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.)

After World War II, Philadelphia’s gay geography, like that in many American cities, expanded greatly. The war had uprooted millions of men and women across the country and exposed them to urban life here and abroad they had never seen before. Postwar downtown Philadelphia, or “Center City,” as it was beginning to be called, had the largest concentration of apartments and rental rooms in the “City of Homes,” providing gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people with the privacy and urban anonymity they sought.

By the 1950s, Rittenhouse Square and the beatnik coffeehouses nearby on Sansom Street had become part of the public gay geography of the city. So many gay men moved into apartments south of the square that even straight people commonly referred to gay men who lived in Center City by the coded term “Spruce Street boys.”  Gays, of course, lived all throughout the city, with a significant lesbian presence in the Germantown/Chestnut Hill area. In an era when racism extended even into the LGBT community, many African American gay men and lesbians socialized in bars or through private parties north of Market Street, in North Philadelphia, or across the Schuylkill in West Philadelphia.

The LGBT presence in Philadelphia became increasingly visible. In December 1962, Greater Philadelphia Magazine published an essay by Gaeton Fonzi (1935-2012) about the city’s gay community. Titled “The Furtive Fraternity,” it was the first article in the country about a city’s LGBT population to appear in a mainstream publication. The article mentioned a dozen or so gay bars and coffeehouses scattered along Spruce Street west of Broad and along the Locust Street area east of Broad. Fonzi also interviewed a handful of gay people, many of whom remained anonymous. Despite its semi-sensationalist subtitle—“Philadelphia’s homosexuals lead a strange twilight life outside the law and outside of society”— the story steered away from the lurid and focused instead on the problems of gay people in Philadelphia and the burgeoning gay political scene. Only a few years later, from 1965 to 1969, Philadelphia activists collaborated with groups in Washington, D.C., and New York to stage annual demonstrations for gay rights in front of Independence Hall.

The “Twilight Life”

The cliched “twilight life” described by early newspaper and magazine articles did have some basis in fact. Many gay men, lesbians, and gender-variant people who lived through the 1950s and 1960s experienced compartmentalized lives. They described themselves as being “straight during the 9 to 5 work week, but damned gay on weekends.” The parks, bars, and restaurants that crowded Center City streets provided semipublic spaces where LGBT people could socialize and be themselves.

A number of factors worked together to turn the few blocks that radiated from Locust and Thirteenth Streets into the neighborhood that became known as the Gayborhood. Close to the hotels and theaters on Broad Street, by the 1940s the Locust strip became a major center of Philadelphia nightlife. The street was dotted with nightclubs, restaurants, and musical bars that featured top national performers like Fats Waller (1904-1943), Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), and Patti Page (1927-2013). By the 1950s, however, some of the spots did away with the expensive first-rate entertainers and began featuring Las Vegas-style showgirls instead. As the character of the area changed, a few of the “musical bars” on the hidden, smaller streets like Camac and Quince began attracting a gay clientele and a few venues became predominantly gay.

In the 1960s, the area declined. City planner Edmund Bacon’s (1910-2005) plans for Washington Square East and Washington Square West came to a halt in the late 1960s when federal funding dried up after his successful redevelopment of Society Hill. The city bought and demolished many buildings in the section that encompassed the emerging Gayborhood, but lack of funds left the area pockmarked with vacant lots and no real plan for development. By the late ’60s many of the musical bars and nightclubs degenerated into seedy strip joints with links to organized crime. The Philadelphia Inquirer began referring to the area as “Lurid Locust Street.”

To make matters worse, the construction of the Vine Street Expressway and the destruction of what had been Philadelphia’s Tenderloin district to the north pushed prostitution, gambling, and drug dealing down Thirteenth Street as far south as Locust. Police actions on area strip clubs led by then-Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo (1920-1991) usually included raids on gay bars, lumping prostitutes, drug dealers, and homosexuals all together as “undesirables.” Even gay and lesbian private clubs, incorporated to get around the city’s ban on same-sex dancing, were not immune. Police raids on gay bars were common well into the 1980s.

Demonstrations After Stonewall

The strip bars and “gentlemen’s clubs” kept the area depressed through the early ’70s, but the gay community was evolving rapidly. Philadelphia was not far behind New York in responding to the revolutionary call raised by the Stonewall Riots of 1969.  Within a few years, Philadelphia saw the birth of several radical, new-left organizations including the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activist Alliance, and Dyketactics. In 1972, Philadelphians held their first Gay Pride demonstration, with an estimated 10,000 people marching from Rittenhouse Square to Independence Mall, signaling the end of a “furtive fraternity” and the beginning of a new, highly visible presence. The city’s LGBT community was out and proud. By 1976, gay Philadelphia had opened a gay community center on South Street, founded the Philadelphia Gay News, and began pushing for a citywide gay rights ordinance.

The new LGBT involvement in politics affected the geography of the Gayborhood. Gay spaces proliferated, with gay bars opening both east and west of Broad Street, along South and Front Streets, and in suburbs like Cherry Hill and Norristown. New African American bars opened along Arch and Filbert Streets, just north of Market Street, and along Broad Street in North Philadelphia. Many of the bars, restaurants, and shops in the Gayborhood advertised themselves as gay-owned and operated, and the first LGBT business associations were formed. By the end of the decade, city food writers attributed Philadelphia’s restaurant renaissance to its gay entrepreneurs.

As the 1980s began, the worst parts of Locust Street had been razed and rebuilt.  When crime continued to be a problem in the area, particularly manifesting itself in violence against transgendered people, the community and business associations came together to form neighborhood watches to patrol the area. In 1982, the Gay Rights Bill that had stalled year after year through the 1970s passed in City Council with almost no opposition.

The devastation of the AIDS epidemic and horrendous loss of life in the 1980s brought the community together. When federal, state and local governments failed to respond, Philadelphia activists stepped up. They formed groups like ActionAIDS, Unity, Manna,  ACT-UP, and the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania to promote AIDS education, to care for victims of the disease, and to fight for legislation and medical research.

The Gayborhood Gets Its Name

Center City’s gay neighborhood gained its name in 1995 at Outfest, a commemoration of National Coming Out Day, when David Warner playfully paraphrased the Mister Rogers children’s song and declared, “It’s a beautiful day in the Gayborhood!” The name stuck, and what had been a “gay ghetto” gradually became commonly known as the Gayborhood. In 2007, the city of Philadelphia installed thirty-six rainbow street signs in the area bounded by Eleventh and Broad Streets and Pine and Walnut Streets to honor the history and diversity of the area. In 2012, a section of Locust Street from Twelfth to Thirteenth Streets was dedicated as “Barbara Gittings Way,” in honor of Philadelphia’s pioneer activist.

By the twenty-first century, the Gayborhood was anchored by the William Way LGBT Community Center on Spruce Street and Giovanni’s Room, the country’s oldest LGBT bookstore, on Pine Street. In February 2014, the John C. Anderson Apartments, Philadelphia’s only housing for LGBT seniors, opened on Thirteenth Street near Spruce. Farther north on Thirteenth, upscale sidewalk cafes have replaced the hookers and drug dealers. The building at Locust and Thirteenth Streets that once housed the All in the Family strip club became Nest, a play space for Washington West toddlers. A combination of political activism, business savvy, and community involvement have succeeded in transforming Philadelphia’s downtown gay neighborhood.

Bob Skiba is the archivist at the William Way LGBT Community Center and the President of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides. In 2013, he co-authored Lost Philadelphia, with Edward Mauger. Skiba maintains a Philadelphia Gayborhood history blog at http://thegayborhoodguru.wordpress.com/ (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.)

Originally a township independent of Philadelphia, Germantown’s claims to national attention stem from several important events. The establishment of Germantown as a permanent German settlement in America in 1683 put into place William Penn’s bold ideas of religious toleration of different faiths in one colony, bringing Quakers to Pennsylvania together with Mennonites, Dunkards, and other groups that had been unwelcome in England and Continental Europe. In 1688 four Germantown settlers drafted a protest against slavery within the Dutch-German Quaker community that is considered to be the earliest antislavery document made public by whites in North America. The American Revolution saw one of the largest engagements of the war sprawl over Germantown’s streets in 1777. In the early American republic, Germantown provided the temporary home of President George Washington and his cabinet in 1793, which many years later became known as the “Germantown White House.” In many ways, Germantown’s history touches on several of the most salient chapters of America’s struggle for religious toleration, freedom, and independence.

Fourteen Historic Sites

Germantown’s history has frequently been the subject of regional and national attention. Architects working on the Depression-era Historic American Buildings Survey began the path-breaking national survey of historic structures by examining twelve houses in Germantown. The National Park Service has served as a steward of one Germantown site (the Deshler Morris House) since 1948 and the National Trust for Historic Preservation of another (Cliveden) since 1972. From the 1950s to the 1970s, some of the nation’s top urban planners devoted their energies to devise solutions to Germantown’s economic decline and population loss mostly based on capitalizing on its historic assets. Today, the presence of fourteen historic sites testifies to a century’s worth of preservation efforts. Those museums, however, have not always been interested in producing new knowledge; rather they preserved how life was lived long ago.

Until recently fourteen small museums of the consortium, Historic Germantown Preserved, have focused preservation, research, and programs primarily on colonial, revolutionary, and Victorian history. The neighborhood’s efforts at historic preservation can be seen as one continual Colonial Revival. Over the last decade, however, institutions founded upon one facet of interpretation are changing to incorporate new research and perspectives, extending the reach of historic interpretation while burrowing deeper to understand what Germantown was really like, in ways that speak to its current residents.

The first example of a historic house that changed its interpretation occurred at the Johnson House, a 1768 German-Dutch house that had been damaged in the 1777 Battle of Germantown. In the 1980s scholars discovered the house was a “station” on the Underground Railroad. While rumors had circulated for years that the Johnsons, a family of abolitionists, had helped freedom seekers hide on the family’s large property, strands of research into African American history and new social history coincided to establish that, in the 1850s, the house had served as a “station.” Neighborhood activists along with the museum community formed a board of directors to preserve the house and interpret it not for its period of construction, but for its significance as a site where the principles of the 1688 Germantown Protest Against Slavery were acted upon. In 1997 Johnson House was declared a National Historic Landmark for its role in the struggle for freedom.

In its centennial year, 2000, the Germantown Historical Society began initiatives to enhance its twentieth-century collections through a variety of ways. One has been the collection of oral histories of immigrant and in-migrant communities, particularly those of Italian Americans and African Americans. These stories reflect the experiences of people who moved to German Township and resulted in a collection that shows residents’ initiatives to end housing discrimination in the Mt. Airy section of German Township and to integrate through active initiatives by neighborhood associations. The projects resulted in a richer sense of diversity throughout the recent past, including ways of life in the pockets of Germantown which were frequently isolated from one another by prejudice or segregation.

Many institutions in Germantown have important histories. Church histories alone account for hundreds of community histories that profile the tapestry of diverse communities, from founding groups like Mennonites to newer, growing congregations in the Muslim community. Schools have also reflected the ways the neighborhood responded to newcomers. A research study of Germantown High School indicates its evolution over the course of the twentieth century reflected the demographic shifts, specifically charting neighborhood and ethnic backgrounds of students throughout the century. It puts into sharp relief how Germantown’s civil rights protests in the 1960s took shape with students calling for reforms about what kinds of history they were being taught.

History of Inter-Racial Programs

The recently closed YWCA, long a leading institution since its inception in 1917, has sparked research into its influence, particularly efforts to foster inter-racial programs for young people and to coordinate efforts between its white and Black branches. The YWCA was instrumental in creating collaboration among institutions in the star-studded “Negro Achievement Week” in 1928. This event, a forerunner of Black History Month, brought artistic and cultural leaders from the African American community to Germantown at a time of great racial volatility due to a large presence of the Ku Klux Klan. Such events are now being explored in the traditional historical community in ways that expand the memory infrastructure to include examination of the lives of all Germantown’s residents.

Cliveden is the largest house museum in Historic Germantown. Built by the Chew family in 1767, Cliveden opened to the public in 1972 and has been interpreted for its role in the 1777 battle, along with its treasured colonial furnishings and decorative arts. The Chew family’s wealth was based in large part on the fact that the family was among the largest, and latest, owners of enslaved Africans in Pennsylvania. The voluminous Chew Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania have recently proved a wealth of information about specific individuals among the Chews’ enslaved Africans, the workings of plantations throughout the mid-Atlantic region, and the climate of violence necessary to manage plantation life. Research indicates active agency and manipulation of the system, as well as escapes, by enslaved people as early as the 1770s and 1780s, much earlier than most Underground Railroad accounts. Cliveden’s ability to tell the larger, more complex story of the struggle for freedom and independence, rather than just the site’s connections to the Revolution, greatly expands and deepens the sense of what Cliveden means to the neighborhood and the Philadelphia region and points to the major reorientation underway at Trust sites regarding interpreting “troubled pasts” and integrating the stories of slaves and servants into new narratives.

The consortium of Historic Germantown Preserved is best understood as a group of educational institutions with historic preservation at their core that continue to move toward a shared history of Germantown—something which has been largely lacking but whose potential is great. Such collaboration promises not only a more integrated history but also a more efficient and effective use of historical resources. It also serves to promote greater community investment in historic places as agents for community development. Indeed, the stories that continue to be uncovered through research and interpretation speak to audiences that are very different from early in the twentieth century. These efforts have produced new partnerships and connections that result in audiences very different from ones that visited house museum when they were considered sacred shrines to the past. Historic sites now actively partner with churches, businesses, community development corporations, and even the local police district to produce youth-serving programs, and thereby count not only museum visitors but also the many people served by created education programs in ways that build these sites from the past into the life of the neighborhood present.

David W. Young is a lecturer at University of Pennsylvania Graduate Program in Historic Preservation and Executive Director at Cliveden House in Historic Germantown. (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.)

In 1950, West Mount Airy was home to 18,462 residents. Outside of the neighborhood’s Sharpnack section (an industrial village that had sprung up in the eighteenth century as a home for domestic workers and was, by the 1890s, known for its densely populated blocks of narrow two-story stucco homes), 98.6 percent of the community’s residents were white. As in urban neighborhoods throughout the northern United States, West Mount Airy residents experienced deep racial anxieties and worked hard to preserve what they saw as the integrity of their community. When Black migration from the South produced a sudden influx of African American buyers, they worried that their property values would diminish, that the instability would breed volatility and crime, and that their neighborhood institutions would fall apart. Enterprising realtors quickly stepped in, spreading rumors of mass home sales and projecting intense instability and a pronounced decline in housing values.

But many residents saw the possibility of something different. Not wanting to give in to the belief that racial transition necessarily brought about neighborhood decline, white homeowners sought to find a new strategy to preserve the viability of their neighborhood: by welcoming prospective Black buyers.

Diverse and Flight-Resistant

Mount Airy’s cultural, economic, and physical character created the possibility for purposeful and peaceful integration in the neighborhood. The community was home to a critical mass of high-achieving white residents. They were well educated, politically oriented, and liberally minded. Many worked with African Americans in their professional networks and were perhaps more open to friendly relations in their residential community as well. The neighborhood’s rich diversity in housing stock and proximity to Fairmount Park and the Wissahickon Gorge, difficult to replicate in other parts of the city or in the surrounding suburbs, also attracted a variety of people and made them more resistant to flight.

In 1953, a group of West Mount Airy homeowners, led by clergy from four area religious institutions, decided to learn all they could about local and national trends in housing and race relations. After months of research, they concluded from the evidence that a racially mixed neighborhood was both sustainable and, just maybe, even desirable. To preserve the material and cultural benefits of the neighborhood and to retain its economic viability, they decided to work to create interracial living.

At first, community leaders adopted a strategy of individual education and persuasion, including calling on residents to participate in “sell your neighborhood” campaigns and encouraging prospective buyers of “high standard” to purchase homes in the area. Through public sermons, focus groups, informal gatherings, and the creation of new community gathering spaces, these leaders promoted a positive attitude about the racial change that was occurring in the neighborhood.

High Cost of Living Promoted Stability

This approach was rooted in a sense of economic exclusivity. The high cost of living in the neighborhood meant that only the most financially stable buyers were able to purchase homes. Like the existing white community, upwardly mobile Black families who sought entry were invested in maintaining the economic and social status of the community. Organizers facilitated this de facto class-based exclusion by minimizing discussion of racial difference and by promoting the economic and cultural similarities among residents, Black and white, old and new.

The neighborhood began to see concrete results from community efforts within the first few years of transition, but this stability was precarious. As early as 1953, housing prices began to decline, and community leaders believed that real estate agents were directing most prospective Black buyers to the southeastern pocket of the neighborhood, where Black families first began to congregate at the beginning of the decade. Though these early efforts slowed the rate of change, by the late 1950s, some believed that creating long-term stability in an integrated neighborhood would require consolidating community initiatives.

George Schermer (1910-89), a West Mount Airy homeowner and director of the city’s Human Relations Commission, believed that the community needed an infrastructure to connect individual responsibility with broader institutional authority. In 1959, under Schermer’s leadership, West Mount Airy Neighbors (WMAN) was born as a community clearinghouse for neighborhood organizing, an institutional collaboration that became the defining principle of West Mount Airy’s organizing success through the twentieth century.

But even as residential integration in the community stabilized, Mount Airy residents contended with shifting economic and political pressures and evolving notions of racial justice around the city and across the nation.

Debate in the Black Community

In the mid-1960s, local NAACP president Cecil B. Moore (1915-79) condemned both the class-based identity and the integrationist ideology of Mount Airy’s Black homebuyers as dangerous to the larger African American community. Moore’s attacks touched off intense debates over the very meaning of Blackness in urban space. As he tried to galvanize the Black masses of North Philadelphia, the NAACP leader saw West Mount Airy as an ideological dividing line in the city’s struggle for civil rights. African Americans moving to the Northwest Philadelphia neighborhood became symbols of Black middle-class complicity with the white establishment that Moore condemned. To Moore, the Black middle-class residents of Mount Airy represented African Americans who had abandoned the Black masses and thus given up their claims to Blackness. Such rhetorical battles between the NAACP president and the city’s liberal middle-class community highlighted rising tensions within the fight for racial justice.

Under pressure from larger cultural forces and public policies that tended to perpetuate segregation, community members struggled to redefine their mission and to maintain control over local institutions. External pressures became particularly heated around the issue of neighborhood schools. When West Mount Airy experienced its first hints of transition in the early 1950s, the neighborhood’s elementary schools were overwhelming white. As Black families began to move in, school demographics shifted rapidly, significantly faster than the neighborhood itself. Henry School, in the center of West Mount Airy’s integrated core, experienced this change particularly acutely.

In 1953, Henry had 400 white and 95 Black students. By the end of the decade, as Black families moved in and as the school district redrew catchment areas to contend with changing residential patterns in Northwest Philadelphia, enrollment of white students plummeted to 35 percent. By the middle of the 1960s, 275 white students and 560 African Americans attended Henry.

As parents wrestled with how best to negotiate the public schools, they were forced to consider their own responsibility to the surrounding communities. In 1959, West Mount Airy Neighbors board members contemplated a proposal to return to pre-1953 catchment boundaries, a change that would have sent a substantial number of lower-income Black students from Henry School to the nearby, but overcrowded, Emlen School. Some believed that it was in the best interest of West Mount Airy to remake the elementary school in the image of the neighborhood. Others argued that local integration should only be a goal insofar as it did not create discriminatory conditions elsewhere.

Ultimately, the committee abandoned the proposal, but such questions of equity and justice persisted through the end of the twentieth century.

Stability and Diversity Endure

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, West Mount Airy remained one of the most economically stable and diverse areas in Philadelphia. At the time of the 2010 census, the neighborhood was roughly 41 percent African American, 54 percent white, and 5 percent Asian or Latino, with 3 percent of residents self-identifying as multiracial. Between 2005 and 2009, the median household income in West Mount Airy was nearly $85,000, almost 60 percent higher than the national median for the same period, with more than a third of residents having earned graduate degrees. In March 2013, the Pew Charitable Trust named the 19119 zip code, which encompasses both East and West Mount Airy, the seventh-wealthiest zip code in Philadelphia. The community also continued to be a haven for alternative families and progressive politics, evidenced by hybrid cars with bumper stickers proclaiming “Support Organic Farmers” and “Keep Abortion Legal.” At the corner of Carpenter Lane and Green Street, the center of the original integrated core, the Weaver’s Way Co-op, the Blue Marble Bookstore, and the High Point café, provided every indication of a thriving, open community.

A more nuanced evaluation of the neighborhood, though, reveals racial isolation increasing and a class-based exclusivity continuing to pervade local housing patterns. Between 1990 and 2010, the population of West Mount Airy decreased from roughly 17,500 to less than 10,000, with Black residents accounting for 70 percent of that loss. In that same period, block-by-block integration saw a sharp decline. In 1990, the typical Black resident lived on a block comprised approximately 75 percent of African Americans; by 2010, the same blocks had become almost entirely Black. Furthermore, in 1990 African Americans were dispersed relatively evenly throughout the neighborhood, but by 2000 they were disproportionately clustered in the southern and eastern regions of the community, adjacent to poorer and Blacker East Mount Airy and East Germantown. These numbers indicated a continuing and growing economic divide. In the early twenty-first century, the economic status of residents remained a key factor for achieving residential integration and cultural diversity.

This demographic profile of West Mount Airy at the turn of the twenty-first century was set against a growing national critique of the very idea of integration. Echoing Cecil Moore’s condemnations in the 1960s, by the late 1990s, some had come to view post-war integration as an effort by white liberals to heal the nation’s fractured race relations without reshaping its power structure. As these commentators write, in the decades following World War II, integration had become the mainstream rallying cry of the civil rights movement. But even as activists made strides in eroding legal barriers in employment, education, and housing, these triumphs revealed the limits of integration, in its failure to bring about fundamental changes in the material conditions of American society.

These larger critiques reflect the history of West Mount Airy itself. The area’s integration efforts allowed long-standing residents to maintain the integrity of their neighborhood by welcoming similarly situated African Americans. Together, they created a community grounded in the ideals of postwar racial liberalism, and they fought hard to maintain that ideal amid shifting economic and political pressures and evolving notions of racial justice. But the Mount Airy integration project never sought to be transformative; at its core, the neighborhood efforts were grounded in a desire to preserve their community and to retain its viability through celebrating interracial living.

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

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

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

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

Post-Revolutionary War Development

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

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

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

Development Bolsters City Coffers

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

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

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

Urban Renewal in 1990s

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

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

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

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

Northeast Philadelphia’s earliest enclave, Frankford, consisted of Lenni Lenape Indians and Swedish settlers prior to the founding of the Pennsylvania colony by William Penn (1644-1718) in the early 1680s. Immediately following Pennsylvania’s establishment in 1681, Quaker settlers constructed a meetinghouse, built in 1684,  and post office at William Penn’s request in what was initially designated the Manor of Frank during the mid-1680s. Situated to the northeast of the city of Philadelphia, Frankford’s importance as a center of commerce and trade grew principally because of its geographic location along the King’s Highway (present-day Frankford Avenue). It developed into a manufacturing village in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, drawing in German and English settlers, who opened numerous mills along the Frankford Creek. In addition to European settlers, free blacks established fraternal, religious, and anti-slavery institutions in the village to counter the creeping signs of residential segregation and employment discrimination surrounding them.  Located within the boundaries of Philadelphia County, Frankford’s commercial dominance attracted nearby farmers, who principally resided in Northeast townships, such as Lower Dublin and Moreland, to process their raw materials and farm products in Frankford’s bustling mills. The village also became a vital munitions site for the U.S. Army after the War of 1812, when the federal government began the construction of an arsenal, completed in the mid-1820s,  along the banks of the Frankford Creek.

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

Flourishing Industry

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

In the early twentieth century, Philadelphia’s elected officials embraced the City Beautiful Movement with the intention of improving the city’s infrastructure and attracting affluent suburbanites to downtown Philadelphia. One of these projects, the Northeast Boulevard, which was renamed the Roosevelt Boulevard in 1918, opened in 1914 to much fanfare, as builders and private developers soon capitalized on the city’s investment in the roadway to construct single- and twin-family dwellings along its expansive corridor, especially in the Northwood section of Frankford in the lower Northeast. As the Roaring Twenties progressed, commercial development also coincided with residential expansion in the lower Northeast. Local booster organizations, especially the establishment of the Northeast Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, and Sears-Roebuck’s new merchandising facility, which opened in 1920, symbolized the Northeast’s flourishing commercial identity.

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

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

Public Housing Segregation

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

Generous government benefits, namely the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill) and FHA home lending policies, assisted returning veterans, the majority of whom were white, in their quest to move from Philadelphia’s densely packed industrial neighborhoods to the quasi-suburban atmosphere of Northeast Philadelphia following World War II. Prominent builders, most notably Hyman Korman (1882-1969) and A.P. Orleans (1888-1981), capitalized on these circumstances to expand home construction west of Roosevelt Boulevard in the Near Northeast, especially in Rhawnhurst, Lawndale, and Oxford Circle, in the late 1940s and 1950s. The Far Northeast, on the other hand, remained largely undeveloped until the late 1950s and 1960s, at which point large contingents of affluent, white households, many of whom were Jewish, were drawn to Cape Cod and ranch dwellings designed with a suburban feel nestled in Bustleton and Somerton. Residential development of a mixed, aesthetic character, containing both row house and single-family dwellings, also unfolded east of Roosevelt Boulevard in the Far Northeast, especially in Torresdale, Holme Circle, and Academy Gardens, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, where an assemblage of white, ethnic Catholics with strong community affiliations to nearby parishes bought homes.

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

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

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

Rizzo’s Mandate

Repeated attempts to implement full-blown school desegregation waned during the mayoral tenure of Frank Rizzo (1920-1991), as he appeased many white residents’ anxieties, especially after receiving an electoral mandate from Northeast whites in 1971, by curtailing liberal demands for racial parity within Philadelphia’s public schools. Public support for mandatory school desegregation in the city’s public schools eventually faded in the mid-1970s, at which point city officials and residents agreed to institute a voluntary school-desegregation plan commencing in 1979, which experienced less popular resistance in the Northeast.

As deindustrialization and white flight threatened Philadelphia’s already shaky fiscal foundations and deteriorating municipal services during the 1970s and early 1980s, some Northeast residents, including Republican State Senator Hank Salvatore (1922-2014), questioned the logic of remaining wedded to the “City of Brotherly Love.” After W. Wilson Goode (b. 1938), the first African American elected mayor of Philadelphia, made repeated calls in the 1983 mayoral election to erect a “mini-City Hall” in Northeast Philadelphia in order to offset Northeast residents’ fears about declining city services, Senator Salvatore, unmoved by Goode’s proposal, declared his intention to introduce legislation in the state legislature that would permit Northeast Philadelphia to secede from the city and become formally known as “Liberty County.” Goode, living up to his promise, opened the mini-City Hall in the Northeast Center Shopping Center along Roosevelt Boulevard in 1985, severely undercutting the legitimacy of Salvatore’s secession agenda, which lost its popular appeal by the late 1980s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry-Related Growth

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

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

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

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

Influx of City Residents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Society Hill’s history begins in 1682, when William Penn first set foot in his new colony at the point where Dock Creek poured into the Delaware, near the Blue Anchor Tavern. To spur development, he gave a charter to “The Society of Free Traders” and a strip of land in the same area, which became part of the new city of Philadelphia when Penn’s surveyor sketched the grid centered on High Street (now Market), a few blocks north. The Society flew its flag on the top of a small hill that soon become known as “The Society’s Hill.”

All social classes and both enslaved and free Blacks moved to the growing neighborhood, with larger houses on the main streets and smaller quarters filling in back streets and alleys soon added to the grid.  By 1776, the neighborhood had a diverse population. The elite built freestanding mansions such as the Physick House and town houses such as the Powel House. Close by were smaller structures for servants and workers, particularly those from the nearby waterfront. Farther inland were the homes of tradesman, craftsmen, and others.

Some of the city’s first public and community institutions took root here. The growing population prompted construction of a new market, which started with shambles (sheds) on Second Street in 1745 and gained a Head House in 1804. The neighborhood added churches of various denominations such as the Friends Meeting (a Quaker meeting house), St. Peter’s (Anglican), Old St. Joseph’s (Roman Catholic), and Old Pine Street Church (Presbyterian). Richard Allen founded Mother Bethel, home church of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, there. A Quaker and a public almshouse (predecessor to the city’s first public hospital and its large state hospital, Byberry) housed the poor, Pennsylvania Hospital (the first private hospital in the country) tended the sick, and the gaol, or the Walnut Street jail or prison, held prisoners and debtors. The Athenaeum, a member-supported library and museum, opened. Economic activities ranged from the port to taverns, the first insurance company, and the offices of investors, physicians, and attorneys. The diversity of people and interests also led to clashes, most famously a large anti-Catholic riot in 1844, part of a broader conflict between nativists and Catholics in the city.

The Fifth Ward

Once called the Dock Ward, the area came to be defined as the Fifth Ward, a designation that fit it until well after World War II. By 1860, 24,792 lived there. The population declined to just over 7,000 people by 1950, largely due to outmigration to the suburbs. By 2010, the population was just over 6,000 people.

The population mixture changed as well. As Philadelphia grew, commerce and elite families moved westward, away from Society Hill. Always home to some African Americans, the ward’s southwest corner blended into the large African American community of the old Seventh Ward. This area was the primary subject of W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1868-1963) seminal sociological study of an urban neighborhood, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). He wrote that by the end of the nineteenth century the Fifth Ward was the worst Negro slum in the entire city, comparing it to a “cess-pool.”

During the late nineteenth century, the old Fifth Ward also became an important part of the city’s Jewish Quarter. Synagogues and Jewish newspapers and community institutions filled what is now Society Hill’s southern half, as Jewish immigrants crowded into the neighborhood. Indicative of the ethnic succession in Society Hill, in 1916, a historic Baptist church was renamed the “The Great Roumanian Shul” (as spelled out in Hebrew across the present façade of the Society Hill Synagogue).

In 1900, the old Fifth Ward housed an often impoverished population, with all of the health and social problems attendant to that. At the same time, the area remained a mixed-use neighborhood with commercial and industrial establishments such as a wholesale food market located at Dock Street and warehouses and light manufacturing nearby. Several publishers worked out of large buildings fronting Washington Square, and the insurance industry expanded along Chestnut Street. The area near Willings Alley was the home to the headquarters of three of the country’s largest railroads.

The Great Depression accelerated the old Fifth Ward’s transformation. Redlining limited investment, and colonial and federal houses were outfitted with storefronts and fire escapes and used as shops and rooming houses. A purveyor of hog bristles purchased the Powel House, intending  to convert it into an “outdoor garage.” Preservationists saved the historic structure  from that fate by acquiring it and operating it as a museum. But after World War II, as work disappeared from its factories and port, the old Fifth Ward sank further, with its councilman claiming Dock Street was a virtual skid row. The market was filthy, dilapidated, and congested.

Creating the New “Society Hill”

Political reform swept over Philadelphia after World War II.  Mayors Joseph Clarke (1901–90) and Richardson Dilworth (1898-1974) led an effort to renew the city beginning with its badly decayed Center City. The city located a new food distribution center elsewhere. Mayor Dilworth built a house in the colonial style on Washington Square and moved his family there,  hoping such actions would encourage others to convert what was viewed as a dirty and dangerous “has been” area of an urban core into a place of renewal.

Led by city planner Edmund Bacon (1910-2005), an urban renewal plan gave a major role to restoration of many of the early residences. Bacon’s plan included the demolition of many nonresidential buildings and the creation of “greenways.” The hope was that several high-rise buildings such as Society Hill Towers, new single homes and developments that complemented colonial homes, red brick sidewalks and Franklin lamps, a new market near Head House Square, and a supermarket and shops all would help to draw in families. New organizations such as the Philadelphia Historical Commission and the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation were created to certify historic houses and acquire property and then resell it to owners who agreed to follow strict preservation guidelines. By adopting a historic preservation urban renewal strategy of saving an entire neighborhood, not only individual homes, Philadelphia built upon the precedents of historic districts created in Charleston, S.C., Savannah, Georgia, and elsewhere.  Locally, leaders such as Charles E. Peterson (1906–2004), employed by the National Park Service during creation of nearby Independence National Historical Park, joined Bacon in spearheading the effort. But Bacon insisted on incorporating greenways and new construction in modernist style, such as the high-rise Society Hill Towers and Hopkinson House, to create a neighborhood distinctly different from a collection of historic buildings.

Peterson renamed the old Fifth Ward as “Society Hill” as part of rebranding of the area and an investment strategy. Newspaper stories of urban pioneers who had used their own labor or funds to refurbish historic structures helped change its image. But another reality was also present: Most of the African American renters were displaced from the area; merchants opposed closing their businesses; and one resident later talked about the area before renewal as “a fun little neighborhood.” In Society Hill, as elsewhere in urban America, gentrification also meant dislocation as wealthier individuals and lenders pushed older residents out. Property

values and rents rose. The later story line for Society Hill, however, became one of private initiative more than government effort remaking a city neighborhood. After all, banks, contractors, and corporations like Alcoa Aluminum had provided much of the capital for Society Hill’s renewal.

Plans to create a Crosstown Expressway would have leveled the South Street neighborhood, while off-ramps for Interstate 95 would have taken a corner of Society Hill. Older residents opposed to renewal and newer residents supportive of it combined their organizations into the Society Hill Civic Association in 1965, joining others in successfully opposing the expressway and ramps. Society Hill was nominated as an official city historic district in 1999, helping guard its historical character by vigilant review of zoning and historic preservation standards.

The area went from being well below the poverty line to one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. By 2014 its population included a higher proportion of senior citizens, foreign born, and households without children than before renewal. Recent changes have included more tall buildings such as Independence Place and a wave of conversions of nonresidential buildings into condos, such as the former headquarters of the Reading Railroad transformed into a luxury condo building (The Willings). A 45-story tower (The Saint James) arose behind the façade of a nineteenth^–century bank. But high-rise projects have not succeeded everywhere. For example, efforts to construct a tower behind the Dilworth House have so far been stopped in the courts.

Over more than three centuries, Society Hill evolved from a mixed-use neighborhood of a colonial town, to a big city ward that contained skid row and slum, and now to a gentrified “gold coast.” Its recent history includes a largely successful effort to return it to a former glory as an urbane village of historic homes (and, now, luxury high-rises), but one largely stripped of the industrial, commercial, and civic institutions and the visible racial and ethnic minorities that once filled its streets.

George W. Dowdall is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Saint Joseph’s University and Adjunct Fellow, Center for Public Health Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania. (Author information current at time of publication.)