Surveyor Thomas Holme (1624-95) and founder William Penn (1644-1718) conceived the idea for a gridded city punctuated by garden squares in the 1680s. They drew inspiration from baroque town planning, post-Great London fire (1666) concerns for city health, desires to compensate initial investors in Pennsylvania with land, and personal preferences of Penn and early interest groups such as the Free Society of Traders. The plan drawn by Holme intended settlement to occur on both the Schuylkill and Delaware waterfronts and along the main streets of High (later Market) and Broad. After the first printing of the plan in 1683, the river-to-river grid appeared prominently on maps of Pennsylvania, but creating a city in the image of Penn and Holme’s plan required nearly two centuries of clearing trees, leveling land, extending streets, and building upon the grid.

Early settlement focused on the Delaware waterfront, which became the main site of commercial and residential building and growth during the colonial era. While property at the city plan’s western edge, on the Schuylkill, remained relatively open with scattered farms and industrial workshops, the Delaware riverfront grew with wharves, warehouses, churches, taverns, and houses. Settlement hugged the Delaware shore in a semi-crescent shape, most densely along High Street and thinning to the north and south. More and more residents clustered into the area by subdividing lots. Residences of the most prosperous Philadelphians faced the main streets while smaller houses on back alleys and courts filled with laborers and the poor. Instead of civic buildings on a center square, as Penn and Holme had planned, by the 1720s a town hall and Quaker meetinghouse anchored the city at Second and High Streets. Construction of the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall) in the 1730s pulled the city westward to around Fifth Street, but as late as the 1790s, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) received advice to rent quarters east of Seventh Street because “so few houses” stood farther west.

Port of Commerce and Entry

The port on the Delaware, ferries from New Jersey, and roads radiating outward into Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland enabled people and goods to move in and out of the compact city. Throughout the colonial era English, Irish, Scots-Irish, Welsh, German, and free and enslaved people of African heritage came through the port of Philadelphia to build and settle the city and surrounding region, which had been occupied earlier by Native American camps and Swedish settlements. From nearby hinterlands and across the Delaware River from New Jersey, agricultural products came to the High Street market and shipped out to other colonies and the world. The presence of the market, which extended to the west as the city grew, gave High Street of the original city plan a new name: Market Street (informally at first, made official in 1858).

The settled area of the city extended to Seventh Street by 1790, and by 1800 the forest had been cleared from river to river. In the decades following the American Revolution, as property values closest to commercial High Street increased, the settled area of Philadelphia became more segregated by economic status. The laboring class and the poor migrated in greater concentrations to low-rent districts at the southern and northern fringe, including a notoriously bawdy area known as “Helltown” north of Arch Street between Third Street and the Delaware River. Beginning in the 1790s and continuing into the early nineteenth century, a significant free African American neighborhood grew at Sixth and Lombard Streets, around Mother Bethel AME Church. African Americans also clustered in the area north of Arch Street and west of Fourth. A German neighborhood formed on the city’s northern border, and French immigrants who arrived during the French and Haitian revolutions opened businesses in the vicinity of Second and Walnut.

Philadelphians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century made choices that imposed order and shaped the look and feel of the city proper for centuries to come. In 1795, city officials banned wood-frame buildings from inside the city limits, which assured that the fine rows of new homes built in the early decades of the nineteenth century would be made of red brick, often with marble-front raised basements and steps. The city government also looked back to the original city plan to guide improvements of the neglected public squares. Between 1801 and 1829 the center square, which Penn and Holme had intended for public buildings, became home to a neoclassical pump house that architect Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820) designed to supply water to the city via a gravity-fed system from the Schuylkill. In 1825 the City Councils gave the squares new names that imprinted history in the landscape: Washington (for the southeast square), Franklin (northeast), Rittenhouse (southwest), Logan (northwest), and Penn (in the center). Washington and Franklin squares transformed during the 1820s and 1830s from neglected plots and sometime burial grounds into landscaped parks. Rittenhouse and Logan squares similarly improved during the 1840s and 1850s, as the population spread west. Rittenhouse Square became an especially prime address as lands west of Broad Street began to fill with row houses, new houses of worship, schools, and businesses during the 1850s and 1860s.

Expansion on the Waterfront and Inland

While residents and businesses planted new structures across the width of the grid, earlier settled blocks churned with changing purposes and redevelopment. The Merchants Exchange completed in 1834 at Third and Walnut Streets signaled the continuing importance of maritime commerce, as did the 1830s rebuilding of a warehouse district on Front Street north of Market Street and the creation of the waterfront Delaware Avenue, funded by a bequest of merchant Stephen Girard (1750-1831). However, businesses also moved inland from the waterfront and formed specialized clusters for banking, insurance, and publishing. In the oldest sections of the city proper, many colonial-era homes survived but deteriorated into subdivided multiple-family dwellings or industrial workshops. Homes associated with the nation’s founders gave way to commercial buildings on High Street, and factories replaced brick houses on Arch and Cherry Streets. Philadelphians built over cemeteries and turned streams into underground sewers.

The relationship of the city proper with outlying areas changed fundamentally from the 1830s through the 1850s, first with the expansion of public transportation networks and then with the Consolidation Act of 1854. Railroads, omnibuses, and horse-drawn streetcars allowed increasing numbers of Philadelphians to move beyond the boundaries of the original “walking city.” The Consolidation Act extended the city’s boundaries to encompass all of Philadelphia County, but in doing so it reduced the old city proper into a nameless section of a larger whole. “Old city proper” lingered as a name for the central city, remaining in use as late as the 1920s. However, by the late nineteenth and early centuries “center city” (or “centre city”) appeared frequently in newspaper advertisements for real estate and employment, suggesting a widespread understanding of the phrase as a designation for Philadelphia’s downtown. During the 1920s and 1930s, Center City (sometimes capitalized and sometimes not) became more common as a place name in advertising, in the names of buildings, and in city government communication. Thereafter, embraced by city planners as well as organizations such as the Center City Residents Association (formed in 1947), Center City dominated as the name for the old city proper.

Following consolidation, Philadelphians made another pivotal decision for the future shape and functions of the central city when they selected Penn (or Center) Square, the site Penn and Holme had intended for public buildings, as the location for a new City Hall. The site at Broad and Market Streets, determined by referendum in 1870 after years of debate, followed the westward trend of the city away from the traditional home of municipal government on Independence Square. By the time voters chose Penn Square over Washington Square, substantial development had occurred on Broad Street, including construction of the Academy of Music (opened in 1857) and fine hotels on South Broad and development of business and industry to the north. Anticipation of the new City Hall, which took form between 1871 and 1901, spurred additional nearby development. The Pennsylvania Railroad and Reading Railroad opened massive new stations on Market Street flanking Penn Square (Broad Street Station, built 1880-82 and expanded 1892-94 at Fifteenth Street, and the Reading Terminal, built 1891-93 at Twelfth Street). Adding to Broad Street’s status as a cultural corridor, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts moved to its new building designed by Frank Furness (1839-1912) in 1876. The same year, as Philadelphia celebrated the nation’s centennial, John Wanamaker (1838-1922) opened his “Grand Depot” store in the former Pennsylvania Railroad Freight Depot at Thirteenth and Market Street, heralding an era when large department stores drew crowds of shoppers from the city and surrounding areas to an increasingly bustling and diverse downtown.

Immigrant Settlement in Older Areas

Older blocks continued to lose their cachet but served as points of entry for immigrants and other new arrivals to Philadelphia. Beginning in the 1870s, a Chinatown began to form in the 900 block of Race Street as Chinese merchants and laundrymen migrated to Philadelphia from the West Coast. With few options, the Chinese created their community in the midst of a vice district known as the Tenderloin, north of Race Street between Sixth and Thirteenth Streets. In the remnants of the colonial city near the Delaware River, refugees from pogroms in Russia created a Jewish Quarter beginning in the 1880s. African Americans migrating from the South to escape repressive Jim Crow conditions extended the historically Black neighborhood around Mother Bethel AME Church westward toward Broad Street and beyond.

In the northwest quadrant of Center City, meanwhile, the new City Hall helped to fuel imagination of a grand new boulevard extending northwest to link the center of the city with Fairmount Park. Plans formed slowly but came to fruition with the opening of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1918. The civic improvement gave Philadelphia an expansive new avenue in the style of Paris and spurred development of a new cultural district around Logan Square (which became a traffic circle). In the process, the city demolished 1,300 residential and industrial properties but spared the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, which had faced Logan Square since 1846.

Although the urban core remained in part residential, by the early the twentieth century commerce and culture firmly dominated the landscape and the skyline. The central city reached new heights not only with the 548-foot tower of City Hall but also with the advent of skyscrapers, starting with the Land Title Building at Broad and Chestnut Streets (fifteen stories built 1897-98; twenty-two story addition built 1902). The combination of railroad stations, cultural institutions, department stores, and other businesses anchored Center City as a hub for commercial and cultural life, including conventions that filled Broad Street hotels. At the same time, a greater variety of residents gained the option of commuting from outlying areas on electrified streetcars (introduced in the 1890s), the Market-Frankford Subway-Elevated Line (built 1903-8, extended to Frankford in 1922), and the Broad Street Subway (1928-32). Motor vehicles added flexibility of travel and the option of driving to New Jersey over Philadelphia’s first bridge over the Delaware River, the Delaware River Bridge (opened in 1926 and renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in 1955).

Restructuring in the Twentieth Century

As the region became more suburban from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century, Center City felt the impact. By the 1950s and 1960s, urban reformers focused their attention on areas of poverty and “blight” along the Delaware waterfront and in nearby neighborhoods. Pointing to areas that had “changed over the years from aesthetic assets to eyesores,” the Philadelphia Planning Commission led by Edmund Bacon (1910-2005), the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (established 1945), and the Olde Philadelphia Development Corporation (1956) spearheaded massive restructuring plans for Center City that involved redeveloping areas perceived as slums and adding infrastructure. Catering to car culture, highways created new boundaries and connections for Center City. Construction of I-95 along the Delaware waterfront in the 1960s linked Philadelphia to the Northeast Corridor but largely cut off the city from its formerly bustling harbor. On the other side of town, the Schuylkill Expressway reached completion in 1958. Planners also sought to improve movement of automobile traffic across the city with new expressways along the northern and southern boundaries of the old city proper. They succeeded in implementing the Vine Street Expressway, over strong opposition from residents of Chinatown, but could not overcome neighborhood resistance to a planned Crosstown Expressway along South Street.

In Center City, redevelopment sought to compete with the appeal of suburbia with a new mix of residential, recreational, and commercial space, including high-rise apartment buildings and the suburban-style Gallery shopping mall on Market Street. West of City Hall, the Penn Center complex of office buildings rose in the corridor where an aging viaduct known as the “Chinese Wall” had carried trains into the old Broad Street Station. Around Independence Hall, historical parks managed by the state and federal governments replaced blocks of commercial buildings. South of Independence Hall, by removing and resettling predominantly ethnic and poor residents, then preserving and restoring the best of their colonial-era homes, urban renewal transformed the old Jewish Quarter into upscale Society Hill. In addition to the urban pioneers who bought and rehabilitated the houses of Society Hill, residents added new vitality to other Center City neighborhoods, for example creating a “Gayborhood” in the vicinity of Thirteenth and Locust Street and an arts community in the abandoned factory lofts east of Third Street and north of Market.

The High-Rise Boom

The continuing revitalization of Center City as a mix of residential and commercial historic ambiance and new development built upon these twentieth-century projects. Beginning in 1976, federal tax credits for historic preservation spurred creation of a new supply of luxury apartments through adaptive reuse of old hotels, factories, and office buildings. A boom in skyscraper construction west of Broad Street occurred after 1987, when One Liberty Place broke a longstanding but unofficial practice of respecting the William Penn statue atop City Hall as the highest point in the city. Other skyscrapers followed, with Comcast surpassing all others for height with its fifty-seven-story headquarters built in 2008 and again with its sixty-story Technology and Innovation Center built between 2014 and 2018. East of Market Street, after retailing suffered the failures and consolidations of department stores, the onetime showcase urban shopping mall, the Gallery, itself became the site of redevelopment into a retail-entertainment complex to be called Fashion District Philadelphia.

In an era of industrial decline, Center City anchored a tourism industry that became increasingly important to the region’s economy. Promoters showcased the birthplace of a nation with museums and historic sites like Independence National Historical Park as well as yearly attractions such as the Mummers Parade, an abundance of public art, and a thriving dining and entertainment scene. To compete for conventions as well as recreational travelers, the Pennsylvania Convention Center opened in 1993, taking up the whole of four city blocks between Arch and Race Streets from Eleventh Street to Thirteenth (then more than doubling in square footage with an extension to Broad Street in the 2010s). Redevelopment in service to tourism also occurred in Independence National Historical Park, which gained a block-long visitor center, an expanded exhibit hall for the Liberty Bell, and the National Constitution Center, and nearby a Museum of the American Revolution.

Stewards of Philadelphia’s Center City, like those in other American cities, grappled with the challenge of preserving the past while ensuring a secure future for the city and its residents. Beginning in 1991, the Center City District—a business improvement district—supplemented city services to improve quality of life with initiatives ranging from street cleaning to development of Dilworth Park adjacent to City Hall and Sister Cities Park on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. By the early decades of the twenty-first century, new attention turned toward reintegrating the Delaware River waterfront into the urban grid, and the Schuylkill River Trail opened on the western edge of the original city plan. By 2017, an estimated 190,000 of Philadelphia’s 1.5 million residents lived in Center City and adjacent blocks north to Girard Avenue and south to Tasker Street, including a high concentration of young professionals and increasing numbers of older residents relocating from the suburbs. In a city of many neighborhoods, Center City remained a heart of political and cultural activity and a visible expression of Philadelphia’s growth and change—not only a geographic location, but a signpost of urban vitality.

Catharine Dann Roeber is associate professor of decorative arts and material culture at the University of Delaware and the author of the PhD dissertation Building and Planting: Material Culture, Memory, and the Making of William Penn’s Pennsylvania, completed at the College of William and Mary in 2011. Charlene Mires is professor of history at Rutgers-Camden and editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Neighborhoods

Avenue of the Arts

Chinatown

Fitler Square

Gayborhood/Midtown

Logan Square

Old City

Rittenhouse Square

Society Hill

South Street

Washington Square

Where exactly North Philadelphia begins and ends is a matter of debate. Even native Philadelphians have difficulty identifying the boundaries of this area of their city with precision. This is likely because so many of the neighborhoods located north, northeast, or northwest of Philadelphia’s center enjoy common histories and developmental patterns and consequently look a great deal alike. Before the 1682 arrival of William Penn (1644-1718) in North America, what is now North Philadelphia was covered with thick woods inhabited by Native Americans. Philadelphia’s establishment that same year began the area’s gradual transformation from acres of forests to blocks of homes, factories, churches, universities, and other institutions built to serve the area’s diverse inhabitants. These inhabitants included Native Americans, English colonists, and enslaved Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and waves of immigrants hailing from places as varied as America’s southern states; Northern, Southern, and Eastern Europe; the Caribbean; and Latin America in the nineteenth, twentieth, and  twenty-first centuries.

The Lenni-Lenape Indians were the earliest documented inhabitants of the area that later became North Philadelphia. For thousands of years, the Lenapes occupied the banks of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, establishing several large settlements in and around the area that became North Philadelphia. These settlements included the Coaquannock or “Grove of Tall Pines” camp in the area that later became Laurel Hill Cemetery. Another camp called Nittabakonck, meaning “place that is easy to get to,” was situated near where the Wissahickon Creek empties into the Schuylkill River. Today, most of the remnants of these native peoples are deep underground, accessible only to archaeologists. However, a handful of North Philadelphia roads, including Frankford Avenue and Old York Road, roughly follow trails established by the Lenape and other Native American tribes centuries ago.

After William Penn founded Philadelphia as the capital of his New World colony, the forests that had sustained the Lenni-Lenapes slowly gave way to farms and estates. Hoping to attract people to his new “green country towne” and to encourage development in and around the city, Penn granted the initial investors in Philadelphia lots within the city but also “liberty lands” or “free lots” in areas north of the original city limits where farms could be established. Reminders of North Philadelphia’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century agricultural history exist in the form of landmarks like Judge William Lewis’s 1789 Strawberry Mansion (originally called Summerville), Fox Chase Farm (one of Philadelphia’s two working farms), and in place names such as “Northern Liberties.” Many property lines in North Philadelphia have origins in the farmsteads that were gradually developed as this area urbanized over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Post-Revolutionary War Development

When the British occupied Philadelphia during the War for Independence, King George III’s soldiers ran their fortifications unhindered through the open ground along present-day Spring Garden Street. After the war, however, development pressure on the northern side of the city increased with the population boom that accompanied Philadelphia’s post-war position as the political, financial, and social capital of the United States. One of the first major developments in North Philadelphia following the Revolutionary War was an initiative to build a canal to link the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. If completed, the canal would have run along the present route of Pennsylvania Avenue to Broad Street on Philadelphia’s west side and would have bordered Spring Garden Street on the city’s east side. Due to lack of funds, however, this project floundered and the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, the Baldwin Locomotive Works, and various other industries filled in the canal’s right of way and the acres of open space along Philadelphia’s northern fringes. Not only did this part of the city offer industries convenient access to the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers and abundant space for growth, but the area was far enough removed from Center City to ensure that industrial smells and toxic chemicals would not interfere with central Philadelphia’s more genteel atmosphere.

The initial industrialization that took hold in North Philadelphia at the beginning of the nineteenth century laid the foundation for rapid changes later in the same century. Nineteenth-century maps of Philadelphia offer a compelling visual record documenting how urban expansion gradually eliminated the farms north of the city, replacing them with homes, factories, warehouses, workshops, and other institutions. An 1824 Map of Philadelphia published by William Allen shows heavily developed Northern Liberties and Kensington neighborhoods bordering the Delaware River, but sparsely populated blocks immediately north of the central city. Later maps of Philadelphia, such as W.H. Gamble’s 1887 Plan of the City of Philadelphia, show blocks of homes and factories stretching beyond Allegheny Avenue. The industrialization that overtook large swaths of open land in North Philadelphia quickly attracted residential development as workers drawn to factory jobs came to settle in the region. Companies such as Nicetown’s Midvale Steel, founded in 1867 as Butcher Steel; the large textile mills and tanneries of Kensington; Port Richmond’s Cramp Shipbuilders; and hundreds of other manufactories and cottage industries scattered throughout North Philadelphia created the vast array of goods and supported the mercantile culture that earned Philadelphia the nickname “The Workshop of the World.”

By the 1880s, North Philadelphia’s Broad Street neighborhoods competed with Rittenhouse Square and other fashionable districts for urban prestige. Along North Broad, the nouveau riche who were responsible for much of the industrial development of the surrounding neighborhoods constructed performance halls, social clubs, beautiful churches and synagogues, and proud, turreted homes of brick and brownstone. One of the most ostentatious of these North Philadelphia mansions, belonging to Peter A. B. Widener (1834-1915), stood on the corner of North Broad and Girard Avenues. This Germanic-style mansion represented the fortune that Widener acquired developing trolley lines, urban rail lines, and other public utilities that opened up great swaths of undeveloped land for urbanization. Wherever Widener’s car tracks or railroads were constructed, speculative row houses, twin, and detached houses quickly followed as trolleys made it possible for workers employed in Center City to commute from neighborhoods located outside of Philadelphia proper.

Development Bolsters City Coffers

Philadelphia’s rapid development eventually contributed to the city’s reputation as “corrupt and contented,” as Philadelphia’s 1854 Act of Consolidation helped bring money into city government coffers by incorporating the quickly developing areas outside the central city. Over time, this extra tax money often found its way into the pockets of city officials rather than being put back into Philadelphia’s treasury. This same growth also gained Philadelphia the moniker “the city of homes” as blocks of North Philadelphia filled with row houses built to accommodate a growing workforce that  included thousands of immigrants, beginning with German and Irish families in the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by Russian, Eastern, and Southern Europeans in the second half. Amid its factories, mansions, and row houses, North Philadelphia acquired Mannenchoir halls and German beer gardens, Irish Catholic churches, Ashkenazi synagogues, Latvian social clubs, and various other religious, ethnic, and cultural institutions. These institutions served as community centers for the many immigrants whose Old World traditions helped them navigate the harsh realities they faced as they established new lives in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia natives also invested in North Philadelphia to create other types of community centers with the intent of helping the area’s poorer residents better establish themselves into American society. One of the most notable of these institutions was Girard College, founded by the banker and philanthropist Stephen Girard (1750-1831), who provided millions of dollars upon his death in 1831 to establish a school for “poor, white, male” orphans. Several decades later in 1884, the Baptist preacher Dr. Russell Conwell (1843-1925) began to give lessons to working-class parishioners in the basement of Grace Temple Baptist Church located on North Broad Street. Temple University eventually grew from these efforts. In similar fashion, the Catholic Bishop James Fredric Wood (1813-1882) commissioned Brother Bernard Teliow (1828-1900), the principal of a local Catholic academy, to establish a school for Philadelphia’s often-persecuted Catholics. La Salle University was established in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood in 1863 but moved several times thereafter, eventually arriving at its present location on Olney Avenue in 1930.

North Philadelphia retained a European immigrant flavor until the turn of the twentieth century, when African Americans from southern states began to migrate en masse to Philadelphia and other northern industrial centers, establishing many of North Philadelphia’s neighborhoods as important centers of Black culture. Black social groups formed throughout North Philadelphia and theaters like the Uptown and later the Freedom, both located on North Broad Street, promoted musical shows featuring gospel, jazz, and other types of performances aimed at African American audiences. North Philadelphia also became a center of Black activism as the area’s African American residents fought for better representation and working conditions and against redlining practices that refused housing loans to individuals who lived in areas deemed to be “high risk.” Nevertheless, white flight from North Philadelphia led to increased segregation in the area during the 1950s and the 1960s, decades that also saw the shuttering of many of the factories that North Philadelphia’s residents had long depended upon for work. Each factory closing increased stress on neighborhoods already marred by poverty and growing racial tensions. A low point for North Philadelphia came in 1964 with the Columbia Avenue Riot, which arose out of conflicts between police and North Philadelphia’s African American community. The riots resulted in hundreds of injuries, arrests, and looted businesses, many of which never reopened.

Urban Renewal in 1990s

During the last half of the twentieth century, blocks of decaying buildings and nearly deserted streets registered the impact of the social and economic fraying suffered by many of North Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. The general disregard shown North Philadelphia by private investors from the 1950s into the 1990s levied a devastating blow to this sector of the city. Attempts at renewing North Philadelphia did come in the form of federally funded housing projects like the Richard Allen Homes built in 1941, Cambridge Plaza built in 1957, and the 1967 high-rise Norman Blumberg Projects—projects which, at the time they were built, were hailed as progressive solutions to urban problems. Nevertheless, by the 1980s, many of these projects had fallen into disrepair and become centers of crime and drug activity. Starting in the 1990s, several of these projects were refurbished or, in the case of the Richard Allen Homes, completely torn down and replaced with detached suburban-style townhouses. These homes have improved neighborhood conditions in sections of North Philadelphia but have also been criticized for not accommodating the city’s poorest residents and for being architecturally incongruent with the row houses that dominate much of North Philadelphia.

Numbers from the 2010 census documented that North Philadelphia’s legacy of constant change continued. The northern neighborhoods nearest to Center City, including Spring Garden, Northern Liberties, and Fishtown witnessed rapid gentrification as urban professionals occupied newly built townhouse complexes and patronized the bars, restaurants, and galleries that slowly replaced their decaying factory buildings or abandoned lots. According to the 2010 census, Northern Liberties and Fishtown experienced the highest population increase in Philadelphia (a 24.7 percent increase from 2000 to 2010). At the same time, other North Philadelphia areas attracted job-seeking Puerto Ricans and Dominican and South American immigrants. Latin restaurants, bodegas, cultural institutions, and street murals in Spring Garden, Fairhill, Kensington, Frankford, Olney, and most especially in the North Philadelphia “Centro de Oro” area (located around the intersection of Fifth Street and Lehigh Avenue), document the strong Latino influence that has rooted in large swaths of North Philadelphia.

Some North Philadelphians openly bemoaned the waves of change that beset their neighborhoods, fearing that familiar characteristics would be lost in the process. Many others recognized, however, that North Philadelphia’s history revolves more around transformation than around constancy. Indeed, it is this constant transformation that has made North Philadelphia into one of Philadelphia’s most textured and fascinating areas—an area whose built environment not only registers Philadelphia’s own poignant story but also many of the historical trends that have informed centuries of broader American history.

David Amott earned his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Delaware in art and architectural history. While working on these degrees, he researched several immigrant churches in North Philadelphia for the Historic American Building Survey. This experience allowed him the opportunity to become familiar with and to fall in love with North Philadelphia and its rich history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Northeast Philadelphia’s earliest enclave, Frankford, consisted of Lenni Lenape Indians and Swedish settlers prior to the founding of the Pennsylvania colony by William Penn in the early 1680s. Immediately following Pennsylvania’s establishment in 1681, Quaker settlers constructed a meetinghouse, built in 1684,  and post office at William Penn’s request in what was initially designated the Manor of Frank during the mid-1680s. Situated to the northeast of the city of Philadelphia, Frankford’s importance as a center of commerce and trade grew principally because of its geographic location along the King’s Highway (present-day Frankford Avenue). It developed into a manufacturing village in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, drawing in German and English settlers, who opened numerous mills along the Frankford Creek. In addition to European settlers, free blacks established fraternal, religious, and anti-slavery institutions in the village to counter the creeping signs of residential segregation and employment discrimination surrounding them.  Located within the boundaries of Philadelphia County, Frankford’s commercial dominance attracted nearby farmers, who principally resided in Northeast townships, such as Lower Dublin and Moreland, to process their raw materials and farm products in Frankford’s bustling mills. The village also became a vital munitions site for the U.S. Army after the War of 1812, when the federal government began the construction of an arsenal, completed in the mid-1820s,  along the banks of the Frankford Creek.

Other settlements, primarily centered on farming and mill activity, dotted Northeast Philadelphia’s rural terrain and creek beds prior to and following the Consolidation Act of 1854, with pockets of gilded affluence appearing sporadically along the Delaware River in the late nineteenth century. Multiple townships throughout the Northeast possessed small, farming enclaves and communities, especially Bustleton, Somerton, and Fox Chase. In the early 1850s, residents from the Northeast decried the city’s plan to annex their communities into a newly consolidated city-county governance authority, which aimed to confer municipal services and policing functions on outlying suburbs in exchange for jurisdictional control over their neighborhoods. Some Bustleton residents, afraid of losing their independence, resisted the city’s annexation plan in 1852 by initiating legislation, which ultimately failed, to thwart the proposal. While the Northeast remained predominantly rural following the Act of Incorporation’s passage, some of Philadelphia’s well-heeled elite erected palatial mansions and estates in Holmesburg and Torresdale, with the most notable Victorian structure being the opulent Glen Foerd mansion, which still overlooks the Delaware River, in Torresdale.

Flourishing Industry

Additional industrial enterprises and communities emerged and flourished immediately north of Frankford along the Delaware River in the mid- to late nineteenth century, as some industrialists sought additional space to accommodate their expanding companies. Henry Disston (1819-1878), an English industrial entrepreneur, moved his burgeoning saw works enterprise from the congested confines of Northern Liberties to Tacony in 1872. Upon relocating his saw works, he gradually constructed a self-sufficient company town to house his workers. Disston’s company town attracted both existing and newly arrived ethnic, European immigrant communities, namely Irish, Italian, Polish, and Germans, and offered them generous benefits and homeownership opportunities, melding them into a productive and loyal working-class community.

In the early twentieth century, Philadelphia’s elected officials embraced the City Beautiful Movement with the intention of improving the city’s infrastructure and attracting affluent suburbanites to downtown Philadelphia. One of these projects, the Northeast Boulevard, which was renamed the Roosevelt Boulevard in 1918, opened in 1914 to much fanfare, as builders and private developers soon capitalized on the city’s investment in the roadway to construct single- and twin-family dwellings along its expansive corridor, especially in the Northwood section of Frankford in the lower Northeast. As the Roaring Twenties progressed, commercial development also coincided with residential expansion in the lower Northeast. Local booster organizations, especially the establishment of the Northeast Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, and Sears-Roebuck’s new merchandising facility, which opened in 1919, symbolized the Northeast’s flourishing commercial identity.

The Great Depression’s onset, however, soon dampened the homebuilding spirits of Northeast boosters and exacerbated economic tensions between middle-class WASPs, who inhabited bungalows and mansions along the Boulevard, and ethnic whites and working-class blacks, who remained consigned to industrial enclaves closer to the Delaware River. In the mid-1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which created detailed, color-coded residential security maps to demarcate desirable from dilapidated housing throughout the city of Philadelphia, documented and widened, through its discriminatory redlining policies, the emerging residential and class disparities in the lower Northeast.

The oldest, residential precincts, especially in Tacony and Wissinoming, primarily housed skilled workers laboring in the Disston Saw Works and other industrial facilities east of Torresdale Avenue. Meanwhile, Mayfair, Lawndale, and the Northwood section of Frankford, home to a mixture of white- and blue-collar workers, had experienced significant construction and residential upgrades immediately south of Cottman Avenue and along Roosevelt Boulevard during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Public Housing Segregation

The growing demand for adequate housing during World War II, in fact, led to increased racial segregation in, and civic resistance to, public housing projects in Northeast Philadelphia. The 1941 Lanham Defense Housing Act established the funding provisions that facilitated the construction of Pennypack Woods and Oxford Village I in 1942, with both housing complexes only accepting applications from white war workers and their families. Speaking on the behalf of anxious, middle-class homeowners in the Northeast, the Northeast Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce resented what it regarded as the federal government’s intrusive wartime housing schemes, openly assailing the government’s intention to provide affordable housing to war workers in the Northeast, albeit on racially segregated terms.

Generous government benefits, namely the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill) and FHA home lending policies, assisted returning veterans, the majority of whom were white, in their quest to move from Philadelphia’s densely packed industrial neighborhoods to the quasi-suburban atmosphere of Northeast Philadelphia following World War II. Prominent builders, most notably Hyman Korman (1891-1964) and A.P. Orleans (1888-1981), capitalized on these circumstances to expand home construction west of Roosevelt Boulevard in the Near Northeast, especially in Rhawnhurst, Lawndale, and Oxford Circle, in the late 1940s and 1950s. The Far Northeast, on the other hand, remained largely undeveloped until the late 1950s and 1960s, at which point large contingents of affluent, white households, many of whom were Jewish, were drawn to Cape Cod and ranch dwellings designed with a suburban feel nestled in Bustleton and Somerton. Residential development of a mixed, aesthetic character, containing both row house and single-family dwellings, also unfolded east of Roosevelt Boulevard in the Far Northeast, especially in Torresdale, Holme Circle, and Academy Gardens, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, where an assemblage of white, ethnic Catholics with strong community affiliations to nearby parishes bought homes.

Commercial development, especially shopping centers, also molded the spatial alignment of Northeast Philadelphia’s neighborhoods in the postwar period. Just as mini-strip shopping centers began to dot the Northeast’s still developing landscape during the 1950s and early 1960s, some Northeast residents, apoplectic about commercial overexpansion in their neighborhoods, requested the construction of a major shopping facility to counteract the sometimes unwieldy dimensions of commercial growth in the Northeast. In 1961, for instance, civic boosters, city officials, and residents congregated at the Bustleton-Cottman shopping center—a newly erected major regional shopping facility that openly competed for Northeast customers with Philadelphia’s central business district—to mark its  opening, with Gimbels serving as its principal anchor department store.

Amid the rising tide of middle-class prosperity coursing through Northeast Philadelphia in the postwar period, there also developed a residential backlash among white homeowners toward proposed zoning changes to accommodate public housing in residential neighborhoods and fair housing proposals offered by civil rights advocates. In July 1959, Harold Stassen (1907-2001), the Republican mayoral candidate, sought the support of Northeast voters by claiming that he would disassemble “City Hall’s bungling socialistic experiments” aimed at providing public housing for low-income families and racial minorities in Northeast neighborhoods. While popular defiance toward public housing in the Northeast persisted over the next two decades, Northeast Realtors and residents also resisted anti-discriminatory overtures in the private housing market, as calls for fair-housing legislation mounted among Philadelphia city officials and state legislators in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Although the Pennsylvania state legislature passed a fair-housing law in 1961 to end discriminatory practices in the private marketplace, Cecil B. Moore (1915-79), a prominent African American civil rights advocate who grew dissatisfied with the pace and trajectory of residential desegregation, still accused the Northeast of being a “lily-white island” within the city’s limits in 1964.

Racial animosities between whites and blacks in Northeast Philadelphia intensified further around busing and school-desegregation proposals  during the late 1960s and 1970s. As president of the School Board of Philadelphia, Richardson Dilworth (1888-1974) faced staunch opposition from white residents in both the Near and Far Northeast after the school board, working in conjunction with the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, released its 1968 desegregation plan for the city’s public schools. In their effort to achieve racial equilibrium and enhance educational standards across Philadelphia’s public school system, Dilworth and the school board encountered massive resistance to the busing of Black students into the Northeast’s overwhelmingly white schools, and “reverse” busing, which entailed busing white children into predominantly Black city schools.

Rizzo’s Mandate

Repeated attempts to implement full-blown school desegregation waned during the mayoral tenure of Frank Rizzo, as he appeased many white residents’ anxieties, especially after receiving an electoral mandate from Northeast whites in 1971, by curtailing liberal demands for racial parity within Philadelphia’s public schools. Public support for mandatory school desegregation in the city’s public schools eventually faded in the mid-1970s, at which point city officials and residents agreed to institute a voluntary school-desegregation plan commencing in 1978, which experienced less popular resistance in the Northeast.

As deindustrialization and white flight threatened Philadelphia’s already shaky fiscal foundations and deteriorating municipal services during the 1970s and early 1980s, some Northeast residents, including Republican State Senator Hank Salvatore (b. 1922), questioned the logic of remaining wedded to the “City of Brotherly Love.” After W. Wilson Goode (b. 1938), the first African American elected mayor of Philadelphia, made repeated calls in the 1983 mayoral election to erect a “mini-City Hall” in Northeast Philadelphia in order to offset Northeast residents’ fears about declining city services, Senator Salvatore, unmoved by Goode’s proposal, declared his intention to introduce legislation in the state legislature that would permit Northeast Philadelphia to secede from the city and become formally known as “Liberty County.” Goode, living up to his promise, opened the mini-City Hall in the Northeast Center Shopping Center along Roosevelt Boulevard in 1985, severely undercutting the legitimacy of Salvatore’s secession agenda, which lost its popular appeal by the late 1980s.

Over the subsequent two decades, Northeast Philadelphia underwent significant demographic and racial changes to become an increasingly diverse, urban community. Starting in the 1990s, white families and individuals relocated, principally because of their economic mobility and aging households, to the surrounding suburban counties and outside the Philadelphia metropolitan region in increasing numbers. In 2011, the Pew Charitable Trusts released a citywide population study that documented the dramatic racial and ethnic transformations that had occurred throughout Philadelphia during the previous twenty years. It found that Northeast Philadelphia’s white population had fallen precipitously, from 92 percent in 1990 to 58.3 percent in 2010. As middle-class whites migrated outside the city’s limits, racial minorities began the process of inhabiting the once predominantly white corridors of Northeast Philadelphia and relied on affordable mass transportation links, such as the Frankford El, for their daily work commutes into the city. Indian families and ethnic Russians moved into the Far Northeast neighborhoods of Bustleton and Somerton, respectively, while African Americans, various Asian groups, and Hispanics relocated from North Philadelphia into the lower Northeast neighborhoods of Mayfair, Frankford, and Oxford Circle. Once a bastion of racial defiance and material affluence, Northeast Philadelphia evolved into a dynamic, cosmopolitan atmosphere in the early twenty-first century to embrace economic, cultural and racial diversity in its private and public spaces.

Matthew Smalarz, who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, is a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Rochester who teaches at Manor College.  His dissertation examines middle-class whiteness in the making of private and public space in Northeast Philadelphia following World War II. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Northwest Philadelphia, bound loosely by the Roosevelt Expressway to the south, Broad Street to the east, and the suburbs of Montgomery County to the north and west, has origins as old as the city itself.  Developing around the Schuylkill and Wissahickon Creek waterways, and later Fairmount Park, the Northwest expanded and changed with the advent of new technologies and the larger legal, political, and cultural trends of Philadelphia.

In the late seventeenth century, as William Penn (1644-1718) worked to establish his “green country town,” the German Township along the Wissahickon came together as a small community of Dutch Mennonite and German Pietist immigrants, bound at first by religious and cultural identity.  On August 12, 1689, Penn granted the group its own charter, creating a distinct Germantown borough with a mayor, council, court, and marketplace.

The community prospered in the cloth trade, as townspeople worked as linen weavers, and also gained a reputation as a seedbed of antislavery agitation.  In 1688, German Quakers published a resolution condemning the “traffick of men-Body.”  In 1775, the French-born Anthony Benezet (1713-84), a longtime resident of Germantown, founded the first abolitionist society in the United States, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, later the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and by 1800, 60 free blacks (and seven slaves) were recorded as living in Germantown.

This legacy of activism persisted in parts of the region, even as it maintained an identity as a largely white and wealthy enclave.  For many of Philadelphia’s elite, Germantown – with its relatively high elevation at 336 feet, offering scenic views and lazy breezes – became a popular respite from the frenzy of the city.  In 1750, loyalist William Allen (1704-80), later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, built a country estate at what is now Germantown Avenue and Allens Lane, and called the home Mount Airy, bestowing the name for the neighborhood that two centuries later earned a national reputation for racial tolerance.

Industry-Related Growth

In the early nineteenth century, as Philadelphia entered the age of industrialization, the Northwest region grew precipitously.  In 1815, the city granted a charter to the Schuylkill Navigation Company, charged with improving the navigational system of the Schuylkill River.  Less than a decade later, the 108-mile waterway reached completion, linking Philadelphia with the coalfields of Port Carbon and Pottsville.  These advancements brought new life to the communities along the river.

Across the Wissahickon Gorge from Germantown, the borough of Manayunk, part of the larger Roxborough Township and ideally positioned in the river valley, experienced massive development, largely due to local textile manufacturing.  From 1817 to 1824, the population expanded from 60 to nearly 800 people, and by the late 1820s the community, which just a few years earlier contained little more than a toll house, had become known alternately as the “Lowell of Pennsylvania” and the “Manchester of America.” In 1840, the town was incorporated as its own separate borough.  The owners of the Manayunk mills resided above the town on the ridge between the river and the Wissahickon, which along with Germantown became one of the wealthiest communities in Philadelphia County.

Until 1854, these northwest communities retained their independent charters and systems of governance.  On February 2 of that year, though, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania and Governor William Bigler (1790-1879) approved the Act of Consolidation, dissolving the townships, boroughs, and districts that surrounded the city and incorporating the entirety of Philadelphia County under the authority of the Philadelphia municipal government.

As this legislative action brought the region under the auspices of city institutions and services, the expansion of the railways opened up the city and made the area more accessible.  In the early 1830s, a group of Germantown entrepreneurs set out to create the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad.  The earliest trains arrived in Germantown in 1832, and the community soon developed into the first Railroad Suburb in Philadelphia, and one of the first in the nation.  Within a year, the wealthy residents of Chestnut Hill, occupying the northernmost section of Germantown, clamored for a regular stagecoach service to connect their large pastoral plots on the Hill to the Germantown Depot at Germantown Avenue and Price Street.  Two decades later, more reliable horse car and steam rail service came to Germantown, carrying multi-passenger vehicles along the iron rails.  In Chestnut Hill, local commuters raised funds for a permanent railroad connecting the southern and northern ends of Germantown.  The new terminal at Chestnut Hill Avenue and Bethlehem Pike opened on July 3, 1854.

Influx of City Residents

With these political and technological changes, the region rapidly expanded.  The influx of city residents prompted new housing development throughout Northwest Philadelphia, but even as population surged, residents held strong to each community’s independent roots.

It was, in part, the green space around these northwest neighborhoods that allowed homeowners to maintain their autonomy from the rest of the city. Fairmount Park (officially incorporated in 1855) and its forested Wissahickon Gorge acted as a buffer between Germantown and Roxborough and the rest of Philadelphia County.  But even the Wissahickon, which had served as the stage for the Battle of Germantown in 1777, felt the effects of the city’s industrial growth.  At the turn of the eighteenth century, the region had become home to the first two paper mills in North America – the first built by William Rittenhouse at the south end of the gorge in 1690, the second by William Dewees at the northern end in 1708. By 1850, the dense woods and deep valley were home to more than 50 water-powered mills. Mining and blasting broke through the steep cliffs along the southern end of the creek, giving way to the development of the Rittenhousetown mills, and by 1856, the Wissahickon Turnpike, a private toll road, ran through the valley south to north.  In the latter half of the 1800s, efforts to protect and preserve the water source prompted the Fairmount Park Commission to take over the land, demolishing the mills and in their place erecting several inns and lodges, where visitors could enjoy the natural splendor that remained.

By the turn of the century, the population of Northwest Philadelphia was beginning to change.  From 1910 to 1930, more than 140,000 African Americans arrived in the city in the first wave of the Great Migration from the South to northern cities. As they settled in South, West, and North Philadelphia, long-established residents began to move outward, creating greater ethnic diversification in the Northwest.  Many Italian-Americans left South Philadelphia for the Roxborough area.  German, Scots-Irish, and Irish families moved to Germantown.

As the population shifted, the economy also prompted vast changes. First, road construction along the Schuylkill River connected Northwest Philadelphia to the city center, making automobile travel a reality for the first time. Then, the Great Depression of the 1930s brought the closing of most of the mills along the Schuylkill River corridor, and such neighborhoods as Manayunk and East Falls saw their industrial prowess begin to wane.  Many of the large mansions of Chestnut Hill – by the late nineteenth century one of the most elite neighborhoods in the United States – were demolished as the most affluent residents lost fortunes in the stock market. This also led to job losses for the large service economy that existed in the area.

With the Second World War, the city once again experienced new growth with a second mass migration of African Americans. Philadelphia’s black population increased from nearly 251,000 in 1940 to 376,000 in 1950.  At first, most upwardly mobile black newcomers concentrated in North Philadelphia.  After World War II, though, as these increasingly all-black neighborhoods experienced an acute housing shortage, middle-class African Americans also began to move outward to the Northwest.

When the war ended, communities on the outer edges of the city saw their under-developed green space quickly fill with new housing.  Although Northwest Philadelphia saw less physical development than other areas of the city, the region still underwent widespread growth. Upper Roxborough experienced development much like the surrounding Montgomery County suburbs, with new houses, green front lawns, and strip malls spreading along Henry and Ridge Avenues.  New neighborhoods sprung up along the northwest city borders, including the westernmost pocket of Andorra and West Oak Lane to the east.

In southern Germantown, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority allocated $10.6 million for public housing, to contend with the growing numbers of black families moving into the area.  West Mount Airy, the community in the central section of historic German Township named for Justice Allen’s 1750 home, began to develop its own identity as an economically viable, racially integrated community.  Unlike other areas of the region and city, where white residents responded to the arrival of black families with “fight or flight,” community leaders in the upper-middle class neighborhood created a proactive plan toward interracial living.  By the early 1960s, the community was touted across the nation as a site of racial progress. Its counterpart across Germantown Avenue, East Mount Airy, experienced a brief period of integration before transitioning to a predominantly black middle-class population. Throughout the next decade, similar patterns of white flight and African American settlement took hold in West Oak Lane and Germantown. Across Northwest Philadelphia, churches, schools, and neighborhood organizations offered critical institutional support during these postwar years, helping residents navigate these periods of transition and preserve a sense of community identity.

By the last decades of the twentieth century, as the Northwest section became more enmeshed in the Philadelphia economy and as individual communities responded to the larger political, economic, and cultural forces of the city, the regional identity of the area began to wane. Even as efforts toward local preservation, restoration, and oral history collection highlighted the living history of the region, Northwest Philadelphia became less a cohesive entity than a loosely connected group of neighborhoods, still bound by the common heritage of the natural woodlands of the Wissahickon, the industrial might of the Schuylkill canal, and the desire for independence as well as strong community ties.  Perhaps more than any other section of the city, Northwest Philadelphia retained William Penn’s historic mission to create a green country town in an urban center.

Abigail Perkiss is an Assistant Professor of History at Kean University in Union, N.J. She is the author of Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Post-War Philadelphia, published by Cornell University Press. (Author information current at time of publication.)

From the film Rocky (1976) to the Italian Market, South Philadelphia’s image as an urban village has been entwined with Italian immigration. While South Philadelphia’s large Italian immigrant community marked the neighborhood in many ways, an array of ethnic, racial, and religious groups have resided in South Philadelphia since the seventeenth century, making its history the history of immigration and working-class striving in Philadelphia. Drawn here due to the availability of work, each group fought to carve out a space for itself by establishing homes, families, and social institutions in this neighborhood that stretches from South Street to the I-76 expressway and from the Delaware to the Schuylkill Rivers.

South Philadelphia’s roots lie with Lenni Lenape Indians who utilized the Delaware shoreline as source of food. European settlement began with the New Sweden colony, centered in Delaware. The second oldest Swedish church in the U.S., Gloria Dei, now known as Old Swedes Church (Columbus Boulevard and Christian Street) was built between 1698 and 1700. After a brief period of Dutch habitation, the English settled here, with King Charles II (1630-1685) granting William Penn (1644-1718) a charter for Pennsylvania in 1681. When Penn began planning Philadelphia, South Philadelphia was rural farmland outside the city center. It  remained that way through the eighteenth century, made up of several separate districts including Southwark, Moyamensing, and Gray’s Ferry, names which still describe areas within the neighborhood.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the ethnic composition of South Philadelphia changed. Irish immigrants, who had been among the first settlers of Philadelphia, began to move south in the late eighteenth century, drawn by jobs like coal heaving along the banks of the Schuylkill, and they settled especially in Southwark and Moyamensing. Sharing cramped, dilapidated quarters with the Irish were free African Americans who accounted for 24 percent of Moyamensing’s residents in 1830. As nativism swept the nation, both Blacks and the Irish were targets of violence in Philadelphia, spurring the Black community to fight for civil rights in the mid-nineteenth century, with South Philadelphia as an important node. Octavius Catto (1839-71), one of Philadelphia’s first African American civil rights activists, migrated from the South and became a teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth (Tenth and Bainbridge Streets). In addition to raising regiments of Black soldiers for the Union Army in the Civil War, he, along with other activists, battled for the desegregation of the streetcar lines. Catto’s murder in 1871 after the first desegregated mayoral election made this victory bittersweet. His funeral, the largest for a Black person in Philadelphia to that time, helped accelerate the rise of the Republican Party, which ruled Philadelphia until the mid-twentieth century.

A Persistent Reputation

Even after South Philadelphia joined the larger city under the Consolidation Act of 1854, its image as an impoverished and dangerous area remained. The New York Tribune sensationally reported that the districts of Southwark and Moyamensing “swarm with these loafers, who, brave only in gangs, herd together.” Moyamensing Prison (1400 S. Tenth Street), opened in 1835, was another sign of the neighborhood’s poverty and social and literal distance from the city center. In operation until 1963, it housed everyone from a drunken Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) to serial killer H.H. Holmes (1861-1896) and Samuel Roth (1893-1974), a smut publisher whose later obscenity conviction ascended to the U.S. Supreme Court.

With the turn of the twentieth century, new immigration added even more complexity to South Philadelphia. Jewish people, for example, represented the largest foreign-born group by 1910. By 1930, they had organized several labor union headquarters and over 140 synagogues. By creating these institutions, immigrants laid claim to the neighborhood. While race, ethnicity, and religion distinguished these groups from each other, one thing they shared was class. The working class dominated South Philadelphia, though, as in all immigrant neighborhoods, some individuals rose in status to become merchants who owned stores and other operations that catered to local needs. While ethnic enclaves dotted the landscape with pockets of homogeneity, competition among ethnic and racial groups for housing and work led to racial conflict. In July 1918, a race riot in South Philadelphia resulted in four days of white violence against Blacks, leaving three people dead and hundreds seriously injured.

Although Italian immigration to Philadelphia began in the eighteenth century, it was only in the 1880s that large numbers of Italians settled here, often through the intercession of employment brokers—padrones—who brought them to the U.S. to help build the Philadelphia subway system and to work as stone cutters, masons, and fruit and vegetable sellers. Not made to feel welcome at the Irish Catholic churches, in 1852 the community established the first Italian national parish in the U.S., St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi Roman Catholic Church (712 Montrose Street). This helped cement an Italian national identity out of the regional identities held by most Italian immigrants, who at the time of their arrival considered themselves as Abruzzese or Pugliese, rather than Italian. They forged strong social ties in South Philadelphia as they founded churches, gathered in bars, and spoke their native tongues.

Reign of Frank Rizzo

While the Italian community of South Philadelphia boasted a number of famous figures, like opera singer Mario Lanza (1921-59) perhaps the most politically influential was Police Commissioner and two-term Mayor, Frank Rizzo (1920-91). Growing up on South Rosewood Street, Rizzo capitalized on the law-and-order response that followed the urban uprisings of the late 1960s to assert community control for Philadelphia. Criticized by people of color, gays and lesbians, and progressives, Rizzo built a base of white support that included South Philadelphia but expanded beyond it by fanning fears of racial integration. For example, in 1967-68, Rizzo supported white South Philadelphians, many identifying as Italian, who pressed for closing the predominantly Black Edward Bok Vocational School (1901 S. Ninth Street) because of supposed Black violence against whites. However, in their response, the white group used racist language and attacked Black students who attended the school, suggesting that the real goal was maintaining the whiteness of the neighborhood. Black students rallied in protest, but changes increased the percentage of white students attending Bok and helped set Rizzo on his political trajectory.

During the 1970s and afterward, many Italians left South Philadelphia for the southern New Jersey suburbs. Deeply felt ties to South Philadelphia remained, nurtured through visits to family, friends, and churches for festivals, and trips to restaurants and specialty stores. Looked at in this way, South Philadelphia’s affective borders extend far past the river. Demographic change accelerated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, continuing the neighborhood’s tradition of being an ethnic and racial patchwork. The Italian Market reflected these changes. Originally, Irish immigrants sold produce along this stretch of Ninth Street (between Wharton and Fitzwater Streets). Italian grocers displaced them, taking ownership of the area as seen in its name and marketing. By the late twentieth century, though, the Italian Market shifted again, with Hispanic and Latino-owned businesses, like tacquerias and a tortilleria, abutting Italian specialty groceries and butchers.

While South Philadelphia retained a distinct identity, it also forged deep ties to the region. In the early twentieth century, Italian immigrants worked as migrant laborers in the Vineland, New Jersey, fields that produced tomatoes for Campbell’s Soup, located in Camden, New Jersey. By the twenty-first century, their descendants owned the farms, which employed Mexican and Vietnamese workers to pick the produce that is sent to the large Food Distribution Center on Pattison Avenue in South Philadelphia, completing the circle. Transportation also joined South Philadelphia to the rest of the world, though the work opportunities this afforded were accompanied by serious upheaval for some. The Walt Whitman Bridge, named for Camden’s famed poet, connected South Philadelphia to New Jersey in 1957, but its construction demolished one of the poorest areas of South Philadelphia, known as “The Neck” (below Oregon Avenue, near Third Street), where residents lived a nearly rural lifestyle even though they were just a few miles from Center City. Similarly, Hog Island, once a shipbuilding facility, became the Philadelphia International Airport. Located between two rivers, residents have long counted the ports and waterways as a source of employment and large tankers and ships—some in service and some rusted to hulks—can be seen from Columbus Boulevard. The Navy Yard (4747 S. Broad Street), converted to office space, anchors the southern end of the neighborhood.

For Sports, Go South

South Philadelphians play as well as work. From the construction of Sesquicentennial Stadium in 1926 to the Spectrum in 1967, Veterans Stadium in 1971, and Xfinity Live! (Eleventh Street and Pattison Avenue) in 2012, when residents of the region have wanted to see a baseball or football game or go to a concert, they have come to South Philadelphia. This tradition dates back to the city’s founding, as Philadelphia’s first theater, the Southwark Theater (Fourth and South Streets) opened outside the city limits in South Philadelphia to evade Quaker disapproval. In a neighborhood that has enjoyed rowdy public celebrations since the nineteenth century, the best known is the Mummer’s Day Parade on New Year’s Day, when local social clubs create ornate floats and march symbolically from South Philadelphia to the heart of Center City and back. Designated an official city celebration in 1901, the Mummer’s Parade has been controversial and only in the late twentieth century did the parade ban blackface and allow women to participate.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, South Philadelphia continued to be a neighborhood of change. According to the 2010 census, more than half of the neighborhood was white, with Blacks totaling approximately one-quarter of the population. Asians made up another 12 percent, with a growing Hispanic/Latino population of 8 percent. While Southeast Asian immigration began in the 1970s as the Delaware Valley welcomed refugees, it rose dramatically beginning in the 1990s. Like earlier immigrants, Southeast Asians created their own social worlds, including a vibrant commercial and cultural infrastructure along Washington Avenue that included large supermarkets, restaurants, and music and video stores. However, in a repetition of earlier examples of racially motivated conflict, in 2009 Southeast Asian students were attacked at South Philadelphia High School (2101 S. Broad Street), bringing to public attention tensions that had been simmering barely below the surface for years. This time, the conflict was primarily between Black and Asian students. Student and community groups rallied through this incident to advocate for better services for immigrants, much in the way that earlier settlers fought for their civil rights.

A mural by the Mural Arts Project acknowledges that immigration is the connective fiber of South Philadelphia. Called “Aqui y Alla” (1515 S. Sixth Street), the mural tells the story of the neighborhood’s growing Mexican immigrant population. Indigenous youth in Mexico created pieces of the mural, which were sent to Philadelphia and completed by Mexican immigrant youth in South Philadelphia. The continued importance of the homeland pictured in this mural helps put a visual face on the activities of generations of South Philadelphians as they built businesses, created houses of worship, founded civic organizations, and celebrated together. In this city of neighborhoods, the ties that bind South Philadelphians have as often been to faraway places as they have been to the city.

Mary Rizzo is the Public Historian in Residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.) 

Southwest Philadelphia, which along with adjacent Tinicum Township, Delaware County, is the location of the Philadelphia International Airport, greets many visitors to the city. Yet, Southwest Philadelphia, often described as “far” Southwest, is quite possibly the least-known area of the city, even to Philadelphians. Kingsessing, as this vicinity was originally named, was the first section of Philadelphia settled by Europeans and in the twentieth century came to national attention as the Eastwick Urban Renewal Project. Since the early twentieth century, when this seemingly remote location in the city became useful for an airport and other industrial activities, the possible contributions of Southwest Philadelphia to the metropolitan economy have often overshadowed the needs of neighborhood residents.

Southwest Philadelphia is the southern portion of the city lying west of the Schuylkill River. The northern boundary is roughly marked by Baltimore Avenue, Fiftieth and Forty-Ninth Streets; on the west by Cobbs and Darby Creeks, which separate Philadelphia and Delaware Counties; on the south by the Philadelphia International Airport, and on the east by the Schuylkill River. Southwest Philadelphia encompasses the city’s Fifty-First and Fortieth Wards and includes the neighborhoods of Kingsessing, Elmwood, Paschall, and Eastwick; below Seventy-Fourth Street, Eastwick is known to residents as “the Meadows.” Large nonresidential tracts are occupied by the Heinz wildlife preserve, the Philadelphia International Airport, industrial parks, the Southwest Sewage Treatment Plant, and, adjacent to the Schuylkill River, tank farms and oil refineries.

This landscape includes the lowest-lying land within the city, some of it below sea level. The southernmost portion was at one time crisscrossed by a network of creeks.  Mud, Hog, Carpenter’s, Minquas (Mingo), Province (later State), and Boon’s Islands were some of the largest of the Schuylkill River delta islands indicated on early maps. These well-watered meadowlands produced luxuriant grass and weeds for grazing livestock and fertile soil for plowing without the arduous task of removing trees, explaining their attraction for early European farmers.

Europeans Arrivals

Kingsessing, from a Delaware Indian word most frequently translated as “a place where there is a bog meadow,” became the center of Swedish occupation in 1643 when Governor Johann Printz (1592-1663) moved the Swedish headquarters to big Tinicum Island. The Swedes built two forts in lower Kingsessing to control the final leg of the Great Minquas Trail (Island Avenue), used by the Susquahannock (Minquas) beaver traders traveling  from the Susquehanna Valley to the Schuylkill River. The Dutch and then the English claimed this vicinity—and the valuable beaver trade. William Penn created the township of Kingsessing, corresponding approximately with the later Fortieth and Fifty-First Wards.

Upper Kingsessing provided a convenient link between Philadelphia and points south, while lower Kingsessing seemed more remote. In 1696, the King’s Highway (later Darby Road) was laid out from Gray’s Ferry (the Lower Ferry), becoming the main artery from Philadelphia to Baltimore and the southern colonies. During the Revolution, an extension through William Hamilton’s estate, the Woodlands, linked the road (renamed Woodland Avenue) with the Market Street Ferry. Penrose’s Ferry from lower Kingsessing to South Philadelphia was not established until 1742, when a pest house (quarantine hospital) was constructed on Fisher’s Island (renamed Province, then State Island) to isolate contagious diseases. This ferry was finally replaced with a bridge in 1853; the fourth bridge, constructed in 1949, was renamed the George C. Platt Bridge.

During the War for Independence, Mud Island, adjacent to Province Island, became the site of a significant battle in the Philadelphia Campaign. In November 1777,  the British wrested control of the island’s Fort Mifflin from American defenders. The victory helped the British to secure the Delaware River, allowing supply ships to reach Philadelphia.

The imperial struggles punctuating the early history of Kingsessing gave way to a peaceful agricultural landscape of farms and country estates for the next century. Limited industrial development occurred in isolated pockets adjacent to throughways and the larger creeks. Cobbs Creek provided water power for the Passmore Textile Mill on Woodland Avenue. Paschalville, laid out in 1810, was inhabited by the mainly British immigrant mill workers. At mid-century, the entire township contained only about 1,800 residents. Just after the Civil War, the Angora Woolen Mill and a small village were established just below Baltimore Pike.

Slow-Growing Kingsessing

The 1854 Act of Consolidation incorporated Kingsessing Township as the Twenty-Seventh Ward of Philadelphia but made little difference: Kingsessing, as it was still called, remained the slowest-developing section of the city for several more decades.  Even the Philadelphia Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad linking Philadelphia to Baltimore through Kingsessing prior to consolidation did little to foster growth. The rural landscape made accessible by the railroad did encourage sporting activities, though.  In the 1860s, the Suffolk Park Race Track and Hotel, with races reported in the New York Times, was established adjacent to Bell Road Station, the sole station in southern Kingsessing. In the next decade, the Belmont Cricket Club was located in the northern part of the ward. The Pennsylvania Railroad had closed the Bell Road Station by the time investors began subdividing tracts below Seventy-Second Street in the 1880s.

Perhaps Kingsessing is most important in American history for its famous garden nurseries and seed farms, which also benefited from the combination of a rural landscape and a railroad. Street names such as Botanic, Bartram, Dick’s, Lyon’s, and Buist commemorate this important local economy. In the eighteenth century, John Bartram (1699-1777) created what became the oldest surviving botanic garden in the United States. Railroad industrialist Andrew McCalla Eastwick (1811-1879) purchased the house and garden as a private park for his own country house, designed by Samuel Sloan.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Helendale Nurseries established by John Dick (1814-1903) included thirty greenhouses with more than 100,000 square feet of glass. The most famous Kingsessing nurseryman, Robert Buist (1805-1880), created one of the first great nurseries in the United States at Rosedale. Buist was the center of a trans-Atlantic horticultural exchange and is also credited with introducing the poinsettia to the United States from Mexico. One of his books, The Rose Manual (1844), was the first American gardening book devoted to roses.

This horticultural economy was made possible by the growing numbers of wealthy Americans who established country estates, as well as the rural cemetery and urban park movements. Mt. Moriah, located in Kingsessing and Yeadon, Delaware County, became the third of Philadelphia’s great cemeteries, along with Laurel Hill and the Woodlands.

Industries Move to Southwest

Southwest Philadelphia saw sustained residential and industrial development from the 1880s through the 1920s. Consequently, Ward 40 was made a separate ward before the turn of the century. In the 1890s, several important industries moved to Southwest.  Joseph Fels built the Fels Naptha (laundry soap) factory on the site of the old Passmore mill. The J. G. Brill Company in Kingsessing and Baldwin Locomotive, which relocated from Spring Garden to adjacent Delaware County, both employed thousands of local residents.

Immigrant and native-born workers followed the opportunity for industrial employment. Irish, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants built detached and semidetached dwellings, often purchasing extra lots for large gardens.  Once families located in the area, they tended to stay for generations. Below Seventy-Fouth Street, some truck and pig farms survived into the mid-twentieth century. The northern area just below Baltimore Pike developed in the first two decades of the twentieth century as home to native-born and northern European immigrants who worked in West Philadelphia or commuted to Center City. This more densely developed residential area was eventually separated from Ward 40 as the city’s Fifty-First Ward.  As neighborhoods developed, trolley-served Woodland Avenue became an important retail district.

More dramatic changes were wrought by World War I, when the federal government authorized the American International Shipping Corporation to build Hog Island, the world’s largest shipyard. The site virtually became a town, with barracks to house almost 15,000 male workers. New railroad and trolley tracks transported an additional 20,000 workers and materials to and from the shipyard. The war initiated a significant demographic change: White and Black southern families found wartime an opportunity to move out of the South. In 1920, Black residents accounted for about 25 percent of the population of about 10,000 (excluding Hog Island dormitories) living below Seventy-Fourth Street at a time when Black residents accounted for about 27 percent of the total population of Philadelphia.

Greater Eastwick Improvement Association

The shipyard, closed in 1921, brought Southwest Philadelphia to the attention of City Hall in the competition for funding of transportation and municipal services. Real estate developer David E. Triester named the Fortieth Ward Eastwick and created the Greater Eastwick Improvement Association (GEIA) to obtain more comprehensive municipal services. Seeing the lesson of Hog Island, GEIA leaders, supported by the Southwest Globe Times, tied their future to the city when they successfully lobbied for a Southwest airport rather than a Northeast or Camden facility. Charles Lindbergh dedicated the new Southwest airport in 1927, but the muddy landscape proved challenging; for more than a decade the airport was moved to Camden.  In the 1930s, Mayor S. Davis Wilson negotiated with the federal government for the Hog Island Shipyard site to bring the airport back to Southwest.  Works Progress Administration workers filled in the area and built runways as part of Philadelphia’s share in the New Deal.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the GEIA less successfully and more controversially publicized the need for modern sewage systems and additional diking along the surviving network of creeks after several hurricanes seriously flooded homes and businesses. Some  residents contended the association’s publicity created negative views of the area and discouraged investment in modern sewage facilities. Despite this, more residential development occurred in the 1920s than in the three previous decades. The 1920s building boom was so extensive that by the early 1930s sociologist William Weaver predicted the Tinicum Marsh would disappear. By that time, though, Philadelphia residents evicted from houses and apartments in other areas of the city erected shacks in the still largely undeveloped lower marshy areas.

After World War II, the Fortieth Ward once again gained public attention, some of which resulted in improved infrastructure—but not for longtime residents.  In 1954, Philadelphia’s Mother of the Year, Jennie Harley Cook, was a homemaker from the Meadows (below Seventy-Fourth Street). Just a few years later, though, Harley and her family along with thousands of other Southwest families received eviction notices when Eastwick was condemned as a slum. Lack of modern sewage services and Depression-era shanties were featured in official city publications and city newspapers. The Philadelphia City Planning Commission had envisioned a “New Eastwick” to support the developing post-industrial service economy. In 1950, the Eastwick Urban Renewal Project began when much of Ward 40, about 3,000 acres, was declared “blighted.” Plans to reduce residential and farm use included creating space for an East Coast highway (I-95, which crosses the Schuylkill  over the two-tiered Girard Point Bridge) and a hub of transportation and light industry centered on an enlarged international airport. The long-projected Southwest Sewage Treatment Plant was finally constructed as, despite residents’ protests, neighborhood demolition began in 1960.

Ongoing Challenges

Following the demolition, light industrial parks, shopping centers, and some replacement housing were built, but large tracts remained vacant. In 2002, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission certified a forty-block area of Kingsessing as “blighted.” Squatting and gap-tooth syndrome (empty lots between dwellings) had become common, and environmental problems continued to plague many residents, especially in the lower area. Despite the 1997 opening of SEPTA’s Eastwick Station and the relocation of Philadelphia’s main post office to Eastwick, in 2006 the entire Eastwick Urban Renewal Area was recertified as a blighted district.

In the decades at the turn of the twenty-first century, Southwest Philadelphia faced serious challenges to neighborhood stability, leaving high crime and vacancy rates in an area formerly characterized by high levels of home ownership and middle class apartment houses. Most Southwest neighborhoods experienced an overall decline in population after 1990, but they developed greater diversity—and racial tension—with an influx of new immigrant groups, primarily West African with some new Vietnamese and Hispanic residents.

The Elmwood neighborhood experienced some of the most serious racial tensions in the city in recent decades. This area was predominantly home to Polish and Irish American families centered on Roman Catholic parishes, but the disintegration of the manufacturing economy left many unemployed. In 1985, when two houses were sold to an African American family and an interracial couple, some white neighbors reacted violently, destroying property with axes and arson. Mayor Wilson Goode declared a state of emergency. Between 1990 and 2000 the white population of Elmwood decreased by almost 70 percent, while the African American population increased. Vietnamese and West African immigrants added to the racial picture. In 2008, John Bartram High School was placed in lockdown when a fight between African American and African students turned into a school riot.

Eastwick Stability

Eastwick, with a longer history of diversity, has not seen the dramatic population shifts of other neighborhoods, although by 2014 African American residents accounted for 76 percent of the residents. Eastwick residents have higher average education levels and homeownership rates than many other neighborhoods in Southwest, perhaps providing more economic and social stability for residents.

Eastwick residents, however, contend with worsening environmental justice issues compounded by episodic flooding, the consequences of incomplete redevelopment, and controversial plans for the future development of vacant areas. Environmental problems, always a challenge in this low-lying vicinity, have worsened with changing land use. Tinicum Marsh, once reduced to about 200 acres, was preserved by a 1972 Act of Congress because it contained the last remaining freshwater tidal marsh in the state.  Renamed the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum, it encompasses 1,000 acres. But periodic flooding has increased since much of the vicinity was rezoned for industrial use. Large vacant tracts have attracted illegal dumping of hazardous substances that seep into the ground.  Cleanup of former industrial sites has not always been conscientious. In the 1990s, environmental problems caused by nearby oil refineries led to a partly successful lawsuit for improvements to protect local residents. The airport expanded and became the cornerstone for planning development. Thus, the struggles of Southwest Philadelphians to achieve livable family neighborhoods continued in the early twenty-first century.

Neighborhoods in Southwest Philadelphia

Eastwick

Kingsessing

Elmwood

Paschall

The Meadows

Clearview

Penrose

Anne E. Krulikowski holds a Ph.D. in American history with a concentration in material culture/preservation from the University of Delaware.  She teaches at West Chester University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

West Philadelphia did not exist until the middle of the nineteenth century. Although this part of the region witnessed small settlements of Lenape and Swedes who established Lutheran churches and log cabins on the west side of the Schuylkill, it was not included in the original plan of Philadelphia.  William Penn wrote that the area “is likely to be a great part of the settlement of this age” and intended to expand settlement across the river. But he abandoned the idea by 1684, two years after his arrival.

Throughout the eighteenth century much of what would become West Philadelphia remained sparsely populated farmland. Then on the far bank of the Schuylkill, port and mercantile infrastructure began to build up at this westward point of entry to the city. A major wagon route, Lancaster Pike, ran through the area, and in 1805 the first permanent bridge was built over the Schuylkill at Market Street. The Darby Road also ran up to this point, granting access to communities like Chester farther down the Delaware River. A few large estates were built during this time as well, most notably the Hamilton family’s Woodlands with its iconic Georgian mansion and that of John Bartram (1699-1777), the renowned botanist and Quaker who cultivated extensive gardens along the banks of the Schuylkill.

Bridge Promotes Growth

The new bridge spurred growth, prompting a network of industries, including stockyards, lumber mills, slaughterhouses, coal yards, foundries, and glass factories to serve the city across the river. Small communities began to spring up to support these businesses, like Hamiltonville in 1804. The then-scion of the family, William Hamilton (1745-1813), established the estate’s Georgian mansion and laid out

Hamiltonville as a continuation of Penn’s grid in Philadelphia proper. Other settlements followed, including Mantua Village, carved from the holdings of a local landowner, Judge Richard Peters (1743-1828), and laid out in 1809. Neither area proved popular at first, but as the city became more highly developed the lots began to sell. By the 1840s developers in Philadelphia, which was the second-largest city in the United States at the time, were already looking beyond the Schuylkill for fresh land. Abraham Brower’s innovative omnibus service, introduced to Philadelphia in 1831, allowed new settlers speedy access into the central city. At the time, the majority of residents were working class—about half immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and England—and settlements of any density tapered off at what would become the boundaries of Fortieth Street, with the wealthy clustered along Walnut and Chestnut near this westward extremis.

To accommodate the bourgeoning population, in 1844 Hamiltonville, Mantua, and Powelton joined together to incorporate as the borough of West Philadelphia, before being brought into the city proper with the consolidation of 1854. After that, the population exploded from eleven thousand in 1850 to twenty-three thousand in 1860. For the next half century at least, West Philadelphia largely became a suburb in the city—abetted by a series of advances in transportation technology, starting with the horsecars of the 1850s.

A bustling light industrial sector continued to grow south of Market Street on land adjacent to the river, relying on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s infrastructure around 30th Street Station to convey the sector’s goods efficiently. Some of the largest concerns included the metal workings at Job T. Pugh’s Auger Works, the Otto Gas Engine Manufacturing Company, and the Allison & Sons Car & Tube Works, one of the biggest wagon firms in the nation until its destruction by fire in 1872. Like the rest of the city’s manufacturing sector, West Philadelphia’s industry enjoyed great diversity. Everything from printers and bakeries to slaughterhouses and mirror manufacturers dotted this slice of the landscape.

Residential at First

Despite the industry clustered along the area’s shores, development in this period remained largely residential in the rest of West Philadelphia. This set the living pattern apart from its counterparts in North and South Philadelphia, where row houses were interspersed with factories and warehouses. On the far side of the Schuylkill, the new housing developments were mostly marketed for the middle and upper classes, whose westward movement was further enabled by the replacement of the omnibus by horse cars in 1858. New routes into the city aided this movement too, like the Chestnut Street bridge completed in 1866.

Then in the 1870s the University of Pennsylvania left its cramped center city location for West Philadelphia, a move with enormous effect on the development of surrounding neighborhoods, especially during the second half of the twentieth century. After 1880 the larger houses closer to the river and the university, which dated to earlier in the century, began to be carved into smaller units. Apartment buildings—unusual in this row-house-dominated city—began to spring up as well. At the same time, new development moved beyond Forty-Fifth Street out to Cobb’s Creek, the border with Delaware County.

The introduction of electric streetcars in the 1890s further altered the area, as those with more resources moved farther out, leaving behind a more broadly based middle class. This process accelerated with the full extension of the Market-Frankford line in 1907, which boosted settlement, including that of immigrant and Black laborers living close to the line. By the twentieth century many of the wealthy residents who remained in West Philadelphia located away from the Market-Frankford elevated line or the multiplicity of trolley lines, further accelerating the growth of the Main Line suburbs in the process.

The district still had fewer than a hundred thousand people in 1890, but every new census revealed meteoric growth. In 1900 West Philadelphia had 148,548 residents, in 1910 the number grew to 247,928, and by 1920 there were 359,601. In 1923 the Philadelphia Bulletin estimated that at least half the population of the district commuted in to center city every day. Housing was at a premium, and due to the desirability of the area, the newspaper of record noted that more than any other section of the city, West Philadelphia encouraged the construction of apartment buildings and the subdivision of old mansions to accommodate the boom.

Soaring Ambitions

As West Philadelphia’s population climbed in the 1920s to the point that would have ranked it the nineteenth most-populous city in the United States, ambitions for the area soared. In 1924, the president of Drovers and Merchants National Bank argued that West Philadelphia should have its own seat on the local Federal Reserve Board. He noted there was $60 million in manufacturing capital invested in the district, mostly by the river, and fifteen banks with total deposits of $40 million. Multiple  business corridors sprouted on Fifty-Second Street and Baltimore, Lancaster, Woodland, and Girard Avenues.

By the 1930s one of the more notable developments in West Philadelphia was the growing number of Black residents and the discriminatory pressures that boxed them into an intensely segregated area stretching south to Market Street, west to Fifty-Ninth Street, and bounded to the north and east by the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the river beyond it.

The process began during World War I, as Black migrants arrived in the city in increasing numbers. By the end of the 1920s, 220,000 African Americans lived in Philadelphia, and they desperately needed housing beyond the older Black ghetto in North Philadelphia. By the 1940s, the new area of settlement stretched from the river out to Fifty-Ninth Street and housed about forty-four thousand African Americans, from poor and working class by the water to the Black elite in the northwestern neighborhoods closest to the Main Line.

The Black population swelled again during World War II, breaking West Philadelphia’s racial boundaries by moving south of Market Street and west of Fifty-Ninth Street. As African Americans began living in more neighborhoods, the white population began fleeing to the expanding suburbs. By 1950, West Philadelphia had lost a quarter of its Irish-American and 11 percent of its Italian-American population, while the African American population increased by 72 percent. As the century wore on, the only corners of West Philadelphia that were not overwhelmingly Black were immediately around Drexel and Pennsylvania universities and in a band of neighborhoods to the west of the higher education cluster that remained racially mixed from the 1960s onward.

The Black residents of West Philadelphia were forced to contend with redlining and other discriminatory practices that limited access to capital and higher-paid employment for many residents. They were also discouraged, by legal means or by violence, from immediately following the white population into the growing suburbs. But during the early decades of majority-Black West Philadelphia, these challenges were attenuated by the growth of African American political power and the slowly declining, but still available, unionized industrial jobs.

Public sector employment in city government and the school district offered a wide range of employment opportunities for Black workers, from professional positions as managers and teachers to jobs that required less formal education, like sanitation and transportation. Many public sector unions became majority African American, or at least enjoyed large minorities of Black members, giving their neighborhoods larger political and economic anchors.

University Master Plan

As West Philadelphia became majority African American, the University of Pennsylvania began an ambitious expansion framed by its 1948 master plan (the university’s first update in almost half a century). A few African American neighborhoods close to campus were largely destroyed by eminent domain as a result, most famously the area known as Black Bottom that stood between the university and Powelton Village. The Black neighborhoods closest to the river, and therefore closest to Penn, tended to be those with the lowest income and the least political power. Farther west, African American neighborhoods tended to be more stable, with larger populations of public sector workers and private sector white collar workers, but that was little comfort to the displaced residents of Black Bottom.

The impetus for Penn’s expansion came from an infusion of government research funding along with the urban renewal dollars made available by the national Housing Act of 1949. During this period, the university  adopted the moniker  “University City” for the surrounding neighborhoods. Penn took full advantage of postwar federal largesse, competing successfully with its counterparts in higher education for research and development grants—especially after the flood of funding following the Soviet Union’s Sputnik success in 1957. Penn also competed with other parts of the city for urban renewal funds (much of the money allocated within West Philadelphia went to the university’s ends). The upgrades to campus were impressive. They were also necessary to create a more walkable environment and additional housing for a growing student body. But the expansion into surrounding residential neighborhoods embittered many residents.

In the latter decades of the twentieth century West Philadelphia kept changing as the white population continued to drain out of the city. The remaining African American neighborhoods continued to suffer discrimination in access to jobs and capital while many of the jobs that previously fostered economic stability were lost or undercut by the flight of manufacturing firms. This postindustrial economic vise resulted in the kind of divestment and shadow economy dealings that blighted many other inner city neighborhoods. In the 1980s some immigrants began to move into the area, chiefly African and Cambodian, although the latter population would almost entirely decamp for other parts of the city by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In the mid-1980s, crack cocaine reached West Philadelphia and wreaked havoc in many neighborhoods, resulting in a crime wave that scared off  many middle-class African Americans and some of the remaining white families as well. The police department made matters worse by becoming the first U.S. law enforcement institution to bomb its own city. During a confrontation at the fortified compound of the anarcho-primitivist group MOVE in 1985, the police attempted to drop a high explosive on a bunker atop the radicals’ home. The resulting explosion sparked a conflagration that consumed much of the block and killed eleven people. In the following decade, farther to the east, general violence continued to rise, as it did in the rest of the country. After several high-profile murders of Penn graduate students living in the mixed- race neighborhoods beyond the campus borders, which had lost much of their white population during the 1990s, the university began to again be active in the community.

Under the guidance of university president Judith Rodin (b. 1944), who was born and raised in West Philadelphia, Penn promised to not repeat the aggressive steps taken in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, it provided unarmed security services to patrol the area and exercised soft power to provide incentives to staff, from professors to janitors, to buy and repair homes in a catchment area around the university. Penn also invested in local public schools, founding the Sadie Alexander School, for pre-K through eighth grade. With other anchor institutions in the area, it supported development of the University City District to provide further amenities.

This activity resulted in the rejuvenation of the neighborhoods surrounding the university and the historically mixed-race neighborhood to its immediate west, which in 2010 became majority white for the first time since 1970. The university was not the only force at work; its efforts were aided by a nationwide decline in crime and marginal increase in the desire for urban living among a segment of the professional classes. Meanwhile, in many neighborhoods on the border of Delaware County and elsewhere, conditions worsened during the Great Recession and the subsequent decimation of the public sector workforce.

By the early twenty-first century West Philadelphia was about as populous as it had been in 1910, having lost more than a hundred thousand residents after 1950. It stood divided, like much of the city and the country, between the haves and the have nots. Its western majority African American neighborhoods were declining in population and median income. Much of the vacancy and crime that blighted West Philadelphia could be found in these areas, which were still cut off from legitimate employment and capital markets. This situation was counterpoised by the rise of University City, which was quickly becoming a rival for Center City in term of jobs and investment. It remained to be seen whether the ascendancy of the eastern section of West Philadelphia, where old industries and worker housing were giving way to new investment, would be enough to buoy the fortunes of the outlying, formerly middle class areas.

Jake Blumgart is a reporter for WHYY’s PlanPhilly. (Author information current at time of publication.)