The Soy Café
The Local business owner at 630 North 2nd Street Philadelphia provided some context for how she perceived Northern Liberties. When she was asked about why she decided to move her business into the neighborhood, she expressed her interest in the area because it was the next “hot spot.” The owner was also a resident in the neighborhood and the liked the local feel of the neighborhood. The owner also stated that her interest with the the neighborhood was partly because there were other small businesses owners on 2nd street. When asked about her views about gentrification (such as the new proposal for Casinos & The Piazza), she did not express animosity toward Bart Blatstein’s Piazza projects because it has helped spur new business for the café. In contrast, the owner was more concerned with the new casinos bordering on the fringe of the neighborhood. She was concerned with the types of traffic and clientele spilling over into the neighborhood. For a small business owner of a place like The Soy Café, a hip changing neighborhood with charm provided the right location for her new store.
Framing Philadelphia
Local Business owner Timothy Martin moved into Northern Liberties in the 1970s because rents were cheap and space was available. Mr. Martin also moved into the neighborhood because the neighborhood was extremely affordable to own home and operate a business. Mr. Martin opened his second custom framing store on 631 North 2nd Street about five years ago, and he described the dramatic changes since the 1970s to us. Mr. Martin was originally from the Philadelphia suburbs, and he described Northern Liberties as an old industrial center that has changed over the years. In particular, he noted that when he moved into the neighborhood in the 1970s, there were very few residents and the neighborhood was in decline, especially with decaying industrial spaces. By the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Mr. Martin stated, “One could start to see the little transformations in the area” which started to catch the eye of real estate developers and speculators. Since Northern Liberties was one of the few areas with vast amounts of open space, which made the area conducive for new development.
When we asked Mr. Martin felt about the new development and gentrification process occurring in the neighborhood, he answered in two ways. On one hand, he noted that the neighborhood had been positively affected spurring new development and helping his local businesses, which has cleaned up the area from vacant lots, squatters, and eyesores. On the other hand, gentrification had changed the local dynamic of the neighborhood. More specifically, the speed at which the neighborhood has changed in the last five years can be nerve racking because the old neighborhood feel has now become an entertainment and residential venue for hipsters and artists. Mr. Martin made it clear that the neighborhood had improved, but he would have done things differently given the fact that the neighborhood had so much available open space.
Architectural Antiques Exchange
Local business owner Mark Charry has owned his shop at 709-15 N. 2nd Street since the 1970s and he is a lifelong resident of Philadelphia. Mr. Charry was gracious enough to discuss in depth about his personal experience regarding the transformation of Northern Liberties from an old industrial wholesale district to a gentrified residential and entertainment area.
Economically, Mr. Charry provided an excellent description of the industrial activity that was distinct to Northern Liberties. He stated that, “Part of the reason he moved his business to this wholesale district was the affordable rents for warehouse space and the low cost of living.” Mr. Charry described the area as a “whole district” which entailed a variety of different wholesale companies such as sporting goods, pet foods, hardware, meatpacking, and box companies. In addition, there was luncheonette and one variety store at the time.
Culturally, Mr. Charry describes the neighborhood as Eastern European. While most of the ethnic groups were not still in the neighborhood by the time he moved into the neighborhood, one could detect the presence of Romanians, Russians, Albanians, and Ukrainians through the churches that are still in use today. There was also an early Jewish population, but Mr. Charry noted that they moved out in the 1960s. By the 1970s, he noted that there was a larger presence of African Americans and Hispanics.
Mr. Charry described the revitalization of Northern Liberties in a positive fashion. The revitalization efforts that started to occur in the late 1980s and early 1990s helped transform the neighborhood from a decaying industrial zone to a more livable residential area. Part of the revitalization effort was jumped started by the local community development corporation (CDC). Mr. Charry was a part of this effort and expressed his vision for a historic rehab of the neighborhood. Ultimately, the neighborhood developed into a residential and entertainment district. The change in business has also been relatively positive and urban renewal for the area had helped the dying neighborhood. This neighborhood’s up swing was spear headed by a restaurant revival in junction with public private partnerships helping to revive old commercial properties into new vibrant live-work spaces catering to the influx of artists.
Mr. Charry elaborated that the 1990s was an era when Northern Liberties had to redefine the neighborhood identity. As the affluence and new money started to enter the neighborhood, so did the crime. Ironically, Mr. Charry discussed some facts about the neighborhood. He described that as, “As the neighborhood gentrified, crime actually got worse because there were so few residents in the area before the new development.” Mr. Charry was excited to be a part of the revitalization committee (as an older local resident) to help be a part of the transformation. Although he had envisioned the neighborhood as a “revived historical area,” he was still pleased with the result. In our concluding words with Mr. Charry he said, “Northern Liberties is not quite at the caliber of the Main streets of Manayunk or Chestnut Hill, but it’s much better than it was in the 1970s and 1980’s and the neighborhood is much less of an eyesore.”
Other Voices
Jennifer Baker: Excerpt from Philaplace.org.
I moved to Northern Liberties when I got out of art school in 1978. I rented the top floor of a four story factory building at 3rd and Green Streets with one of my fellow sculpture students. We had 2,000 square feet, huge skylights, and at first, no heat. The rest of our building was completely empty–the owners, who had a porno print shop on the first floor, had closed their business and gone into real estate investment. The rest of our block was empty too and we used to tell our friends that we lived at “3rd and Nowhere.”
However, the rest of Northern Liberties wasn’t empty at all; it was full of row houses occupied by mostly older immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and Romania. There were many small manufacturing businesses like Ortleib’s Brewery, which sent the smell of fermenting hops through our windows; there was Schmidt’s bottling plant; there was Cannuli Brothers’ House of Pork meat-packing plant next door to my studio, which had a much more unpleasant smell than the brewery. There was Harry Shur’s hardware store where you could ask Harry for just about anything and he would rummage through the attics of his block of padlocked row houses and eventually he would reappear with what you wanted, usually ancient and rusty, but more or less serviceable. There was Kaplan’s Bakery, still there today at 3rd and Poplar. And there was the giant Burk Brothers Tannery which, over the great objections of the neighborhood, was demolished by the city, eventually making room for Liberty Lands Park. There were also many Eastern Orthodox churches and the black-robed and bearded priests were a frequent sight in the neighborhood.
But this neighborhood was gradually on its way down. Over the next few years, most of the businesses closed, and the older residents moved away to be near their children who had left the neighborhood because there was no longer anyplace to work. There was nothing to keep anyone there other than the churches, and to this day many former residents still return to attend these churches, at least on special occasions.
As the neighborhood emptied out, more and more artists started moving in, buying or renting the inexpensive row homes and industrial buildings. For several years there were conflicts between the old time residents, the artists, and the real estate speculators, resulting in anger, tire slashings and possibly murder.
In 1988 my husband and I bought a house on American Street. There was a mini real estate boom going on and many people thought that Northern Liberties was going to be the next Society Hill. However, about a year after our daughter was born in 1990, our neighborhood began burning down around us. More and more of the houses and factory buildings were empty, and the owners did not want to make the investment to rehab the buildings, they just wanted to sell the land and cash out. It is expensive to demolish a building, but when buildings were “accidentally” left open, the job was done for free. Scavengers would go into an empty building to cut out the copper pipes and start a fire with their torches, or someone, at that time often crack addicts, would build a little fire to keep warm and the fire would get bigger, and pretty soon the building was gone, insurance collected, and the land available for sale.
Blanche’s house, at the corner of American and Laurel, to me illustrated the process of change in Northern Liberties. When we first lived on American Street, Blanche, an elderly and homebound woman, lived on the corner, and I walked past her house every day on my way home from my studio. She would often stop me as she sat inside her house by an open window, and ask me to go buy her a quart of milk or something. After a few years, Blanche died, and was replaced by a man claiming to be her nephew who seemed to be running a crack house with many visitors coming to call. At some point the house was raided by the police, and I remember one day walking by and finding the front door open, the occupants gone, dirty mattresses strewn about and half eaten plates of food left out for the rats. Eventually the house was boarded up and left to decay.
Now this same house is a nicely renovated row home across the street from the park, where there are often neighborhood events: music, movies, and picnics. There is a playground at the north end of the park, just where the burned and twisted shell of the Morris Schiff furniture warehouse collapsed and was left where it fell for most of the years that we lived on American Street.
There are complicated economic and social factors at work here that have affected and determined the process of change, but I am looking at this process from a completely personal point of view, as these changes have affected my life and that of my family.
Up until about 1990 I was making large sculptures and installations, until my neighborhood intruded into my life in such a way that I decided to document what was going on around me in a direct way. I am now examining Northern Liberties’ newest incarnation as a mecca for hip young people, much in the news recently with the murders at the Piazza. Sushi bars have sprouted up in former building shells and shoe warehouses, while many artists have been forced to move north due to rising real estate prices – even as developers go bankrupt in the midst of the financial crisis. My paintings and monoprints present my personal experience of this process.
-March 2010
Jennifer Baker is a painter and sculptor who has worked in Northern Liberties since 1978. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts). She has shown her work at Art 101 and Pleiades Galleries in New York and Nexus Gallery, F.A.N. Gallery, The Painted Bride Art Center and many others in Philadelphia. She was selected for a Challenge Exhibit at Fleisher Art Memorial in 1997 and was a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship in 1993 and a finalist for a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1997. Ms. Baker presented her “Northern Liberties Project,” at the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art at the Painted Bride Art Center in 2009.
