The Crosstown Expressway
In 1947, Robert B. Mitchell, the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, recommended the city build a Center City highway loop to ease traffic and boost business. In 1953, Mitchell founded the Urban Traffic and Transportation Board (UTTB), and, as its executive director, he proposed that the Crosstown Expressway be located between Lombard Street and South Street. By 1957, the Pennsylvania Department of Highways (now the Department of Transportation and the Federal Bureau of Public Roads (BPR)) (now the Federal Highway) approved the route as part of the Interstate highway system.
When the expressway was first proposed, South Street was a thriving local business center. East of Broad Street, South Street’s merchants served a mixed ethnic clientele. West of Broad Street, South Street’s stores and jazz bars served the area’s black residents. In 1964, the consulting firm of Modjeski and Masters prepared a preliminary report for the Crosstown Expressway. One justification they gave was that “the Crosstown Expressway will serve as an effective buffer zone separating the proposed redevelopment areas to the north and the incompatible land usages to the south.” In effect, separating “land usages” would also mean separating racial groups.
In 1967, when the Pennsylvania Department of Highways actually put the Crosstown Expressway on its six-year construction program, public opposition exploded. The Delaware Valley Housing, a non-profit group headed by W. Wilson Goode (who later served as mayor from 1984 to 1991), spoke out against the Crosstown Expressway.
Emily Achtenberg, a spokesperson for the association, responded saying:
“While we believe that the expressway has serious shortcomings from a transportation standpoint and would create a racial barrier between Center City and areas to the south, our overriding concern is with the city’s inability to re-house adequately the thousands of low-income families whom the Crosstown would displace.”
A new organization, the Citizens’ Committee to Preserve and Develop the Crosstown Community (CCPDCC), unified the mostly white residents in the townhouses of Society Hill and Rittenhouse Square just north of the proposed expressway, and the mostly black residents along the route of the expressway. The CCPDCC charged:
1) racial discrimination in the selection of the route
2) failure to prove a need for a road that would bring more cars to the traffic-glutted Center City, and
3) failure to provide an adequate plan to relocate several thousand people who would be uprooted.
George T. Dukes, the founder of the CCPDCC, challenged state highway officials to come up with a better plan that would at least create a covered highway so that the land could still be used for things like parks and housing.
In response, state highway officials claimed that constructing a covered expressway was too expensive—even though they had agreed to construct a very well decorated cover over the expressway in Society Hill. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Department of Highways purchased rights-of-way along South Street in preparation for the expressway. Over time, the threat of a freeway destroyed property values and contributed to a serious decay of the area.
Jim Campbell, an architect and longtime resident who lives and works in the South Street West community, said the following:
“It seems like everything [on South St] froze with plans for the expressway. People were afraid to buy property or invest …This whole area south of the core of Center City was viewed as disposable, or recyclable…”
The divisive Crosstown Expressway issue was a hot topic in the 1967 mayoral race. According to long time resident, Amos Florence, “[t]he neighborhood and business associations banded and successfully warded off the proposed Crosstown Expressway. They met with legislators, wrote letters, rallied and picketed.”
Influenced by the strong opposition, as well as by a letter from Robert B. Mitchell (who had first suggested the plan) urging officials to abandon the project “in light of changed conditions,” Mayor James Tate dropped his support of the expressway. When three of his cabinet members tried to insist on pressing ahead with the expressway, Tate said, “Let the people have a victory.”
Graduate Hospital
Even as one threat was overcome, another one reared up. The decay that had occurred during the threat of the expressway had left the neighborhood vulnerable, with many vacant buildings and a weakened community. Graduate Hospital saw an opportunity to expand into the neighborhood. Local resident, Jim Campbell described it, saying:
“Graduate had started to buy some properties on the 1700 block of South. Those properties were part of the commercial fabric of that block and we in the neighborhood didn’t want Graduate Hospital to do blockbusting. Blockbusting is when an institution goes in and buys a couple of properties on a block, then lets those deteriorate, then people start selling out. The institutions buy more and more. Properties become cheaper and cheaper, and the institution gets a larger and larger development parcel, which they need.”
This is not to say that the community was opposed to the institution of Graduate Hospital itself. On the contrary, the hospital provided necessary services. However, as Campbell explains, Graduate Hospital was “poor in negotiating with the community” in terms of planning and zoning and “wouldn’t make an agreement with the neighborhood to confine its development to the area the neighborhood specified. As a result, the neighborhood wouldn’t make an agreement with Graduate Hospital to allow for the institutional zoning on the south side of the 1800 block of South Street. It was a lose-lose situation and not the way that any of us had hoped it would have gone.”
To fight back, the South Street West Business Association, the Center City Residents Association, and the Southwest Center City Association (predecessor to SOSNA, the South of South Neighborhood Association) banded together to advocate for the community input and control in the planning and zoning of the neighborhood. This organized civic effort was the primary reason for success in curtailing Graduate’s unchecked acquisition of property, demonstrating the need for both community awareness and organizing to prevent displacement and other negative impacts on the neighborhood. Some gentrification had already occurred by private developers on the smaller streets of Rodman and Naudain, but the community worked hard to maintain control of its central corridor on South Street.
