Early in the colonial era, poor, infirm, and mentally ill Philadelphians were cared for privately by the community. Churches, trade and ethnic associations, and family members took care of their own. A prime example of this was the Friends Almshouse, built in 1713. Located on Walnut Street between Third and Fourth Streets, this poorhouse run for and by Quakers provided a sanctuary for poor, widowed, and aged Friends.

With an increase in population and a growing influx of immigrants, the Philadelphia public officials soon saw the need for city-run poor relief and established the Overseers of the Poor, an organization made up in large part of Quakers. The Overseers, later renamed the Guardians of the Poor, were to oversee all subsequent almshouses in Philadelphia. These included the Philadelphia City Almshouse, a complex completed in 1732 and encompassing the block between Third and Fourth and Spruce and Pine Streets, previously a rural green meadow. Built and organized like a large domestic house, this almshouse was never meant to accommodate more than forty or fifty people at a time. Only those in dire need such as orphans and the very sick and elderly were supposed to be admitted. For others in need, the city preferred  “out-relief” in the form of small amounts of money, clothing, firewood and food.

The Philadelphia Almshouse and all subsequent almshouses in the city struggled with funding. Mismanagement, corruption, and an ever-growing indigent population created an almost constant need for more money, and poor taxes were never enough to cover expenses. To dispense with the poor while simultaneously raising money, almshouses across the colonies engaged in bonding out children. This involved indenturing children and even young adults to paying members of the community, who in return agreed to teach their charges useful skills and in some cases to educate them to some degree. This system had unlimited potential for abuse and sorrow. Children could easily be forcibly removed from their parents who would never see them again. In fact, almshouse authorities preferred to place children far from their homes to discourage runaways and to keep disgruntled parents from complaining about the condition in which their children were kept.

Reforming and Teaching Skills

As the eighteenth century progressed, attitudes began to change away from just feeding and clothing the poor, toward reforming and teaching them skills. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) expressed his opinion that poor relief itself (meaning handouts) caused indigence. Almshouses began to employ their tenants in attached workhouses, where they were made to weave cloth, manufacture and repair shoes or linens, make buttons, and other such activities. These tasks were meant to defray the costs of running the almshouse while teaching the inmates morality through labor. Generally, both goals failed. The products of task work proved unprofitable due to a combination of corruption and mismanagement, and inmates resented being made to work for no pay.

After the second quarter of the eighteenth century, admissions to the Philadelphia Almshouse increased steadily as the general population grew. By the 1760s, the almshouse was vastly overcrowded, with a population exceeding 200 persons, and the building proved too small to implement new philosophies regarding poor relief. As the city expanded, the almshouse property also became prime real estate in the neighborhood later known as Society Hill. In 1767, the institution moved to less-expensive land more distant from the city core: a plot bounded by Tenth and Eleventh Streets from Spruce to Pine. Officially known as the Philadelphia Almshouse and House of Employment, the new complex was most often called the Bettering House, with more than a little hint of irony.

The Bettering House was, at the time, the largest building in the American colonies and a source of great pride for Philadelphia. Surrounded by lavish pleasure gardens, the institution was an attraction visited by wealthy Philadelphians and travelers, who reported in their diaries about having dined or taken tea in the gardens. Some, however, were repulsed to be surrounded by such splendor while observing the poor as though they were animals in a zoo.

Unlike the first almshouse, the Bettering House rigorously controlled inmates’ lives. Authorities segregated the population by age, race, gender and even “good” versus “bad” poor, with a goal of reforming the “failed” indigents, who were increasingly seen as criminal. The poor were expected to accept their place in society and taught how to properly fulfill their role once released. Punishment, religious instruction, task work, and, at times, solitary reflection, were employed to this end. Those who were capable were to work six days a week, between eight and ten hours a day, not including a half-hour break for breakfast and an hour for dinner. The overseers complained in daily journals that the population swelled during the tough winter months, and inmates departed in droves once they were clothed, fed, the weather improved, or they were cured of their particular ailments, often to return again the following year. It was not uncommon for prospective inmates to complain of “sore legs” upon entry in order to gain shelter for a few cold months and avoid labor.

Rural Almshouses

While the greatest concentration of those in need tended to center in cities, almshouses or “poor farms,” as they were often called, also opened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in rural areas, including Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties. Countryside institutions became necessary as cities passed poor laws specifying that the infirm and impoverished seeking aid could only obtain it from the county in which they had legal residence. Although industrialization drew many individuals seeking jobs to cities, those who fell on hard times had to be transported back to their hometowns. Rural almshouses differed somewhat from their urban counterparts by placing greater emphasis on being self-sufficient institutions and assigning work centered on farming and related tasks.

Meanwhile the Bettering House, thought to be the solution to eliminating Philadelphia’s poor population, fell to the same corruption, lack of funding, and overcrowding as the city’s first almshouse and closed in 1835. The same year, its replacement opened. With this next iteration of the Philadelphia Almshouse, founders hoped to succeed by completely institutionalizing the poor. Located in West Philadelphia in an area formerly known as Blockley Township  between Thirty-Fourth Street and Cleveland Avenue (later renamed University Avenue), the new “Blockley Almshouse” had no formal gardens. It looked out over the Schuylkill River, which served as an effective barrier between the city and its poor. A massive complex of four main buildings, Blockley included a traditional poorhouse, insane asylum, infirmary, and orphanage. Showing off industrious paupers was no longer of importance. All activities occurred privately within the compound, including numerous dissections of bodies of deceased inmates by doctors and their anatomy students. With a well-developed infirmary to treat the sick poor, Blockley Almshouse evolved into the Philadelphia General Hospital in 1919.  Similarly, by the 1960s many of the surrounding rural almshouses were converted to nursing homes.

The almshouses’ role as free hospitals for the sick indigent may be their most positive legacy. The first Philadelphia City Almshouse essentially served as the first public hospital in the colonies. Almshouses did not turn away those with ailments viewed as “sinful,” such as venereal diseases or complications from alcoholism. For ailing prostitutes and unwed pregnant mothers, the almshouses were often the only choice available. Many doctors in the Philadelphia area learned their trade from practicing on inmates. That being said, almshouses were institutions of last resort for many who turned to them during difficult times. The use of almshouses and the practice of institutionalizing the poor ended throughout the United States in the mid-twentieth century after three centuries of failed policy.

Mara Kaktins is a historical archaeologist who holds an M.A. from Temple University.  Her graduate work focused on the changing treatment of the poor throughout the colonial period. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Early twentieth-century developers built one of the first auto-centered residential neighborhoods just inside the Philadelphia city limit.  Later designated on the National Register of Historic Places as the “Cobbs Creek Automobile Suburb District,” this community sat adjacent to the newly created automobile parkway along Cobbs Creek, which formed part of Philadelphia’s western boundary. The neighborhood’s rows of two- and three-story houses, constructed mostly in the first quarter of the twentieth century, accommodated the family automobile with rear alleys and rear basement garages. Once Henry Ford introduced assembly line production in 1914, he began selling automobiles at prices that middle-class households could afford. Car ownership increased dramatically during the 1920s, accelerating middle-class suburbanization in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Delaware River Bridge, which opened in 1926 (later known as the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), forged an easy connection between the two states.

Some of the earliest suburbs in the region became hubs of the much-larger suburban wave following World War II. An example is the community of Delaware Township in Camden County, which was subsequently renamed Cherry Hill. There, white-collar professionals sought a suburban lifestyle at mid-twentieth century. To serve this affluent population, developers started construction on the Cherry Hill Mall in 1960, opening it a year later as the first enclosed shopping mall on the East Coast.

Manufacturing Moves to the Suburbs

Not only did stores and services follow the central city populations migrating outward to the suburbs. Manufacturing firms as well left older urban industrial districts for the green fields beyond the city limits. The owners of industrial plants in Philadelphia, Camden, and Chester played an early role in shaping twentieth century suburbs. The federally funded interstate highway system launched in the 1950s made it convenient for them to move their plants out of nineteenth-century industrial districts to cheap land at the edge of the city. There they replaced their multistory operations with one-story plants that accommodated continuous-flow production processes. They favored locations near highway on-ramps, where they could dramatically reduce the time it took truck drivers to deliver raw materials and pick up finished goods. Since suburban plants were typically more automated than older urban factories, owners could also save money on labor. For example, RCA, long a mainstay of Camden’s industrial economy, moved a significant part of its offices and laboratories to Cherry Hill in 1964. Camden’s combined losses of retail and manufacturing employment to Cherry Hill were so significant that by 1965, Cherry Hill’s assessed property value surpassed that of Camden, deepening the economic challenge facing that aging city. This pattern of industrial flight to the suburbs undermined the economic stability of all the older manufacturing districts in the Greater Philadelphia region.

Lower taxes and municipal incentive packages helped lure industries to the suburbs. The historic fragmentation of the region’s land area into hundreds of separate municipalities led to competition among townships for business investment. Relying mostly on automobiles and trucks, businesses gained the freedom to distribute themselves broadly across the suburban landscape rather than clustering. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, early manufacturing suburbs had lost ground to newer locations.  or example, lower Bucks County began losing its industrial job base as companies chose locations in upper Bucks County.

Households Pursue the Suburban Dream

Federal funds for building highways in metropolitan areas constituted only part of the national government’s spur to suburban growth following World War II. In addition, the G.I. Bill of 1944 provided low-interest loans to veterans for buying single family homes, fueling the exodus from older residential neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Camden, Wilmington, and Chester City. In 1940 the city of Philadelphia contained 57 percent of the total population living in nine counties that the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission defined as the Greater Philadelphia region.  By the year 2000 that figure had plummeted to 28 percent.

The suburbs built beyond the city limits at mid-twentieth century featured one-story or split-level houses, each home surrounded on all sides by its own grassy yard. Typically, builders offered a limited number of house plans and architectural styles, most of which offered either a side garage or a carport, building the automobile into the culture of the families who bought them. That move of the automobile from back alley to the front yard of the home signified the growing importance of the car in suburban life. New suburbs typically arranged homes along slow-speed, curvilinear streets just wide enough for emergency vehicles to turn around. Surrounding these residential enclaves, shopping malls, drive-through restaurants, and drive-in movie theaters lined suburban highways to serve the car-owning population. By the late 1950s these services began to cluster in early shopping centers surrounded by massive parking lots.

Highway intersections in the suburbs often determined the locations of early shopping malls. In 1966 the Baltimore-based Rouse Company built Plymouth Meeting Mall near the interchange where the Pennsylvania Turnpike (I-276) crossed the Northeast Extension/Blue Route (I-476). Developers strategically located the King of Prussia Mall where the Schuylkill Expressway intersected with the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The 1960s also saw the building of the Moorestown Mall near the intersection of Interstate 295 and N.J. Route 73.   Satisfying so many household needs, these and numerous other shopping centers gave suburban homeowners fewer reasons to drive into Philadelphia, Camden, or Wilmington.

Civic Leaders Accommodate the Automobile

Recognizing the threat posed by this tide of suburbanization, Philadelphia leaders focused on auto-friendly projects that would maintain the centrality of downtown as the center of a region that increasingly relied on cars and trucks. To make it easy for drivers to access downtown from any point on the suburban fringe, downtown planners designed a loop of expressways around the city.  First came the Pennsylvania Turnpike, crossing the region from west to east across the northern suburbs. On the western side of the central city, the Schuylkill Expressway opened in 1958, connecting the city to King of Prussia, which became one of the largest suburban shopping and office complexes in the United States. Across the city on its eastern edge, construction crews in 1966 began building I-95 among the Delaware River to connect the city with northern suburbs in Bucks County and Mercer County.  In 1959 engineers opened a depressed expressway across the north edge of downtown with limited access between Twenty-first Street and Seventeenth Street.  Then in 1991 they extended the eastern portion of that Vine Street Expressway all the way to the Delaware River at the city’s eastern edge.

Ultimately, however, those efforts by Philadelphia planners could not stem the rise of the suburbs. Growing segments of the suburban workforce both lived and worked outside the city limits. The automobile enabled businesses to disperse along major auto routes, rather than clustering in a handful of edge cities. That dispersed pattern of employment produced increasing traffic flows from suburb-to-suburb, breaking the spoke-and-wheel pattern that had marked earlier commuting by streetcar and rail.

While the negative impacts on the city are well-known and documented, urban analysts have paid less attention to the consequences for the inner suburbs. Mass auto ownership reduced their competitive advantage, which had been based on their easy access to downtown Philadelphia via mass transportation. Even families in suburbs served by the extensive regional rail service acquired cars because the entire suburban landscape was developed to require automobiles in everyday life for travel to schools, churches, shopping and services of all kinds.

The Automobile Enables Sprawl

Rather than locating most services, entertainment, and employment in town centers where they could be reached on foot, the automobile encouraged real estate developers to spread out those everyday destinations. Admittedly, some stores, restaurants, and services were clustered in strip malls or enclosed shopping malls, but almost all accommodated the automobile. Both commercial and residential developers sought large tracts of suburban land on which to build—  a practice that worked against a consistent pattern of outward expansion. Builders constantly leapfrogged over already-developed areas in order to acquire cheaper land that was not near already-developed territory. The resulting pattern created broadly scattered subdivisions and  commercial and industrial development. That scattering reinforced the necessity of car travel as a requirement of life in the suburbs.

The one consistent element in all suburban plans was parking space for autos and trucks. Not just shopping centers, but also schools, hospitals, medical centers, and office complexes provided free parking as a matter of course. Often zoning boards required developers to assure at least one space per employee, and the easy availability of free parking led commuters to drive alone to work. The absence of sidewalks in many suburban commercial and office districts, along with the prospect of crossing massive asphalt parking lots, discouraged both walking and transit use in the suburbs.

In 2001 a civic coalition including the Pennsylvania Economy League, 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, The Reinvestment Fund, and the William Penn Foundation sounded an alarm about the impacts of sprawl in metropolitan Philadelphia. Between 1970 and 1990, population in the nine-county area served by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) had barely increased from 5.12 million to 5.18 million, slightly more than 1 percent. Yet in those same twenty years, total developed land had expanded by 30 percent, which amounted to paving over one additional acre every hour.

The Automobile Contributes to Pollution

The spread of massive suburban parking lots especially affected water quantity and quality. Paving over land that could otherwise filter rainwater reduced the amount of water recharging suburban aquifers, which often serve as primary sources of drinking water.  Stormwater draining off paved areas heightened the potential for flooding. And the proliferation of impervious parking surfaces in suburban locations increased the quantity of contaminants being washed into local streams, rivers, and lakes by stormwater runoff.

Even more threatening than the automobile’s impact on water quality was the air pollution generated by auto exhaust. Philadelphia’s embrace of the automobile in the 1950s and 1960s blinded some civic leaders to this threat. A 1969 DVRPC transportation analysis (projecting the region’s needs and conditions in 1985) drew blistering criticism from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for its heavy emphasis on accommodating automobiles at the expense of public transportation and environmental quality. Specifically, the federal agency criticized the DVRPC for planning to spend three times as much money on limited access roads as on mass transit. To dramatize their criticism, the EPA representatives staged their news conference on an incomplete section of the I-95 highway.

Subsequent trends confirmed the EPA’s fears about the impacts of auto transportation on the region’s air quality. From 1990 to 2019, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by autos and trucks in the Philadelphia metropolitan area increased faster than the population grew, according to Boston University’s Database of Road Transportation Emissions. Among the neighborhoods burdened with the most auto-related pollution were Old City, Northern Liberties, Callowhill, and Chinatown — all areas adjacent to the Vine Street Expressway, which community leaders in Chinatown had fought bitterly. Suspecting the massive expressway project would damage their district, they had demanded unsuccessfully that the submerged road be capped, at least in their vicinity.

Not only inside the city, but also in the suburbs, dependence on the automobile endangered air quality at the turn of the twenty-first century. The single largest contributor to ozone was automobiles on congested roads. Lower Bucks County consistently recorded some of the highest smog levels in Pennsylvania, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease and strokes. In some years, the two Bristol census tracts bordered by I-95, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and Route 3 recorded the highest asthma rates in the United States, exceeding 10 percent of adults. Advocates for cleaner air proposed that employers in Lower Bucks County allow employees to work from home on days with poor air quality, or organize ride-sharing, and reduce the company’s use of motor vehicles.

Automobile Culture and Social Separation

Among the most important long-term effects of the automobile culture was to enable social separation of residents by income and race in the Philadelphia suburbs. As the suburban job base ranged across long distances (instead of concentrating in industrial districts like those within the central city), commuters needed daily access to an automobile.  That requirement prevented many lower-income Philadelphians from living in the suburbs.

Since the car made it possible to live at significant distances from workplaces, the fortunate families who could afford suburban homes enjoyed the freedom to select their neighborhood based on factors other than the journey-to-work, newcomers made choices based on the price of housing, the kinds of services and amenities that different communities provided, and the kinds of people they preferred as neighbors.

In some suburbs, trends toward income, racial, and ethnic separation were reinforced by restrictive covenants, sales, rental or financing opportunities, and real estate agents who steered African American buyers away from all-white neighborhoods. Suburban residents engaged in such practices not only to live among compatible neighbors, but also to preserve the value of their houses. The resulting pattern separated the suburban population into homogeneous enclaves. By the 1970s, the social mixing of residents that had been common in earlier streetcar suburbs had become distinctly uncommon in suburbs. Inner suburbs had become home to many working-class and immigrant households. In contrast, the greatest number of middle-class suburbs were arrayed at the outer edges of the metropolitan area, where land prices were affordable. The suburban towns with the highest household incomes in the region clustered in Pennsylvania at mid-distance between downtown Philadelphia and the region’s edge, where land prices had risen historically in older suburbs served by commuter railroads.

Recovering Walkable Townscapes

At the opening of the twenty-first century, suburban planners faced changing consumer preferences that affected suburban planning. The dominance of shopping malls as retailing centers had begun to erode in competition with online shopping. Several of the region’s largest malls had suffered serious declines. At the same time, young adults appeared less committed to auto ownership than their parents’ generation and more inclined to favor walkable environments for recreation, shopping, and entertainment.  To accommodate the growing interest in walkable communities, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2014 began publishing a “National Walkability Index” because walkability had emerged as an important factor in real estate markets across the nation.

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission encouraged redevelopment of walkable suburban centers with its Classic Towns initiative carried on between 2008 and 2018. That program encouraged and publicized a group of suburbs working to encourage pedestrian traffic by investing in walkable commercial districts. Typically, their Main Street improvements included historic preservation of stores, office buildings, restaurants, bars and movie theaters, plus the addition of street trees and other greenery, historic lighting fixtures, and benches for sitting.

Some of those walkable suburbs served as county seats (for example, Doylestown and West Chester), while others developed lively town centers around regional rail stops (for example, Ambler and Collingswood).  Such town-based initiatives, while they certainly could not eliminate the place of the automobile, could at least signal the end of its overwhelming dominance in suburban life.

Carolyn T. Adams is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Information in this essay was current at time of publication.)

In eighteenth-century Philadelphia, master mechanics customarily boarded apprentices, who received food, lodging, and craft training in exchange for their labor. Farmers in the surrounding rural counties boarded hired hands. Families of all social ranks took in lodgers, accommodating unmarried men and women who had few other housing options. Taverns sheltered both travelers and long-term residents. By the 1780s, however, enterprising proprietors began advertising “genteel” boarding and lodging in the city’s newspapers, sometimes promoting their establishments as superior to taverns. The trend spread rapidly; Robinson’s Philadelphia Register and City Directory for 1799 included nearly one hundred boardinghouses.

By the late nineteenth century these numbers had increased tenfold. Indeed, by accommodating migrants from the surrounding countryside as well as immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Britain, and, later, Italy, Poland, and Russia, boardinghouses helped to make Philadelphia’s rapid economic and population growth possible. Nearby cities experienced similar boardinghouse booms. Wilmington directories listed seven boardinghouses in 1814, forty-three in 1874, and 174 in 1900; the number of boarding places in Camden rose from only eight in the early 1860s to 137 at the turn of the twentieth century.

How Boarding Shaped Urban Life

These statistics vastly underestimate the degree to which boarding shaped urban life. Historians estimate that one in four nineteenth-century Philadelphia households included boarders. These residences ranged from relatively large concerns that resembled small hotels to homes that sheltered a single lodger. Boardinghouses could be remarkably cosmopolitan, bringing together people who otherwise never would have met. More often they reinforced ethnic, racial, class, and occupational distinctions. Boardinghouses near Independence Hall housed middle-class clerks and merchants who worked nearby. Establishments that catered to the elite, such as the boardinghouse on Spruce Street run by Ann Smith, could be found in Society Hill. Working-class families who lived in the alleys off major downtown streets took in boarders; so, too, did the inhabitants of the heavily Irish neighborhoods of Southwark, Kensington, and Moyamensing. Immigrants from other ethnic groups settled into their own boarding places, usually run by a woman from the old country. Sailors’ and stevedores’ boardinghouses clustered near the Delaware River docks. Before the University of Pennsylvania opened its first dormitories in 1900, most of its students lived in the nearby “boarding house colony.” Not all boardinghouses were urban. In rural New Castle County, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company paid its married workers to board bachelor employees.

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in some cases after, public accommodations, even in northern cities, were segregated by race. African American boardinghouse keepers performed a vital function by accommodating people of color, both travelers and permanent residents. And before the Civil War, African American boardinghouses in Philadelphia and Camden occasionally functioned as informal stops on the Underground Railroad by sheltering fugitives from slavery.

If boardinghouses provided food and shelter to transients and newcomers, they also provided women with a means of making a living or supplementing their families’ incomes. In 1880 Margret McNamara (b. c.1840), the wife of a peddler, housed nine boarders, all of them Irish immigrants like herself, in her residence on Mifflin Street in South Philadelphia. McNamara did not describe herself as a boardinghouse keeper, perhaps because doing so might suggest her husband’s income was insufficient to support her. As her experience suggests, much boarding and lodging housekeeping in Greater Philadelphia, as elsewhere, consisted of what economists call hidden market labor. Even when census takers or city directories identified a man as the establishment’s proprietor, women undertook the considerable labor keeping boarders entailed—cooking, cleaning, monitoring comings and goings, collecting rents. When the DuPont Company paid male employees who agreed to house unmarried workers, they paid men for work their wives performed.

Boarding as the Butt of Jokes

Boarders did not always appreciate the fruits of these labors. Philadelphians, like their counterparts elsewhere, participated in a lively, often humorous, anti-boardinghouse discourse. An 1854 issue of the Philadelphia Mercury carried the surely apocryphal story of a boardinghouse keeper who saved money by serving soup made with kittens. Irish longshoremen who labored on Philadelphia’s docks in the early twentieth century recalled a landlady who smeared fat on the faces of sleeping inhabitants to deceive them into thinking they had been fed. In 1881 the Wilmington Morning News poked fun at the less than desirable accouterments, including smelly mattresses and dingy sheets, at a boardinghouse that advertised “meels & login cheep.” Even the social elite were not exempt from the unsavory conditions that supposedly afflicted boardinghouses. In the 1860s one resident of a fashionable Philadelphia establishment complained about an unwelcome nocturnal visitor—a “promenading” rat. Criticisms of this sort no doubt reflected the realities of boardinghouse life. Most landladies could not afford to lavish delicacies on their tenants, nor did they typically command a labor force capable of maintaining exacting standards of cleanliness. By the same token, most boarders could afford to pay only modest rents—more often than not they got what they paid for. But the sheer ubiquity of boardinghouse folklore also revealed a persistent cultural tendency to contrast the deficiencies of boardinghouses with idealized single-family homes.

By the turn of the twentieth century, these complaints had taken a more ominous turn. City officials and social reformers bemoaned the “lodger evil,” especially in Little Italy and the African American neighborhoods clustered along Lombard Street in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. While the authors of various housing studies recognized the importance of boarders and lodgers to working-class family economies, they feared the moral danger paying guests allegedly posed. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), for instance, condemned the “pernicious” influence of lodgers, whom he believed destroyed “the privacy and intimacy of home life.”

Early twentieth-century social reformers believed that lodging houses—more commonly called “furnished room houses”—presented a different kind of moral problem. While nineteenth-century commentators sometimes used “boarding” and “lodging” interchangeably, semantic distinctions became more important as lodging houses rapidly replaced boardinghouses in downtown Philadelphia, Camden, and Wilmington. Lodgers, also called roomers, took their meals at nearby restaurants instead of at a common table. Unlike boarders, they came and went as they pleased. The salesmen, clerks, stenographers, and secretaries who rented furnished rooms enjoyed the greater privacy and social freedom lodging—as opposed to boarding—offered them.

Reformers and social scientists, however, voiced increasing alarm about “the furnished room problem.” The problem was less acute in cities such as Camden, which boasted only a few dozen furnished-room houses, most of them located near the block that became Johnson Park. Philadelphia’s rooming houses numbered close to a thousand. Contemporary observers acknowledged the difficulties of pinpointing the precise boundaries of the city’s constantly changing furnished-room districts, which encompassed portions of Society Hill as well as Frankford, Richmond, and Kensington. They agreed that the most prominent lodging-house neighborhood lay just north of Center City, bordered roughly by Race Street, Girard Avenue, Broad, and Sixth Streets. Reformers lamented roomers’ easy proximity to the saloons, movie theaters, vaudeville shows, and peep shows clustered on Eighth Street; they claimed furnished-room districts attracted crime, vice, and prostitution. Lodging-house critics even succumbed to historical amnesia by extolling the virtues of “the old-fashioned boardinghouse,” which, they argued, had provided a homelike atmosphere and familial supervision.

Boardinghouse Era Fades

By the 1950s, if not earlier, white-collar workers had decamped for apartments and rooming houses had become synonymous with skid row. Many of the latter, known in official terminology as single room occupancies (SROs), fell victim to gentrification and urban renewal, processes that left former residents homeless. While some old-style establishments survived into the 1950s and 1960s, by midcentury boardinghouses more commonly sheltered the poor, the elderly, and the mentally ill, often under unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

Nevertheless, boardinghouses—albeit by other names—survived and even flourished in the twenty-first century. During the Great Recession more than a few homeowners stayed afloat by taking in boarders, as suggested by the title of a 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer article: “Rooms for Rent: In a Flashback to Earlier Times, Recession-Pinched Homeowners are Seeking Paying Guests to Share their Space.” And whether they realized it or not, those residents of Greater Philadelphia who embraced alternative living arrangements out of choice rather than necessity also invoked past practices. Collective ventures such as West Philadelphia’s Life Center houses, the Penn Haven Housing Co-op, and the Friends Housing Cooperative owed their origins at least in part to these earlier forms of multifamily housing.

Wendy Gamber is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor in History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of three books: The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, and The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age. (Author information current at time of publication.)

During the community development movement, which arose in the 1960s in large part in response to years of disruption spurred by government-imposed urban renewal, Philadelphia became an important center of activism and institutions devoted to locally-based improvement programs. Community development programs sought to provide greater control over the future of neighborhoods at a time when declining populations and tax bases were weakening municipal government’s capacity to deliver services and attract capital investment. The outcome of community development plans often depended on the extent to which government and community could agree upon sharing responsibility for making policy, developing programs, and allocating resources.  These were especially difficult challenges in an era of scarce public resources.

Shared control over neighborhood development emerged in Philadelphia well before President Lyndon Johnson (1908-73) made “maximum feasible participation” a central component on his declared War on Poverty. Working in collaboration with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and the Philadelphia Housing Authority between 1952 and 1957, Friends Neighborhood Guild formed a housing cooperative devoted to advancing racial integration through the development of high-quality affordable housing in an impoverished community. It succeeded in both goals through the rehabilitation of nineteen deteriorated buildings in the vicinity of Eighth and Franklin Streets to create eighty-four new housing units. Subsequently it marshaled construction of Guild House, a 91-unit elderly housing complex located at 711 Spring Garden Street. Similarly, Bright Hope Baptist Church, working with a redevelopment plan approved by City Council in 1958, completed the design, organization, and marketing of 635 new single-family homes built in low-density style on 153 acres of land in North Philadelphia. Known as Yorktown, the new neighborhood helped create a base of middle-class African American homeownership in an area undergoing serious decline and clearance for the expansion of Temple University to the north and construction of public housing projects in West Poplar to the south.

Philadelphia became one of five cities funded in the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas program, which piloted the federal War on Poverty’s Community Action Program. In 1962, the city formed the Philadelphia Council for Community Advancement (PCCA), to implement grants from Ford, the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, and later federal War on Poverty programs. Led by a coalition of public, labor, business, university, and African American civil rights leaders, PCCA initially focused on North Philadelphia, helping to establish and fund early housing and shopping center development by the Opportunities Industrialization Center, founded by the Rev. Leon Sullivan (1922-2001). PCCA went on to build cooperative and other affordable housing and support the growth of community development corporations around the city, though by the early twenty-first century its work became limited to housing counseling services devoted to helping homeowners avoid foreclosure.

Neighborhood-Based Organizations

Despite the shortcomings of the War on Poverty, not the least its Model Cities program instituted in 1966, the federal policy of ensuring “maximum feasible participation” prompted the creation of a number of community-based organizations. Among the first in Philadelphia and Camden, both called the Black People’s Unity Movement and both inspired by the Black Power movement, were self-help organizations determined to do more than simply serve as repositories for federal or other public funding. Not adverse to receiving public-sector support, these and other organizations, including Mantua Community Planners, Mill Creek Council, and Advocate Community Development Corporation, completed affordable housing ventures and operated a variety of health and human service programs in response to identified community needs. Such neighborhood-based organizations continued to contend, however, with unwanted effects of externally generated redevelopment during the late 1960s through the 1970s. Much of this opposition focused on the use of eminent domain to acquire private property and the associated displacement of residents and businesses. During this period, a number of additional groups formed to promote activism or to provide support for community-based initiatives.

Some of these groups organized exclusively to address a single issue. For example, a broad coalition of neighborhood-based organizations spearheaded a long-term campaign against the Crosstown Expressway proposal, a plan first introduced in 1947, which would have taken land between Lombard and South Streets to support the construction of a highway connector between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers.  The withdrawal of the expressway plans in 1974 was a milestone in the history of organized community activism in Philadelphia. Another highway revolt against the Vine Street Expressway and its planned ramps did not prevent the road’s construction but altered it and saved Chinatown. Across the Delaware River the prospect of a state prison on the waterfront prompted formation of Concerned Citizens of North Camden in 1978. Failing in the effort to block the prison, Concerned Citizens nonetheless moved from that defeat to create its own neighborhood plan and to secure the city’s acceptance for it.

Other groups formed to provide support for grassroots initiatives on a citywide basis. In 1969, the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects founded the Architects Workshop, a program designed to provide planning and design services to community-based organizations. Largely supported by pro bono services contributed by private architectural firms and by VISTA volunteers working under the aegis of the War on Poverty during its early years, the program provided assistance to more than ninety community-based organizations annually during its most active period. The Philadelphia AIA withdrew from the program in 1977, though a group of architects revived its function in 1991, founding what became the Community Design Collaborative.

In 1973 activist Edward A. Schwartz (1943-2012) established the Institute for the Study of Civic Values in Philadelphia to promote civic engagement. The institute’s key role in supporting community development constituencies gained the organization citywide and, to some extent, national recognition and enabled Schwartz to win a City Council at-large seat in 1983.  Similarly, in 1985 Camden residents formed a citywide organization, Camden Churches Organized for People, as a means of bringing neighborhood concerns to the attention of city government.

As population declined and the number of abandoned houses grew, groups of squatters moved into several hundred vacant buildings, primarily in North and West Philadelphia, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The North Philadelphia Block Development Corporation, organized by activist T. Milton Street (b. 1941) in 1977, began assisting families in breaking into and moving into vacant houses that had been seized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a result of mortgage foreclosure. Street subsequently broadened the group’s approach to support squatting in city-owned and privately owned vacant houses, as a response to the inadequacy of city policies to systematically address property abandonment and the need for affordable housing.

As squatting gained momentum in Philadelphia, HUD Secretary Samuel R. Pierce (1922-2000) entered into negotiations with a leading squatter coalition, the Inner-City Organizing Network (ICON) and pledged to help squatters find housing in HUD-owned properties. In 1982, the City of Philadelphia began awarding funding to ICON to support housing rehabilitation activities, a practice that terminated when the organization found that role beyond its capacity.

Community Development Policy

Through something of a cruel irony, federal anti-poverty programs intended to spur community development were folded into a much broader and less targeted funding mechanism by Republicans under the name “community development.” With passage of the federal Community Development Act of 1974 funding previously associated with eight programs was consolidated into a single annual block grant award. With that change in policy, municipalities and counties gained broad discretion in determining how Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding would be allocated.

The 1974 Act mandated citizen participation in the planning and implementation of CDBG-funded activities and the convening of annual public hearings as a required part of the preparation of the CDBG funding proposal. To address these mandates, Philadelphia government staffed a Citizen Participation unit, convened a citizens’ advisory committee consisting primarily of representatives of neighborhood organizations, and created a CDBG budget line item for “community-sponsored projects.” In addition, the city allocated CDBG funding to support the operation of Neighborhood Advisory Committees, community-based organizations that, like the Project Area Committees formed in the urban renewal period, were created for the purpose of providing information about government-sponsored planning and development activities and encouraging grass-roots participation.

From the start of Philadelphia’s CDBG program, activists voiced significant concerns about the extent to which city officials would use their new discretionary powers in a manner responsive to their concerns and the extent to which external political considerations would influence decision-making about the allocation of CDBG funding. One response was the creation of the Philadelphia Council of Neighborhood Organizations (PCNO), a broad citywide coalition of community groups, founded in 1976 with the support of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values. The new coalition worked closely with the institute in advancing initiatives to make mortgages available in previously underserved neighborhoods, to address the city’s growing vacant housing problem, and to support city funding of neighborhood projects. Joseph M. Kakalec (1930-2007), a Jesuit priest who served as president of PCNO until 1982, played a key leadership role in convening and coordinating a coalition that was both broad-based and reflective of Philadelphia’s racial and ethnic diversity.

During the early years of CDBG program implementation in Philadelphia, activist groups such as the North Philadelphia Block Development Corporation joined with more established organizations such as the Housing Association of Delaware Valley to oppose CDBG funding decisions that bypassed neighborhood needs to support downtown development projects, police services, and public administration. This advocacy, ultimately supported by HUD administrators, resulted in a redirection of CDBG funds to provide more financing for affordable housing and community-based projects.

Affordable Housing Ventures

Although the National Housing Act of 1968 shifted government programs toward greater private sector control, two provisions—sections 235 and 236—opened the door to community participation. These provisions, through the Federal Home Administration, made mortgage insurance available to finance owner-occupied housing and rental housing, respectively. FHA insurance, combined with rental assistance subsidies obtained through the federal Section 8 voucher program, financed the production of many rental housing development ventures in Philadelphia neighborhoods. In a number of instances, these projects were organized in a manner similar to the Yorktown model, in which a private developer worked in partnership with a community-based organization or institution. Such was the case in West Philadelphia, where Mt. Olivet Senior Housing, a rental housing venture sponsored by Mount Olivet Tabernacle Baptist Church and Mount Vernon Manor Apartments, nurtured a collaboration between community members and the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority.

Several neighborhood-based organizations, assisted by consultants and service providers, also developed affordable housing as independent producers or as active participants in joint ventures with for-profit partners. National Temple Non-Profit Corporation, which developed more than three hundred apartments, townhouses, and single-family homes in North Philadelphia west of Broad Street, was the most productive of these groups.

Community Development Institutions

Many new opportunities for direct community engagement in real estate development and service delivery emerged in Philadelphia during the second term (1988-91) of Mayor W. Wilson Goode (b. 1938). Under the leadership of Edward Schwartz, the city’s Office of Housing and Community Development, the municipal agency created in 1976 to administer CDBG funding and other housing programs, financing and service contracts between the city and community-based organizations expanded significantly. In subsequent years, the agency made community development block grant funding available to support the completion of neighborhood strategic plans, to establish a citywide network of housing counseling agencies, and to create a systematic Request For Proposals approach for awarding development financing, in which first consideration would be given to proposals received from community-based organizations.

A primary boost to neighborhood-based development in the era of declining public resources was the formation of community development corporations (CDCs), which became the predominant community-based institution in the larger community development sector. Formed first in the mid-1960s as part of the War on Poverty, such organizations multiplied particularly in the Reagan era.  Characterized by significant bonding capacities to draw neighborhood residents together in common purpose, they diversified their work from producing and managing affordable housing to engaging in workforce and commercial corridor development, community organizing, public health and food access, and various other projects and services. CDCs survived largely by marshaling external resources. These included not just government and philanthropic entities but the private sector as well. To further enhance their power to draw investment and desirable development to their neighborhoods, CDCs in Camden and Philadelphia joined to form their own associations devoted to presenting a unified voice in policymaking and budgetary circles.

Community development in Philadelphia and nationally has been supported by another set of important organizations, Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), independent nonprofit organizations with their own sources of capital to reinvest in poor neighborhoods.  A Philadelphia affiliate of the national Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and a new organization, the Delaware Valley Community Reinvestment Fund (later renamed The Reinvestment Fund, or TRF), opened for business in Philadelphia in 1981 and 1985, respectively. Both organizations supported affordable housing ventures and other development and service programs in the region. They helped secure funds from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program (authorized by Congress as an element of the Tax Reform Act of 1986), as well as the HOME Investment Partnerships Program (a component of the National Affordable Housing Act of 1990), among other sources.

Beginning in the late twentieth century, concerns about the effect of rising property values on housing affordability influenced some advocates to work toward the creation of community land trusts, organizations that would acquire real estate, sell existing or newly developed houses on the property at prices affordable to low- and moderate-income households and retain ownership of the land under them in order to help ensure that subsequent resale prices would be affordable as well. As one outcome of the late-1970s squatters’ movement, the North Camden Land Trust formed to manage the rehabilitation of vacant houses (assisted with financing provided by TRF) that were not in habitable condition. During the next decade, two land trusts formed in Philadelphia: United Hands Community Land Trust, organized by the Kensington Joint Action Council, and the ACORN-sponsored Community Land Association of Pennsylvania. Although these organizations were successful in rehabilitating vacant properties for affordable housing for a time, these initiatives were not able to overcome funding, organizational development, and capacity-building challenges in order to sustain operations over a longer term.

A Recharged Housing Market

During the years leading up to and following the advent of the twenty-first  century, Philadelphia’s real estate market grew stronger, influenced in part by national trends and in part by the success of a ten-year tax abatement, offered as an incentive to developers, initially in Center City and subsequently on a citywide basis. By one estimate, Philadelphia house prices increased by more than 150 percent in nearly every section of Philadelphia between 1979 and 2015.

The revitalized real estate market, combined with shifts in federal funding away from housing for the poor, presented new opportunities and challenges for nonprofit and neighborhood-based organizations. Some leveraged private financing and entered into joint ventures with private developers. For instance, Project HOME purchased a nine-story apartment building near Rittenhouse Square and developed it for 144 units of mixed-income housing. The State Department authorized the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation to secure $33 million in financing through the federal EB-5 Immigrant Investment Program to support the development of Eastern Tower, a mixed-use high-rise development project at Tenth and Vine Streets, though the CDC abandoned its initial plans to include affordable housing in the project.

As property values rose, community development advocacy focused on housing affordability and on the inadequacy of the city’s policies for acquiring and conveying vacant property. Women’s Community Revitalization Project (WCRP) played a leading role in organizing coalitions to advance two related initiatives: the Philadelphia Campaign for Housing Justice, in support of an inclusionary zoning mandate that would require private developers to contribute a portion of their profits to an affordable housing fund; and the Campaign to Take Back Vacant Land, focusing on the creation of a Philadelphia Land Bank as a resource for stabilizing low-income communities. Philadelphia’s land bank legislation was approved in 2013.

The concept and institutions of community-based development owed much to the social and civil rights activism of the 1960s.  Although limited in power, activists in many inner city neighborhoods in the Philadelphia area remained committed to assuring as much community control over development decisions as possible. Because poverty and inequality persisted in many high poverty neighborhoods in the region, their services remained in demand into the twenty-first century as they continued to seek revitalization through community empowerment.

Howard Gillette is Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers-Camden and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Domenic Vitiello is Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an associate editor of  The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. This essay incorporates information gathered and compiled by John Kromer, former City of Philadelphia Housing Director and former Director of the Camden Redevelopment Agency. (Author information current at time of publication.)

CDCs originated in the 1960s under the Special Impact provision of the federal War on Poverty. Owing their origin to a 1966 amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act that designated the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn as a pilot experiment, the concept quickly spread. Given problems associated with Philadelphia’s anti-poverty program, not the least its Model Cities program, the city received no federal funding for the Special Impact Program. Instead, the early model for community development was a network of Opportunities Industrial Centers, organized and effectively funded nationally during the Nixon administration by the Reverend Leon Sullivan (1922-2001).

Philadelphia’s first CDC emerged in 1969, when residents who had been fighting the Vine Street Expressway’s potential destruction of Chinatown formed the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation. Over time, its activities extended beyond protest to the development of hundreds of affordable new housing units and the transformation of Chinatown’s landscape with the Friendship Gate and other streetscape improvements. Another CDC formed in 1970 when the Tasty Baking Company, the largest employer in its upper North Philadelphia neighborhood, formed the Allegheny West Foundation as a vehicle for local investment. The foundation rehabilitated hundreds of housing units and a block of properties for mixed residential and commercial use on North Twenty-Second Street.

Two-Tiered Approach

The concept caught on both in Philadelphia and in Camden, where neighborhood-based activity took many forms. Most CDCs combined “hard development”—rehabilitating housing and commercial real estate, starting businesses, and creating jobs for local residents—with “ soft components” related to human services such as child and elder care, home-ownership counseling, recreational activities, and drug and alcohol abuse programs. The West Oak Lane CDC founded in 1980, for instance, acted as its own general contractor with its own construction crew to rehabilitate the neighborhood’s 600 abandoned houses. It also created twenty-five new jobs when it opened its own Dunkin’ Donuts franchise. The organization survived as a housing subsidiary to the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corporation (OARC), which assumed the larger goal of making the neighborhood desirable to middle and working-class households. Over time the OARC directed programs in housing development, home improvement, education, economic development, and workforce development, while adding “softer components” such as arts and cultural event planning, grass-roots community planning, and even tourism promotion.

Many CDCs arose out of earlier grass-roots advocacy of the 1950s and 1960s, including civil rights, anti-urban renewal, and related movements. For example, in 1970 a group of Puerto Rican veterans of the Vietnam War founded the Asociacion de Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM, the Association of Puerto Ricans on the March), which extended their  activism to urge government to address the Puerto Rican community’s housing, employment, and health needs. Reflecting broader trends in the history of CDCs, APM expanded its work over the years from a focus on health and mental health programs to become one of the region’s premier nonprofit housing developers with a staff of over one hundred and a diverse range of services. Also following trends in federal policy and funding, APM’s housing development shifted from rental housing for the poor to moderate-income homeownership to a mix of affordable and market-rate apartments.

In Camden, Catholic parishes, left with the loss of their white working-class members, established community development corporations with the goals of engaging their new neighbors and stabilizing for them the often tumultuous experiences associated with concentrated poverty. The St Joseph’s Carpenter Society, seeking to strengthen the housing market in East Camden, undertook an expansive rehabilitation program, which included home-ownership training funded by the city’s only major remaining corporation, Campbell Soup. In the impoverished and environmentally compromised Waterfront South neighborhood, another CDC, Heart of Camden, drew on the skills, donations, and connections of former residents who had moved to the suburbs but remained committed to serving area residents through Sacred Heart parish and school. In addition to housing rehabilitation, Heart of Camden instituted associated resources for enrichment, including a full service fieldhouse created from an abandoned movie theater, a theater on the site where the director’s grandfather once operated a neighborhood tavern; an urban farm; and a community art gallery center carved out of an abandoned fire station.

In Wilmington, the Central Baptist CDC formed to revitalize the city’s Eastside, emphasizing a combination of workforce development and housing stabilization. Through its Urban Acres Produce organization, it sought to assure convenient access to healthy foods in low income sections of the Eastside and Northeast sectors of the city.

Local Associations

To enhance the impact of such localized efforts, community development corporations in both Camden and Philadelphia formed their own associations. According to a 2012 report from the Econosult Corporation, members of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, formed in 1992, had completed 1,500 development ventures at a cost of $2.2 billion over a twenty-year period, generating a total economic impact of $3.3 billion. In 2004 the Camden Non-Profit Housing Association reorganized and hired an executive director to assume the role of supporting the city’s thirteen community development corporations under the name of the Camden Community Development Association.

With the benefit of access to a number of external resources, entrepreneurial CDCs were able to organize and implement development and service activities that had previously been managed exclusively by government agencies, businesses, or citywide and regional service organizations. Examples included the development and operation of a new supermarket (by APM); the construction of transitional and permanent housing for formerly homeless people, including on-site human service programs (by the Project HOME and People’s Emergency Center CDCs); and the implementation of an ambitious open space greening and development strategy (by New Kensington CDC) that facilitated the creation of Greensgrow Farms, a nationally recognized urban agriculture venture.

In order to help address the need to support community development corporation operating expenses, City Council member W. Wilson Goode Jr. (b. 1965), son of a former Philadelphia mayor, introduced a CDC Tax Credit Program, approved by Council in 2002, through which a business that contributed funding to a qualified CDC annually over a ten-year period would receive equivalent reductions in Business Income and Receipts Tax liability during that time.

Born in a period of neighborhood activism, CDCs proved largely adept at responding to local needs in light of diminished public resources. Seeking to lift the fortunes of those living in areas weakened by years of disinvestment, they could point to many accomplishments, even if the areas they represented continued to suffer the long-term effects of urban restructuring.

Howard Gillette is Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University-Camden and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Domenic Vitiello is Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. This essay incorporates information compiled by John Kromer, former City of Philadelphia Housing Director and former Director of the Camden Redevelopment Agency. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Nestled between Second Street and the Delaware River, thirty-two Federal and Georgian residences stand as reminders of the early days of Philadelphia. Elfreth’s Alley survived in the twenty-first century as a residential street, historic landmark, and interpreted site labeled the “Nation’s Oldest Residential Street.” The heroic efforts of residents and local historians from the 1930s to 1960s preserved the Alley as a typical colonial street, but it took decades of new scholarship for the Elfreth’s Alley Association to create an interpretation encompassing the everyday lives of all generations who lived on this street.

Elfreth’s Alley, which has existed for three centuries as a residential enclave, was not included in William Penn’s original plans for Philadelphia. Demand for land in proximity to the Delaware River erased Penn’s dream of a bucolic country town composed of wide streets. As Philadelphia became a bustling city, artisans and merchants purchased or rented the in-demand property close to the ports where goods and materials arrived  daily. By 1700, most of the population of Philadelphia settled within four blocks of the Delaware River. This led to overcrowding, and landowners recognized that tradesmen needed alternate routes to the river through the crowded streets Penn had laid out decades earlier. Landowners Arthur Wells and John Gilbert combined their properties between Front and Second Streets to open Elfreth’s Alley, named after silversmith Jeremiah Elfreth, as a cart path in 1706.

Taking advantage of trading on the waterfront, artisans soon created a small community of people living and working on the Alley. The homes they inhabited ranged between two and four stories, and residents often used the front room on the first floor as workplaces and shops, while the kitchen and upper levels served as private space for the family. Residence #112 alone was home to a carver, boat builder, baker, and joiner throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Several Alley residents also earned income by renting rooms to sailors, and others engaged in work on the waterfront. Census records suggest that Widow Esther Meyer in #119 and Sarah Melton in #124 rented rooms to sailors, and Ann Taylor, the widow of bricklayer Enoch Taylor, ran a boarding house from half of her home in #116.

Factories Surrounded the Alley

The move of manufacturing from the home to the factory during the Industrial Revolution transformed the Alley and surrounding neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth century. Factories lined Second Street, with no fewer than four surrounding the homes on the Alley. As the years passed, immigrants flocked to the street to take advantage of the many factory jobs in the area, first Irish and Italians and later Russians. In 1900, the Freemans, a Russian family, lived in #125 with another family, and some of the residents worked in local button factory. With the increase in demand for housing near the factories, several Alley residents built tenements in the courtyards and rented them for extra income.  A typical tenement, like the one behind #126, consisted of two to three floors with one room on each floor, and families used side alleys to access them.  Each home no longer housed an artisan and his small family or a widow with two tenants. According to census records, between 1870 and 1930 no fewer than two families lived in #123, twenty-six people resided at #124-126, and more than three hundred people lived in the homes and tenement buildings by 1880.

By the 1930s, decades of overcrowded homes and encroaching industrial buildings had taken their toll on the street. While the houses on the Alley were in high demand when Philadelphia was a leading colonial port city and manufacturing hub, these eras had passed. Many factories left the neighborhood, and residents moved away as the jobs did. Condemned homes and abandoned tenements plagued the Alley, and the area was considered a slum. Conditions only worsened after World War II as the city witnessed a population exodus to newly developing suburbs. Real estate values plummeted in the area around Elfreth’s Alley.

Touched by the Colonial Revival movement that looked to the birth of the nation as a simpler, romantic time, Alley residents attempted to reverse the decline of their neighborhood. The city condemned #126, and Wetherill Paint Company rented the run-down #124 to tenants. Inspired by the preservation efforts of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks at the Powel House, Alley resident Dolly Ottey drew on Colonial Revivalist themes to combat the Alley’s deterioration. The Elfreth’s Alley Association, established in 1934, raised funds to purchase and restore #126 by 1937 through house tours, fund-raising events, and an annual summer street festival filled with colonial costumes and eighteenth-century games. The Association established a house museum in #126. After saving #124 from demolition by Wetherill Paint Company in the 1940s, the Association used the house as a rental property until turning it into its headquarters in the late 1990s.

Officially Historic

Facing another challenge to the survival of the residences in the 1950s, the Elfreth’s Alley Association secured National Historic Landmark status to ensure that Interstate 95 construction did not erase the homes on the street. They restored the Georgian and Federal architecture, demolished tenements, and placed telephone wiring under new stone street pavement. Except for a few factories that survived on Second Street, most of the vestiges of nineteenth and early twentieth century life and industry on the Alley and in the surrounding neighborhood disappeared, and the neighborhood seemed frozen in time.

In the early 1960s, the Association hired an architectural historian to create a house museum on the Alley celebrating the colonial period. The Association acquired furniture from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to recreate the residence of an eighteenth-century artisan in #126, further helping establish the Alley as a showcase for colonial Philadelphia. That remained the main story told to visitors for several decades. The rise of social history and developments in the field of public history in the following decade led the Association to take steps toward transforming the colonial interpretation of the Alley. As a result, the Association broadened its story to include the full range of alley occupants and the urban developments that affected their lives. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the present-day, relationships with local scholars, new research methods, and an emphasis on the identity of the street as continuously residential helped the Association expand the scope of the Alley’s story and define this urban space so rich with associations over several centuries.

Joanne Danifo holds a master’s degree in history from Rutgers University with a focus in administration and programming at historic sites. She has worked for the Elfreth’s Alley Association, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and in freelance research positions. (Author information current at time of publication.)

As Philadelphia’s African American population grew in the decade after World War II, from nearly 251,000 to more than 376,000, the city’s Black population faced a severe housing shortage. Only 1,044 of the 140,000 housing units built during the period in Philadelphia were available to African Americans. In the face of such extreme racial discrimination, early fair housing efforts focused primarily on human relations attempts to eliminate or at least lessen the barriers to housing for African Americans.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Philadelphia became a center for fair housing advocacy. Beginning in 1951, under Joseph Clark (1901-90), the city’s first Democrat to serve as mayor in over six decades, the city entered a new era of liberal reform that addressed the city’s racial tensions in several ways. That year, voters approved a Home Rule Charter, which banned discriminatory practices in public employment, public accommodations, and housing. The new charter also replaced the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) with the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, whose mission was to enforce the Home Rule Charter’s pledge to alleviate racial conflicts.

Much of the Human Relations Commission’s early housing efforts focused on providing education about housing integration with publications and through neighborhood stabilization programs. However, racial discrimination, community tension, and vandalism targeting African American homebuyers as well as whites selling their homes to African Americans continued. This prompted the Human Relations Commission to shift its focus from a case-by-case approach to addressing discriminatory housing through far-reaching fair housing legislation.

Fair Housing Efforts Deferred

Meanwhile, the civil rights movement had yet to make fair housing part of its agenda during the 1950s. Instead, civil rights organizations deferred such efforts in order to focus on fair employment legislation, particularly Pennsylvania’s Fair Employment Practices Act of 1955. With passage of that act, 42 of the member groups that had previously made up the Pennsylvania Council for a State FEPC took on the fair housing issue when they united to form the Pennsylvania Equal Rights Council (PERC) in 1958. Three years later, PERC’s extensive efforts resulted in the enactment of a statewide fair housing bill. It created the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, which acted in similar fashion to Philadelphia’s own Human Relations Commission.

Fair housing enforcement efforts in Philadelphia quickly followed. In 1962, the City Council created a Fair Housing Commission as part of the city’s first fair housing ordinance. It prohibited landlords from engaging in unfair housing practices, such as evicting a tenant or raising a tenant’s rent in properties that violated the City’s Housing Code. A year later, with the support of civil rights groups like the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and the Congress for Equal Housing, Mayor James Tate (1910-83) signed the Fair Practice Code, strengthening the Human Relations Commission’s local influence and enforcement mechanisms. Under the new ordinance, the city assumed some of the powers that had previously belonged to the state’s own Human Relations Commission, which had few workers assigned to work its Philadelphia section. Philadelphia’s Human Relations Commission, then headed by Sadie T.M. Alexander (1898-1989), gained the power to order real estate agents and builders involved in prima facie cases of discrimination from doing business until the commission investigated the allegations made against them. Under the new law, it could also fine offenders up to $300 and impose jail sentences of up to 90 days. The Human Relations Commission and the Fair Housing Commission merged in 1993.

Over a decade before federal fair housing legislation became a reality, Philadelphia’s suburbs were home to several smaller but very active organizations devoted to passing regional fair housing legislation. Among them were Friends Suburban Housing Inc. and the Fair Housing Council of Suburban Philadelphia, both established in 1956.

Founded as a nondiscriminatory real estate brokerage firm by a group of mostly Quakers, Friends Suburban Housing devoted its efforts to racially integrating housing in Delaware, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties. Until it dissolved in 1976, the group undertook hundreds of housing discrimination cases. In 1968, it made a major breakthrough when it won a legal battle in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court against the Main Line Board of Realtors for illegal restraint of trade for denying Friends Suburban Housing the use of its valuable multiple listing service. Led by Pennsylvania fair housing icon Margaret Collins (1908-2006), Suburban Fair Housing was successful in many of its efforts to increase integration in mostly white suburban neighborhoods in Greater Philadelphia as well as spurring the creation of dozens of other suburban fair housing groups in the area.

Assisting African American Buyers

Similarly, the Fair Housing Council of Suburban Philadelphia, which was made up of various members of Friends Suburban Housing, fought housing discrimination by providing non-financial assistance to African Americans seeking to buy homes. Considered to be the nation’s oldest fair housing council, it also provided encouragement to apprehensive real estate agents seeking to sell homes to African Americans. As an open-housing watchdog, it monitored real estate firms’ performances and brought discrimination charges against those who executed unfair practices.

New Jersey faced similar housing discrimination issues. During the 1960s and 1970s, as Camden lost industry and its historically white ethnic residents at the same time, the suburban areas surrounding the city retained a predominantly white population through zoning ordinances that helped exclude lower-income residents. In a landmark 1975 decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court held in the case of Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Township of Mount Laurel that zoning ordinances excluding low- and moderate-income persons like those living in Camden from obtaining alternative housing were unconstitutional. The court’s decision and its repeated affirmation of the “Mount Laurel Doctrine” generated a good deal of affordable housing in New Jersey’s suburbs over subsequent decades, but it did not materially affect the concentration of poor minorities in cheaper housing in Camden and in the area’s older suburbs.

As the rapid decline of industry hit Philadelphia’s established working-class neighborhoods during the 1970s, mounting racial tensions and white flight, accelerated by the loss of jobs, added to the complex problem of enforcing the city’s housing policy. Although white flight opened housing opportunities for minorities in declining neighborhoods, such housing was not always “affordable” for individuals with low incomes. They were relegated instead to limited and aging housing, with the U.S. Department of Housing Development and Urban Development (HUD) finding that, from 1975 to 1978, Philadelphia had frequently discriminated against minorities, many of them poor, in community development programs.

In 1984, the mayoral victory of Wilson Goode, an African American, signified a progressive shift in Philadelphia politics and housing enforcement. With increased focus on community development, city authorities initiated new housing methods that addressed the effects of deindustrialization. City authorities reallocated federal funds to distressed areas and promoted the development of neighborhood-based organizations that managed city housing funds. Still, the financially limited city administrations of the 1980s and 1990s lacked oversight in urban planning and enforcement, often choosing instead to invest in conspicuous Center City-based projects intended to recuperate the city’s tax base. As a result, distressed areas throughout the city, including North and West Philadelphia, continued to decline.

Overall Strategy Lacking

Troubled by a mounting financial crisis, city authorities reorganized Philadelphia’s housing enforcement mechanisms. In 1992, under Mayor Edward Rendell (b. 1944), a city report found that Philadelphia lacked an overall strategy for providing and improving housing. Thereafter, much of the city’s housing powers became centered in the Office of Housing and Community Development. On the federal level, in 1992 the HOPE VI program promoted “New Urbanism” models for public housing. Such models encouraged smarter growth which, in Philadelphia as in other cities, replaced distressed housing with low-density mixed-income developments. As the twenty-first century approached, however, Philadelphia’s financial woes continued to complicate the city’s efforts to address fair housing issues, and city initiatives that sought to “revitalize” distressed neighborhoods found only limited success.

As Philadelphia’s housing market surged in the twenty-first century in the wake of increased private and residential developments, the city grasped opportunities to create mixed-income, affordable housing with the goal of creating racially and financially diverse communities. Originally adopted in 2007, Philadelphia enacted inclusionary zoning requirements in various large-scale developments. With yet one more step towards assuring access to decent and affordable housing, Philadelphia thus continued to grapple with the complex legacy of housing discrimination.

Pedro A. Regalado is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale University. He is interested in twentieth-century urban history, particularly questions surrounding race, housing, and migration. (Author information current at time of publication.)

As the city transitioned towards a post-industrial economy in the ensuing decades, neighborhood revival became a key focus for municipal government. Attracting new residents to Philadelphia seemed like the surest way to grow the city’s tax base as manufacturing jobs evaporated and suburbanization continued apace. As the 2000s wore on, the revitalization of residential neighborhoods became the cornerstone of Philadelphia’s revival—even as the city struggled to temper gentrification’s most harmful consequences.

Gentrification could not occur without the initial separation of Greater Philadelphia’s residents by class, race, and country of origin. During the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, newly built suburbs outside of Center City intensified these divisions. At first, so-called “streetcar suburbs” allowed the gentry to retreat to the leafy streets of Cedar Park and Upper Darby. After World War II, suburbanization exploded. By 1960, the surrounding suburbs were more populous than Philadelphia itself. With the rapid loss of human and monetary resources in the central city and the expansion of wealthier, primarily white suburbs, the stage had been set for gentrification in Greater Philadelphia.

Throughout the post-World War II period, Philadelphia struggled valiantly to entice the middle class back from the suburbs. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Philadelphia—under the aegis of City Planning Commission Executive Director Edmund Bacon (1910-2005)—attempted to reimagine and revive Center City as an attractive residential zone. Restoring the city’s historic housing stock, Bacon reasoned, would encourage upper-income residents to move back to the city—thereby stabilizing its dwindling tax base and upgrading real estate values.

Remaking Society Hill

The first area to undergo this ambitious makeover was the Society Hill neighborhood in southeast Center City. By mid-century, it had fallen into disrepair and infamy—acquiring a sinister nickname, the “Bloody Fifth Ward.” Nevertheless, Bacon hoped that middle-class buyers would be tempted there by the promise of newly refurbished colonial-era row homes.

As would become common in subsequent renewal projects, a coalition of public organizations, local and federal governments, and private investors worked together to remake Society Hill. The Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, a city agency, spearheaded the project. It was joined by the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM), a nonprofit organization founded in 1948 by area businessmen. To direct the neighborhood’s ground-level renewal, Greater Philadelphia in turn spawned another interest group, the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation (OPDC), to coordinate the actions of bankers, finance capital, and homeowners. Old Philadelphia funded a national advertising campaign that recast the neighborhood as a desirable historic enclave—the better to attract aesthetically-minded middle-class homebuyers.

Homesteaders and developers were encouraged to renovate the neighborhood’s row houses themselves. Many hundreds of enterprising individuals did just that. Armed with generous mortgages, these gentrifiers were careful to heed OPDC’s stringent guidelines for historical verisimilitude. At the same time, other historical features were sacrificed in the name of development. The Dock Street Market, the city’s principal food market since the late eighteenth century, was razed to make way for three I.M. Pei-designed modernist residential towers.

To achieve the transformation of the area, the City Planning Commission called for the elimination of blighted late nineteenth-century buildings and retail establishments. In doing so, it prompted the mass displacement of the neighborhood’s poorer residents. Unable to meet the costs of renovation, long-term residents—many African American—were forced to sell their historic properties. Even though Black residents fought gentrification—forming an anti-displacement group that demanded low-income housing options—their efforts were largely unsuccessful. From 1960 to 1970, the neighborhood’s percentage of nonwhite residents fell from 20 percent to 7 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of college-educated adults in the neighborhood shot up from under four percent in 1950 to 64 percent by 1980. As anticipated, property values soared, rising nearly 250 percent during the 1960s.

In the ensuing decades, Society Hill became a touchstone for supporters and detractors of gentrification. For the city and real estate developers, it served as a hopeful model for neighborhood revitalization. But for existing communities facing the gentrification of their neighborhood, those dreams of revival were dampened by fears of displacement.

Homesteaders in the City

Buoyed by the success of Society Hill, other Philadelphia neighborhoods began to experience revitalization during the 1970s. Southwark, located just south of Society Hill, was transformed into a middle-class district by the efforts of individual homesteaders and, later, real estate developers. Even though it was not subject to the physical destruction seen in Society Hill, this neighborhood experienced a similar degree of social disruption. In a few short years, Southwark saw a dramatic decline in its working-class population along with the conversion of its mixed-use streetscapes into expensive residential-only corridors.

Southwark’s fortunes had begun to fade after World War II. South Street, its once-bustling commercial thoroughfare, lost customers to suburban shopping malls. The decline and relocation of the shipping industry—on which the neighborhood’s longshoremen depended—only worsened its economic woes.

Even during that mid-century nadir, however, there were stirrings of renewal. Beginning in the late 1960s, the neighborhood began to change as some white middle-class “pioneers” were lured to the area by the promise of affordable housing near Center City. Artists, too, moved into vacant row houses and commercial spaces, which offered them ample space to pursue their craft. Others were more mercenary, buying and renovating abandoned shells for profit. In the 1970s, these investors sought to differentiate the area from the rest of South Philadelphia by renaming it “Queen Village.”

In their wake, others moved to the newly-dubbed neighborhood for reasons that were cultural as much as financial. These arrivistes chose to live in—and work to renew—a historic and diverse part of the city. Colonial row houses, they believed, were a stark contrast to the stultifying sameness of the suburbs. Its legacy as an epicenter of immigrant and African American life lent the area a desirable gloss of authenticity—a dash of “real folk” in the city.

Those newcomers remade Queen Village’s physical landscape. Hundreds of crumbling row houses were renovated—first by urban homesteaders, then by enterprising developers. Artist Isaiah Zagar covered dozens of drab brick walls in the neighborhood with his kaleidoscopic mirror-flecked murals. Churches and synagogues, relics of the neighborhood’s immigrant past, were converted to market-rate lofts. Ethnic businesses—kosher wine merchants, haberdasheries, and furriers—were reincarnated as vegetarian restaurants, feminist bookstores, and hip clothing boutiques.

Initially, newcomers and old-time residents found common cause, coming together to fight the long-planned Cross Town Expressway that would have leveled South Street in an effort to attract suburban commuters back to the city. For years, the extant Black, Polish, and Jewish communities had mobilized to thwart the plan. By the late 1960s, middle-class newcomers joined their fight. This was a rare type of coalition: cross-class and multiracial, gentrifiers allied with the existing population to reject the destruction of modernist city planning. Ultimately, this partnership succeeded in defeating the proposed expressway.

Queen Village’s heyday of diversity and cooperation proved to be short-lived, however. Like many Philadelphia neighborhoods that experienced a middle-class influx, rising rents and tax assessments made life increasingly difficult for poorer residents. One 1978 study estimated that real estate taxes in Queen Village had increased almost 300 percent since the start of the decade. Real estate prices skyrocketed, too; an abandoned row house that might have sold for $300 in the 1960s now commanded up to $30,000. As in Society Hill, Queen Village’s African Americans were the most dramatically affected by gentrification. In 1970, the neighborhood was nearly 50 percent Black. By 1990, that figure had fallen to 20 percent. By 2010, only about 5 percent of Queen Village residents were African American.

There were also cultural conflicts between old-timers and newcomers. Long-time residents resented the intrusion on their tight-knit ethnic communities. Many were put off by their new neighbors’ perceived unfriendliness or condescension. Newcomers’ cosmopolitan tastes contributed to the alienation of the neighborhood’s working-class residents. On South Street, the Theatre of the Living Arts put on avant-garde works under artistic director Andre Gregory. In the late 1970s, dozens of chic businesses catering to the upper middle class opened. National food writers raved about South Street’s burgeoning selection of gourmet restaurants, where diners could enjoy soft-shell crab tempura or salmon with sorrel beurre blanc. In a few short years, the once-conservative immigrant neighborhood had become a hotbed of hip nightlife. By the end of the millennium, the transformation of Queen Village was complete; the languishing ethnic enclave had been entirely remade into a middle-class haven.

Revitalization or Decline?

The gentrification of Queen Village and Society Hill were exceptions in a region that continued to suffer the effects of deindustrialization and decline. Indeed, the effect of these localized neighborhood transformations could not stem the continued exodus from the city. From 1970 to 1990, Philadelphia lost over 18 percent of its remaining residents, its population falling to nearly a half a million people below its postwar peak. As manufacturing jobs continued to decline—from 350,000 in 1950 to a meager 31,000 by 2005—white working-class residents fled to suburbs in Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey.

Yet even in the midst of this apparent nadir, there were glimmers of hope. As industrial jobs evaporated, Greater Philadelphia’s institutional service sector expanded. Universities and hospitals, which could not move their operations out of the city, fueled this growth. By 1980, the University of Pennsylvania was the city’s largest private employer. As these anchor institutions continued to attract thousands of young, highly-educated residents to Philadelphia, previously disinvested neighborhoods—from Spruce Hill, near the University of Pennsylvania,and Washington Square West, which adjoined Jefferson and Pennsylvania Hospitals—saw increases in population and property values.

During the 1980s, new federal tax credits helped fund the redevelopment of other overlooked neighborhoods. With the passage of the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, developers could enjoy up to a 25 percent tax credit on the cost of rehabilitating certified historic structures. Tax inducements helped make the renovation of older buildings economically feasible. From 1982 to 1984, Philadelphia led the nation in the number of claims for such tax credits.

In the Old City area just north of Society Hill, those tax incentives encouraged developers to convert abandoned workshops into stylish loft apartments. With their artistic connotations, these post-industrial spaces attracted white-collar workers looking for a taste of bohemian lifestyle. During the 1980s, demand for these apartments exploded, and developers scrambled to meet it. In 1970, the neighborhood had only 90 housing units; by 1990, it had 1,665. Galleries and restaurants followed the arriving middle class. So, too, did a greater police presence, designed to enforce the newly genteel social order. In rapidly changing neighborhoods like Old City, minority residents often suffered the brunt of such measures.

In the same period, tax credits helped spur commercial revivals in other historic neighborhoods. Manayunk, a working-class mill district along the Schuylkill River to the northwest of Center City, was one such area. After a city-funded refurbishment effort, its Main Street began to draw young artists and boutique owners in search of a quaint, pedestrian-oriented corridor. This process accelerated after its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. By the late 1980s, Manayunk’s Main Street boasted dozens of new shops, bars, and restaurants, many housed in refurbished historic buildings. Residential gentrification soon followed the growth in commercial activity. In the 1990s, young urban professionals flocked to the area. By 2000, over 44 percent of Manayunk’s residents worked in managerial or professional positions, up from just 12 percent in 1970.

Affluent homesteaders also continued to rehabilitate row houses in neighborhoods closer to the urban core. Spring Garden—with its attractive housing stock and proximity to Center City—began to experience gentrification by the mid-1970s. Housing prices soared even more quickly than they had in Queen Village. An average row house costing $7,400 in the 1960s sold for over twenty times that amount in 1990. The rapid influx of wealthier homebuyers triggered alarming demographic changes. Nearly one-third Latino in 1960, the neighborhood was only 14 percent Latino by 1990. Much of Spring Garden’s Puerto Rican community decamped for neighborhoods farther north and east of Center City after their demands for affordable housing went unmet.

At the same time, Greater Philadelphia enjoyed an influx of foreign immigration, which helped to repopulate neighborhoods in South and West Philadelphia. The late 1970s saw the arrival of thousands of Southeast Asians; in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, they were joined by waves of Indians, Koreans, Chinese, and Mexicans. Many of these working-class immigrants were employed in restaurant and domestic services—a sector that grew along with Philadelphia’s affluent urban class.

Gentrification Takes Off: 1990s and 2000s

W.E.B. DuBois’ seminal 1899 work of urban sociology, The Philadelphia Negro, catalogued the lives and labors of those living in the predominantly African-American Seventh Ward—a narrow rectangular strip that spanned the southern edge of Center City Philadelphia, from the Schuylkill River on the west to Sixth Street on the east. At mid-century, the area remained a bastion of Black life, teeming with blues and jazz clubs, barrooms, and Black-owned businesses.

Yet by the turn of the twenty-first century, things were changing rapidly in DuBois’ Seventh Ward. In particular, the western stretch of this area—rebranded as “Graduate Hospital”—saw a dramatic influx of young, white, well-off residents, drawn by its proximity to tony Rittenhouse Square and easy accessibility to the University of Pennsylvania. Others were lured by the city’s development incentives, which in the late 1990s included a ten-year tax abatement for new construction and large-scale rehabilitations. Real estate prices soon reflected this surge in demand. From 1997 to 2007, the median price of a single-family home rose from $86,000 to $275,000. As in Society Hill and Queen Village, the gentrification of Graduate Hospital triggered striking demographic changes. At 78.5 percent African American in 1990, the neighborhood was less than one-third Black by 2014.

In the 2000s, the effects of gentrification began to spill over into other neighborhoods adjacent to Center City. Callowhill, a former manufacturing district just north of Chinatown and east of Spring Garden, blossomed into the city’s “loft district.” Members of the “creative class”—graphic designers, software developers, theatre performers—were drawn by its affordability, its edgy post-industrial aesthetic, and its location close to Center City. Developers met the demand, refashioning old factories into spacious lofts. They also converted spacious industrial spaces into arts and music venues. As more creative class consumers moved to the neighborhood, they were followed by cafes and bars that catered to their bohemian tastes.

As Philadelphia’s population rose for the first time since World War II, an increasing number of neighborhoods outside of Center City began to experience a revival. This resurgence was fueled by a demographic upheaval which found baby boomers, new immigrants, and young college graduates choosing cities over suburbs. Factors that had once driven people away from cities—their density, their older housing stock, the presence of ethnic and racial minorities—now drew them back to the urban core. As a result of these secular changes, more formerly depressed neighborhoods saw increased investment. One example was Fishtown, an enclave of working-class whites bordering Northern Liberties. By the early 2000s, it boasted scores of infill projects and row-house rehabilitations. Seemingly overnight, gastropubs and vintage clothing stores appeared along Girard Avenue, Fishtown’s commercial corridor.

Universities also continued to play an outsized role in the transformation of their surrounding neighborhoods. In West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania worked with the city’s Redevelopment Authority, starting in the 1950s, on a massive program of urban renewal that cleared the way for its expansion. In the following decades, it encouraged professors to invest in the neighborhood by providing mortgage incentives and funds for building rehabilitations. Along with other area institutions, it created the University City District, a nonprofit organization tasked with promoting development in the area. It succeeded in upgrading real estate values but also faced criticism from long-established residents. The area around Temple University in North Philadelphia also witnessed rapid changes. Speculative developers rushed to build housing for Temple’s expanding off-campus student population in a poverty-stricken African American district west of Broad Street. But tensions rose as young, mostly white, suburban-raised Temple students began to move in. Longtime residents complained about loud parties and unkempt rental properties. While Temple’s administration tried to encourage better relations between students and residents, it did little to discourage the spread of private development around its campus.

Ongoing Concerns

By the 2010s, Greater Philadelphia was grappling with issues familiar to all urban areas in the midst of gentrification. Residents of neighborhoods undergoing the most rapid changes watched as their longstanding social networks evaporated. One by one, local associations, congregations, and ultimately whole communities fell prey to the vicissitudes of the real estate market. Many uprooted residents resettled elsewhere in the city—some moving to adjoining neighborhoods still awaiting rehabilitation, some following cheaper rents to inner-ring suburbs.

While the pace of Philadelphia-area redevelopment lagged behind other rapidly revitalizing cities—notably, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C.—the specter of displacement troubled government officials and longtime residents alike. Gentrification had become a policy problem necessitating a public response. In the 2010s, Philadelphia began experimenting with measures designed to stem gentrification’s worst effects. In 2014, Philadelphia City Council enacted the Longtime Owner Occupants Program (LOOP). This initiative froze tax increases for residents who had occupied their homes for more than ten years and faced higher assessments as a result of skyrocketing property values. While LOOP promised some relief for homeowners, maintaining the diversity of revitalizing neighborhoods remained a challenge. Other gentrifying cities experimented with “inclusionary zoning,” which ensured new projects would include a percentage of affordable units. The Philadelphia City Council, however, failed to pass a similar measure. As market-rate development proliferated, nearly 110,000 households remained on a waiting list for subsidized or low-cost housing.

Even as the city government struggled to balance the costs and benefits of neighborhood revival, many areas remained untouched by the effects of gentrification. Further from the booming downtown, neighborhoods continued to suffer from abandonment and decay. In 2013, there were still 4,000 buildings and over 10,000 lots sitting empty in Lower Northeast Philadelphia. For every new town house  built in Graduate Hospital or Queen Village, scores of crumbling row houses were demolished in Nicetown and Kensington. Across the Delaware River, Camden, New Jersey, still awaited significant revitalization. Disinvestment only intensified after the financial crisis of 2008, as banks tightened up loan requirements and refused to extend credit to the most blighted areas.

Ultimately, the return of the middle and upper classes to the city was not a panacea for all of the region’s ills. But neither was it entirely unwelcome. To many Philadelphians, neighborhood renewal represented the best hope for the city’s revitalization. In the 2010s, Philadelphia tried to strike an equilibrium between development and stasis, renewal and disruption, gentrification and decay. It remained to be seen if the city could enjoy the fruits of revival without obliterating its legacy of diverse and vibrant neighborhoods.

Dylan Gottlieb is a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, where he works on recent American urban history. His latest publication is “ ‘Closer to Heaven’: Race and Diversity in Suburban America,” which will appear in the Journal of Urban History in 2015. (Author information current at time of publication.)

English colonists to the Delaware Valley brought with them a preference for large, open fireplaces, which meant that as settlement expanded, so did the demand for firewood. Although some German colonists preferred burning wood in closed stoves, this had little impact on the region’s home heating markets. As a result, the fires burning in most colonial hearths were incredibly inefficient, as most heat disappeared up the chimney with smoke and soot.

After more than a half century of depleting local firewood stocks, home heating fuel became a scarce commodity. In 1744, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) published a pamphlet advertising his “Pennsylvanian Fireplace,” which claimed to burn firewood more economically, produce more even heat, and reduce smokiness. Eventually known as the “Franklin Stove,” this cast-iron inset for existing fireplaces achieved few of Franklin’s goals. Improvements by David Rittenhouse (1732–96) in 1784 helped reflect heat into interior rooms, yet the Rittenhouse Stove was expensive and difficult to install. In 1796 the American Philosophical Society sponsored a contest, complete with a sixty-dollar prize, for the best stove design to “benefit the poorer class of people.” Although intended for less-affluent consumers, the contest winners planned to charge ten dollars—a sum far beyond the budgets of poor Philadelphians—for their stove. As fuel scarcities became more acute, the ability to stay warm in Philadelphia’s frosty winters increasingly depended on a household’s income.

The British blockade during the War of 1812 exacerbated firewood shortages. Jacob Cist (1782–1825) of Wilkes-Barre saw an opportunity and shipped samples of anthracite coal to Philadelphia, along with literature touting its many advantages as a home heating fuel. Although initially Philadelphians struggled to light this “stone coal,” anthracite eventually heated the homes of those willing and able to install a fireplace grate or stove designed for the new fuel. In the 1820s, two new canals, built by the Schuylkill Navigation Company and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, connected Philadelphia to the anthracite region and dramatically increased the city’s supply of coal. As late as 1830, though, firewood still accounted for about two-thirds of the home heating market. A concerted effort by the city’s stove manufacturers to provide affordable coal stoves and philanthropic and promotional campaigns that touted anthracite as the “workingman’s fuel” combined to make “stone coal” the preferred home heating fuel by the advent of the Civil War. In fact, by 1860 anthracite met 90 percent of Philadelphia’s home heating demand.

In the post–Civil War decades, a sophisticated network of fuel distribution developed in the region. Most coal arrived via water at the Schuylkill coal wharfs or via railroad at the Reading Railroad’s Port Richmond facility and then was carried by coal dealers to their small yards throughout the city. Dealers competed fiercely for customers, who often complained that they were swindled by unscrupulous dealers. Although retailers offered scales for weighing coal, many consumers doubted their accuracy. Despite calls for inspection and regulation, Philadelphia never provided much oversight of the coal trade, relying upon the market to drive out the worst coal dealers. As the trade had a low barrier to entry—a small coal yard and a delivery wagon—hundreds of coal dealers worked across Philadelphia by 1900. With razor-thin profit margins, the incentive for dealers to cheat customers was significant.

Although coal reigned supreme well into the 1940s, manufactured and natural gas, along with heating oil, eventually replaced mineral fuel in the region’s home heating markets. This meant that area residents were much more likely to manage home heating through a utility company than purchase, manage, and operate their own heating apparatus. In 1924, for example, the Philadelphia Electric Company introduced electrically driven oil furnaces on the market. By 1927 there were over twelve thousand of these furnaces at work in the city. Philadelphia Electric also sold gas furnaces to residential customers. Using heating oil became more cost effective for consumers after the completion of major pipelines, called Big Inch and Little Big Inch, linking petroleum fields in the Southwest with the East Coast during World War II. The expansion of the market for gas—mostly natural gas piped from the Southwest—occurred quite dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s, and by 1955 the utility was adding over ten thousand customers per year. Some local gasworks continued to make “manufactured gas” from anthracite coal, but national trends in energy markets  undermined this source of heating fuel. The adaptation of Big Inch and Little Big Inch to transport natural gas to Philadelphia area in the postwar decades, in addition to the construction of new gas pipelines in the 1950s, linked the Delaware Valley’s refineries to national energy flows, as petroleum products from Texas and Oklahoma became cost-effective substitutes for Pennsylvania oil and coal. The rise in oil prices during the 1970s made oil furnaces less attractive, and by the beginning of the twentieth-first century, new methods of drilling for gas, such as hydraulic fracking, increased gas supplies. Still, oil furnaces persisted into the twenty-first century.

No matter what method people in the Philadelphia region used to warm their homes, they found themselves less and less involved in the day-to-day decisions of which fuel to use, how much to purchase, or how to manage their apparatus. Heat became available at the turn of a dial and the original source of that energy was often thousands of miles away. Without the hassle of haggling with dealers, arranging for delivery and storage, and then managing their own furnace, the substitution of gas, oil, and electricity for wood and coal made sense for most households. In the post–World War II decades, for example, Philadelphia Electric alone served one hundred thousand residential natural gas customers, and home heating accounted for two-thirds of the company’s gas revenues. In the end, the convenience of getting heat on demand without worrying about coal prices, shady dealers, or how to operate their furnace outweighed any concerns local consumers might have about the origins of the energy they used to stay warm.

Sean Patrick Adams is Professor of History and Chair at the University of Florida. He is the author or editor of several books, including Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (2014). (Author information current at time of publication.)

The region’s earliest industrial neighborhoods were mill towns near waterways, a location necessary for water-powered factories. For example, Manayunk, which became a neighborhood of Philadelphia with the city’s consolidation in 1854, originated as a textile village along the Schuylkill River in Roxborough Township. Only lightly settled during the early nineteenth century, the area experienced rapid development after 1819, when the Schuylkill Navigation Company completed construction of the Flat Rock Canal and dam. By 1828 the power produced by the new waterfall from canal to river had attracted ten textile mills, which touched off a population and housing boom. The textile industry attracted English, Irish, Scottish, and German immigrants, and a community formed, featuring houses for mill workers and factory owners, churches, schools, expanded mills, and improved roads. By the 1830s the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad connected the village to Philadelphia. With urbanization, residents of Manayunk—grandly touted as “the Manchester of America”—also experienced problems of the early industrial era, including instability of work, health hazards, and high rates of poverty.

From the early to middle nineteenth century, access to waterways and rail lines dictated the locations of mills and factories, which in turn created or attracted the housing necessary to sustain a workforce. In Kingsessing (later Southwest Philadelphia), for example, the village of Paschalville developed in 1810 near the Passmore Textile Mill on Cobbs Creek. In Kensington, home to mills, factories, and shipyards near the Delaware River, the population more than tripled between 1820 and 1840, from 7,000 to 22,000 residents. In Camden prior to the Civil War, factory owners built housing for workers close to their waterfront mills, sawmills, lumberyards, and railroad companies. Near Camden’s Kaighn’s Point manufacturing district, developer Richard Fetters (1791-1863) built inexpensive houses so enticing that laborers moved across the river from Philadelphia.

Homes in Shadow of Factories

In this era of the “walking city,” before streetcars or subways, industrial workers lived literally in the shadow of the factories. For most, home meant a two-story row house (or a rented room in a row house) on a street lined corner-to-corner with identical homes. The sounds and smells of the factories permeated these neighborhoods. Smokestacks sent pollution into the air, and smoke-belching locomotives shared the streets with horse-drawn vehicles and pedestrians. The rapid growth of industry could easily overwhelm the capacity of the neighborhoods. By 1859, for example, the Manayunk Star and Roxborough Gazette described Manayunk as densely packed with overcrowded and poorly kept houses.

Immigration and ethnicity also shaped life in the industrial neighborhoods. So many English immigrants settled in Kensington in the nineteenth century that it became known as “Little England.” German immigrants found work in the yarn and knitting mills and tanneries of Germantown. The Irish, who represented half of Philadelphia’s nineteenth-century foreign-born population, dominated areas such as Northern Liberties, Fishtown, and Harrowgate and found work in a variety of trades, including textiles. Irish immigrants did much of the bricklaying for the industrial buildings, bridges, and railroads necessary for Philadelphia’s next industrial boom.

An alternative to the typically congested factory neighborhood developed in Northeast Philadelphia when Henry Disston (1819-78) transformed Tacony from a resort spot into a planned industrial community for his saw works and its workers. In the 1870s, Disston purchased a large tract of land in Tacony for a factory to replace his earlier plant in Northern Liberties and for worker housing. In contrast to the row house blocks elsewhere, the town plan for Tacony included lot sizes large enough to accommodate twin homes. Exercising paternalistic control over the district, Disston banned taverns, stables, and steam engines for industries other than the saw works, but he also provided a popular opera house, parks, banks, and a commercial corridor. The small community developed rapidly and gained a favorable reputation. In an 1886 report, the Pennsylvania secretary of Internal Affairs praised Tacony as the ideal manufacturing town.

By the mid-nineteenth century, steam-powered technology dramatically changed the nature and efficiency of industry and produced substantial growth in Philadelphia and other cities. The population of Philadelphia more than doubled from 565,529 in 1860 to 1,293,697 at the turn of the twentieth century as industry grew and intensified across North Philadelphia and in neighborhoods near the Delaware River waterfront. Many workers achieved modest prosperity, often enough to purchase their own homes. Elsewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania, Coatesville’s population expanded by 447 percent between 1850 and 1910, fueled largely by expansion of the powerful Lukens Steel Company. The increase at Chester was even greater,  from just over 1,000 residents in 1850 to 20,226 in 1890, an eleven-fold increase produced chiefly by its large shipbuilding industry. In South Jersey, Camden grew nearly as remarkably, from just 9,500 in 1850 to more than 58,000 by 1890 and 75,000 by 1900.

The Streetcar Revolution

During this era of industrial expansion, new forms of public transportation such as the streetcar (introduced in the 1850s and motorized in the 1890s) created the option of moving to less congested, less polluted suburbs for those who could afford the fares, generally five cents each way. The industrial neighborhoods they left behind absorbed a new wave of immigrants who arrived from southern and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These trends – the departures and arrivals – produced neighborhoods segregated by income, with the poorest and most recent of the new arrivals crowding into areas closest to the factories. With housing in high demand, some of the finer factory-district homes vacated by mill owners or managers became boarding houses. At transit hubs, such as Kensington and Allegheny (K&A) in Philadelphia, business districts developed around banks, taverns, and shops, which served the neighborhoods as well as commuters.

The new immigrant groups changed the industrial neighborhoods and forged new social and cultural networks. They infused the neighborhoods with the cultures and traditions of their homelands, but public transportation also allowed them to connect with others of the same nationality elsewhere in the city. For the large number of Roman Catholics in the latest generation of immigrants, communities were defined not only by industrial geography but also by the boundaries of their parishes. As the Catholic population increased, the spires of new Catholic churches joined the factories as neighborhood landmarks.

Philadelphia promoted itself as the “City of Homes” as well as the “Workshop of the World,” but over the first half of the twentieth century, the oldest industrial neighborhoods fell into decline. When the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) surveyed Philadelphia in the 1930s, it judged many row house blocks close to factories to be inherently undesirable because of nearby manufacturing, aging housing stock, and presence of immigrants. Color-coded in red and marked with the lowest grade of “D” on maps produced by the HOLC, these areas gained a stigma that discouraged investment and accelerated the deterioration of property even as new generations of residents occupied the homes.

Already challenged, Philadelphia’s industrial neighborhoods experienced a dramatic shift in the second half of the twentieth century when industries closed or left the region, part of a national trend of industrial decline that affected traditional “Rust Belt” cities. While much of the white middle class moved to the suburbs, jobs left the industrial cities, poverty increased, and abandoned factories posed fire risks and offered havens for drug users. Crime and violence increased. In Philadelphia’s industrial neighborhoods, working-class white residents with few resources fought against integration longer than those who had settled the old streetcar suburbs. By the time they left, when they found the means to do so, the African Americans and Latinos who made up the next generation of occupants often found homes dilapidated and lacking in basic amenities. Similar trends occurred in industrial neighborhoods in smaller cities of the region, including Camden, Coatesville, Norristown, and Chester.

Aging Housing & Poverty

By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, residents in many of the former industrial neighborhoods faced problems such as poverty and limited educational opportunities while inhabiting aging, inadequate housing close to abandoned and hazardous industrial buildings. In many areas, important community institutions such as churches and schools closed or merged as the population declined.  At the same time, however, the compact nature of these districts, including their access to public transportation, guided efforts at renewal. With the aid of government programs such as tax credits for adaptive reuse of buildings, some of the former factories gained new life. Other efforts aimed to revitalize the former industrial areas by demolishing abandoned buildings, encouraging new social and commercial investment, and acting to reduce crime.

In Manayunk, revitalization came to Main Street, its primary commercial district. New restaurants moved into abandoned buildings, and businesses once again occupied previously empty storefronts. Developers and business owners promoted the neighborhood and attracted a new wave of residents. Some industrial buildings became apartment complexes and factories, while investors demolished others that could not be converted and replaced with condominium towers for the growing population. In Coatesville, officials embarked on a revitalization project of demolishing abandoned buildings to promote growth and investment. In Camden, attractions such as the New Jersey State Aquarium occupied former industrial sites, and Cooper Hospital and Rutgers University worked toward redeveloping parts of the downtown, although it proved to be a slow process. In Philadelphia, neighborhoods such as Old City and Northern Liberties experienced dramatic redevelopment. Developers adapted old industrial buildings as residences or workspaces or replaced them with new homes and apartments.

In the early twenty-first century, many of the region’s old industrial neighborhoods became just shadows of the vitality of earlier days. But remnants of the industrial neighborhoods remained, undergoing new transitions long after the golden age of industrialization.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Jacob Downs earned a master’s degree in history at Rutgers-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)