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When Ron Tarver first photographed Jordan Bullock in 1993, he was just a 12-year-old kid growing up in North Philadelphia who was mad for horses, just like his old man, Bumpsey Bullock, who ran the White House stables in Brewerytown.
Jordan is now 43 and has built his life around horses. He’s a racehorse trainer, keeping a half dozen stalls at the stables of Parx Casino and Racetrack in Bensalem.
“This is all I ever knew. It was normal my whole life,” Bullock said. “That’s what we did on weekends and after school, it was my father and my aunt, my cousins, one of my uncles. My mother’s side of the family — by total chance, my parents did not know this when they met each other — but my mother’s side of the family is in horses in Virginia.”
Bullock appears as a child in Tarver’s new book, “The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America,” representing a time in Philadelphia’s urban history when horses were everywhere. Many neighborhoods in North and West Philly had stables.
“You had the White House. You had 33nd Street, at 332nd and Master which is literally up the street from us,” Bullock said. “You had the Hole in the Wall, which was a stable where they literally broke a hole in the wall of a warehouse and built a stable.”
“You have Fletcher Street, which is on Fletcher Street. You have Uber Street, which is actually the Big Muddy. That’s what they call it because the yard was always muddy,” he said. ”You had Goats. Goat was a person and a farm on Ridge Avenue near Andorra, which is now houses. 48th Street is not even on 48th Street. It’s on Parkside Avenue, but that’s just what it’s called. Same thing with Sammy’s. There’s, like, a whole culture.”
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