Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia

Contents » Wealth and Poverty

Almshouses (Poorhouses)

From the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, almshouses offered food, shelter, clothing, and medical care to the poorest and most vulnerable, often in exchange for hard labor and forfeiture of freedom. Those who entered the Philadelphia region’s almshouses, willingly or unwillingly, rarely accepted this exchange and often protested their treatment or blatantly ⇒ Read More

Armstrong Association of Philadelphia

The Armstrong Association of Philadelphia was a social-service organization established early in the twentieth century to assess and address the needs of the African American community. Through its efforts to improve education, housing, and health, the organization addressed social and economic issues facing African Americans. Founded in 1908, the association formed as a branch of ⇒ Read More

Banking

Greater Philadelphia’s banking roots go deeper than those of any region in the country. Philadelphia was the home of the first commercial bank (1782), the first national bank (1791), the first savings bank (1816), and the first savings and loan association (1831). Until the mid-1980s, celebrated local institutions such as First Pennsylvania, Girard, and Provident ⇒ Read More

Boarding and Lodging Houses

Distinguished by its ubiquitous row houses and high rates of home ownership, Philadelphia has been long been known as a “city of homes.” But for much of its history, it also has been a city of boardinghouses. “Boarding” and “lodging” houses did not enter the local lexicon until the late eighteenth century, but the practice ⇒ Read More

Charter Schools

Privately run but publicly funded charter schools became an important part of the educational landscape in Greater Philadelphia by the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Their advocates across the country argued that they were an antidote to politicized and unwieldy public school systems and a way to move decision-making out of the hands of government ⇒ Read More

Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania

The Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania was founded in 1882 by a group of predominantly women volunteers to address social issues plaguing the city of Philadelphia, such as drunkenness, child homelessness, and rampant crime. Child welfare advocate Helen W. Hinckley led the charge, assisted by Cornelia Hancock (1840–1928), who had volunteered as a nurse in ⇒ Read More

Contractor Bosses (1880s to 1930s)

As Philadelphia expanded physically after its 1854 consolidation of city and county, building contractors wielded a greater degree of political power as they paid politicians and civil servants handsomely for the rights to construct the city’s infrastructure. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of the “contractor boss”—a construction magnate who wielded political power directly ⇒ Read More

Country Clubs

Country clubs originated in the 1890s as elite, family-oriented havens usually emphasizing golf, but they have never been just about golf or even sports. Clubs fostered sportsmanship, appropriate deportment, and social development while also providing opportunities for exercise. A “golden age” of country clubs lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the number ⇒ Read More

Dancing Assembly

Established in the winter of 1748-49, the Dancing Assembly of Philadelphia— also known as “The Assembly” or “The Assemblies”— originated as an occasion for elite men and women to gather for social dancing in carefully matched pairs. Modeled after the English “assembly,” a type of formal social gathering most famously held in Bath and London, ⇒ Read More

Dispensaries

Free clinics known as dispensaries served the “working poor” of European, British, and American cities from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Paid or volunteer physicians saw patients on site or at their homes in the dispensary’s district, caring for both minor ailments and more serious diseases. The Philadelphia Dispensary for the Medical Relief ⇒ Read More

Girard College

The history of Girard College, a boarding school for children from poor families headed by single parents or guardians, reflects the history of Philadelphia and the nation.  Opened in 1848, Girard College was established under a bequest from wealthy philanthropist Stephen Girard (1750-1831), whose will specified a school for “poor white male orphans.” Girard College ⇒ Read More

Girard’s Bequest

On December 26, 1831, the richest man in the United States died and gave the city of Philadelphia the great majority of his fortune. Committed to philanthropy for much of his life, Stephen Girard (1750-1831) had wealth at the time of his death estimated at more than $6 million, earned during his life as a ⇒ Read More

Great Depression

The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1941, was characterized in both the Philadelphia region and the nation by a severe contraction in all levels of economic activity, massive unemployment, widespread bank failures, and sharp price deflation. Many people lost their life savings and their homes. Untold thousands went hungry; some starved. It led ⇒ Read More

House of Refuge

Established on February 7, 1826, the Philadelphia House of Refuge provided an alternative to prisons for incarcerating juvenile delinquents and child vagrants. Although the House of Refuge purported to aid poor and delinquent children, in practice it became a paternalist organization that strove to implement social control over the city’s lower classes. A project of ⇒ Read More

Inner Suburbs

Presenting a varied and complicated patchwork of both thriving and distressed communities, Philadelphia’s inner suburbs developed during different eras to serve different purposes and populations. European influence predated the Revolutionary War with English, Swedish, Dutch, and Welsh settlers establishing tight-knit farming communities in what were then outlying areas of William Penn’s Philadelphia. During the eighteenth ⇒ Read More

Lotteries

Lotteries have a long and controversial history in the Philadelphia region. Since the early eighteenth century, random drawings of numbers have funded charities and clubs, paid for roads and schools, settled estates, distributed land, and promoted various private and state-run initiatives. Lotteries have drawn multitudes of customers seeking cash and other prizes, but over three ⇒ Read More

Magdalen Society

Founded in 1800, the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia was the first institution in the United States concerned with caring for and reforming “fallen women.” A good many women in nineteenth-century Philadelphia apparently preferred prostitution for a variety of reasons, notably as a means of support in order to achieve economic independence from an oppressive family ⇒ Read More

Mansions

Since the earliest European settlement in the seventeenth century, but especially from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, large houses constructed by elites in the Philadelphia region provided agreeable places to live that demonstrated social status. As architectural fashion and geographic distribution changed, mansions served as conspicuous symbols for elite Philadelphians and were a salient ⇒ Read More

Octavia Hill Association

The Octavia Hill Association of Philadelphia was founded in 1896 to provide clean dwellings at reasonable rents to some of the city’s poorest residents, who were often exploited by profit-hungry landlords. Still active as a real estate management company, the Octavia Hill Association has a history of responding to changing economic conditions and housing needs. ⇒ Read More

Orphanages and Orphans

Philadelphia’s earliest orphanages grew out of social projects intended to help impoverished families. As early the first decades of the eighteenth century, city officials created organizations such as the Overseers of the Poor (later the Guardians of the Poor) to provide relief to those, such as the elderly, widows with children, and orphans, who faced ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia Story (The)

The Philadelphia Story (1939) is a comedy of manners presented as a three-act play set in the late 1930s in a magnificent mansion in Philadelphia’s western Main Line suburbs, a location of wealth and exclusivity. Written by Philip Barry (1896-1949), a prolific dramatic and comic playwright, The Philadelphia Story centers on the lives of an ⇒ Read More

Poverty

Urban areas in the United States have always attracted destitute persons, including immigrants and internal migrants fleeing even worse poverty and harsher conditions elsewhere. Philadelphia and its environs were no exception, having had a reputation as “the best poor man’s country” reaching as far back as the city’s founding in 1682. Despite the area’s vibrant ⇒ Read More

Prisons and Jails

In the late 1700s, on the heels of the American Revolution, Philadelphia emerged as a national and international leader in prison reform and the transformation of criminal justice practices. More than any other community in early America, Philadelphia invested heavily in the intellectual and physical reconstruction of penal philosophies, and the region’s jails and prisons ⇒ Read More

PSFS

Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, known as PSFS, was the first savings bank in the United States, founded in 1816. For most of its history, PSFS emphasized practicality in its operations, architecture, and community orientation. The historic organization added a modern accent to the Philadelphia skyline in 1932, when it opened a new, International-style building at ⇒ Read More

Public Housing

As the dominant response to the housing needs of low-income residents since the 1930s, public housing in the Philadelphia region provided shelter for thousands. Over the years, however, as needs as well as programs changed, the city and the region struggled to provide safe, decent, and sanitary living quarters when the private market failed to ⇒ Read More

Railroad Suburbs

As railroads reached outlying villages and the countryside around Philadelphia during the nineteenth century, railroad companies and other enterprising real estate developers created fashionable residential enclaves, new suburban towns, and vast semirural estates. These developments enabled prosperous Philadelphians to live apart from the city while still enjoying its amenities and maintaining their positions in the ⇒ Read More

Redlining

Redlining, the practice of basing access to capital and financial services on neighborhood characteristics such as race and ethnicity, had destructive effects on older, nonwhite areas of Philadelphia. Especially in areas of South, West, and Lower North Philadelphia that form a ring around downtown, banks and other lending institutions issued proportionally fewer mortgages than in ⇒ Read More

Settlement Houses

The settlement house movement, a phenomenon of the Progressive era with origins in London, spread to Philadelphia in the 1890s as a large influx of needy immigrants and unsanitary conditions in the city attracted the attention of middle-class, college-educated reformers. Living among the poor in South Philadelphia, Kensington, and other neighborhoods, settlement house residents sought ⇒ Read More

Single Tax Movement

During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Philadelphia helped give birth to the single tax movement, one of the country’s more influential, if less well-remembered, reform movements. The idea of a “single tax” on the unimproved value of land, rather than on productive activities, was popularized by Henry George (1839-97), a native of Philadelphia. The ⇒ Read More

Thrift

Philadelphia became a national center for the thrift movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a high concentration of progressive individuals and institutions promoted values of frugality, industry, and stewardship as a means for poor and working-class people to improve their circumstances. Espoused by white middle-class society, the thrift movement declined when ⇒ Read More

Vagrancy

Vagrancy, generally defined as the act of continuous geographical movement by the poor, often has been interpreted to signify idleness, unemployment, and homelessness. Since the colonial era, it has been a driving social concern in the Mid-Atlantic region, where urban centers, including Philadelphia, attracted poor migrants seeking new economic prospects. Laws created to aid them ⇒ Read More

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

In response to the rising tide of unemployment nationally, and after the short-lived Civil Works Administration (CWA) failed to stem that tide, Congress in May 1935 created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the “alphabet soup” of economic recovery programs enacted as part of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). Later ⇒ Read More

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