Daniel Rubin: A reluctant farewell to Phila.

Heinz Gabel knew three years ago it was time to leave the city, but he couldn't say goodbye.

His neighbor Kwok Wai-Ho had been killed - mugged by a neighborhood kid who'd told his friends he wanted to "catch a body."

A few days later, Gabel went to go biking in the Pennypack when he passed a group of teens who'd taken over the corner.

He didn't go out of his way to avoid them. At 65 he was big and strong, and this was his neighborhood. He just kept looking straight ahead, as though they weren't there.

One called out. "Next time it's your turn, old man."

Gabel said, "Thank you very much," and kept going, putting the teens behind him, but never quite out of mind.

They're the reason that on Sunday he and his wife, Helene, put their Oxford Circle house on the market. The Gabels have already settled on a place in Oley, in Berks County.

From the Web they picked a 55-and-over community. There's nothing there, they say, but woods and trees and quiet. Good quiet.

"How do you say goodbye to Philadelphia?" Gabel asked over bagels at the Casino Deli. His wife of 47 years sat next to him. In her heart, she'd packed up years ago. But not Heinz. He told himself the neighborhood was going to pick itself back up. He was wrong.

"It's only gotten worse," he said. "The city is bleeding."

It was Tuesday when we talked, a glorious day. Glorious days make him nervous. That's when the punks go outside and trash the corners that were once kept spotless.

The trial of Ho's killer over the summer was hard on Gabel. His neighbor across the street got an unnerving letter from the defendant and was scared to testify, though she did. The killer, Marcquis Walker Williams, 17, got 12-1/2 to 25 years for third-degree murder in the death of Ho, who was 69 and who had supported his family by working 14 hours a day in his food truck.

Ho was returning from his evening walk when the boy jumped him from behind and pinned his arms. Two neighbors saw what was happening and yelled. The boy let go. But Ho fell to the curb and struck his head. A week later, his family took him off life support.

I met Gabel right after the murder. He was standing outside his home, in the 1300 block of Greeby Street, talking about how his neighbors - Brazilian, African, Jamaican, Chinese, Samoan, and German - had formed a community.

With Ho's murder, he said, that community unraveled.

Many neighbors have moved. Others no longer come outside.

He identified with Ho. Each had raised a boy and a girl. Each was given opportunities in this country.

Gabel was 6 when he arrived with his family on Pearl Harbor Day 1949, ethnic Germans displaced from Yugoslavia. They settled at Ninth and York, across the street from a sponsoring aunt. Their neighbors, congregants of a black Pentecostal Church, brought them a tree and presents on their first Christmas. This surely was the promised land.

"In Linz, [Austria] we'd lived in a chicken coop," he said. "We used to crawl under a fruit truck to scavenge rotten fruit."

Heinz and Helene met as kids at the Girard Avenue Methodist Church. "We started dating at 17, were married at 19, had our first kid at 20, had our second at 23, and that was it," she says.

For 40 years he worked as a tool-and-die maker until he was laid off in 2002, given 30 minutes to clear out his desk. She was a legal secretary until retiring two years ago.

For most of that time, they lived in the redbrick rowhouse they bought 23 years ago for $50,000. It was a neighborhood then - all but one of the houses on the block were owner-occupied. You could walk two blocks to Castor Avenue to shop, bank, see the doctor.

Now he wouldn't walk anywhere.

"What does Willie Nelson sing, 'There's nothing good about goodbye?' " he asked. It's just what it is, a man whose heart is breaking over a home he can't watch get any worse. "Too dangerous. Too expensive. Just a feeling of hopelessness."