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Northwest Philadelphia

By MandiMH on March 30, 2013, 11:02pm in Activism, American Revolution, Business, Industry, and Labor, City of Neighborhoods, Colonial Philadelphia, Essays, Geography, Government and Politics, Green Country Town, Historic Places and Symbols, Immigration and Migration, Nineteenth Century after 1854, Nineteenth Century to 1854, Religion and Faith Communities, Themes, Time Periods, Topics, Transportation, Twentieth Century after 1945, Twentieth Century to 1945, Twenty-First Century, Workshop of the World
[caption id="attachment_4986" align="alignright" width="201"]NWPhila_ManayunkTrail The many canals and channels that once acted as a vibrant lifeline for northwestern Philadelphia neighborhoods are no longer visible. The remaining canals however, have been converted to recreational use as shown here on the banks of Manayunk. (B. Krist for Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Company)[/caption]

Northwest Philadelphia, bound loosely by the Roosevelt Expressway to the south, Broad Street to the east, and the suburbs of Montgomery County to the north and west, has origins as old as the city itself.  Developing around the Schuylkill and Wissahickon Creek waterways, and later Fairmount Park, the Northwest expanded and changed with the advent of new technologies and the larger legal, political, and cultural trends of Philadelphia.

In the late seventeenth century, as William Penn (1644-1718) worked to establish his “green country town,” the German Township along the Wissahickon came together as a small community of Dutch Mennonite and German Pietist immigrants, bound at first by religious and cultural identity.  On August 12, 1689, Penn granted the group its own charter, creating a distinct Germantown borough with a mayor, council, court, and marketplace.  

The community prospered in the cloth trade, as townspeople worked as linen weavers, and also gained a reputation as a seedbed of antislavery agitation.  In 1688, German Quakers published a resolution condemning the “traffick of men-Body.”  In 1775, the French-born Anthony Benezet (1713-84), a longtime resident of Germantown, founded the first abolitionist society in the United States, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, later the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and by 1800, 60 free blacks (and seven slaves) were recorded as living in Germantown.

This legacy of activism persisted in parts of the region, even as it maintained an identity as a largely white and wealthy enclave.  For many of Philadelphia’s elite, Germantown – with its relatively high elevation at 336 feet, offering scenic views and lazy breezes – became a popular respite from the frenzy of the city.  In 1750, loyalist William Allen (1704-80), later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, built a country estate at what is now Germantown Avenue and Allens Lane, and called the home Mount Airy, bestowing the name for the neighborhood that two centuries later earned a national reputation for racial tolerance.

In the early nineteenth century, as Philadelphia entered the age of industrialization, the Northwest region grew precipitously.  In 1815, the city granted a charter to the Schuylkill Navigation Company, charged with improving the navigational system of the Schuylkill River.  Less than a decade later, the 108-mile waterway reached completion, linking Philadelphia with the coalfields of Port Carbon and Pottsville.  These advancements brought new life to the communities along the river.  

Across the Wissahickon Gorge from Germantown, the borough of Manayunk, part of the larger Roxborough Township and ideally positioned in the river valley, experienced massive development, largely due to local textile manufacturing.  From 1817 to 1824, the population expanded from 60 to nearly 800 people, and by the late 1820s the community, which just a few years earlier contained little more than a toll house, had become known alternately as the “Lowell of Pennsylvania” and the “Manchester of America.” In 1840, the town was incorporated as its own separate borough.  The owners of the Manayunk mills resided above the town on the ridge between the river and the Wissahickon, which along with Germantown became one of the wealthiest communities in Philadelphia County.

Until 1854, these northwest communities retained their independent charters and systems of governance.  On February 2 of that year, though, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania and Governor William Bigler (1790-1879) approved the Act of Consolidation, dissolving the townships, boroughs, and districts that surrounded the city and incorporating the entirety of Philadelphia County under the authority of the Philadelphia municipal government.  

[caption id="attachment_4989" align="alignright" width="300"]This image from 1832 shows a steam engine pulling railroad cars that resemble horse drawn buggies at the Philadelphia Germantown & Norristown Railway Depot at the southwest corner of Ninth and Green Streets. In the middle of the eighteenth century Philadelphia became more dense, congested, and dirty. To escape the grime, wealthy Philadelphians moved to the small borough of Germantown and built grand country estates. This influx of wealthy residents to the outskirts of town necessitated a reliable, efficient means of travel to and from the city. As a result, in the early 1830s a group of Germantown entrepreneurs set out to create the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad. The first trains arrived in Germantown in 1832, and the neighborhood soon developed into the first railroad suburb of Philadelphia, and one of the first in the nation. (Library Company of Philadelphia) In the early 1830s a group of Germantown entrepreneurs set out to create the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad. The first trains arrived in Germantown in 1832, and the neighborhood soon developed into the first railroad suburb of Philadelphia, and one of the first in the nation. (Library Company of Philadelphia)[/caption]

As this legislative action brought the region under the auspices of city institutions and services, the expansion of the railways opened up the city and made the area more accessible.  In the early 1830s, a group of Germantown entrepreneurs set out to create the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad.  The earliest trains arrived in Germantown in 1832, and the community soon developed into the first Railroad Suburb in Philadelphia, and one of the first in the nation.  Within a year, the wealthy residents of Chestnut Hill, occupying the northernmost section of Germantown, clamored for a regular stagecoach service to connect their large pastoral plots on the Hill to the Germantown Depot at Germantown Avenue and Price Street.  Two decades later, more reliable horse car and steam rail service came to Germantown, carrying multi-passenger vehicles along the iron rails.  In Chestnut Hill, local commuters raised funds for a permanent railroad connecting the southern and northern ends of Germantown.  The new terminal at Chestnut Hill Avenue and Bethlehem Pike opened on July 3, 1854.

With these political and technological changes, the region rapidly expanded.  The influx of city residents prompted new housing development throughout Northwest Philadelphia, but even as population surged, residents held strong to each community’s independent roots.

It was, in part, the green space around these northwest neighborhoods that allowed homeowners to maintain their autonomy from the rest of the city. Fairmount Park (officially incorporated in 1855) and its forested Wissahickon Gorge acted as a buffer between Germantown and Roxborough and the rest of Philadelphia County.  But even the Wissahickon, which had served as the stage for the Battle of Germantown in 1777, felt the effects of the city’s industrial growth.  At the turn of the eighteenth century, the region had become home to the first two paper mills in North America – the first built by William Rittenhouse at the south end of the gorge in 1690, the second by William Dewees at the northern end in 1708. By 1850, the dense woods and deep valley were home to more than 50 water-powered mills. Mining and blasting broke through the steep cliffs along the southern end of the creek, giving way to the development of the Rittenhousetown mills, and by 1856, the Wissahickon Turnpike, a private toll road, ran through the valley south to north.  In the latter half of the 1800s, efforts to protect and preserve the water source prompted the Fairmount Park Commission to take over the land, demolishing the mills and in their place erecting several inns and lodges, where visitors could enjoy the natural splendor that remained.

By the turn of the century, the population of Northwest Philadelphia was beginning to change.  From 1910 to 1930, more than 140,000 African Americans arrived in the city in the first wave of the Great Migration from the South to northern cities. As they settled in South, West, and North Philadelphia, long-established residents began to move outward, creating greater ethnic diversification in the Northwest.  Many Italian-Americans left South Philadelphia for the Roxborough area.  German, Scots-Irish, and Irish families moved to Germantown. 

As the population shifted, the economy also prompted vast changes. First, road construction along the Schuylkill River connected Northwest Philadelphia to the city center, making automobile travel a reality for the first time. Then, the Great Depression of the 1930s brought the closing of most of the mills along the Schuylkill River corridor, and such neighborhoods as Manayunk and East Falls saw their industrial prowess begin to wane.  Many of the large mansions of Chestnut Hill – by the late nineteenth century one of the most elite neighborhoods in the United States – were demolished as the most affluent residents lost fortunes in the stock market. This also led to job losses for the large service economy that existed in the area. 

With the Second World War, the city once again experienced new growth with a second mass migration of African Americans. Philadelphia’s black population increased from nearly 251,000 in 1940 to 376,000 in 1950.  At first, most upwardly mobile black newcomers concentrated in North Philadelphia.  After World War II, though, as these increasingly all-black neighborhoods experienced an acute housing shortage, middle-class African Americans also began to move outward to the Northwest.

When the war ended, communities on the outer edges of the city saw their under-developed green space quickly fill with new housing.  Although Northwest Philadelphia saw less physical development than other areas of the city, the region still underwent widespread growth. Upper Roxborough experienced development much like the surrounding Montgomery County suburbs, with new houses, green front lawns, and strip malls spreading along Henry and Ridge Avenues.  New neighborhoods sprung up along the northwest city borders, including the westernmost pocket of Andorra and West Oak Lane to the east. 

[caption id="attachment_4987" align="alignright" width="300"]For many who participated in the Second Great Migration, Philadelphia’s industrial prowess made the city an ideal destination. However, African Americans often encountered the same prejudice they had experienced in the South, especially in the form of housing discrimination. In the decades surrounding World War II, white flight played a prominent role in the growth of area suburbs, where population rates rose 85% between 1940 and 1960; in the same period, the percentage of African Americans in the inner-city communities of North Philadelphia expanded from 25% to 69%. But not all neighborhoods struggled with integration. West Mount Airy, the community in the central section of historic German Township named for Justice Allen’s 1750 home, began to develop its own identity as an economically viable, racially integrated community. Unlike other areas of the region and city, where white residents responded to the arrival of black families with “fight or flight,” community leaders in the upper-middle class neighborhood created a proactive plan toward interracial living. By the early 1960s, the community was touted across the nation as a site of racial progress. The image left is a 1976 photograph of the active organization, East Mount Airy Neighbors (EMAN), the sister group to the West Mount Airy’s WMAN. East Mount Airy, located just across Germantown Avenue from its western counterpart – struggled with early volatility and dislocation. In 1960, Reverend Rudolph Gelsey offered a critique of the community in a sermon titled “East Mount Airy: Slum, Ghetto, or Good Place to Live.” EMAN was born six years later, with Gelsey as its first president. The organization worked to inform authorities of illegal real estate practices, promote equality in schools, and create a new racial understanding. (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Library) East Mount Airy, located just across Germantown Avenue from West Mount Airy – struggled with early volatility and dislocation. The East Mount Airy Neighbors (EMAN) worked to inform authorities of illegal real estate practices, promote equality in schools, and create a new racial understanding. (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Library)[/caption]

In southern Germantown, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority allocated $10.6 million for public housing, to contend with the growing numbers of black families moving into the area.  West Mount Airy, the community in the central section of historic German Township named for Justice Allen’s 1750 home, began to develop its own identity as an economically viable, racially integrated community.  Unlike other areas of the region and city, where white residents responded to the arrival of black families with “fight or flight,” community leaders in the upper-middle class neighborhood created a proactive plan toward interracial living.  By the early 1960s, the community was touted across the nation as a site of racial progress. Its counterpart across Germantown Avenue, East Mount Airy, experienced a brief period of integration before transitioning to a predominantly black middle-class population. Throughout the next decade, similar patterns of white flight and African American settlement took hold in West Oak Lane and Germantown. Across Northwest Philadelphia, churches, schools, and neighborhood organizations offered critical institutional support during these postwar years, helping residents navigate these periods of transition and preserve a sense of community identity.

By the last decades of the twentieth century, as the Northwest section became more enmeshed in the Philadelphia economy and as individual communities responded to the larger political, economic, and cultural forces of the city, the regional identity of the area began to wane. Even as efforts toward local preservation, restoration, and oral history collection highlighted the living history of the region, Northwest Philadelphia became less a cohesive entity than a loosely connected group of neighborhoods, still bound by the common heritage of the natural woodlands of the Wissahickon, the industrial might of the Schuylkill canal, and the desire for independence as well as strong community ties.  Perhaps more than any other section of the city, Northwest Philadelphia retained William Penn’s historic mission to create a green country town in an urban center.

Abigail Perkiss is an Assistant Professor of History at Kean University in Union, N.J. Her first book, Civil Rights' Stepchild: The Making, Maintenance, and Meaning of Neighborhood Integration in Post-WWII Philadelphia, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

 
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Commuter Trains

By cmires on September 29, 2012, 11:47pm in City of Neighborhoods, Essays, Greater Philadelphia, Nineteenth Century after 1854, Nineteenth Century to 1854, Themes, Time Periods, Topics, Transportation, Twentieth Century after 1945, Twentieth Century to 1945, Twenty-First Century

Commuter trains have helped to shape and define Philadelphia and its region since their introduction in 1832. The trains influenced suburban development and shaped Center City. For most of this period, the trains charged higher fares than other forms of public transit and remained a largely middle-class means of transport. Commuter trains connected middle-class homes in the city’s neighborhoods and suburbs with the offices, stores, and entertainment of Center City and, according to historian Jack Simmons, allowed for “the liberation of [middle-class] women” in the late-nineteenth century. By the twenty-first century, commuter trains offered a “green alternative” to the crowded highways and automobile-oriented culture of the United States.

The region’s first commuter rail line was the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown Railroad (the PGN), which began operation in 1832. This line, like Britain’s London & Greenwich Railway (opened in 1836), was designed from the outset to rely upon local traffic. Prior to the Civil War, in general, railways tended to be either local carriers (like the PGN), which carried extensive commuter traffic, or “trunk line” railroads, like the Philadelphia & Columbia (later the Pennsylvania Railroad), which tended to focus on long-distance freight and passenger traffic and had very few local trains. One notable exception to this early dichotomy was the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad that both linked its namesake cities as a trunk carrier in 1838 and began actively developing commuter traffic from the 1850s.

[caption id="attachment_4552" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Commuters at Jenkintown Junction, photographed in 1892, await the train arriving in the distance. (Detroit Publishing Co. Collection, Library of Congress)"][/caption]

In the 1870s and 1880s, a variety of factors ranging from increased railway consolidation and greater competition among the surviving companies to new and better central passenger stations in Philadelphia, allowed for the region’s three railroad systems (the Pennsylvania, Philadelphia & Reading and Baltimore & Ohio) to build or assemble extensive commuter networks centered on Philadelphia and Camden. In fact, competing lines were built to Chester, Norristown, and Chestnut Hill, as the railroads’ only competition for travel beyond two miles or so were other railroads. The final decades of the nineteenth century were truly the halcyon days of commuter rail service in the region with a large variety of lines linking the city to its hinterland. In addition to the lines focused on Center City and Camden, during this period there were smaller commuter nodes in North and Northeast Philadelphia.

By about 1890, however, the commuter railroads had their first real competition from the electric streetcars (especially when suburban trolleys were allied with urban subway and elevated trains). The Pennsylvania Railroad experimented with electrifying its Mount Holly branch in New Jersey between 1895 and 1901 using electric streetcar technology, but, like most other steam railroad attempts at using trolley technology on existing lines, this was a “one off” trial. More effectively, the railroads focused on developing greater passenger traffic in the five-mile or more range and often conceded the short distance trips to the trolleys. This strategy worked well and commuter rail traffic continued to be robust on most lines in the region.

[caption id="attachment_4553" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Reading Terminal builder Charles McCaul prepared this lithograph of Phiadelphia's new train terminal and market for the building's opening in 1893. (Library of Congress)"][/caption]

Mainline electrification, developed in the first decade of the twentieth century, became the technological change that largely defined commuter rail service for the Philadelphia region. Initially, the Pennsylvania Railroad pioneered heavy-rail electrification in southern New Jersey not because of local needs but as a way to experiment with the technology required for its railroad tunnel to Manhattan under the Hudson River. In 1906, the railroad electrified its underused secondary line between Camden and Atlantic City via Newfield using third-rail technology for both local and through trains. In the next decade, capacity issues at the busy Broad Street Station in Philadelphia caused the Pennsylvania to electrify its lines to Paoli (in 1915) and Chestnut Hill (in 1918), using what would become the region’s standard: overhead catenary.  Based on the success of these lines, both the Pennsylvania and the Reading electrified other lines in the region through 1933.

Although the contraction of commuter rail services in the region began in reaction to the trolleys in the 1890s, much of the network remained intact until the Great Depression. Starting in the 1930s, most lines that were not electrified cut service. This retrenchment, though delayed by World War II, continued in the 1950s and 1960s as the now struggling railroads sought to slash costs.  In 1949, the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines route to Millville, a remnant of the 1906 Atlantic City electrification, was converted back to steam operation (and eventually would lose all service by 1971).  By the mid-1960s, the only non-electrified commuter services operated in the Philadelphia region were those of the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines, a few Pennsylvania Railroad branches in southern New Jersey, and the Newtown line of the Reading in Bucks County.

In reaction to these service cutbacks, local and state governments became involved in commuter rail traffic starting in the late 1950s. In 1960, the City of Philadelphia began subsidizing service and purchasing equipment for use on lines in the city to Chestnut Hill and Manayunk. In 1966, Philadelphia paid for the electrification of the Reading’s Newtown line within the city limits to Fox Chase.  The South Eastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) began in 1965 to coordinate and fund all local passenger services in the area. SEPTA bought new equipment and built the Center City Commuter Connection, which opened in 1984, linking the former Pennsylvania and Reading systems as a truly regional system. Similar changes happened in New Jersey, but, by the time they did, the only train services remaining in southern New Jersey were the lines to the shore with few commuters.

Since the 1970s, government agencies have been responsible for the development of commuter rail service in the Philadelphia region. In 1976, all of the railroads in the region that still had passenger service were merged into the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail). In 1983, Conrail ceased running commuter trains and SEPTA took over their direct operation in its region. The transition was not an easy one and, after a strike and a period of closure, it took years for SEPTA to recover lost riders. SEPTA has expanded service on longer distance routes and opened more park- and-ride stations in the outer suburbs, at the cost of more restricted and expensive short-distance service. In New Jersey, the rail route to Atlantic City from Philadelphia (closed in 1982) reopened in 1989, with Amtrak initially providing long distance service and NJ Transit commuter trains. Since 1995, all service has been operated by NJ Transit. In 2004, NJ Transit opened the River Line between Trenton and Camden. In 2012, DART First State, Delaware’s transit provider purchased its first railway cars ever, for operation with SEPTA coaches on the Wilmington-Newark line.

Commuter trains in the twenty-first century confronted such major dilemmas as uncertain funding and the problem of how to follow jobs to the suburbs when the rail routes were largely fixed.  The three commuter train operators and funders in the region — SEPTA, New Jersey Transit, and DART First State--faced the challenge of adapting to these changes as the region’s transportation needs continued to evolve, as their predecessors had done for the last one hundred and eighty years.

John Hepp is associate professor of history at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and he teaches American urban and cultural history with an emphasis on the period 1800 to 1940.

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Nominate A Topic

By curator on October 28, 2009, 8:00am in Topics

What would you like to know about Philadelphia and its history? Nominate a topic and tell us why you'd like to see it in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. To submit your ideas to the editors, simply scroll to the bottom of this page.

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