09. Lockham

The counterpart to Nor Lock’s squalor, Lockham is where many of Nor Lock’s employees live. It’s a poorly planned neighborhood with obsolete two and- a-half-family homes jumbled next to dingy apartment complexes and crumbling starter homes. At any given point, half of the lights at the rail stations are burnt out or vandalized. The district demographic is predominantly Latin, with the next largest populations split equally among Poles, African Americans, North African Muslim immigrants and various Middle Eastern nationalities. A dwindling population of original owners who bought homes in the neighborhood back before Nor Lock had decayed so irreversibly still lives here, too. The streets of Lockham are forever under pothole repair, and the neighborhood needs many new streetlights to replace the stop signs for traffic relief, but the money’s just not there. Here are yards with cars up on blocks and chain-link fences that corral dogs hungry with neglect, and persistent rumors of “the boogeyman/wife” cling a little more tenaciously to the local culture than children’s stories usually do.

Background

In the early 1940s, Lockham was an up-and-coming neighborhood, a pastoral neighborhood of small homes that working men could afford. As the complexion of the factory floor changed, “white flight” occurred, and the neighborhood slowly shifted under the influences of inflation and transitory workers to one of low income and high crime. Lockham was never the high-rise tenement that television fosters as the idea of in-town poverty, but the neighborhood remains a dead-end neighborhood where the working poor watch their meager savings slowly spiral into negative equity.

Alternative Name(s)

Slums

Type

District

Location under

New Castle