I went to a celebration in honor of my deceased neighbor yesterday. She died a year ago, but they were officially naming her block after her (the sign was already up, and says “Joyce Hill Way” underneath the official street name, which is the 3000 Harper Street.

Miss Joyce was often sitting on her front step, a large and implacable presence who disapproved of me and didn’t have any time for me or what I represented to her, which was white gentrification. I approved on principle, because she was not wrong. The neighborhood these days is full of young white couples, who either have dogs or babies (or both), and some of the ugly new houses that filled the empty lots that were here twenty years ago are a disgrace of short-term money-grubbing.

When we moved in twenty years ago the nice old solid row homes were relatively cheap; we bought the house in decent (renovated, because it had a fire some years before) condition for the same amount we got for our crumbling cottage out on the Main Line. It would have taken $600,000 to get our old cottage in good shape, and I wanted to be back in Philadelphia, where I have lived most of my life in crumbling not-yet-gentrified neighborhoods, plus there are four bus routes within a block of my house.

My husband (who grew up in a tough white neighborhood of Philadelphia that is now Black) knew everyone, and everyone knew him, but Miss Joyce didn’t have time for him, either.

Yesterday they had strung a huge photographic banner over the end of the street, above the platform the City had put up for the celebration. It had a fierce blue sky on it, and a big photo of Miss Joyce. A DJ was set up at the side of the street, and rows of chairs, and further down the street lots of umbrellas and tables, with food being prepared at the back. Miss Joyce set up a lot of block parties in her life, and her family knew how to do it right. She was the block captain, the committee person, and a force.

I stood at the front of the crowd and said hello to several of my neighbors and former neighbors, most of whom were Miss Joyce’s kids or grandkids. After a while I was the only white person up there, because the many other white people who live on that block sort of faded into the background or went back into their houses, not feeling wanted even though they make up half the block these days. A house is a house, but sometimes white people just don’t know how to be neighbors. I have lived in a lot of tough areas, white and black, and I stand by that blanket statement, even though there are exceptions like my neighbor Charlie who could talk the hind leg off a donkey even though his mother bought that house for him for way too much.

The former local state representative, who resigned under investigation for corruption in 2015 and who remains influential in the neighborhood, emceed the event. Our current state representative, Harris, a useless guy who replaced a competent woman, gave a short impromptu speech revealing that he didn’t really know Miss Joyce; he called her by her middle name instead of her first one. That was disgraceful and I’m voting for his opponent in the primary, though she won’t win. There were two city council members on the platform, because the family forgot we changed from fourth district to fifth district in the last few years, when they started setting up the ceremony, and a preacher who did the necessary invocation at the start and then said he was going to “stand up, speak up, shut up, and sit down.”

Also there was a guy I didn’t know on the platform who grew up in the neighborhood way back before it was majority Black, because these things change. He gave a little speech too.

A older Black lady on the bus told me the other day that Black people didn’t venture below Girard Avenue when she was young, you see, because my neighborhood (just below Girard) was White back then.

The citation from the city and from the state was read aloud, and then they made Miss Joyce’s whole family come stand on the platform. I wasn’t sure the platform would stand the weight. There must have been fifty people up there, including the nice lady who looks out for me when it snows, and the twins who are graduating from college soon, a little late because they lost their way for a while but pulled it together when they had kids. Different branches of the family looked alike, and there was someone who looked almost exactly like Miss Joyce, probably a sister, I’m assuming. People had on T-shirts with an image of the new street sign. People were holding souvenir signs the size and shape of the new street sign. “Go eat,” said the emcee, and I left to run some errands.

It’s not actually my neighborhood, that block, you see, because it’s around the corner from me. Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, and some of them, like this one, are only a block long. But when I first looked at my house twenty years ago, I walked down Harper Street and down Cambridge, two dead-end blocks (terminating in a railroad cut) either side of my street (30th), and I saw that Harper, at least, was a proper neighborhood with families in it. There was a sign up in Miss Joyce’s windows fulminating against gentrification. I knew I would be okay there. There was drug dealing on the corner (the twins were a little dumb back then) and empty lots; someone tried to set fire to a vacant house with a dead body in it right after we moved there, but in a proper neighborhood there are people sitting outside, watching out, and they talk to one another.

The lack of good neighbors was one of the reasons I moved out of the Main Line. I grew up there, and my own one-block street used to be the home of a lot of college and prep school faculty, people who didn’t have much money (though they were respectable enough, and some of them had pretentions.) By the time my husband and I moved out, though, we didn’t know most of the people on the block any more. Though it was white still, it had been gentrified, by white people a lot wealthier than we were. I joke that the woman who bought our house (a realtor herself) did it for the ZIP code.

My ZIP code is a good one again these days, according to the realtors. Houses are going for a lot more, and the taxes have gone up. But I’m old enough that I live on Social Security and I’ve been here forever, so I qualify for a couple of tax reductions. I can’t afford to move, even though the place is way too big for me. So I’m going to hang on and do my best to be a good neighbor. I sit on my step when the weather is nice and say hi to the kids who rampage up and down, and I talk to everyone, whether they approve of me or not.