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.)

Garreau popularized the term “edge city” in his 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. He argued that the phenomenon grew out of postwar suburbanization, the building of interstate highways, and “new towns” conceived by planners including Ray Watson (1926-2012) and Robert E. Simon (1914-2015). Their proliferation accelerated urban decentralization while at the same time reflecting the shift from manufacturing to service- and information-based economies. In some cases, they developed in rural areas or near existing transportation infrastructure (rail lines and secondary highways) while others resulted from new roadways, shopping malls, and the embrace of “car culture.”

Following World War II, population and job losses severely damaged Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania; Camden and Trenton, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware. At the same time, early postwar suburbs, such as Levittown and Springfield, Pennsylvania; Duncan Woods and Sherwood Park, Delaware; and Willingboro, New Jersey, accommodated a growing middle-class in communities that later included their own shopping centers, churches, and schools. Yet many residents still commuted to central cities for work and leisure activities. By the early 1960s, following the opening of new interstate highways, edge cities formed in rural portions of Burlington and Camden County, New Jersey; New Castle County, Delaware; and in Chester, Bucks, and Montgomery Counties to the north and west of Philadelphia. In the process, Greater Philadelphia’s older cities struggled to remain relevant.

Along with expressways, many edge cities owed their founding to the modern shopping mall. In 1961, the Cherry Hill Mall, then the nation’s largest enclosed shopping facility, opened in Delaware Township, Camden County. Designed by Victor Gruen (1903-80), it included dozens of stores, a food court, tropical atrium, art exhibits, a four-hundred-seat auditorium, and acres of free parking. Located four miles from the interchange of US Route 30, US Route 130, and New Jersey Route 38, the mall grew into one of South Jersey’s main commercial centers and over time drained economic activity from nearby Camden and Philadelphia’s aging department stores. The town of Cherry Hill, renamed from Delaware Township the same year, emerged as a prosperous edge city, luring pharmaceutical firms, auto dealerships, corporations such as Subaru of North America, and an NJ Transit rail stop. In 2003, demolition of its sixty-year-old horse track commenced to make way for Garden State Park, a mixed-use complex of condominiums, restaurants, and upscale stores totaling more than one million square feet. The building of the New Jersey Turnpike in the 1950s and the opening of the Moorestown Mall in 1963 boosted the Moorestown-Mt. Laurel area to the east in Burlington County. Bisected by I-295 and the New Jersey Turnpike, the affluent edge city attracted college campuses, waterparks, corporate tenants, and upscale restaurants.

Chester and Montgomery Counties

Upon completion of the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76), edge cities developed in Chester and Montgomery Counties. In 1963, the King of Prussia Mall opened near Valley Forge. Expanded over the years, the shopping complex located at the junction of I-76, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and US Routes 202 and 422, ranked in 2017 as the nation’s second-largest mall. In addition King of Prussia hosted more than sixteen thousand jobs, in health care, utilities, and energy, among others. To suit convention traffic, the 240,000-square foot Greater Philadelphia Exposition Center opened in 2009. For entertainment and gaming, the Valley Forge Casino Resort opened in 2012 five miles away.

Conshohocken, a former factory city eight miles east, by the late 1990s had attracted chain hotels, apartments and restaurants, and the headquarters of design firms and security companies. Combined with nearby Norristown (the Montgomery County seat) the three cities formed a metropolitan area in its own right, with links to central Philadelphia by trains, bus lines, and several roads. In nearby Malvern, Pennsylvania, the Great Valley Corporate Center opened in 1974. Touted by then-president Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) in 1985 as the “workplace of the future,” the expanded complex employed more than twenty thousand and was home to biotech, financial, and medical firms. In 2015, plans unfolded to redesign the area into a walkable, mixed-use community with over one million square feet of stores, offices, and condominiums. Located just north of US Route 202 and US Route 30 and serviced by SEPTA regional rail, the Malvern area also included Paoli and Exton. Elsewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania, the Warminster-Willow Grove and the Bensalem-Levittown-Langhorne areas experienced edge city-style growth.

Adjacent to I-95 between Wilmington and Newark, Delaware, the Christiana Mall opened in 1978. Beginning in the 1980s, after much of Wilmington’s industry disappeared, the unincorporated Christiana-Churchman’s Crossing area attracted firms such as Astra-Zeneca, Christiana Hospital, shopping centers University Plaza and Centre Point Plaza, hotels catering to business travelers, and a SEPTA regional rail station. North of downtown Wilmington, the Concord Mall opened in 1965 along US Route 202; by 2016, the US 202-US 1 axis, extending north into Talleyville, Delaware, and Chadds Ford and Concordville, Pennsylvania, contained office parks, shopping centers, and thousands of single-family homes. Reflecting the area’s commercial importance, in 2014 Chester County officials proposed a feasibility study for resuming rail service to central Philadelphia, which had been eliminated in the mid-1980s.

In the nearly three decades following Edge City’s publication, Garreau’s definition faced criticism. Edge cities had grown significantly, ultimately blurring the lines between them and older cities. Philadelphia experienced an economic resurgence in the 1990s and early 2000s that attracted “millennials” and “empty nesters,” while older towns such as Haddonfield, New Jersey; Ardmore, Pennsylvania; and Newark, Delaware, saw revitalization of their downtown areas. In 2016 Camden, long beleaguered by job loss and high crime, heralded a $1 billion waterfront development proposal by Liberty Property Trust. Urban planner Robert Lang (b.1959), charting the amount of office space in the region, reasoned in 2006 that while King of Prussia and Paoli, Pennsylvania, still retained edge city characteristics, other towns, including Christiana, Warminster, and Cherry Hill also witnessed high rates of occupational dispersal and outward growth. Along the I-295 corridor in South Jersey, the US 202-US 1 corridor in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and US Route13 in New Castle County, Delaware, clusters of office parks, retail stores, and housing appeared to form large conurbations, or what Lang termed “edgeless cities.” They not only competed with Greater Philadelphia’s traditional urban centers for population and revenue but refuted Garreau’s contention that edge cities were bound to outpace other suburban concentrations, even to the point of rendering them obsolete.

Stephen Nepa teaches history at Temple University, Moore College of Art and Design, and the Pennsylvania State University-Abington. A contributor to numerous books, journals, and documentary films, he is currently working on a project about urban ruins. He received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Presenting a varied and complicated patchwork of both thriving and distressed communities, Philadelphia’s inner suburbs developed during different eras to serve different purposes and populations. European influence predated the Revolutionary War with English, Swedish, Dutch, and Welsh settlers establishing tight-knit farming communities in what were then outlying areas of William Penn’s Philadelphia. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of slow but steady population increase, stately mansions were built in many of these well-positioned borderland communities as summer homes for wealthy Philadelphians while other communities were setting the foundation to become vibrant industrial towns. Beyond a common penchant toward small-town life and local allegiance, during the twentieth century these communities acquired different identities ranging from upscale hamlets with storied histories of housing wealthy families for more than a century, to working-class towns rooted in manufacturing, to post-World War II suburbs whose middle-class housing began to lose value by the end of the century. These early suburban communities represented a critical juncture in metropolitan dynamics as the first places outside of the city limits to experience rapid population growth during the twentieth century such that their residents were still essentially connected to the urban core while adopting new localized daily routines that began to disconnect them functionally from an urban sensibility.

Clustered around the city boundaries, the inner suburbs formed a contiguous ring of older jurisdictions within which the majority of housing dated to 1970 or before. This buffer, extending out approximately eight miles from Philadelphia’s city limits, corresponded roughly to the service area of the region’s popular commuter rail system along which early suburban development coalesced.  As such, the region’s inner suburbs could be considered to include the townships, boroughs, and a few cities within eight miles of Philadelphia’s border in Pennsylvania’s Delaware, Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties as well as New Jersey’s Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties. U.S. Census population figures attested to an enduring attraction of inner suburbs to the region’s residents. During the post-World War II era of mass suburbanization, migration flowed mainly to the inner suburbs that grew to be almost equal to the population of Philadelphia by 1970. At the close of the twentieth century, population in the inner suburbs well exceeded that in either the city or the outer suburbs.

During the nineteenth century, many towns along waterways developed as centers of manufacturing in the era of industrialization and became working-class suburbs. Water power and transportation influenced development in places such as Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, where the abundance of creeks and streams allowed for the development of mill towns. Along the Delaware River, Chester, Pennsylvania, became known for its shipyards and factory work in the early 1900s. Paulsboro, New Jersey, home to the Port of Paulsboro, developed its capacity for petroleum transfer and manufacturing.  Industrial parks were situated in Pennsauken, on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River. The boroughs of Conshohocken and West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, along the Schuylkill River, became centers for steel and iron production.

Although places that formed this suburban inner ring had unique longstanding histories, the introduction of rail lines in the mid-1800s shaped modern municipal demarcations. One string of affluent inner suburban communities, encompassing parts of Lower Merion and Radnor, Pennsylvania, acquired its moniker as “the Main Line” because the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad ran through these towns. These “bourgeois utopias” with their ample supply of sprawling estates remained prosperous and prestigious areas. In Camden County, New Jersey, a pair of high-income suburbs with lengthy histories similarly retained their appeal for wealthy residents. Haddonfield and Haddon Heights were built as classically laid-out towns with large homes that drew affluent professionals.  Railroad connections were integral to the plans of both communities, initially to the Camden and Atlantic Railroad and by 1969 to the PATCO high speed line.

The region’s suburban footprint changed dramatically with the mass suburbanization that defined the post-World War II period. Tract housing subdivisions transformed many of Greater Philadelphia’s inner ring agricultural areas into middle- and working-class bedroom suburbs to mirror the nationwide trend. Levitt and Sons builders chose Greater Philadelphia’s inner suburbs for two of its iconic Levittown communities, one spanning four jurisdictions in Pennsylvania’s Lower Bucks County and the other in Willingboro, New Jersey. Population in the inner suburbs mushroomed.  For example, in Lower Moreland, Pennsylvania, a 1940 resident count of 1,451 grew to 11,665 by 1970. In Deptford, New Jersey, a 1940 resident count of 4,738 grew to 24,232 by 1970. With the construction of an extensive network of highways and roads, inner suburbs drew middle- and working-class households seeking the quintessential American dream of owning a single-family home in a neighborhood with good schools, a safe and community-oriented environment, and easy automobile access to anywhere in the metropolitan region. White flight from city neighborhoods fueled the dramatic population increases in the inner suburbs between 1945 and 1970.

After 1970, African Americans began moving into suburbs where a pattern of disinvestment in aging homes had lowered prices enough to make them affordable. Typically, declining housing conditions preceded the arrival of minority buyers, yet many white residents assumed the reverse—namely, that the arrival of minority residents caused housing conditions to deteriorate. In an effort to stem the racial animosity that such transitions prompted, citizens in some racially changing suburbs like Pennsauken, New Jersey, as well as Lansdowne and Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, formed organizations to support minority homebuyers and combat racial discrimination in housing. After 1970, however, some inner suburbs experienced population decline, especially losing white households to outer suburbs and, starting around 2000, to Philadelphia’s downtown. The racial makeup of inner suburbs grew more varied than in outer suburbs whose residents continued to identify predominantly as “white alone” in U.S. Census figures. In a few of the region’s distressed inner suburbs such as Chester and Yeadon, Pennsylvania, racial integration could not be maintained and a process of resegregation into predominantly minority communities ensued by the end of the twentieth century.

Inner suburbs increasingly became a destination of choice for immigrants to the region. By the twenty-first century, immigrant settlement in the inner suburbs followed class divisions as educated professionals chose upper-class enclaves and working-class immigrants gravitated to the more affordable working-class areas with easily accessible public transit. Inner suburbs recorded disproportionate shares of elderly residents, although the trajectory was decidedly upward for both inner and outer suburbs. And poverty began to rise in the inner suburbs, mirroring national trends as well as the trajectory of Philadelphia’s inner city neighborhoods. The public schools in distressed suburbs came to be counted among the worst performing in the region. In under-funded Pennsylvania school districts like William Penn School District, Southeast Delco School District, Norristown Area School District, and Bristol Borough, over 90 percent of fifth graders tested “Not Proficient” on the state’s standardized tests for Math and English in 2021.

A number of factors explained these trends of population decline, demographic change, and increased poverty in Greater Philadelphia’s inner suburbs as well as under-performing schools in certain places. Outdated post-World War II housing stocks and aging infrastructure made many older suburbs less appealing to homebuyers. The regional tide of deindustrialization undermined working-class manufacturing suburbs. In addition, the region’s governmental fragmentation, assigning each suburb responsibility for taxation and service delivery within its boundaries, played a role as small suburban jurisdictions struggled to fund services on a stagnating tax base.  The most threatened were bedroom communities that lacked commercial property to bolster tax revenues. For example, the William Penn School District was created in 1972 to serve six small boroughs clustered together near Delaware County’s border with Philadelphia. All were residential communities with little commercial tax base, so the full weight of paying for local services and schools fell on homeowners. Thus inequalities widened among inner suburbs as prosperous communities strategized effectively to strengthen their amenities and advantages with a focus on commercial and office park development as well as educational and medical infrastructure, leaving more vulnerable places to decline. Struggling inner suburbs were thus caught in a “policy blind spot,” overlooked in policy debates that contrasted flourishing outer suburbs with declining cities.

Even as some inner suburbs declined, however, others possessed qualities that positioned them to prosper. Many smaller boroughs offered the charm, walkability, sense of community, and main street orientation that the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission touted in its promotional campaign for the region’s treasured “Classic Towns.” Boroughs such as Narberth and Media in Pennsylvania, and Collingswood in New Jersey, began drawing people to their independently owned main street shops and restaurants as well as their robust community life centered on festivals and public events. Conshohocken successfully capitalized upon its traditional town layout to reinvent itself as a major hub of the region’s knowledge economy. The ample inventory of older housing built before 1939 offered stately and unique architectural features increasingly of interest to homebuyers.

The Philadelphia region’s densely settled inner suburbs exhibited far greater variation than its outer suburbs. In this complicated metropolitan mosaic, pockets of distressed places developed side-by-side with prospering ones. But all shared the continuing geographic advantage of easy access to central Philadelphia in an era when sprawled development patterns shifted growing numbers of suburban residents farther away from, and less able to sustain, connections with the region’s core.

Suzanne Lashner Dayanim holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Urban Studies from Temple University. Her dissertation measured the value of community facilities to inner ring suburban resilience. (Author information current at time of publication.)

King of Prussia’s name comes from an inn and tavern opened in 1769 in a converted farmhouse originally built by Welsh Quakers in 1719. The owner named his tavern to honor King Frederick II of Prussia, an eighteenth-century monarch who opposed Britain’s imperial ambitions. The business prospered because its location stood at a crossroads exactly one day’s travel from Philadelphia by horse, a favored position further boosted with the arrival of a rail connection to the Pennsylvania and Reading railroads. By 1850, both the inn and the place were called King of Prussia. By the twentieth century, its size warranted its own zip code (19406) and post office, but King of Prussia existed as an incorporated governmental jurisdiction in Upper Merion Township, not a separate town. In this edge city, so-called because of its replication of historically central city functions in a previously rural area, the King of Prussia Business Improvement District established in 2010 became the closest thing to a governing framework through its work to enhance the commercial environment and to influence township policies on zoning, planning, taxes and transportation issues.

King of Prussia Business Park

Highway construction in the mid-twentieth century set the stage for King of Prussia’s rapid development into an edge city. The Pennsylvania Turnpike, constructed from west to east across the state, arrived at Valley Forge in 1950, and by 1954 it extended eastward to the Delaware River. Almost at the same time Philadelphia was building its Schuylkill Expressway, which fully opened in 1958. That same year, spurred by the turnpike’s arrival near King of Prussia, Boston developer Cabot, Cabot & Forbes acquired rights to 710 acres north of the turnpike interchange and began signing up companies like Western Electric, Smith Kline and French, Merck Sharp and Dohme, and Pennwalt to occupy warehouses, office buildings, and factories. Since the highway interchange made it a reasonable commute from many other suburban communities, jobs quickly multiplied in what was then called the King of Prussia Industrial Park (later known as the Business Park). While some companies came from outside the region, others moved from Philadelphia to this convenient suburban location. For example, General Electric in 1962 relocated a major division from West Philadelphia to King of Prussia.

Subsequently the business park hosted software, biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, finance, and insurance firms. From the beginning it welcomed defense contractors, one of which became the target of a famous anti-war protest by the Plowshares Eight. In September 1980 antiwar activists Daniel (1921-2016) and Philip (1923-2002) Berrigan with a half dozen other protesters illegally entered the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, vandalized the nose cones of several nuclear warheads being assembled there, and poured blood on company documents. Their arrest and trial sparked the Plowshares Movement, which grew into an international Christian peace movement. The business park continued to house numerous defense-related firms, most notably Lockheed Martin Space System Company, which took over the General Electric facility through corporate mergers.

King of Prussia Mall

To the average resident of the Philadelphia region, King of Prussia became known even more for its retailing than for its industrial production. The Kravitz Company began building its first-generation mall near the highway interchange in 1963. That early outdoor mall consisted of a strip of anchor stores (Korvette 1962, JC Penney 1963, John Wanamaker 1965, Gimbels 1966) around an Acme supermarket, along with a cluster of smaller specialty shops. Starting from that mid-market retail cluster intended to serve middle-income households, the mall gradually shifted toward luxury goods for higher-income shoppers. This evolving business strategy reflected the mall’s location in a favored part of the region where high-paying jobs abounded.

As early as 1970 the mall added an enclosed arcade to provide some indoor shopping at what came to be known as “The Plaza.” Then, in 1981, a second complex called “The Court” opened, adding upscale stores including Bloomingdale’s and Abraham and Strauss. The Court signaled the developers’ effort to rebrand King of Prussia as a higher-end shopping location for the increasingly affluent population living in the area. In a subsequent upgrade during the 1990s, the owner added nearly a million square feet to the older Plaza to make it the second largest mall in the United States, behind only the Mall of America in Minnesota. The renovations of the 1990s made room to add increasingly pricey shops to the existing retail mix, leading locals to distinguish between the “poor mall and the rich mall” because different sections of King of Prussia attracted different customers.

In 2003 a major retail developer based in Indianapolis, the Simon Property Group, bought a controlling interest in the King of Prussia Mall. The Simon Group continued upgrading the property to provide the largest collection of luxury retailers in the region (for example, Neiman-Marcus, Nordstrom, Tiffany’s, and Hermes). Additional renovations done in 2016 included an indoor heated connector between the two main shopping centers—The Plaza and The Court—to tie them into a single complex while simultaneously adding fifty new stores and restaurants. The resulting three million square feet of mall space was projected to serve twenty-six million visitors a year, about one-fifth of them tourists in the region. Interestingly, that renovation sacrificed four hundred parking spaces, signaling a shifting vision for the edge city as a place that would also be reached by public transportation.

Coping With Congestion

King of Prussia’s history of reliance on the automobile made congestion on local roads a major problem for daily commuters, shoppers, and even tourists visiting nearby Valley Forge National Historical Park. Regional transportation planners and township zoning officials took steps to reduce dependence on automobiles and encourage people to live near their workplaces. With the closest rail station located two miles away from the mall, bus service on congested roads offered the only transit option, especially frustrating to the large number of transit-dependent riders commuting daily from Philadelphia to jobs in King of Prussia. To address this problem, SEPTA reviewed proposals for a five-mile rail extension to bring the Norristown High Speed Line into the core of King of Prussia, winding through the high-end stores, chain restaurants, and offices, with stops in both the shopping mall and business park. Construction was projected to start in 2020, with a cost exceeding one billion dollars.

As part of a broader movement to create a more traditional urban environment, Upper Merion Township rezoned the Business Park in 2014 to foster mixed uses and more compact development, to reduce parking requirements, and to promote pedestrian-friendly designs. The new guidelines authorized multifamily residential developers to build as many as thirty units per acre. Over time, plans called for replacing existing buildings with multipurpose structures to house people as well as businesses, restaurants and shops, allowing residents to live near their work.

That trend continued in plans to develop the last major open parcel, a former golf course west of the mall, as the Village at Valley Forge, centered on a “lifestyle shopping mecca” with streets laid out in a walkable grid pattern, sidewalk cafes, living spaces built above stores and restaurants, and a town square area for programming public events like yoga sessions and movie nights for families. Beyond that core, additional elements of the new Village at Valley Forge were to include hotels and a conference center along with a new surgery center for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This ambitious plan prompted some critics to question whether the area really needed more shopping, restaurants, and services. Wouldn’t that simply worsen congestion?

Despite spirited debate, it should not have surprised critics to see township officials approve the plans. Ever since the highway cloverleaf triggered new development in the late 1950s, Upper Merion Township’s government mostly maintained a pro-development stance, largely because new investment generated enough tax revenue to allow the township to keep its residents’ property taxes among the lowest in the region.

Carolyn T. Adams is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The iconic Levittown communities–the first in Long Island, New York, and the subsequent two in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Burlington County, New Jersey–endure as symbols of the unique character of post-World War II U.S. suburban development. A confluence of forces encouraged the particular nature of these large-scale, mass-produced, low-cost suburban tract housing developments, including a shortage of housing for returning veterans and their young families, the rise of new building techniques, and federal government mortgage financing incentives. Levitt and Sons builders of New York, led by Abraham Levitt and his two sons William Jaird (1907-94) and Alfred (1912-66), seized the opportunity to afford home-ownership to masses of middle- and working-class Americans.

Early suburban development had been incremental, custom-oriented, and expensive, which limited life on the metropolitan periphery to a wealthy few. Levitt and Sons, however, were at the forefront of the trend toward mass-producing smaller housing units in large subdivided communities. In the early 1940s, the Levitts gained experience in erecting modest homes quickly through war-related federal contracts in and around Norfolk, Virginia, to meet the acute demand for housing the area’s substantial naval population. After the war’s end, the Levitt organization quickly adapted for the broader market its newfound expertise constructing affordable housing in a way that resembled the assembly-line production of automobiles. Standardized houses were built on concrete slabs using precut components. Subcontractors would move from house to house, performing their single task with such great efficiency that, at the height of production, a Levittown house was completed every 16 minutes. The largest housing development ever produced by a single company, Long Island’s Levittown included more than 17,400 single-family detached homes each of roughly 750 square feet equipped with a state-of-the-art built-in kitchen. By 1950 Levitt and Sons had risen to become the largest homebuilder in the country. 

Levittown, Pennsylvania

Like Levitt’s Long Island development, Pennsylvania’s Levittown benefited from the federal Veterans Administration program to provide loan guarantees that allowed veterans to buy homes with little or no down payment. But Pennsylvania’s Levittown was firmly connected to the area’s industrial base. The developer chose this site because U.S. Steel Corporation’s Fairless Works Plant had just broken ground nearby alongside the Delaware River, and thousands of plant employees would need convenient housing. In 1951 Levitt and Sons bought 5,750 contiguous acres of broccoli and spinach farmland near that plant to build what the company claimed was “the most perfectly planned community in America.” Many of Levittown’s initial buyers were employed at the Fairless Works plant.

The Levitts built slightly more than 17,300 homes of only six different models between 1952 and 1958 in this second Levittown. The community was partitioned into four master block areas, which in turn were divided into smaller neighborhood sections of between 300-500 houses. Each section was assigned a general name, and streets within that section were given names beginning with the first letter of the section name. Thus, Hollyhock Lane and Hickory Lane are found in the Holly Hill neighborhood. Sections were kept intimate to encourage community interaction while master block areas were separated by larger through streets such as Levittown Parkway. Community amenities were part of the package with space set aside for a shopping center and places of worship, an elementary school in each master block, and the inclusion of baseball fields, neighborhood parks, and five community swimming pools managed by the Levittown Public Recreation Association.

Levittown, Pennsylvania, is a Census Designated Place in Bucks County that was carved out of farmland that had been incorporated into existing municipalities well before Levitt bought the land. As such, it meanders through Bristol, Falls, and Middletown Townships, and Tullytown Borough. This fragmentation among four municipalities and three school districts undermined the cohesiveness of William Levitt’s community vision. Levitt would have preferred to secure incorporated status for Levittown as a separate township; however residents refused to support the proposal fearing it would increase their tax bills.

Levittowns were notorious as all-white communities. William Levitt famously proclaimed that “we can solve the housing problem or we can solve the racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.”  The national spotlight blazed on Levittown, Pennsylvania, as a battleground for suburban housing integration when, in August 1957, an African American couple, Daisy and William Myers, bought and moved into 43 Deepgreen Lane in the Dogwood Hollow section with their three young children. A year of racist harassment and sometimes violent provocation against the Myerses led religious groups like the Quakers to join with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to try to force local police to protect the Myers family. Ultimately the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania issued an injunction to stop what it called “an unlawful, malicious and evil conspiracy” by Levittown neighbors and convicted the ringleaders of violating the Myerses’ rights. 

Levittown, New Jersey

With the construction of his third Levittown, William Levitt could realize to its fullest extent his vision of a comprehensively planned community. In the mid-1950s the company used straw purchasers to buy farmland in Burlington County, an area within easy commuting distance to Philadelphia, Camden, and Trenton.  Levitt used seemingly unrelated buyers, as he had previously done in Pennsylvania, to discourage sellers from delaying the sales in the hopes of getting higher prices per acre. In New Jersey, Levitt was determined that his new development would not repeat his earlier mistake in Pennsylvania of crossing municipal boundary lines, which had forced him to deal with conflicting zoning and subdivision regulations. In the end, Levitt acquired about 90 percent of all the land located within the borders of the single township of Willingboro. There he built 11,000 homes, selling the first in June 1958. The township was officially renamed Levittown in 1959 by resident referendum. But by 1963 the confusion with Levittown, Pennsylvania, in the same metropolitan area prompted residents to change the town’s name back to Willingboro.

Levitt notably offered mixed housing types on streets in Levittown, New Jersey,  such that a more expensive “House C (Colonial)” could be found next door to the more modest “House A (Cape Cod).”  The adjustment was meant to allay criticism from urban theorists, most notably Lewis Mumford, that the new suburban developments suffered from a depressing uniformity. The mix of housing types at different prices was intended to draw more middle- and upper-middle-class buyers than had been attracted to the earlier Levittowns.  And in fact Herbert Gans’ acclaimed 1967 sociological study, The Levittowners, confirmed the community’s socioeconomic diversity. Gans documented subtle but important variations in class, religion, lifestyle, and political orientation among early Levittown, New Jersey residents.

As Levitt was building Willingboro, his company was already under legal assault for the whites-only policy in its Pennsylvania development. Since the New Jersey location was close to several military bases, it drew interest from military personnel including an African American Army officer, Willie R. James, who integrated the new community by winning a 1960 lawsuit against racial exclusion.  Rather than public harassment and violence, racial conflicts were settled by litigation, which gradually made Willingboro appear safe to more and more minority homebuyers but prompted whites to leave. Although the town leaders tried to stem white flight by banning the public display of “for sale” signs, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the ban. By the 2010 U.S. Census about seventy-three percent of the population identified as “One Race: Black or African American.”

In contrast, Levittown, Pennsylvania, remained predominantly white with about ninety percent identifying as “One Race: White” in the 2010 U.S. Census.  One contributing influence may have been the prominent role of the Fairless Hills plant in the life of Levittown.  That U.S. Steel mill was several times charged with discrimination against African American workers.  Almost certainly, the well-known violence and hostility faced by early residents of color in Levittown discouraged other African American families from moving there.

Enduring Legacy of the Levittowns

The massive scale of these low-cost single-family detached housing developments, coupled with William Levitt’s grandiose persona, catapulted the Levittown brand as the national symbol of the unique nature of postwar mass-migration to suburbia. Criticism abounded of the new American lifestyle in the “cultural wasteland” of cookie-cutter, “little boxes” that typified new tract housing. However, projects such as Gans’ study, architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s “Learning from Levittown” that  analyzed the changes owners made to their homes and yards, and sociologist David Popenoe’s account of Levittown, Pennsylvania’s maturation after twenty years in existence, revealed a more complex life and landscape in these places.

Levittown and Willingboro remain economically stable communities with median household income, according to the 2013 American Community Survey (ACS), at $69,066 and $67,697 respectively, both above the metropolitan area’s median of $60,482. But the two communities’ fortunes differ in many respects. Unemployment in Levittown was 5.8 percent, according to the 2013 ACS, but higher in Willingboro at 10 percent.  Median house value was also strikingly different with the 2013 ACS recording Levittown’s as $230,000 and Willingboro’s as $169,500 even though Levitt built more upscale housing at the New Jersey site. And while the persistent white-majority in Levittown mirrors the overwhelming white-majority composition of the four Levittown municipalities as well as Bucks County in general, Willingboro’s African American majority stands in stark contrast to the white-majority racial makeup present in all other Burlington County municipalities.

One possible explanation for the differing trajectories of these two Levittown communities, apart from their disparate histories, may lie in the difference in choices available to contemporary homebuyers seeking an ideal suburban township setting. Since the sections of Levittown, Pennsylvania,  remain essentially only neighborhoods within larger municipalities, they offer the most affordable choices within those jurisdictions for people of limited resources, while the diversity of neighborhoods and housing types means that wealthier buyers interested in purchasing within those municipalities have options for newer housing styles in different kinds of settings. In Willingboro, on the other hand, since the now outdated Levitt-style development constitutes the vast majority of the township’s housing stock, buyers interested in other kinds of neighborhood layouts or housing styles must look in other municipalities. This explanation suggests a flaw in Levitt’s vision of creating one type of neighborhood within the confines of a single jurisdiction. Developing almost the entire township at a single moment in time limited Willingboro’s ability to update incrementally in response to evolving residential and commercial sensibilities.

Levittowns began as symbols of America’s post-war promise and progress. These communities have been much studied and documented as the archetypal late-twentieth -century landscape of the unfolding American story. The trend toward suburban privatization is illustrated in the literature by the closing of the majority of Levittown, Pennsylvania’s once thriving community pools and the introduction there of property-line fences. Its integration struggles exposed the segregated nature of U.S. suburbanization. Scholars agree that Levittown was a singular American achievement that forever changed the dynamic of suburbia. With the creation of Levittown, masses of working-class Americans, albeit white-only, could own a piece of picture-windowed suburban America with its lure of wholesome living and good schools. More than 60 years after the Levitts first sold low-cost homes, these two Levittowns still proved an affordable option for people of ordinary means seeking home ownership in a suburban setting.

Suzanne Lashner Dayanim holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Urban Studies from Temple University. Her dissertation measures the value of community facilities to inner ring suburban resilience, and its study area includes the four municipalities of Pennsylvania’s Levittown. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Although early industrialization in the eighteenth century took root mainly in urban centers, a substantial share of the Philadelphia region’s early manufacturing sprang up in small towns outside the young city. The explanation for that pattern lay in the region’s great rivers, the Delaware and Schuylkill. As early as the eighteenth century, enterprising settlers saw that the fast-moving currents in those rivers could drive water wheels to power grist mills, sawmills, paper mills, and iron foundries, and they built such businesses along the banks. When coal-fired steam engines overtook both water wheels and hand work, some of those early producers remained on the rivers’ edge since waterways provided affordable transportation for raw materials and finished goods. Thus, the map of early suburban manufacturing followed the region’s main waterways, a pattern that eventually influenced the paths of subsequent transportation networks of rail lines and highways.

In the first half of the nineteenth century canals enhanced the region’s rivers by extending their reach into the hinterlands and overcoming obstructions along particular stretches of river. Canals served especially to transport anthracite coal from the northeastern Pennsylvania coal fields to riverfront manufacturing towns. For example, Bristol Borough in Bucks County began to prosper as a manufacturing center on the Delaware River twenty-three miles northeast of the city after the Lehigh Canal built in 1829 connected Bristol with the state’s anthracite coal fields located near Mauch Chunk (later renamed Jim Thorpe) in Carbon County. Bristol’s industrial base expanded substantially in 1876 when William Grundy (1836-93) moved his woolen mill from Philadelphia, producing rugs, carpets, hosiery, and cloth. In 1815 the Schuylkill Navigation Company began construction of a canal connecting Philadelphia to Pottstown, making possible the emergence of Manayunk as a mill town on the banks of the river. By 1830 the canal had reached northward into the state’s coal region via Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, prompting its textile mills to mechanize to such an extent that Manayunk acquired the unflattering label “the Manchester of America.”

A few of the manufacturing clusters outside Philadelphia grew to become small cities. The city of Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia developed a diversified manufacturing base in the nineteenth century by producing woolens, carriages, writing pens, and, most famously, Campbell’s Soup. The New York Shipbuilding Corporation began operations in 1899 on 160 acres in Camden, where the company built ships in assembly-line fashion, from barges to passenger liners and battleships. By World War II, it had become a central engine of Camden’s economy. Down the Delaware River from Philadelphia, the city of Chester in Delaware County based its prosperity on a diverse manufacturing base that included shipbuilding, textiles, metal products, and paper. Unlike smaller manufacturing suburbs, cities like Camden, Chester, and Wilmington developed beyond their manufacturing base. They gained prominence as hubs of transportation (mainly ports and railroads) and regional business services like banking, finance, and insurance.

Manufacturing Villages

By contrast, other early manufacturing villages remained small, focused on one or two industries. On the west side of Philadelphia, ten miles up the Schuylkill River, the town of Conshohocken spawned iron works on a canal alongside an unnavigable stretch of river. The first foundry was built in 1844. The longest-surviving firm was Alan Wood & Co., which established the Schuylkill Iron Works plant there in 1857. By 1920 Alan Wood Steel could produce 500,000 tons of steel a year. It remained the economic mainstay of Conshohocken until the mid-twentieth century. Many such towns specialized: Phoenixville produced steel; Gloucester City housed DuPont Chemicals; and asbestos plants fueled Ambler’s growth. Although they remained small, these nineteenth-century manufacturing towns shared some features in common with cities, including a land use pattern that mixed together manufacturing, housing, and walkable commercial districts where craftsmen, tradesmen, and merchants clustered. That surviving land-use pattern differentiated early manufacturing communities from twentieth century suburban towns.

Not every important industry located on a river bank. Some chose locations near an important source of raw materials. For example, glass manufacturing flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, particularly around the town of Glassboro in Gloucester County, named for the distinguished craftsmanship of what came to be known as “South Jersey Glass.” The quality of southern New Jersey’s sand, a major ingredient in glass manufacture, helped to establish its reputation, while its proximity to Philadelphia provided a large market for the industry.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, more manufacturers built factories in the suburbs, attracted by cheap land and enabled by cheap energy. In 1916 Sun Oil chose to locate Sun Shipbuilding Co. in Chester in Delaware County eighteen miles downriver from Philadelphia. That plant grew quickly by delivering tanker ships to serve in World War I. In 1906, Baldwin Locomotive expanded its massive Philadelphia operations by building a suburban plant in Eddystone in Delaware County, about twelve miles south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River. In 1925 the Ford Motor Co. transferred its regional operations from North Philadelphia to Chester, where it found more space and more efficient transportation for finished cars. Another major auto manufacturer, General Motors, opened a components factory upriver from Philadelphia in 1938 in West Trenton.

The Depression dealt a dramatic blow to many of these plants. Markets for their products collapsed in the 1930s, but business revived during World War II. Military contractors in Camden, Chester, and many parts of Delaware, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties employed thousands of defense workers. Sun Shipbuilding once again constructed vital oil tankers for a Navy that fought a war on two oceans, while New York Ship built aircraft carriers and battleships.

Lure of the Highway 

Once the expanded highway network of the 1960s and 1970s increased access to undeveloped parcels of land outside the city, manufacturing spread more widely across the region. Rather than concentrating in towns, many manufacturers chose to build near highway off-ramps to speed transportation in and out of their plants, creating a highly dispersed pattern of industrial development.

To counteract the flight of industrial jobs, the city created its own industrial park in Northeast Philadelphia. In that sparsely populated section of the city, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation assembled large parcels of land during the 1960s and equipped them with water, sewer, and other industrial infrastructure. In effect, the city developed its own manufacturing “suburb” within the city limits.

In the space of only a few decades, however, new forces emerged to further challenge both city and suburbs. Obsolete technologies, coupled with competition from low-wage producers around the globe, forced many suburban manufacturers out of business. When diesel technology eclipsed Baldwin’s steam engines, the company suspended operations in 1956 and, after several mergers, closed in 1972. Alan Wood Steel Co. closed its Conshohocken plant in 1977, driven out of business by foreign steel. U.S. Steel managed to keep its Fairless Hills Plant in Falls Township, Bucks County, open, but only until 1991.

Manufacturing Persists

Despite a broad regional decline in manufacturing, the Philadelphia metropolitan area remained competitive in various forms of advanced manufacturing that make use of new materials and processes enabled by nanotechnology or other scientific innovations. Those include pharmaceuticals, medical devices and equipment, precision instruments, plastics, chemicals, aircraft, and other defense industries.

As factory after factory fell victim to overseas competition and outsourcing, the loss of that industrial base brought a host of fiscal and social problems to manufacturing suburbs, including distressed schools, brownfields, deteriorating housing stocks, and stagnating tax bases. Populations aged in some of these suburban towns because the housing stock turned over so slowly that homeowners could not find buyers for their houses. Even in towns that were able to attract new populations, including African American and immigrant families, often the newcomers’ incomes and property values could not provide an adequate tax base for services.

Yet manufacturing suburbs also offered significant opportunities for redevelopment. Towns built before the automobile resembled the city’s industrial neighborhoods, densely developed with worker housing built within walking distance of manufacturing plants. They remained walkable communities usually with a main street commercial district. Planners and developers recognized a preference among some homebuyers for higher density housing in communities with historic character that allowed residents to rely less on automobiles and more on walking, bicycling and passenger rail lines serving many older river towns. The market potential was especially high for manufacturing suburbs built along rivers because of the premium that real estate markets place on waterfront locations. In places like Conshohocken and Bristol, developers repurposed mills, lofts, and other industrial buildings to house offices and commercial businesses. The success of such projects led regional planners to recognize that old manufacturing towns could help concentrate future commercial and residential development and lessen sprawl.

Carolyn T. Adams is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Traditionally referred to as “grassroots” or “community” presses, these papers came in a variety of shapes and sizes but had much in common. Some, including Norristown’s Times-Herald (1799) and Doylestown’s Daily Intelligencer (1804), originated near the turn of the nineteenth century. Many others were born during the industrial era. The Chester Daily Times was established in 1876 and the Bristol Daily Courier in 1910 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. New Jersey’s Gloucester County Times began in 1897 as the Woodbury Daily Times. Most were independently owned and operated, published in the afternoon, and maintained circulations that paled in comparison to Philadelphia’s large-circulation dailies.

Despite their modest size, the community presses provided a vital service to their readers through extensive coverage of local happenings often ignored by Philadelphia papers. Editors and publishers operating in the surrounding counties filled their pages with coverage of local political and business developments, court proceedings, school board meetings, marriages, and community events such as parades, fundraisers, and holiday celebrations. Their papers also served as local filters for the larger regional, national, and international stories acquired from the news wire services. As a result, the local presses often served as the voices of their communities, editorializing on issues large and small and highlighting intrusions that had the potential to upset the economic, social, or cultural status quo.  Retaining high local readership levels was only part of the equation, however, as the community presses also relied heavily on advertising revenues from local businesses and classified ads to ensure profitability.

A Niche Without Competition

By carrying news and advertising not generally found in the Philadelphia Bulletin or Inquirer, community presses carved out a secure, if circumscribed, niche during the first half of the twentieth century. Although many of their readers also read one or more of the Philadelphia dailies, the papers’ provincial focus ensured that they would have little competition. They operated in the same metropolitan area as the Bulletin and Inquirer but did not really compete in the same marketplace.

The surge of residents into America’s nascent suburban areas following World War II altered this dynamic greatly. Between 1945 and 1962, newspapers operating in the suburbs of America’s ten largest metropolitan areas gained more than eight million more new readers than their urban counterparts. Established community weeklies and dailies immediately reaped the benefits of the new arrivals and often expanded their existing operations. In some areas, the construction of large suburban subdivisions and shopping centers fostered the emergence of wholly new newspapers. In other locales, urban papers followed the exodus out of the nation’s cities, built new plants in the suburbs, and either transformed themselves into suburban dailies or provided suburban versions of their urban products.

Nearly a dozen daily newspapers and a large coterie of weeklies operated in the seven Pennsylvania and New Jersey counties surrounding Philadelphia at the outset of the post-war era, while three large dailies served the city: the Evening Bulletin, Inquirer, and the tabloid Daily News. In Bucks County, the construction of the Levittown subdivision and subsequent arrival of more than sixty thousand new residents provided the foundation for the weekly Levittown Times, launched by publisher Ira L. Joachim (1925-2014) in 1952. In traditionally parochial fashion, Joachim promoted the paper as the only reliable source for news specific to Levittown and filled its pages with stories that helped residents navigate the ins and outs of suburban life. The publisher’s editorials often encouraged “Levittowners,” as they came to be known, to form civic organizations and engage in discussions about important issues, including property taxes, municipal government, and how best to maintain the community’s idyllic appearance. Joachim’s provincial approach proved popular, and the paper drew advertising from retailers with stores in Levittown’s large Shop-A-Rama shopping center.

In 1954, Joachim sold the Times to S.W. Calkins (1898-1973), the founder of Calkins Newspapers Inc., who converted the paper into an evening daily. Calkins also purchased the Doylestown Daily Intelligencer and Bristol Courier that same year. He later expanded into New Jersey by founding the Burlington County Times in 1958 to capitalize on the construction of the third Levittown subdivision. In 1966, Calkins created the Bucks County Courier Times by merging the Levittown and Bristol papers.

A Magnet for Advertising

Calkins’ newspaper network proved immediately successful, due in no small part to the increased advertising revenues the papers generated. Community papers typically tied advertising rates to their circulation levels and thus charged substantially less than large-circulation dailies like the Evening Bulletin or Inquirer, which offered broad but expensive coverage. Calkins’ dailies proved highly attractive to national retailers with new stores in the area. With seemingly ever-increasing readership among the upwardly-mobile suburban families prized by advertisers, papers like the Levittown Times and Bristol Courier offered targeted access to consumers at a much lower cost. Adding to the allure, advertising could be packaged across the newspapers. By the end of the 1950s, Calkins’ papers had established an entrenched position in Philadelphia’s fast-growing northern suburbs.

A similar push to capture readers and advertisers took place east of Philadelphia in Camden County, New Jersey, where the owners of the Courier-Post joined the rush of residents and retailers to the suburbs. In 1947, Harold A. Stretch (1891-1951) purchased and merged Camden’s Morning Post and Evening Courier daily newspapers, forming the Camden Courier-Post. Seven years later, the Stretch family moved the paper’s operations from its headquarters at Third and Federal Streets in Camden to a gleaming new plant in the suburbs near Route 38 in Delaware Township. Located amid a growing network of highways that eventually crisscrossed southern New Jersey, the new plant made afternoon home delivery to suburban readers much easier. The plant’s technologically advanced presses, which could print multi-colored advertisements and inserts, attracted advertisers and foreshadowed the advertising opportunities created in 1961 with the opening of the Cherry Hill Mall, the first climate-controlled, enclosed shopping center in the eastern United States.

The Stretches sold the Courier-Post to Gannett Company Inc., a growing newspaper chain, in 1959. The mall’s opening two years later and the continued residential development of Camden County’s suburbs proved a financial boon. In 1962, the Courier-Post gained over one and a half million additional lines of advertising over the previous year, and in 1965, it ran more lines of classified advertising than the Evening Bulletin. The paper’s circulation topped one hundred thousand for the first time during the 1960s as well. The Courier-Post proved so lucrative that Gannett later purchased an additional group of ten weekly newspapers based in Camden and Burlington Counties. When combined with the Courier-Post, the papers gave Gannett a dominant position in the South Jersey portion of the Philadelphia newspaper market.

While Calkins and Gannett were carving out positions in the northern and eastern parts of the metro area, publisher Ralph Ingersoll (1900-85) began acquiring newspapers west of Philadelphia in Delaware and Montgomery Counties and in New Jersey. Between 1961 and 1967, Ingersoll acquired the Trentonian (Trenton, New Jersey), the Delaware County Daily Times, the Pottstown Mercury, a small daily operating in Montgomery County, and Suburban Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., a chain of weekly papers that included the Main Line Times and the News of Delaware County, one of the largest-circulation weeklies in the country. Similar to the Courier Post in New Jersey, the Delaware County Daily Times had been the Chester Times until its move from the City of Chester to Upper Darby Township in 1959. Its relocation capitalized on the substantial residential and retail growth taking place in the suburbs.

A Ring Around Philadelphia

Led by the Calkins, Ingersoll, and Gannett chains, suburban newspapers emerged as a significant economic factor in the Philadelphia newspaper market during the 1960s, collectively creating a ring around Philadelphia and siphoning circulation and advertising revenues from the Evening Bulletin and Inquirer. The Evening Bulletin was long the dominant force in the metro area and the paper of record for most Philadelphians. Consistently ranking among the nation’s largest-circulation dailies for much of the twentieth century, the paper’s slogan, “In Philadelphia, Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin,” seemed apropos. Philadelphia’s status as the commercial heart of the region helped ensure the Bulletin brought in substantial advertising revenues from national and local retailers as well. The Inquirer, owned until 1969 by Walter Annenberg (1908-2002), ranked a not-too-distant second in the regional market. Less a paper of record than a mouthpiece for its outspoken publisher, the Inquirer benefited from its status as a morning paper, as it did not compete directly with the Bulletin for readers or advertising. The Inquirer’s large Sunday edition, whose circulation at times hovered near one million subscribers, helped close the Bulletin’s weekday circulation and advertising lead.

Executives at the Evening Bulletin were especially aware of the trend of competition from the suburbs and actively attempted to combat the suburban papers’ growth, but they were hamstrung in their efforts. In 1964, the Federal Communications Committee thwarted their attempts to build a network of affiliated suburban papers in the region via acquisitions and consolidations on the grounds that doing so would violate federal antitrust laws.

Without the staff and printing facilities that would have been gained from acquiring established suburban newspapers, Bulletin executives attempted to cover the suburbs from their headquarters in Philadelphia with strategic semi-weekly zoned editions. The zoned editions attempted to compete in the areas where the Calkins, Ingersoll, and Gannett papers were prospering, but they were broad, shallow, and ineffective. Approaching the metro area’s many autonomous boroughs, townships, and municipalities through a regional lens prevented the Bulletin from supplying suburban readers with the consistent, in-depth coverage of local government affairs, public school board meetings, and high school sports they received from their local dailies and weeklies. The zoned editions failed to match the quality and depth of the suburban papers, and they failed to lure more readers and advertisers.

The suburban presses continued to prosper during the 1970s and 1980s, and their collective dominance of the growing suburbs helped reshape the regional newspaper market. By 1973, more than 150 newspapers with a cumulative circulation in excess of a million and a half readers operated in the thirteen counties surrounding Philadelphia. Without a strong presence in the suburbs, Philadelphia’s urban dailies each saw their market share decline. The Evening Bulletin felt the sting of this competition acutely as an evening daily competing head-to-head with suburban papers also published in the afternoon. The Bulletin’s failed attempts to break into the suburban markets contributed significantly to an economic freefall from which it never recovered.  Meanwhile the purchase of the Inquirer by the national Knight-Ridder Newspapers chain in 1969 and the subsequent hiring of Eugene L. Roberts (b. 1932) as executive editor helped transform the daily into a nationally recognized, Pulitzer Prize-winning paper. In 1980, the Inquirer finally surpassed the Bulletin in daily circulation, becoming the Philadelphia area’s most widely read newspaper.

Suburban Papers Mature

The transitions that occurred in the Philadelphia newspaper market reflected larger national trends. During the 1960s, the number of suburban papers operating in the United States increased by more than one hundred percent. National trade organizations such as Suburban Newspapers of America formed during the early 1970s and helped establish suburban papers as a distinct branch of the national newspaper industry. The organizations facilitated greater communication among suburban editors and publishers. They also enhanced advertisers’ capacity to circumvent the more expensive big-city dailies and simultaneously place their advertising in strings of suburban papers in the nation’s largest and fastest-growing metropolitan areas. In this environment, urban dailies, particularly afternoon papers, were squeezed out of the suburban markets and often left with dramatically reduced revenues. A wave of mergers, consolidations, and closings ensued. By the 1980s, most cities could not support two competing newspapers.

Ironically, in the immediate aftermath of the Bulletin’s closing in 1982, Roberts led an expensive initiative to expand the Inquirer’s suburban reach. This strategy was predicated on the notion that supplying in-depth local news alongside award-winning national and international investigative reporting would attract more of the middle and upper-class suburban readers advertisers prized. The result, however, was remarkably similar to the Bulletin’s unsuccessful forays into the suburbs. The Inquirer established eight new suburban bureaus that were intended to match the suburban dailies’ coverage of local events and provide stories for the paper’s new zoned “Neighbors” sections. The new sections were initially printed up to three times a week and included as separate inserts within the larger paper. As with the Bulletin’s zoned editions, the Neighbors sections failed to draw enough new readers or advertising revenues to offset their costs. In the decades that followed, the sections were sometimes printed as broadsheets, with varying regularity, while the Inquirer’s circulation and advertising revenues tumbled. By turn of the twenty-first century, the paper attracted fewer readers than the suburban dailies operating in Philadelphia’s seven neighboring counties.

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Philadelphia’s suburban papers remained the predominant sources for local news. They were not immune to broader industry-wide pressures, however. Beginning in the 1990s, as newspaper readership declined across the industry, the trend toward consolidation and cost-cutting that had engulfed urban dailies spread to the suburban presses. Between 1994 and 1999 almost 40 percent of all small newspapers in the United States were bought or sold.

In the Philadelphia area, the Journal Register Company (JRC) owned by Robert Jelenic (1950-2008) quickly expanded by taking over ownership of several suburban dailies following the demise of Ingersoll Publications Inc. in 1990.  By 2001, the JRC’s “Greater Philadelphia Cluster” included seven dailies, 113 nondaily papers, and reached near four million readers. By 2008, the company owned twenty-two dailies and more than three hundred non-daily papers in six geographic areas across the country. Under Jelenic, the JRC centralized its newspapers’ operations in an effort to reduce costs and extract the ever-increasing profits required to maintain loan payments and drive stock prices up. These transitions included widespread pay cuts and staffing reductions that increased the difficulties associated with covering local news. Other new newspaper chains founded during the 1990s, including Liberty Group Publishing (New York) and Community Newspaper Holdings (Alabama), followed suit. As a result, the newspaper workforce in the United States declined by almost twenty thousand jobs, or 39 percent, between 1996 and 2016.

Additional industry-wide factors, including declining newspaper readership among virtually all age groups and declining advertising revenues following the 2008 economic collapse, created additional instability for suburban newspapers. Following Jelenic’s passing in 2008, the JRC went through two rounds of bankruptcy, in 2009 and 2012, prior to being purchased by 21st Century Media.  Despite the upheavals, suburban newspapers continued to occupy a central place within the Philadelphia regional newspaper market.  The papers continued to collectively far outstrip the Inquirer in circulation, and they remained entrenched as their community’s best source for local news.

James J. Wyatt is the Director of Programs and Research at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education at Shepherd University and President of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress. He is curator of the traveling exhibit “Robert C. Byrd: Senator, Statesman, West Virginian” and co-curator of the collaborative digital exhibit The Great Society Congress, an ACSC project. Wyatt earned a Ph.D. in History at Temple University. His doctoral dissertation, “Covering Suburbia: Newspapers, Suburbanization, and Social Change in the Postwar Philadelphia Region, 1945-1982,” focuses on the emergence of suburban newspapers in the Philadelphia metro area following World War II. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The main protagonist of the play is Tracy Lord, who was inspired by Philadelphia socialite Helen Hope Montgomery Scott (1904-95), whom Barry knew from his acquaintance during college at Harvard with her husband Edgar Scott (1899-1995), heir to the Pennsylvania Railroad fortune. At the Ardrossan estate in Villanova originally built for her parents, Hope Montgomery Scott hosted such notables as the Duke of Windsor and other Main Line millionaires.

Barry wrote The Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) in mind after observing her falling star in Hollywood in the summer of 1938. Before completing the play, Barry met with Hepburn, studied her mannerisms, and obtained her input. With a background similar to the Tracy Lord character—she was brought up in an affluent household in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from Bryn Mawr College on the Main Line—Hepburn was ideal for the play.

1939 Premiere

Produced by the Theatre Guild, the original Broadway show, which premiered at the Shubert Theater in March 1939 and continued until March 1940, had a 417-performance run. The show continued on the road for an additional two years. Besides Hepburn, the original play starred Joseph Cotten (1905-94) as C.K. Dexter Haven, Van Heflin (1908-71) as reporter Macauly (Mike) Connor, Frank Fenton (1903-71) as George Kitteredge, and Shirley Booth (1898-1992) as Elizabeth Imbrie.

Set during preparations for Tracy Lord’s upcoming wedding to George Kittredge, the play centers around Tracy, a rich young Philadelphia divorcee engaged to Kittredge, a self-made millionaire attempting to be accepted into high society, and her family. The Lord family is composed of Seth and Margaret, Tracy’s parents, who are separated because of Seth’s extramarital affairs; Sandy and Dinah, Tracy’s younger brother and sister; and Uncle Willie, who ends up pretending unsuccessfully to be Tracy’s father.

The action of the play occurs when Dinah invites C.K. Dexter Haven, Tracy’s ex-husband who is still in love with Tracy, to the nuptials, and Tracy’s estranged father arrives uninvited. An additional conflict arises as the Lord family discovers that Destiny magazine is in the process of running an article about patriarch Seth Lord’s adultery. The Lord family fears that their privacy will be breached and attempts to resolve the situation. Sandy Lord, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, solves the situation, not wholly to Tracy’s satisfaction, by inviting the Philadelphia-based magazine to cover the wedding instead. Two of the magazine’s staff, Mike Connor, a reporter, and Liz Imbrie, the photographer, arrive to report on the wedding.

Different Worlds

Eventually, Tracy becomes infatuated with Mike, who is also a writer, and he fancies himself in love with her. The two are from different worlds, but connect on a human level as he, unlike Kittredge, sees her as a human being and not as someone to worship or to help raise his position in society. Because of his interest in Tracy, Mike agrees to blackmail Destiny magazine editor Sidney Kidd with Sandy Lord, so that he leaves the Lords alone. Tracy’s infatuation leads to her skinny-dipping with Mike and being discovered in a compromising situation by both her finance, Kittredge, and her ex-husband, Dexter. Ultimately, because of the incident, Tracy and Kittredge break off their engagement and Tracy remarries Dexter.

Tracy is presented as a character full of prejudices. Both her father and ex-husband confront her about her intolerance of others’ weaknesses. Her estranged father blames Tracy for being unforgiving and too critical of people, revealing the roots of the strained father-daughter relationship. Tracy’s confrontation with Dexter reveals the reason behind their divorce. During their marriage, Dexter struggled with alcoholism, and he claims that Tracy did not support him, as she is unable to forgive people’s flaws. Only after Tracy sees her own human weakness through her drunken actions with Mike does she forgive failure in the man she still loves.

Class Tensions

The play also comments on the tension between different social classes, demonstrates cultural distinctions between the city (represented by the character of Mike) and the country (exemplified by the Lords), and provides a dose of negative commentary on social climbers. The Main Line as represented in The Philadelphia Story is synonymous with wealth and old aristocracy, which in turn is associated with fashion, old world manners and morals, debutante balls, cricket clubs, and above all, exclusivity. In the play, the disdain of the upper-crust of society toward the lower classes can be seen in Tracy and her family’s dislike of reporters, whom they view as insensitive and lacking manners. On the other hand, Mike’s initial attitude toward the Lords shows prejudice and dislike on the part of working-class intellectuals, who think of the rich as useless fools and parasites. Although Mike is presented as a good person, he and George are middle-class, working men and as such, they cannot marry Tracy. Tracy, who must marry within her own social class, chooses Dexter, an insider born into wealth. In this, Barry shows the powerful hold of the status quo. Barry also condemns social climbers, as seen in his portrayal of Kittredge and his use of Tracy’s social standing.

Although some critics called the play un-revivable, it has been reproduced a number of times. Two noteworthy theater productions included a successful revival on Broadway at Lincoln Center in 1980 with Blythe Danner (b. 1943), Edward Herrmann (1943-2014), and Frank Converse (b. 1938), and another at the Old Vic Theater in May 2005. The Old Vic production, directed by Jerry Zaks (b. 1946), starred British Tony-winning actress Jennifer Ehle (b. 1969) as Tracy Lord and co-starred Kevin Spacey (b. 1959) as C.K. Dexter Haven.

In addition to theater productions, The Philadelphia Story became a movie, also starring Hepburn. Hepburn owned the rights to the play, and as part of the agreement with MGM, she played the lead and she approved the director and co-stars. Released in 1940, the movie version of The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor (1899-1983), met with great success.  Joining Hepburn on the movie set were Cary Grant (1904-86) as C.K. Dexter Haven, James Stewart (1908-97) as Mike Connor, and John Howard (1913-95) as George Kittredge. Stewart won an Academy Award for his performance, and Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980) won the Oscar for his screenplay.

The popular movie led to a second movie adaptation, the 1956 musical High Society. With a setting shifted from Philadelphia to Newport, Rhode Island, High Society featured Grace Kelly (1939-82), an actual Philadelphia socialite, and, thus, a great fit for the role of Tracy Lord. This version of the film was adapted into a Broadway stage musical in 1998 but proved unsuccessful and quickly closed.

Whether in play or film format, the popularity of The Philadelphia Story helped Katharine Hepburn regain her stardom. Additionally, the play cemented Barry’s status as a playwright of note, as a few of his earlier plays were not well received. Ultimately The Philadelphia Story provided audiences with a glimpse into the exclusive and aristocratic world of Philadelphia’s Main Line society, a world that many would never otherwise experience.

Joanna Kolendo is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Services at Chicago State University, where she works as a Reference & Electronic Resources Librarian. She received her M.S. from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and an M.Phil. from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

More often than not, the rural districts that upgraded their public schools were in communities that began to suburbanize as early as the 1870s with the advent of commuter railroads and, later, electric trolley lines.  The residents of these communities wanted urban benefits and services — paved roads, sewer lines, and, above all, comprehensive systems of public education.  Audubon, Collingswood, and Haddonfield, in Camden County, New Jersey, and Abington, Cheltenham, and Lower Merion, in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, acted on such expectations.  So, too, did those who lived in the several small but thriving centers of commerce and industry outside the region’s big cities, in places like Norristown, Pottstown, and Conshohocken in Pennsylvania and Gloucester City in New Jersey.

Rural Districts Become Suburban

Between 1895 and 1920 many rural school districts in Montgomery County became suburban.  In 1897 there were 498 public schools and fifty-five public school districts in the county; forty-four of these operated only one-room schools.  By 1916 the number of districts operating just one-room schools had been reduced to ten; the total number of public schools had been reduced by more than 200; and the number of districts operating high schools had risen from a handful to twenty-one.  Not surprisingly, these included Norristown (with 474 students in high school), Pottstown (380), and Conshohocken (101), along with Abington (205 students), Cheltenham (273), and Lower Merion (336).  Jenkintown and Narberth did not have separate high school buildings in 1916; instead, they set aside rooms for high school classes in their elementary school. But the suburban die was cast, and by 1930 there were high schools in thirty-six of the county’s sixty-six public school districts.

The fifty years that followed the end of World War I might be called the era of suburbanization in Greater Philadelphia. Population grew substantially in the four Pennsylvania and three New Jersey suburban counties between 1920 and 1940, and the pace accelerated after World War II. In South Jersey, for example, population in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester counties grew more than twice as fast in the twenty years after 1940 (+77%) as it did in the twenty years before (+33%). Some of this demographic growth resulted from the Baby Boom that began in 1946. But some of it came about because many young families relocated, and they often settled far from the city, renting or buying housing in newly developed communities. In 1960, for example, more than one-third of Burlington County residents had been living in their present house for no more than two years.  Levitt and Sons persuaded many white-collar and even some blue-collar families to uproot by building planned communities for them in both Bucks (1951) and Burlington (1958) counties.

Most public school systems were unprepared for this demographic shift.  Those in Pennsylvania had some time to adjust because the effect was modest at first; between 1954 and 1958 public school enrollment in the four Pennsylvania counties surrounding Philadelphia grew by just eighteen percent. Over the next twelve years, however, it increased by more than two-thirds, climbing from 228,551 to 384,200 students. The comparable numbers for the three New Jersey counties across the Delaware River from Philadelphia are staggering. Public school enrollment in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester counties nearly tripled between 1950 and 1970, soaring from just over 78,000 to just under 211,000 students.  The lion’s share of this growth (60 percent) took place in Burlington and Gloucester counties where the population before 1945 had been small and scattered.

These numbers alarmed educators and reformers not only because none of the school districts in these suburban counties had enough teachers or classrooms but also because many districts still functioned as they always had.  In 1945 more than a few in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania relied on supervising principals rather than superintendents. Several did not operate their own high schools, paying for their students to go elsewhere. But by far the most vexing problem was the persistence of small school districts.  When Harvard University’s former president James Bryant Conant loudly complained in 1959 that far too many communities in the United States had public high schools that were too small to offer sufficiently rigorous academic programs, his words described the Greater Philadelphia suburbs. Most of their residents still believed that smaller was better in public education or at least not bad enough to justify the consolidation through reorganization of small school districts.  New Jersey codified this expectation by requiring local school boards to submit their annual budgets to the voters for approval by referenda.

Push for Modern Curriculum

Reorganization was not a new idea in 1950. As early as the turn of the twentieth century many school reformers advocated it. They wanted to eliminate the one-room, one-teacher school and form high schools that offered a modern curriculum including contemporary foreign languages, social studies, physical science, bookkeeping, and stenography. They wanted schools capable of housing a varied extra curriculum, including interscholastic athletics for boys and in most cases girls. Small rural districts could not provide these amenities; their tax base was too small, their unit costs too high. Between 1910 and 1940 reformers made considerable progress in achieving reorganization, especially in New England and the South Atlantic states.  But progress came more slowly to the Mid-Atlantic region where local loyalists resisted.

Delaware is a case in point. The crucial variable there was not the economic disparity between Wilmington, its biggest city, and the rest of the state but the political gap between Dover, its capital, and its rural school districts. The idea to reorganize came from the state’s first Commissioner of Education, Charles A. Wagner (1863-1924); his boss, Governor John G. Townsend (1871-1964), ran with it. At Townsend’s behest the legislature instructed the governor to appoint a school reform commission in 1917.  It devised a new school code that put considerable power in the hands of county school boards.  One of the most powerful men in the state, industrialist and philanthropist Pierre S. du Pont (1870-1954), endorsed this reform, but in the face of fierce opposition from local school districts the legislature reversed itself in 1921, dismantling the county school board system. Once again, public education would be overseen by local authorities working with the state Board of Education. But the unintended consequence of this reform was to increase the power of the state board and the state Commissioner of Education.

The state board hoped to modernize public education through reorganization.  At the time there were 395 incorporated school boards and unincorporated school committees in Delaware.  Many supervised just one school. The state’s first consolidated rural district (Caesar Rodney) had been formed south of Dover in 1916. By 1921 there were thirteen such districts, and the reformers hoped that consolidation would make it possible for more rural students to get a high school education.  Not including Wilmington, there were only 116 students in the state poised to graduate from a four-year public high school in 1918. Over the next twenty years the state commissioner convinced some rural districts to accept consolidation in exchange for help from Dover with teacher salaries and pupil transportation. In 1953 the state board drafted legislation to reduce the number of school districts from 105 to fifteen, but rural school consolidation did not really come to pass until the General Assembly adopted the Educational Advancement Act in 1968. It cut the number of school districts in the state from sixty to twenty-six.  Meanwhile, reorganization barely touched the lives of Delaware’s African American children before the 1970s because until then the state maintained a dual system of public education. Only Howard High School in Wilmington was available to black students while school segregation remained widespread.  In 1965 the state board of education ordered the closure of twenty-five “Negro” districts, but most of them were in rural communities.

In New Jersey reorganization reshaped the map of public education following World War II, but the state’s tradition of local control affected the way this occurred. Perhaps because New Jersey lacked a major metropolis, most people had no experience with anything other than “neighborhood” schools.  Not surprisingly, new school districts formed when population grew. Between 1900 and 1970 the number of school districts in the state rose from 395 to 576. Camden County’s total stood at thirty-six in 1950, and this number did not change over the next twenty years because the fastest suburban development in South Jersey was taking place elsewhere. Burlington and Gloucester counties added seven districts in the same period. In many of them home buyers found a four-year public high school, one of the features they wanted most in a suburb. In the three-county region the number of school districts with a high school almost doubled between 1950 and 1976 (from 21 to 41) with Burlington (7) and Gloucester (8) counties registering the largest increases. Twelve of these were regional high schools operated by regional high school districts. For many years families living in a rural district without a high school sent their children to one in a nearby suburban district. In Camden County, for example, they sent them to Merchantville, Haddon Heights, or Haddonfield. But now rural and suburban families could send their children to one of twelve high schools operated by a regional high school district (RHSD). The first two of these, Rancocas Valley RHSD in Burlington County and Lower Camden County RHSD were formed in the 1930s; the rest came to life after World War II. The reason for them, according to the New Jersey State Department of Education, was that they “bring together a sufficient number of pupils and financial resources to offer a broad and comprehensive educational program.” Collaboration, not consolidation, was New Jersey’s response to the people’s demand for public secondary education.

Pennsylvania Takes the Lead

Pennsylvania took a different approach, committing itself to school reorganization after World War II. Larger than New Jersey and Delaware combined, it had 2,544 school districts in 1945, nearly ten percent of which (240) were in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties. Thirty years later the number of school districts in Pennsylvania had been drastically reduced to fewer than 600. In Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties there were sixty-one (as before, about ten percent), but they were now educating more than twice as many students. The justification for reorganization was partly financial.  Even in Montgomery County the tax base in some suburban communities was not large enough to pay for an educational program with all the essentials, much less any extras. The state could have used its equalization subsidy program to compensate for the differences, but it chose to help less affluent communities by achieving economies of scale.

Lawmakers knew that Pennsylvania had too many small school districts as early as 1854 when they first made provision for collaboration among them.  At the beginning of the twentieth century the commonwealth adopted a new school code that authorized the use of state aid for student transportation in districts that collaborated or consolidated. But it was not until the late 1940s, when many Americans realized that public education had been neglected for far too long, that the Pennsylvania legislature mustered the political will to attack the problem. In 1947 it passed a law that gave the county boards of school directors, created in 1937, the “power and duty” to prepare long-range plans for eliminating districts with no or only a few students. It also set aside money to give school districts an incentive to collaborate, but a commission appointed by Governor George Leader (1918-2013) concluded in 1960 that such financial incentives were ineffective.   Leader’s successor, David L. Lawrence (1889-1966), repeated the call for reorganization because he considered the real estate tax base in many rural and even some suburban districts to be insufficient to support a modern educational program. Some of those districts (such as those in Jenkintown Borough and Bristol Township) were in the Philadelphia suburbs. The legislature responded in 1961, passing legislation (Act 561) to reduce the number of districts, but quickly repealed it after Republican William Scranton (1917-2013) defeated Democrat Richardson Dilworth (1898-1974) in the 1962 gubernatorial election. Once in office, Scranton endorsed a watered-down version of Act 561 (Act 299) that retained its predecessor’s minimum enrollment provision of 4,000 students but allowed for numerous exceptions based on topography, pupil population, community characteristics, transportation, and educational quality.

Perhaps the most outspoken opponents of school district reorganization came from the Philadelphia suburbs. Jenkintown’s Wilmot E. Fleming (1916-1978) believed that the best small districts should remain independent. Others argued that consolidation would lead to higher taxes or decline of community spirit and loss of local control. In 1966 State Senator Clarence Bell, a Republican from Delaware County, warned that reorganization would eventually lead to the formation of a metropolitan school district, an idea that Richardson Dilworth floated while he was the president of the Philadelphia School Board.  If such a district had been created, it would have brought a wave of African Americans from the city to the suburbs, a prospect certain to upset many of the whites living there. They did not see the minority children already in their midst, perhaps because they lived in neighborhoods and patronized schools that were mostly segregated. This discrimination led to civil rights protests in places like Mt. Holly, New Jersey, and Abington, Pennsylvania.  It even convinced the Lower Merion School District to close the Ardmore Avenue Elementary School in 1963 because it was segregated.  But it also led to a long and bitter fight against school reorganization – in Delaware County especially.

Just beyond West Philadelphia, southeastern Delaware County began to suburbanize at the beginning of the twentieth century. Public transportation allowed many of its white-collar and blue-collar residents to commute to jobs in Chester or Philadelphia. Some of the area’s public school districts took on suburban characteristics. In 1908, for example, the Darby Borough district replaced its supervising principal with a superintendent. It also opened a four-year high school, as did the Lansdowne Borough School District in 1914. The population of southeastern Delaware County, which rose rapidly at the beginning of the twentieth century, leveled off during the Great Depression but started growing again once prosperity returned. Folcroft’s mostly white population increased by twenty-six percent in the 1950s. Public school enrollment did not increase as fast, in part because many young families chose the leafier suburbs of Bucks and Montgomery counties instead.

Shifts in Racial Balance

Between 1900 and 1960 the African American proportion of the population in Delaware Country shrank from ten percent to seven percent.  But in places like Darby Township and Yeadon Borough there were already enough black families to deter prospective partners in any reorganization effort. In 1964 the county’s plan for reorganization faced opposition because it proposed to combine three school districts that were almost exclusively white – Collingdale (99.7 percent), Folcroft (100 percent), and Sharon Hill (98.5 percent) – with two that were significantly black, Darby Colwyn (22.1 percent) and Darby Township (68.2 percent).  Responding to an appeal from the white districts, the State Board of Education placed Darby Colwyn in another reorganized district. The Delaware County Board of School Directors approved the consolidation of the Folcroft, Sharon Hill, Collingdale, and Darby Township school districts in 1968, and subsequent appeals that eventually went all the way to U.S. District Court failed to prevent the formation of the Southeast Delco School District. But discrimination persisted because minority students living in the southern portion of Darby Township were bused past all-white schools in nearby Folcroft and Sharon Hill to schools in the northern part of Darby Township that already had many black students.

The elaborate appeals procedure set up by the state in 1968 (Act 150) slowed but did not prevent reorganization from being implemented.  In 1975 there were thirteen local and forty-eight regional school districts in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties; many of the latter emerged out of cooperative arrangements, known as “jointures,” which had been in place for years. For example, the eight districts in Montgomery County that had participated in the North Penn Jointure for grades seven through twelve stayed together as the North Penn School District. Its 11,402 students in 1973 made it one of the largest in Greater Philadelphia. But some small districts avoided reorganization, especially in Montgomery County, because they met the state’s requirements for independence.  Despite never enrolling more than 828 students, the Jenkintown School District was not forced to merge with either Abington or Cheltenham because its leadership convinced county and state officials that it had the economic resources and the educational standards to remain self-governing.

By the early 1980s segregation had become a regional problem in Greater Philadelphia because the public schools in Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Camden now had such a high proportion of black students. There were simply not enough whites enrolled in these urban school systems to achieve racial balance. Aware of this disparity, most educators and politicians ignored it. Change did occur in Delaware when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a District Court decision (Buchanan v. Evans, 1975) that led to the consolidation of all the public schools in New Castle County where Wilmington is located. Formed in 1981, the Brandywine, Colonial, Christina, and Red Clay Consolidated school districts brought the black children of the city together with white children living in its suburbs. But such sweeping changes may have helped convince at least some people that public education was failing not just in the region’s cities but everywhere. Whether urban or suburban, public schools increasingly found themselves being compared unfavorably with private schools, charter schools, and even home schooling.

The crisis of confidence in public education that began in the 1980s stemmed in part from the fact that suburban public schools were not able to escape the problems of their urban counterparts. Given a choice, suburban educators would immunize their schools against violence and substance abuse. All their students would excel on standardized tests and be admitted to college. None would be victimized by the ravages of poverty or the sting of racism. But this is not how public education works, even in the most affluent suburbs.

Public schools are open and free to all – by definition. Those in charge cannot ignore at-risk students, no matter what the problem. Children with special academic needs or debilitating personal problems are not geographically bounded, and their right to a “thorough and efficient” public education is legally protected. But some previously all-white suburbs had to contend with more equity issues than others at the end of the twentieth century because by then they had absorbed enough nonwhite residents to make race a significant issue in their public school systems. Consider, for example, the Cheltenham School District in Montgomery County, whose minority population had become big enough by the mid-1990s to attract attention.  In 1996 the Cheltenham School Board decided to achieve better racial balance by busing some elementary students. This decision was denounced – not by white, but rather by some black parents, who accused the board of racism because its busing program increased one school’s proportion of white students. The board members who made this decision did not anticipate such opposition, but they stuck by it because they believed it would make the Cheltenham public schools better for everyone.

Over the course of the twentieth century the relationship between suburban and urban public schools in Greater Philadelphia flipped. Suburban schools at first emulated their urban counterparts and hoped to be compared favorably with them. When urban public education fell on hard times, suburban schools ran away from such comparisons. But suburban and urban public schools could not run away from each other not only because they shared the same fundamental characteristics but also because they served a region that was itself becoming increasingly diverse and interdependent.

 William W. Cutler III is Professor of History, emeritus, at Temple University. He was a member of the Jenkintown Board of School Directors for eight years (1995 to 2003), the last two as president.  Catherine D’Ignazio holds a Ph.D. in Urban Education from Temple University. She is an adjunct professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden campus.

The region’s first railroad suburbs developed along the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown Railroad (the PGN), which introduced commuter trains running northwest from the city in 1832. Using steam locomotives, the PGN operated frequent passenger service along essentially the same routes later served by SEPTA’s Chestnut Hill East and Norristown regional rail lines. The commuter trains made Germantown, founded in 1683, a suburb connected with Philadelphia long before its consolidation into the city in 1854. By the late 1850s, in addition to its stock of colonial-era homes Germantown had a cluster of suburban villas in the neighborhood of West Walnut Lane and Greene and West Tulpehocken Streets. Farther northwest, a few commuters from Chestnut Hill connected to the PGN by stagecoach or carriage during the 1830s and 1840s, but after 1854 they could ride the new Chestnut Hill Railroad to Germantown. The construction of a new Episcopal Church, St. Paul’s (built 1856-61), signaled Chestnut Hill’s increasing status as a suburb for the elite.

As railroad commuting expanded during the later decades of the nineteenth century, it produced social and geographic segregation as upper and middle class families sought distance from the intensifying industrialization and high rates of immigration in Philadelphia and other American cities. The cost of rail fares initially put daily commuting by train out of reach for all but the wealthiest riders, while local streetcars and (later) buses remained the affordable options for others. Because rail fares varied by distance, inner suburbs like Germantown had more middle-class commuters than more distant, semirural idylls of the elite. Steam trains did not appeal to many middle-class commuters to Philadelphia because the locations of terminals on the periphery of the business district required an additional long walk or streetcar ride to get to work. Streetcars running into the central city from closer, newly developing areas of North and West Philadelphia offered more-direct access, as did the Delaware River ferries that connected with railroads serving South Jersey. This did not change until late in the nineteenth century, when the two major rail systems serving the city relocated their main facilities to Center City (the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station, built 1879-82, and the Reading Terminal, built 1891-93).

Similar Patterns Elsewhere

The development of railroad suburbs in the Philadelphia region resembled patterns of metropolitan expansion occurring around the same time along railroad lines radiating from other major cities, including New York, Boston, and Chicago. During the 1850s, other Philadelphia-area railroads joined the PGN in offering commuter train services. The Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad started publishing housing guides for its line through Delaware County, and the West Chester and Philadelphia touted its route for commuters between its namesake communities. In southern New Jersey, the Camden and Atlantic Railroad, which began service in 1854, led to residential growth in Haddonfield, and a group of Philadelphia merchants acquired land and developed Merchantville after the arrival of the Camden and Burlington Railroad in 1867-68. From these South Jersey suburbs, commuters traveled by rail to Camden and then crossed by ferry to the commercial center of Philadelphia east of Sixth Street.

By the 1870s and 1880s, a period of transition for the railroads, some lines had few commuter trains but on others the service became quite intensive. For example, in 1876, the Chestnut Hill Branch of the Philadelphia & Reading (successor to the PGN) offered thirty daily round trips between Center City and Germantown and encouraged daily commuting by offering special low-fare trains. During the 1870s, the Pennsylvania Railroad created havens for the elite along its Main Line, which extended west of Philadelphia through parts of Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester Counties, and spurred similar suburban development in Chestnut Hill. Developers of new suburbs also sought to appeal to the middle class, and the railroads offered incentives (such as free or discounted tickets) to encourage middle-class families to build houses along their lines. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s activity along its Main Line inspired the president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad to develop a similar but more affordable planned suburb for the middle class, Ridley Park, simultaneously with the opening of a new line in 1870 through southeast Delaware County between Philadelphia and Chester. In response to the availability of rail service, Sharon Hill and Norwood also developed along the line. A new line of the Pennsylvania Railroad running from Philadelphia to Norristown and Reading, beginning in 1884, enticed real estate developers to buy up farmland to create the middle-class suburb of Cynwyd (formerly known as Academyville). Along the Main Line, during the 1880s the co-owners of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, George W. Childs (1829-94) and banker A.J. Drexel (1826-1893), developed the planned suburban community of Wayne. In South Jersey, beginning in 1885 local landholders near the Camden and Atlantic Railroad line sold building lots to create the new suburb of Collingswood. Around the same time, local entrepreneurs began to convert farmland into the new suburb of Haddon Heights and persuaded the Reading Railroad, owner of the Philadelphia and Atlantic City Railway, to establish a station to serve the community.

In the new railroad suburbs, buyers found large single-family and semidetached homes with expansive porches and yards, a distinctly different environment from Philadelphia’s row houses. Making these railroad suburbs attractive to these residents required not only countryside ambiance but also more infrastructure of the type available in the city, such as water systems and paved streets. The Pennsylvania Railroad acknowledged this in a 1916 brochure when it touted “the charm of this suburban life, with its pure air, pure water and healthful surroundings, combined with the educational advantages provided, churches, stores and excellent transit facilities to and from the city, is manifest.” Despite developers’ appeals to the middle and upper classes, however, the railroad suburbs were never solely the domain of the region’s wealthiest residents. Most evolved around or within existing communities with their own people and histories, and even the most luxurious suburban estates required a network of support from local businesses and service workers who lived close to the railroad stations in row houses or other modest homes. Starting in the 1890s, electrified streetcar lines also brought more class diversity to some of the same suburbs that had originated along the rail lines, including Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia and Merchantville and Collingswood in New Jersey. Transit fares held steady while working-class incomes rose, making more distant places affordable to a wider range of residents.

The Main Line Corridor

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s role in developing Philadelphia’s western suburbs originated from its purchase of farmland during the 1860s and 1870s in order to straighten the route of its Main Line between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. With its expanded holdings within commuting distance of Philadelphia, the railroad developed a corridor of privilege from existing villages and the surrounding countryside. To increase the area’s appeal, the company gave Welsh and Scottish place names to towns that did not already have them: Athensville became Ardmore, for example, and Humphreysville became Bryn Mawr. To give prospective buyers an opportunity to become acquainted with the area, the railroad took its cue from the resort ambiance of Cape May, New Jersey, and built the Bryn Mawr Hotel (opened in 1872, rebuilt in 1890 and later home to the Baldwin School). Railroad executives led the way by building estate homes. Alexander Cassatt (1839-1906), later the Pennsylvania Railroad’s president, had a city residence on Rittenhouse Square, but in 1872 he began building Cheswold, a mansion set on fifty-four acres in Haverford. Leaders of Philadelphia business and industry followed, including department store partner Isaac Clothier (1837-1921), who built a castle called Ballytore in Wynnewood in 1885. Collectively, the communities and estates that developed around Pennsylvania Railroad stations from Overbrook west to Paoli became “the Main Line,” a name that became synonymous with upper-class living despite the continuing presence of other local residents as well as the businesses and domestic workers necessary to support a gracious lifestyle. Many of the massive estates later became home to religious orders, schools, or other institutions.

In Northwest Philadelphia, completion of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Chestnut Hill Branch in the early 1880s set off a new wave of suburban development west of Germantown Avenue. Henry Houston (1820-95), a member of the railroad’s board of directors with extensive land holdings in Northwest Philadelphia and adjacent Montgomery County, proposed the new rail line and then followed the pattern of the Main Line by beckoning elite residents to Chestnut Hill with amenities such as the Wissahickon Inn (1883, later the Chestnut Hill Academy), the Philadelphia Cricket Club (1883), and another Protestant Episcopal Church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields (1888). In his Wissahickon Heights development (later renamed St. Martin’s), he made homes available by lease. Houston’s son-in-law George Woodward (1863-1952) continued the family tradition and Chestnut Hill’s suburban evolution in the early twentieth century with picturesque developments such as French Village (1913), Linden Court (1915), and English Village (1925). Between Chestnut Hill and Germantown, in Mount Airy, the Drexel Company built the planned suburb of Pelham between 1895 and 1910.

In the golden age of railroad suburbs, from the 1880s through the 1910s, more than one thousand daily trains served hundreds of stations in and around Philadelphia. The combination of railroad and streetcar suburbs brought population growth to Philadelphia’s suburbs. The population of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, doubled between 1870 and 1920 while Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Camden County, New Jersey, quadrupled during the same period. Most early growth took place within about an eight-mile radius of the city, because of both travel time and the distance-based railroad fares. Bedroom communities within this range included Bala, Cynwyd, Darby, Jenkintown, Lansdowne, and Narberth in Pennsylvania; and Audubon, Bellmawr, Collingswood, Haddon Heights, Haddonfield, Magnolia, Runnemede, Westmount, and Westville in New Jersey.

Autos Begin to Erode Rail Demand

By the 1920s, automobiles and buses came into the suburban transportation mix and railroad suburbs, although still located on train lines, no longer depended on the rails to link them to the city and neighboring communities. In New Jersey, the 1926 opening of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) also hastened the shift from rail to automobile commuting. As passengers left the trains, the railroads eliminated or cut back service on many lines, although the Pennsylvania and Reading railroads invested in electric trains and often increased services between 1915 and 1933. After World War II, as automobile ownership and suburban bus service increased, and by the 1960s, the once-dominant railroads wanted to discontinue their money-losing commuter trains. In Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia and then the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) intervened in the 1950s and 1960s, and by 1983, SEPTA had taken over the remaining trains. For the New Jersey suburbs, the Port Authority Transit Corporation (PATCO) between Philadelphia and Lindenwold took the place of earlier rail systems in 1969. New Jersey Transit’s River Line began operating between Camden and Trenton in 2004. In the automobile age, some railroad suburbs retained their appeal as fashionable enclaves while others transitioned into neighborhoods of large houses divided into cheap apartments.

In the early-twenty-first century, although most people living in Philadelphia’s railroad suburbs did not use the trains to go to work, the old commuter lines still affected the social geography of the region because the road system largely followed those lines. With the exception of a handful of edge cities like King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, much of Philadelphia’s suburban development followed the old railroad lines. In 2017, SEPTA and PATCO trains still carried more than 156,000 daily riders, including not only suburban dwellers but also working-class and lower-middle-class reverse commuters traveling to jobs in the suburbs. Along the tracks, railroad stations and homes built by the enterprising developers of the nineteenth century survived as visible reminders of the origins of the railroad suburbs.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. John Hepp is Professor of History and co-chair of the Division of Global Cultures at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He teaches urban and cultural history with an emphasis on the middle classes in the period 1800 to 1940. (Author information current at time of publication.)