcast Center. "You can see a skyline now, but there was nothing back then. Billy Penn's hat didn't come up that high. We had no dreams of downtown big-city lights. Our only dream was to eventually get what we called 'off the project.' "

A fateful trip one day to buy a cheap set of school clothes at Len's, a whole six blocks away, was the key to that dream. Len Mohr, a bit of a crazy Iwo Jima vet, asked Queenan if he wanted to earn a few bucks clerking 10 or 20 hours a week.

"It is where I guess I got my affinity for losers," says Queenan with an uncomfortable laugh. "There were loser politicians and failed musicians and just plain old storytellers who used to come in there. But it got me off the project. The best thing a kid can have is a real boss to guide you. Today, a kid works for McDonald's. Who is the boss there but another, older kid? Len wasn't my pal, but he let me hear all these other people who came in and taught me how to work."

Back at the lot that was Len's, Queenan marvels at how his old boss stayed in business.

"There couldn't have been any foot traffic. Here's a train track and then there is no other retail for several blocks," he says. "I do remember one day we did $2 worth of business. My father said he was a bookie. Who knows?"

Queenan's father said a lot of things, most of which Queenan disdained and resented.

Barbed wire surrounded the project. The middle- and working-class families along places like Calumet Street and Ridge Avenue hated the idea that a government housing project was right in their faces, says Queenan.

"And they hated people like my father, who talked a lot but couldn't hold a job," he says. "My father, though, resented that his kids didn't want to be working class, which he really didn't either, but he drank and he was stuck with it."

While Queenan says he loves his Philadelphia roots, he doesn't pretend to cherish the Rocky mythology: "When I see people like Michael Moore do Roger and Me, I say [nonsense]. No one who works in a factory wants to stay there. Everyone wants to get out.

"Like, Stallone has this accent, but he grew up in the suburbs. All tough guys who talk a lot grew up in the suburbs," he says. "If you talk like that in South Philly, there are 100 guys who will smash you in the face. Those guys who brag about getting caught sneaking into Citizens Bank Park, they grew up in Lower Merion. The real tough guys sneak in and don't tell anyone about it."

Queenan, lanky and gray-haired, wears his Phillies hat all around the town where he lives, up the Hudson from New York City. He took his son and daughter, who are in their 20s, to the Phillies' last World Series game. "Nothing like it. It was the best night we ever had. Then we went to Broad and Walnut. New Yorkers wouldn't get it."

On the other hand, he had a tough time rooting for Villanova in the NCAA men's basketball tournament. Queenan went to Cardinal Dougherty High School and St. Joseph's University. Villanova, he says, is just too preppy for a real Philadelphian. "It says something good about real Philadelphians that they would rather root for Penn, the Ivy League school in the city, than for Villanova, which is just someplace else."

His father died a few years ago, not quite appreciating that Queenan had gotten off the project.

"The previous generation is supposed to revel in their children's success. My father could never come to that. He somehow resented it. He wanted to be his own child, I guess," says Queenan, who admits it is a bit of a failing of his that he can't yet quite forgive his father for his emotional non-support.

Queenan says his favorite story in the book is about when his father persuaded him to shovel snow at an East Falls house his dad said was the Kellys', as in brickwork magnate John and his daughter Grace.

"It seemed right. Whenever we would go there, people would come out and give us hot chocolate and cake or something. I thought it was their butlers or whatever," says Queenan. So when he came back to research the book, he told his sisters about it and they told him that wasn't the Kelly house at all. "Another instance of my father trying to be better than we ever were. Those people probably owned the house and were just being nice.

"Still, it's why I love Philadelphia," he says. "You can be screwed up and people will just go along with it."