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Queen Village is the portion highlighted in red. This image is from the University of Pennsylvania NIS website.
Originally an independent area just below the South Philadelphia boundary, Queen Village is a Philadelphia neighborhood in the northeastern area of South Philadelphia. Queen Village is an area about one-half square mile in size. While there are not concrete neighborhood boundaries, Queen Village is generally considered to be the area bounded by Lombard Street in the north, Washington Avenue in the south, 6th Street in the west, and the Delaware River (or Columbus Blvd.) is the eastern-most boundary. In the 1600s, when Queen Village was first being formed, it had an extremely dense population. The houses typically held a dozen or more people, as most lived with their extended family or friends. Other people took lodgers who rented single rooms in a house. Those who chose to build homes were very economical in purchasing land. They bought small, less expensive, parcels of land and built simple homes in the trinity style. This style of small lots and homes evolved to create the residential architecture seen throughout Philadelphia today. The smaller home size was less important to the residents because people were unlikely to invite people into their homes. Instead, in the evenings, people would sit outside on their front stoops and socialize with one another. Queen Village has a longstanding reputation of being a neighborhood of immigrants. The first European settlers arrived from Sweden in 1642 and were followed by subsequent waves of immigrants from Western Europe. An interesting pattern, known as “cultural clustering”, emerged with the new settlers that arrived in Queen Village. This pattern consisted of residential blocks of homes that began to attract people based upon their country of origin. One block might be an entirely Swedish, whereas the next block could consist of a group from Romania, Germany, Poland, Austria, or Spain. By forming small replicas of their homelands the immigrants were able to preserve Old World traditions while feeling something akin to the comfort of home. By the early twentieth century, Queen Village had become home to a unique mixture of Germans, Irish, Poles, East European Jews, Armenians, Lithuanians, and African Americans. If the diversity, in itself wasn’t enough, there was also an additional dimension in the range of religions. By the early Twentieth Century, there were forty-four different religious congregations in the neighborhood of Queen Village (Levy, 1978). Considering the broad range of immigrants and religions, it may be surprising that the residents were able to live together in close proximity with relative harmony. One of the main reasons for the peaceful neighborhood was a shared bond as laborers in the shipbuilding industry. For many generations, shipbuilding was a way of life that sustained the residents of Queen Village. Until the shipbuilding industry modernized, builders were the dominant force among the residents of Queen Village. Fortunately, as the shipping business began to decline, it was nearly simultaneously met with a greater need for industrial workers in factories. Between shipbuilding and industrial labor, Queen Village was firmly established as a working class neighborhood. Queen Village, as truly one of the first Philadelphia neighborhoods, contains many historic gems. It holds the Sparks Shot Tower on Carpenter Street, which originally produced rifles for game hunting. 4th Street, also known as “Fabric Row”, is the oldest operating fabric district in the nation. Old Swedes, or Gloria Dei Church, on Christian Street was the first church to exist in Pennsylvania. It was built in 1700, after years of the congregation meeting in a log cabin. Modern day marvels include the shops and restaurants on South Street, the Mummers museum on 2nd Street, and the ever-growing attractions of the Delaware riverfront.
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