Word: passyunk
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...snatchers such as Palamarchuk claim that the center of Philadelphia's black market is Passyunk Avenue, in the southwestern part of the city. Here lies a sprawling shantytown of 70 salvage yards, and journalists are about as welcome as the rusty mud after a heavy rain. "Is that your car?" barks the manager of one junkyard. "Leave it there a couple of hours, and see what ! happens to it." His sidekick, an unfriendly German shepherd, growls in agreement...
Nobody knows precisely how much of Passyunk Avenue's merchandise is hot. Palamarchuk believes it's more than 90%. Tony Kane, a special agent who covers Philadelphia for the National Insurance Crime Bureau, guesses 40%. "The general attitude on Passyunk is that if I don't buy it, the next yard will," says Kane. "You'll walk into a lot of yards and see nothing but a few doors and a lot of junk. That's because calls are made, orders are taken, and things get done through the back door...
...owners who want to dump their vehicles and collect from their insurance companies can sometimes go directly to a salvage yard for assistance. A Passyunk operator explains how it works: "Say you got a guy who can't keep up the payments on his car. You call me, the junkyard, and I'll tell you to leave it in a parking lot somewhere with the keys, as well as the title for my own protection. I give you a coupla hundred dollars, I sell the parts to a body shop, and they get resold to an insurance company. Meanwhile...
Take Carla Smith, 25, a welfare mother who lives with three of her four children in Passyunk Homes, a public housing project in South Philadelphia. She and her children rarely leave the four-block project except to walk to the nearby grocery and discount-clothing stores. "I'm young, but I might as well not be," says Smith. "I don't do nothing. I don't go nowhere. My partying days are over. I just stay here with my kids all day long...
...many of his contemporaries in early 19th Century Philadelphia, Stephen Girard was an old codger in an unfashionable full-skirted coat and pigtail who frequently jostled his way to High Street Market to sell baskets of eggs and vegetables from his farm in Passyunk Township, three miles southwest of the city. Solid burghers, however, recognized him as the man who paid one-tenth of Philadelphia's real estate taxes, who had in 1814 subscribed to 95% of the U. S. Government's unpopular $5,000,000 war loan. Clergymen were painfully aware that he read the French rationalists...
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