Design After Decline by Brent D. Ryan

Design After Decline by Brent D. Ryan

Author:Brent D. Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.


Modernism's Legacy: The Rebuilding of North Philadelphia, 1940–90

The OHCD's 1990s design policy had its origin in North Philadelphia's fifty-plus-year-old history of mostly failed redevelopment programs that combined experimental design with poor postoccupancy outcomes. This association was a ghost that OHCD wished to exorcise (as did the federal government, at a much larger scale, in the HOPE VI program) as the agency once again attempted to redevelop the troubled neighborhood. This redevelopment history posed two major questions. If past projects had failed so dramatically, what should OHCD change to make redevelopment worthwhile again? And where should OHCD look for successful redevelopment precedents?

Redevelopment's beginning in North Philadelphia paralleled the area's racial transition from a white to a black neighborhood (Figure 4.1). Blacks began settling in large numbers in Lower North Philadelphia in the 1920s, and by 1950 the nonwhite population of Lower North Philadelphia comprised almost half its total. By 1980 the racial transition was complete: Lower North Philadelphia was almost 90 percent nonwhite. As in Detroit, the new African American population was poorer than the one it had replaced, and housing abandonment and gradual population loss succeeded an initial period of overcrowding. Between 1950 and 1980, the area's population dropped 55 percent. Although most of its population was black, the eastern edge of North Philadelphia, which the city considered to be a different planning area, became the home for much of Philadelphia's Puerto Rican population.

Even in the 1930s, North Philadelphia was so clearly troubled that its redevelopment preceded that of Center City by more than ten years. In the late 1930s the city selected the neighborhood for its first two housing projects, the Glenwood and the Richard Allen Homes. These were completed in 1941 at 22nd and Diamond Streets and 11th and Poplar Streets respectively (Bauman 1987, 48). The city designated both for black tenants, which reflected the segregated policies of the era and the increasing concentration of black residents in the surrounding neighborhood.

As other authors (Vale 2000; Bauman 1987) have described, public housing was a new policy concept, and as such policy makers wished it to embody the latest design ideas. Philadelphia was no different from New York in this regard, where Bauhaus designer William Lescaze designed the city's first full-fledged public housing, the Williamsburg Houses, in 1938 along Modernist lines. Both the Glenwood and Allen Homes were inspired by the German zeilenbau, or “rows of buildings,” principle of the Bauhaus (Bauman 1987, 25) (Figure 4.2). Zeilenbau designated most city streets as redundant, replacing them with pedestrian paths between buildings. To increase the amount of useful open space, zeilenbau concentrated houses at the periphery of superblocks, producing open spaces at the block centers. Designers intended these spaces for residents to congregate within the superblock instead of on public streets, which were often dirty, unpleasant, and filled with traffic.

Following passage of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, the Philadelphia Public Housing Authority constructed another public housing development, the Spring Garden Homes, at Spring Garden and 6th Streets between 1950 and 1952.



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