Gentrification - Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (original) (raw)

Essay

Even as Philadelphia experienced deindustrialization and decline in the 1970s, a handful of neighborhoods began to experience a phenomenon known as gentrification—a process where affluent individuals settled in lower-income areas. As middle-class residents returned, formerly moribund commercial corridors came alive with restaurants and shops catering to the well-heeled. Soon, real estate prices began to creep upwards. By spurring renovation and elevating housing values, gentrification broadened the city’s tax base. Yet such changes also came with a cost: the social disruption and displacement of existing residents.

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

A black and white aerial image of the Society Hill area of Philadelphia. The image shows three large residential towers in the center, with row houses to the around the edges of the image, with a part of the Delaware river towards the top of the image.

Society Hill Towers—the 30-story trio near center—brought hundreds of new residents into the city of Philadelphia while displacing the people who lived and worked in the buildings that were demolished to provide space for the new construction. (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries)

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

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

Remaking Society Hill

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

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

A black and white photograph of a building with a large tower at the front of the rectangular building. There is an overhang covering the sidewalk along the building, and the sidewalk is filled with people and products.

Dock Street Market was a principal food distributor for many local restaurants and businesses. Customers had to find other local merchants when the Dock Street Market was demolished in 1959. (PhillyHistory.org)

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

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

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

Homesteaders in the City

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

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

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

A black and white photograph of a brick building with architectural designs that are not found in the adjacent row houses There is construction equipment outside like ladders and scaffolding in front of the modern building.

While many new residents in gentrified areas refurbished historical row houses, some sought to build modern structures —like this one at Second and Lombard Streets—that expressed new architectural styles. (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries)

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

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

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

Queen Village’s heyday of diversity and cooperation proved to be short-lived, however. Like many Philadelphia neighborhoods that experienced a middle-class influx, rising rents and tax assessments made life increasingly difficult for poorer residents. One 1978 study estimated that real estate taxes in Queen Village had increased almost 300 percent since the start of the decade. Real estate prices skyrocketed, too; an abandoned row house that might have sold for 300inthe1960snowcommandedupto300 in the 1960s now commanded up to 300inthe1960snowcommandedupto30,000. As in Society Hill, Queen Village’s African Americans were the most dramatically affected by gentrification. In 1970, the neighborhood was nearly 50 percent Black. By 1990, that figure had fallen to 20 percent. By 2010, only about 5 percent of Queen Village residents were African American.

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

Revitalization or Decline?

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

A black and white image of three children picking through a pile of trash in the middle of a playground. the side of an apartment building and playground equipment is in the background of the image.

While the nearby blocks of Queen Village saw large investments from city organizations to restore houses and raise property values, the Southwark Plaza apartment buildings for working-class residents lacked funds for trash collection and basic maintenance. Here, children scavenge a playground trash pile.(Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gentrification Takes Off: 1990s and 2000s

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

Yet by the turn of the twenty-first century, things were changing rapidly in DuBois’ Seventh Ward. In particular, the western stretch of this area—rebranded as “Graduate Hospital”—saw a dramatic influx of young, white, well-off residents, drawn by its proximity to tony Rittenhouse Square and easy accessibility to the University of Pennsylvania. Others were lured by the city’s development incentives, which in the late 1990s included a ten-year tax abatement for new construction and large-scale rehabilitations. Real estate prices soon reflected this surge in demand. From 1997 to 2007, the median price of a single-family home rose from 86,000to86,000 to 86,000to275,000. As in Society Hill and Queen Village, the gentrification of Graduate Hospital triggered striking demographic changes. At 78.5 percent African American in 1990, the neighborhood was less than one-third Black by 2014.

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

A color photograph of street vendors and artists in tents along the sidewalks of a street. A large crowd of people are walking in the middle of the street. In the background is a stone bridge.

Manayunk’s Arts Festival developed as more artists and young professionals moved into the Manayunk area in the 1980s. The event draws thousands of people year to the previously industrial-focused section of Philadelphia. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.)

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

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

Ongoing Concerns

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright 2014, Rutgers University

Dock Street Market

PhillyHistory.org

The area of the Dock Street Market in Society Hill was a place of commerce for more than two centuries before it was demolished in 1959 to allow construction of the residential Society Hill Towers. Business owners constructed warehouses along Dock Creek in the late 1600s so ships could unload food, materials, and other products efficiently. The city filled in Dock Creek in 1784 and paved the new land with stones, creating Dock Street. The blocks surrounding Dock Street continued to be popular in the nineteenth century, as hundreds of merchants established distribution warehouses and sidewalk storefronts to sell a variety of food to other Philadelphia businesses and individuals. This image from 1914 shows the Fish Market building, an enclosed warehouse that sold fresh fish from dozens of merchants. The Dock Street market diminished in size after World War II as competition from other markets and changes in distribution forced some merchants to move elsewhere. After the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation purchased the property around Dock Street in 1959, many of the remaining merchants moved to the Food Distribution Center in South Philadelphia.

Edmund Bacon

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

Pictured here years before his appointment as Executive Director of the Philadelphia Housing Association, Edmund Bacon is sometimes referred to as “The Father of Modern Philadelphia.” Born in the Philadelphia suburbs in 1910, he studied architecture at Cornell University and introduced a plan for a new civic center for Philadelphia as part of his senior thesis. He was awarded a scholarship and continued his study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, later finding work in Flint, Michigan, before returning to Philadelphia and becoming director of the housing association.

After serving in the United States Navy during WWII, Bacon joined the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and became the executive director of the committee in 1949. Earning a national reputation during the mid-century era of urban renewal, he was featured in Time and Life magazines and was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to the White House's Conference on Recreation and Natural Beauty.

As the Bicentennial approached, Bacon proposed that Philadelphia host a world’s fair to coincide with the 1976 celebration. He envisioned a redevelopment of the city’s waterfronts, a midway closed to automobiles on Chestnut Street, and a tram that would take visitors over the Schuylkill River into Fairmount Park, site of the successful 1876 Centennial. However, due to political and financial disagreements, Bacon’s vision was never realized. The world’s fair idea was scrapped and on the national level, individual celebrations across the country were encouraged. Philadelphia did not become the international stage as Bacon had hoped.

Society Hill Towers

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

As part of the renewal project for Society Hill that began in 1957, three 30-story residential buildings, the Society Hill Towers, were the tallest of the construction projects and provided 720 apartments designed to attract middle-class residents. Architect I.M. Pei designed the towers to incorporate floor-to-ceiling windows along the exterior wall of each apartment, giving occupants expansive views of Philadelphia or the Delaware River. The apartments had modern amenities and views unavailable to people who purchased a historic row house in Society Hill. As part of the construction process, thirty-one acres of houses and commercial buildings were razed to provide enough space for the redevelopment project, forcing hundreds of individuals and merchants to relocate. Society Hill Towers claimed five acres of that area; the rest of the space, seen in this 1965 aerial image, was filled with other commercial buildings and landscaped parks by 1977.

New Society Hill Construction

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

Restrictions created by the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation prevented new homeowners in Society Hill from drastically altering their historic homes, but regulations for new construction were more lenient. New buildings could reflect modern architectural styles and the owner's tastes, as long as the designs were approved by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. This house on the corner of Second and Lombard Streets used building materials typically used in adjacent row houses, such as brick and concrete, but applied a modernist design to give the building its distinctive look. This image from 1973 shows the house while the interior was still under construction. This building became a commercial property in the 1980s and later a pharmacy for Society Hill residents.

The NewMarket

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

As part of the redevelopment of Society Hill in the 1970s, the NewMarket was an attempt by real estate developers to create a modern shopping center within walking distance of local residents. Opened in 1973, NewMarket was constructed in the middle of the block bounded by Front, Lombard, Pine, and Second Streets, which left some row houses around the block standing, like the one in the background of this 1978 image of the shopping center. NewMarket had entrances on Front and Second Streets, leading to a large courtyard, a central fountain, and the entrances to many of the shops. Neighborhood shoppers were not drawn to the modern building design and its variety of restaurants and specialty shops. Low sales forced dozens of businesses to leave the building over the years and the NewMarket formally closed in 1987. The building was used sparingly in the 1990s as new owners attempted to find a market, but the building remained largely unoccupied and the whole complex was demolished in 2002. The land finally came under redevelopment after the Toll Brothers purchased the land in 2013 to construct condominiums.

Children Outside of Southwark Plaza

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

To assist working-class residents near Southwark who could not afford the increased costs of living in the newly gentrified neighborhood, the Philadelphia Housing Authority in the late 1960s built three apartment buildings, named the Southwark Plaza, along Washington Avenue between Third and Fifth Streets. The apartments were inexpensive for residents but they only provided basic housing and residents complained that the Housing Authority was not responsive to maintenance issues. As the nearby blocks of Queen Village saw large investments from city organizations to restore houses and raise property values, Southwark Plaza apartment buildings had broken elevators, limited electricity, and a trash-filled landscape. Some residents burned trash inside their apartments for heat, or left it inside broken elevator shafts or outside the apartment buildings. In this image from 1977, three children are looking through trash at one of Southwark Plaza's dilapidated playgrounds.

Manayunk Main Street

After decades of slow economic decline from the loss of industrial mills and manufacturing plants, Philadelphia officials offered tax incentives to small businesses and property owners in Manayunk during the 1980s to spur redevelopment and bring more middle-class residents into the area. Business owners opened smaller boutiques, restaurants, and bars that catered to youthful adults who preferred to live within walking distance of dining and other diversions. Refurbished Victorian houses, lofts created from abandoned manufacturing buildings, and newly constructed townhouses provided a variety of living possibilities that reflected Manayunk's history as an industrial outpost of Philadelphia. As more artists and young professional moved into the neighborhood, the Manayunk Development Corporation created a mixture of public programming to cater to the new audience. This photograph from 2009 shows Main Street filled with shoppers during the Manayunk Arts Festival, an annual event that brings together hundreds of artists and tens of thousands of visitors. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.)

The Chocolate Works

PhillyHistory.org

Many of the industrial complexes that dotted Philadelphia emptied in the later twentieth century, leaving hulks of buildings towering over the residences that once housed their workers. Empty buildings and older housing with little government or private investor support led to declining populations and social institutions throughout industrial neighborhoods. Revitalization efforts across the city included redeveloping older factories for new purposes. Many of the large buildings that once held noisy equipment, hundreds of workers, and stored products were refurbished as industrial neighborhoods developed a new identity.

In the Old City section of Center City Philadelphia, H.O. Wilbur & Sons, a chocolate company established in 1884, was once a setting for the mixing and molding of chocolate candies. The candy making there gave way to residential development. Constructed at Third and New Streets in 1902, in the 1920s Wilbur & Sons had to remove a section of the building to make room for construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). By 1933, Wilbur & Sons chocolate business had outgrown the facility and the building changed ownership and remained underutilized until an investment company purchased the property in 1986. Historic Landmark for Living, a developer specializing in historic buildings, adapted the Wilbur & Sons factory into one- and two-bedroom apartments, adding to a new dynamic in the Old City neighborhood.

Themes

Time Periods

Locations

Essays

Adams, Carolyn et al. Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Anderson, Elijah. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Gillette, Howard. Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Heller, Gregory L. Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Hunter, Marcus Anthony. Black Citymakers: How The Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Simon, Roger D. and Brian Alnutt, “Philadelphia, 1982-2007: Toward the Postindustrial City.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 131 (Oct. 2007), 395-444.

Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge, 1996.

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