The Ghost of Broad Street

A Jew contemplating the beginning of Broad and inevitable end of life has but one real question: Goldstein’s Rosenberg’s Raphael-Sacks, or Levine’s?
I pass on the former at Chelten Avenue, not because it sounds like a law firm or the result of mad inbreeding, but because it was there, on the first floor, after midnight, while about to place amulets into the folds of her coffin — omitting Pall Malls based on the hope she was going to a no-smoking zone — that I last saw my mother.

“This is not my mother,” I said, and backed away from the spruce casket. The guards had allowed me some final private time with the woman who had given me life, had taught me the joys of reading, writing and scotch-and-soda, had sent me to Girard College when I was seven, had policed my psyche for 50 years like an occupying army promising liberation. I didn’t recognize her.
Stopping at Goldstein’s Rosenberg’s Raphael-Sacks won’t help. I opt for Levine’s Funeral Home.

“People choose funeral directors according to their family history, their experience, their comfort level,” says Joe Levine. “We are a community of roots. Philadelphians live here, die here, have a need to be memorialized here so their families can visit. Cremations are rare. You’ll find more in Denver and San Francisco.”

Of the 15 or so funeral homes on Broad Street, the two for Jews are geographic and spiritual neighbors. Aside from the trend toward graveside ceremonies, little has changed since Levine moved here in 1956 from a different Broad Street address. Why Broad?

“Broad Street gives us visibility. Like they say in real estate, location, location, location.” And isn’t the Levine family in the real estate business? Whenever a cemetery opens, it sells any number of plots to funeral homes so that, in the event of poor planning, the funeral director can, on the spot, resell a place to spend eternity. A couple years ago, Levine’s bought the farm — a whole Solomon Memorial Park, in Frazer. It was a golden business opportunity, says Levine. Dislocation, dislocation, dislocation.