Vol. 98: A tale of two communities

…with zero help from you-know-who

I heard this story during one of three summers I spent in the early ’50s at Camp MacJannet, a unique international camp in the French Alps. The tale is probably apocryphal, but no matter: It has exercised a powerful influence on me ever since, as you will see.

Following France’s liberation in 1944, the story went, many French communities planned festivities to celebrate their deliverance from Nazi bondage. One such town came up with a unique expression of the communal ideal: Every local household would pour a bottle of wine— red, white, rosé, whatever— into a giant container. These wines would then be stirred into a communal cocktail. A local war hero would be given the honor of tasting this special concoction, after which the rest of the townspeople would savor the result as well.

As the story was recounted by Donald MacJannet, our camp’s idealistic director, the town’s richest man happened to be a wine connoisseur who maintained an extensive collection of rare vintages in his cellar. The thought of parting with even one of his precious wines— not to mention debasing it in a mixture of inferior swill— was more than he could bear. So instead of contributing one of his bottles to the communal container, he poured in a bottle of water. When this water was mixed with wines from hundreds of his neighbors, he reasoned, who would notice?

You may guess what happened. At the opening ceremony, the honored war hero turned the spigot, filled his glass, tasted the communal libation… and grimaced. The community’s collective brew, it turned out, consisted entirely of water. Like the richest man in town, everyone else had assumed that nobody would notice if they added a single bottle of water to all that wine.

Our gentrified block

Now cross the Atlantic and jump ahead half a century. Since 1982 Barbara and I have lived on a narrow residential street in the heart of Philadelphia. Today it’s a prized location: two blocks from the glittering Avenue of the Arts, three blocks from the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, and four blocks from Rittenhouse Square, the Curtis Institute of Music, Liberty Place, and some of the best restaurants on the East Coast. But in retrospect, we seem like urban pioneers: Our home is one of five identical townhouses constructed that year, but for several years we had no immediate neighbors because the other houses stood empty and unsold.

The current gentrified inhabitants of our block, like the Black domestic servants and caterers who lived there after the Civil War, live today cheek-by-jowl in a jumble of narrow houses, few of them more than 16 feet wide. So what changed?

After World War I, the mansions of Rittenhouse Square gave way to apartment buildings, and the demand for the domestic servants who lived on our block declined. But after World War II, the white middle-class fled Center City for the suburbs, so our block retained its exclusively Black character until the mid-1960s, when the white artist Sam Maitin took a studio there. The last of the old Black domestic servant families— a husband and wife named Dobson— died in the mid-1980s, a few years after we arrived.

By then our block had been extensively gentrified, with residents representing diverse occupations, races, religions, and gender preferences. Our block organization, organized in 1984, spent the next 30 years planting trees and flowers, removing graffiti. replacing unsightly barbed wire gates, commissioning a mural, and organizing town watches. We also created a snow removal fund to pay for plowing, since the city often couldn’t afford to plow small streets like ours. Each summer we closed the street for a Sunday afternoon block party, to which everyone contributed a dish of their choice….

Say, are we starting to sound like that village in France?

These communal activities were motivated by our subconscious perception that cultivating friendly relations with our neighbors would enhance our lives while simultaneously driving up our property values. In 2001, when the Kimmel Center opened just three blocks away, home prices on our block doubled, and many residents (including us) found themselves living in houses they couldn’t afford to buy today. By then, the street was home to a half-dozen lawyers and two doctors, presumably reflecting the neighborhood’s growing affluence.

Appealing property taxes

The Covid pandemic nearly five years ago curtailed these block activities, and reviving them is no easy task: In the interim, some neighbors have died and others have moved away. As my grandson sagely observed seven years ago, when he was 13, the addition or removal of even one person can radically alter the nature of any group. Building community is a fragile undertaking.

I mention this background because, each year, the city levies a hefty tax on property owners, based on the assessed valuation of our homes. Since the value of our homes has risen sharply over the years, so has the size of our tax bills. It’s tempting to lament this turn of events as an unjust punishment for the risks we took in moving onto our street in the first place, not to mention all the effort and expense we and our neighbors have invested ever since. Several of our neighbors routinely exercise their legal right to appeal their property tax assessments, sometimes successfully.

But Barbara and I have rarely done so. In general, I’m philosophically opposed to appealing these estimates. Maybe I’m unduly influenced by Donald MacJannet’s story about the watered-down wine in that mythical French town. I mean, somebody has to support the community instead of looking for ways to avoid supporting the community.

As I see it, Philadelphia has been good to us. It’s given us a stimulating neighborhood. We purchased our home for its livability, not as an investment; yet today it’s worth many times what we paid for it in 1982. And as Philadelphia residents go, we’re lucky: Our neighborhood is relatively free of drugs, violent crime, and drag-racing motorcycles. We have a vested interest in our city’s economic health. Is burdening our civil servants with paperwork any way to show our gratitude?

Trump on taxes

During their presidential debate in September 2016, Hillary Clinton pointed out that Donald Trump, for all his alleged wealth, hadn’t paid any taxes in ten of the previous 15 years, largely because he reported losing much more money than he made. Trump replied: “That means I’m smart.” Hillary missed her chance to respond: “No, that mean you’re selfish.” And today, I can’t help thinking: I know Trump hates to pay taxes. And I know he scrupulously avoids alcoholic beverages. But would it be too much to ask him to donate a bottle of water to our next block party?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com