Great Moments In Neighborhood News: Friggin’ Fishtown Fecesgate!
In which The Spirit, a paper not known for agitation, asks you at least three times,
“How would YOU feel if YOUR child was covered in feces, maaaan?”
At this point, even the native populations here in Fishtown (mostly) know that it’s no longer OK to physically chase people of color out of the neighborhood (though we witnessed this actually happening outside our window a few months ago), engage in hate-speech towards people perceived to be homosexual (we haven’t heard a local street urchin scream “FAGGOT!” in nearly 45 minutes), or brazenly litter the streets with iced tea cartons, discarded take-out or needles (um, let’s just say we’re very excited about Philly Spring Cleanup this weekend). So the class wars here — a roiling pot of gentrification and xenophobia stew — have naturally turned to a group seemingly quite uncontroversial: Dog owners. Around here, “dog walkers” is a pleasant synonym for “child-hating yuppie scum,” and why, yes, thank you, some of us are. Thank you for noticing! And in recent years, the Fishtown Dog/Class Wars have had as their focal point Hetzell’s Field, a baseball diamond at Thompson and Columbia. See, Fishtown, for all of its notable dogs and dog-lovers, does not have a dog park. It does, however, have many, many unplanned children, many of whom play baseball, softball, tee ball, soccer and whathaveyou at Hetzell’s. So when a few intrepid “dog walkers” led an unsuccessful movement a few years back to have a section of Hetzell’s cordoned off as a dog park, well, it was an insulting shot across the bow to the breeder populace here. They simply couldn’t understand why these new people don’t just let their dogs shit exclusively on the 5×5 concrete square “yard” behind their own house, like every dog in Fishtown ever, up until some time in the mid-1990s, when the first “faggots and yuppies” began their dastardly invasion of the 19125 zip code. And so it came to pass that the proposed, failed dog park became the defining moment in New Fishtown Vs. Old Fishtown.
So you could understand why today’s lead story in the Fishtown Spirit is presently rocking this community to its core. Penned by one Bonnie Dugan, the piece details two local mens’ efforts to keep Hetzell’s free of what we can probably presume is canine feces and not human (though it’s probably safe to say the hypodermic needles they’ve found were probably discarded by people; it’s widely known that Fishtown dogs mostly only smoke weed). The problem these civic-minded neighbors are having, however, is that the task before them is frankly quite daunting; on a recent cleanup, they removed no less than 120 piles of dogshit. And when they posted signs from the Dept. of Recreation indicating that no dogs were allowed and in fact, dog feces can spread disease, vandals removed the signs overnight. That night. Dugan’s piece, however, positively drips with seething hatred of dog walker culture, and she pours the guilt on so thick that you instantly remember, yes, indeed, everyone of a certain age who grew up here certainly did go to Catholic school:
The score is 2-2; there is only 15 seconds left in the game. Picture your child rushing for the ball against an opponent to score the winning goal, only to slip and sprain an ankle. What is it that he or she slipped on? A huge pile fertilized in dog droppings.
How about if your child wants to draw his or her name in the ground, imagining the sand at the shore. Isn’t that the cutest? What if the dirt is actually a pile of feces that a dog left just hours before?
And throughout the exposé, the Fishtown Dog/Class Wars are alluded to, but never quite voiced. Like certain kinds of love, these wars dare not speak their own name. But the debate rages on at Fishtown.us, where old prejudices (and new ones) bubble just beneath the surface. Will the culprits one day be named? And when they are, will they be revealed to be New York Times “Weekender” subscribers? We don’t know, we can’t say, but whatever happens, we know this much. It will be fair. For as they say, everything is, in love and in war.
