It was a black neighborhood east of 40th St. running to approximately 33rd St. north of Market St. south of Spring Garden St. It has grown progressively more charming and its' black residents ever more victims of urban renewal with each passing year. In fact it was not a terribly nice place to outsiders. And for the "professional victims" who were removed, it was done so that the UC Science Center could be built - NOT Upenn.
The selective amnesia displayed by the displaced "victims" of urban renewal conveniently ignore the fact that all the land south of Market west to 40th St. that WAS taken by UPenn was an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Look at the size of the church and school at St James RC church at 38th & Chestnut. That was their parish. If there's gonna be victims of urban renewal, they were equal opportunity victims. If you do it by the numbers, more were white people south of Market St. than the blacks from the Bottom. Why are no tears shed for all the poor white people who saw their Locust St. houses taken to make Locust Walk?

Wow, is the attitude necessary? Okay so yes there are white victims of urban renewal too. I really don't think you should blame the bloggers for leaving that point out. For the fact remains that if the collective media did not continually depict urban poor people as only black and latino, then you would have no problem. How many people know that Philly is half white and a good portion of those whites are economically challenged. The media has played a major role, influencing our perspectives. But thanks for the information and know that it is confirmed, urban renewal is a problem for everyone and not just poor blacks. Maybe it will be easier for us to unite and shape the change that our communities are facing.

Depending on who you talk to, some people think that I live in "The Black Bottom" or "Mantua" rather than "West Powelton." I think "Black Bottom" is one of those terms that just got expanded to encompass any area where black people lived (sort of like "Kensington" keeps expanding to include any area in the river wards, or just across the El from them, where people get shot).

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Applying a label to a neighborhood is, in a lot of cases, similar to labeling a religious group a "cult". It tells us more about the person applying the label than the thing being labeled.

For buyers, realators don't show houses, they show homes. For sellers, they're selling a house, not a home. No, it isn't in "Grey's Ferry", it's in "Graduate Hospital".

Businesses do this all the time. "Chinatown Medical" is south of South. "Bella Vista Childcare" is at Passyunk and Broad. "Chestnut Hill Computer Repair" is in Germantown.

Then there are the gentrifiers. "Old Kensington" is now becoming "North of Northern Liberties" just as surely as "The Slums" became "Society Hill" and "Hell's Kitchen" became "Chelsea".

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Sounds like some old wounds to me. A large part of what seems to be going on here is the result of a "divide and conquer" approach. When neighborhoods are swallowed up by institutions claiming to be good neighbors it is often effective for them to get their targets fighting each other.

The more we talk about who had the most taken from them, the less we discuss who did the taking and what they took. Here's the area circa 1960:


And today:


In both maps, pink is Penn, blue is residential and commercial. Penn swallowed up a lot.

They did this two ways. Initially, they simply bought anything that went up for sale and let it sit and deteriorate. As buildings on a block went to seed, more residents would leave and prices would fall. As this method was rather slow to clear out entire blocks, Eminant Domain was soon called into play.

Whether the neighborhoods destroyed were African American, Irish Catholic, both or neither is a moot point. I don't care who drew a "line in the sand"* and said stop. The point is that Penn displaced 5,000 or more people in unethical ways. Penn has partially owned up to this and has done somewhat better in the more recent past.

Community displacement is not about buildings, it is about communities. Those of us who move around tend to forget that there are many people who do not. Whether we're talking about Penn, Temple, I-95, the (proposed) South Street Expressway or the idea of a stadium in Chinatown buildings are destroyed and paid for in cash. The community is ultimately broken up and scattered.

There are areas that can benefit from renewal efforts. James Brown's (& others') work in East Parkside is a notable example: restoring what can be restored, replacing what can't, maintaining the exisiting community. There are areas in West Parkside where entire blocks are abandonded. Gentrification and financial displacement become concerns (that one insanely priced house across from Bill's school is frightening), but it's damned hard to argue that a block of collapsing, boarded-up houses should be saved.

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I think Ralph Ellison said something like "wherever negros lived uptown was called Harlem."

"The Bottom" is wherever the poor black people lived. It's the same thing in Baltimore, I've heard people talk about the "bad" part of West Baltimore called "The Bottom" by people who lived right around it. But it is funny to think that way back in the day the eastern part of West Philly was the poor part and the western part was the more middle class part.