The Best Thing That Happened This Week

They were just passing through. They didn’t intend to stop — the CEO of the start-up, the AP tech guy, the Navy midshipman, the dad. Why would they? These were the River Wards, the squeezed-dry neighborhoods beneath the El where America used to get made: munitions, iron, textiles, ships. Solid stuff. Now they’re residential, run through with the old King’s Highway, middle-class, racially diverse. America in microcosm: a little tired, a bit run-down, hardworking, holding on tight.

But when Frankford and Kensington and Port Richmond on Tuesday night heard the crash of the train that was carrying the CEO and the tech guy and the midshipman and the dad to newer places, shinier places, they turned out to help. The neighbors lent the dazed and injured their phones, their shoes, gave them water to drink, turned a school into an emergency center, let them into their homes to wash off the blood. They were a tiny part of a much larger story, but they were the human heart, the first on the scene, attendants to an unexpected tragedy on their home turf.

The high road through the River Wards once bore Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lafayette on their travels between New York and Philadelphia. Sometimes they stopped to enjoy the hospitality at the Jolly Post Inn. People here knew how to treat a stranger in those days.

They still do.