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One year into COVID-19, they continue to play a nightly tribute to Philly’s health-care workers with whistles, a pan and a wooden spatula

Every night for the last year, the sound of whistles and clamoring of pots and pans emanate from the concert “stage” between Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals.

(Left to right) George Bunting, Victoria Gonzales, and Will Houlne on Wednesday night outside the American Postal Workers Housing Complex at Eighth and Locust Streets. Each night at 7 p.m. for the past year that COVID-19 has shut down so much of Philadelphia, they have gathered with another friend, Fred Kirby, to blow whistles and bang a pan in tribute to health-care workers at nearby Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals.
(Left to right) George Bunting, Victoria Gonzales, and Will Houlne on Wednesday night outside the American Postal Workers Housing Complex at Eighth and Locust Streets. Each night at 7 p.m. for the past year that COVID-19 has shut down so much of Philadelphia, they have gathered with another friend, Fred Kirby, to blow whistles and bang a pan in tribute to health-care workers at nearby Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals.Read moreCHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer
    by Diane Mastrull
    Updated 
    Published 

You can set your clock by this nightly concert.

At 7 p.m. sharp, the sound of a few whistles and a pan being banged rises from the front walkway of a subsidized housing complex at Eighth and Locust Streets in Philadelphia’s West Washington Square.

It has happened every single night, Sunday through Saturday, through rain, snow, and the most humid of summer’s uncomfortableness, for the last year. A simple tribute spawned by COVID-19 for the health-care workers who have waged an exhausting battle on the front lines of the pandemic.

This concert “stage” outside the American Postal Workers House, an apartment complex for low-income seniors and people with disabilities, sits between two hospitals where fights against the ravages of the coronavirus have been won and lost — Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University.

Nurses and doctors pass by daily. So a year ago, Victoria Gonzales, Will Houlne, George Bunting, and Fred Kirby decided they would serenade them with thanks.

“Before we knew it, it was a whole year,” said Gonzales.

For the first few months that the coronavirus shut down most of Philadelphia, Gonzales, Houlne, Bunting, and Kirby had lots of accompaniment, as residents in the surrounding apartment and condominium buildings and rowhouses leaned out of windows and joined in with their own pots and pans and whistles.

“They gave up,” Gonzales said, looking up all those now-empty and quiet windows Wednesday night. “But we kept it going.”

(A resident on the 13th floor of The St. James apartment building across Eighth Street has shown constant appreciation with a few flickers from a flashlight.)

For Gonzales, the tribute is personal. Her father got COVID-19 last March, turning 79 in Temple University Hospital last April, where he spent several weeks on a ventilator.

It’s personal for Houlne, too.

“My mom was a nurse in the Navy and at Nazareth Hospital,” he said as tears filled his eyes. “It makes me tearful how many people have died.”

A diabetic with a heart condition, Houlne came down with a relatively minor case of COVID-19, which kept him from the nightly concert until his quarantining was complete.

Their little gesture of thanks will continue each night until the experts say social distancing is no longer necessary, said Gonzales. She owes that, she said, to the doctors and nurses who saved her father.

He turns 80 on April 11.