My North Philly: Kensington

My North Philly: Kensington by artist David McShane is located in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A tribute to the working class, this mural is the fifth in a series of murals which illustrate the voices, stories and lives of people living in North Philadelphia. As a starting point in the design, a large factory scene was made with two workers depicted (a man and a woman). The factory is a textile mill with a large piece of fabric coming off a roll and sweeping across the mural. The plaid fabric represents the blocks of the neighborhood and blocks of workers that populate it. The fabric also has a series of stripes woven together which symbolizes how work and family life weave the neighborhoods together.

Above the fabric is a scene of a typical residential street of tightly packed houses which further represents the family life in Kensington, and below the fabric is a scene of the Market-Frankford El and the shops that run along it. The businesses listed are older businesses that are memories of what used to be and current businesses (including Chinese, Vietnamese, and Hispanic shops, representing how the neighborhood has changed and become more diverse as time has gone by).

In the center of the El and shops scene is the Kent Movie Theater, a magnificent and grand old Art Deco movie palace that used to stand in the large lot in front of the mural (which is now a schoolyard) Scattered across the cloth are little vignettes of family life: a girl roller skating, boys playing half ball (“halfies”), a girl in the May Procession (or First Holy Communion),a boy swimming at the “swimmo”, a woman scrubbing her steps, a “huckster” pushing his cart of miscellaneous goods for sale through the neighborhood, and two kids planting a garden. Also scattered are other vignettes of work life and the other factories that were present in and around Kensington that provide employment to the working families: Philco Radio, Stetson Hats, Kramp’s Shipyard, breweries, hosiery and ribbon mills, and popcorn, pretzel, candy, lampshade, and cigar factories.

As the cloth progresses away from the factory it goes from black and white (representing the past) to gradually more color. The fabric also transforms from a simple plaid to a complex quilt pattern, with patterns and symbols representing the changing ethnic diversity now present in the once all white community. Various squares of the quilt represent these different ethnic cultures. There is an African pattern, a feng shui symbol and Chinese dragon, a Puerto Rican flag, a map of Vietnam and Cambodia, and a Celtic knot. Also present in the quilt are the tiles made by Kensington community members in workshops led by artist Danielle Callahan.

This mural is pat of the My North Philly project that traced the stories of four communities — Nicetown, Kensington, el Norte de Filadelfia, Strawberry Mansion — in North Philadelphia through the oral histories that inspired the creation of seven landmark murals. At the beginning of 2005, the Mural Arts Program began a new odyssey. The My North Philly project aimed to collect the stores that residents of North Philadelphia told about their neighborhoods and to give those words a lasting life through a series of murals. Out of the myriad North Philadelphia neighborhoods, four communities –two east and two west of Broad Street — were chosen with an eye to the history and diverse experiences of the area and Mural Arts established partnerships with neighborhood churches, libraries, resident associations, and community groups. Over the next three years, artists and oral historians from the Program reached out to folks in these communities, taped and transcribed oral histories and group discussions, and pored over the themes, images, and events that interviewees described. By autumn of 2007, seven murals had been painted, one final mural was in progress, and more than ninety North Philadelphians had told their stories — the stories of their North Philly. Though neither the people who told their stories nor the murals that those stories inspired speak for all of North Philly, they capture, in a personal way, some of the lived experiences of the place that many Philadelphians just call “home.”