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Sure. And that's part of why I am surprised. Same as RedLion.
But I don't think Philadelphia has a greater depth than NYC in black culture. Simply due to scale its also a more variety in NYC.
And then yea i just haven't much liked the look of suburban Philly or suburban parts of Philly outside of the mainline or the inner city. Gridded and often lacking trees. Nasty post-war rowhomes or split levels. I know its not all of it though.
Hmm. That really doesn't describe any of the neighborhoods I referenced; parts of Northeast Philly and inner Delco would fit that description, yes. But all of the areas noted above are actually quite pleasant and architecturally interesting:
Hmm. That really doesn't describe any of the neighborhoods I referenced; parts of Northeast Philly and inner Delco would fit that description, yes. But all of the areas noted above are actually quite pleasant and architecturally interesting:
Those are gorgeous. I’ve been way up Wickahisson Park and from center city.. thru NE to Bristol PA and into Willingboro or NJ. Down to to Camden through south and west Philly into University City...just into the inner western burbs. And I’ve been to Villanova as well as Trenton, Wilmington and then the area around Temple a good bit. Never Cheltenham, Mt. Airy, I was in the vicinity once but I don’t recall much- it was dark out/wasn’t paying attention.
Sure. And that's part of why I am surprised. Same as RedLion.
But I don't think Philadelphia has a greater depth than NYC in black culture. Simply due to scale its also a more variety in NYC.
And then yea i just haven't much liked the look of suburban Philly or suburban parts of Philly outside of the mainline or the inner city. Gridded and often lacking trees. Nasty post-war rowhomes or split levels. I know its not all of it though.
This is the birthplace of the first and largest of the Black churches, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Mother Bethel AME Church, the descendant of the Free African Society founded by Richard Allen in the 1780s, is located at 6th and Lombard streets in Society Hill.
The nation's oldest HBCU, Cheyney University, grew out of the Institute for Colored Youth, founded in 1839 in what was then the city's largely Black Cedar Ward — the southern edge of Society Hill and Washington Square West. The building that housed it is now a condominium. Among its graduates and later teachers was the Reconstruction-era civil rights activist Octavius V. Catto, who lived in the ward and lost his life when he was shot by Irish gangsters during Election Day violence in 1871. (Catto successfully fought to integrate the city's segregated horsecars.) Cheney University is now located on the Chester-Delaware county line in the southern part of both counties.
Kansas City and New York may have played bigger roles in the evolution of jazz in America, but Philadelphia was no slouch: it was home to John Coltrane, arguably the most innovative jazz saxophonist who ever played save for Charlie Parker. "Philly" Joe Jones, McCoy Tyner, Lee Morgan and Billy Heath are just a few of the native-born Philadelphians who made their mark on the music, and Dizzy Gillespie honed his skills here before moving on to New York. (Here's the jazz entry from the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia for further reading.)
This was also the birthplace and home of Marian Anderson, the contralto who famously sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her into their concert hall in Washington.
Our local Black newspaper, The Philadelphia Tribune, is one of the nation's oldest, dating to 1884.
Maybe you haven't heard of a West Philly restaurant called Big George's Stop 'n' Dine, but Bill Clinton had; the then-candidate for President paid it a visit on a swing through Pennsylvania in 1992. (The restaurant closed sometime around 2010.)
New York may outdo us simply because it's much bigger, but I'd say that actually, this city has plenty of Black history and culture, both in absolute terms and relative to its size.
Sinxe you mentioned the Main Line here, I guess I should also call your attention to South Ardmore. This section of the community that's known as "the Main Street of the Main Line" and home to the government of Lower Merion Township, the Main Line's most populous municipality, has a Black population that dates back to just after the Civil War — it's the oldest and largest Black community on the Main Line (which does have a couple of other pockets of Black settlement in Wayne (largely disappeared) and Tredyffrin Township (the site of a huge school-segregation fight in the 1930s).
That's sort of ignoring the fact that Coatesville is not a desirable place neither is West Chester. As far as I can see Media is 6% black out of 5k. Avon MA is favorable to that....
COATESVILLE? A place with a 39% child poverty rate is best for your family??? Joke.
Lansdale is 6% black with a median income of 61k. Are you trolling? I need way better examples than any of these. You're deluding yourself if you think any of these are somewhat favorable compared to the Boston suburbs diversity or income. Add to this the Philly suburbs have fewer Asian and Hispanic minorities which is a negative
Furthermore, $41,000 for a household is absurdly low and doesn't afford you a ton of mobility other than to shuffle between Chester and Coatesville. And its like 20k a year less than Boston 20k per year?? Thats huge. There's a wide range of prices in Boston and even when you have more limited disposable income your physical environment and safety is much better, with more opportunity outdoor activity too.
We actually went over this in a thread and found Boston suburbs were -to my surprise-more diverse. To say Philly has historically black suburban neighborhoods as though Boston doesn't (Medford, Milton, Randolph-all had black folks in considerable number since the 1980s maybe the 70s) is a major undersell on Boston and oversell on Philly IMO. And half the ones you listed are cruddy the other half have minimal diversity at all.
You really need to visit this region to see how the stats don't tell you the whole story.
All of the county seats of Philadelphia's collar counties save Norristown (the county seat of Montgomery, the most populous of the four and the second-most-populous in the Commonwealth) are considered great and desirable places to live. Pennsylvania's metropolitan areas have good schools overall*, and the West Chester Area School District is considered one of the best. Its third and newest high school, Bayard Rustin**, usually ranks among the 20 best in the state — and it was built to serve the less-affluent part of the borough and its surrounding townships.
As far as what the "middle class" is, remember that the median household income in the United States is ~$63k per year. Many of the places you cite around Boston have MHIs that put them solidly in the upper middle class, the territory I call "affluent" usually. And given the Black percentages of the communities you posted above around Boston, I wouldn't knock Philly's 'burbs for lack of diversity were I you. (By the way, the Federal poverty line for a family of four is $28k per year; $41k may not be a princely sum but it's not poor either, and in this area, it will enable you to afford housing in acceptable neighborhoods. I wouldn't want to see what sorts of places you could live in around Boston or New York on that income.)
There's a little pocket of affluence four blocks from me in East Germantown; it also happens to be in my very much impoverished Census tract. It's an island of free-standing Victorians, Colonials and Dutch Colonials on tree-shaded streets amidst the kind of nearly-denuded rowhouse blocks you find so unpleasant (and I'm a crusader for TreePhilly, the city-sponsored program that aims to create a 30 percent tree canopy in every city neighborhood; Philadelphia's overall tree canopy of 20 percent is the lowest in the Northeast (including bosky DC here)). The people who live in these houses are overwhelmingly Black (though I've met at least one white resident of this pocket) and all affluent. Here's what our local public radio station wrote about my home neighborhood two years ago. The supermarket James Earl Davis mentions is the one three blocks from me — the result of the only play La Salle University, which sits on East Germantown's edge, could afford to run from the Penn Urban Revitalization Playbook — and Marc Lamont Hill and I are acquainted; here's what I wrote about the coffee shop and bookstore he owns shortly after it opened three years ago.
Meanwhile, three of those 12 murders that took place in East Germantown over the two years prior to that WHYY report took place at opposite ends of the block I live on.
I guess you could day it takes some intestinal fortitude to make it as a middle-class Black family in parts of Philadelphia, but for every East Germantown there's a West Oak Lane, where people do keep up their houses and take pride in their neighborhood. WOL is IMO a true middle-middle-class neighborhood, though I do see that its average household income is below the national median.
Up the road from both it and Mt. Airy is a neighborhood most people call Cedarbrook and whose residents hate it when they do: the Jews who first bought houses in this neighborhood when it was built right after World War II were told they were buying in Mt. Airy, and so were the Blacks who succeeded them. It too is what the academics now call a "middle neighborhood" — a community where the residents have incomes close to the national median but is facing stresses. (Yeah, I wrote about it too.)
Want to read what I wrote about the schools this past September? I might also point out that the #1 and #9 ranked high schools in Pennsylvania are both Philadelphia public high schools; the #1 ranked school almost always appears on the U.S. News Honor Roll of the nation's 50 best high schools, and the #9 ranked school, which I ride past whenever I head into Center City, has the most diverse student body of any public high school in the state. These are both college-prep schools that you have to meet minimum academic standards to get into (and win a lottery in the case of the higher-ranked one), but the kids who go to them didn't go to private or parochial schools — they just about all attended city public grade schools or public charter schools. This, I submit, should indicate that the public schools aren't as bad as the conventional wisdom says they are, and the two Anna Lingelbach parents (both white) who double-teamed me after church services one Sunday two years ago to tell me how great the school their kids attended was would probably agree with that statement. (Both their kids got into Masterman, that #1 ranked high school, which you generally have to enter in 6th grade or you won't get in at all; Central High School, the city's oldest, is the #9 ranked school. (I include one of those two parents in that article.)
Basically, if you just go by the numbers, you might dismiss Philly as a place where a middle-class Black family can do well. But you know what Mark Twain said about statistics, right? They can conceal as much as they reveal.
*Not so sure about the smaller rural districts, but the suburban schools are some of the nation's best, and as far as city schools are concerned, you can read that article.
**I was most pleased to hear at the time the district announced its construction that it was going to name that third high school for the openly gay Black Quaker, a West Chester native, who was the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and the power behind the throne in the Civil Rights Movement. I got to hear Rustin speak at a Black and White Men Together convention here a few years before he died in 1987.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 01-05-2021 at 08:12 PM..
And given the Black percentages of the communities you posted above around Boston, I wouldn't knock Philly's 'burbs for lack of diversity were I you.
What is this supposed to mean? Also, I'm still waiting for the list of Philly suburbs that are comparable to Randolph in terms of population, blackness, and income. If the Philly area is much better than the Boston area (as the poll suggests), then there must be quite a few comparable towns?
Great overview, as always, MSE. I stumbled upon this WHYY article on this very topic discussing Germantown specifically. A great trend that I really hope to see continue.
What is this supposed to mean? Also, I'm still waiting for the list of Philly suburbs that are comparable to Randolph in terms of population, blackness, and income. If the Philly area is much better than the Boston area (as the poll suggests), then there must be quite a few comparable towns?
They've already been mentioned uptrend.
Look, I think it's important to give credit where credit is due. The Boston area does better than most other areas as far as economic mobility for people of color; likely much better than many might think. But let's it's be real: it's still pretty darn segregated in terms of where Blacks tend to concentrate.
That's still true to a large extent in the Philly area, but decidedly less so, because you can simply find critical masses of black neighborhoods across more of the region simply due to the sheer scale of the black population overall. I know that when I personally visit the Philly area (in normal times) from Boston often that it's quite honestly one of the first things I notice when I'm out in public: more black people. My Boston area native wife acknowledges the very same observation.
Put it into perspective; the Philly area is literally more than twice as Black as the Boston area (20% vs 8%), and that includes a suburban County (Delaware) with 22%.
I've already shown how metro Boston's 58K black MHI translates, at the very least, as on par with metro Philly's 41K MHI for black households when adjusting for COL.
So to recap: over twice the population and the same income when adjusted for COL.
If you acknowledge a black middle-class in the Boston area, then by logical extension you definitely have to acknowledge it in the Philly area.
What is this supposed to mean? Also, I'm still waiting for the list of Philly suburbs that are comparable to Randolph in terms of population, blackness, and income. If the Philly area is much better than the Boston area (as the poll suggests), then there must be quite a few comparable towns?
There are a bunch of predominantly black, lower/straight middle class suburbs like Yeadon, Lansdowne, Sharon Hill and Collingdale next to SW Philadelphia and on the NJ side, Willingboro is predominantly black(68%) with a median household income over $75,000. Next to Willingboro, Burlington Township is 31% and has a median household income over $89,000. Nearby Westhampton Township is 23% and its MHHI is $109,527. There are others in PA and NJ, as well as in DE within the metro with towns at least 20% and middle class.
Where? I really do want municipality-level data for the Philly area rather than county-level.
Quote:
and that includes a suburban County (Delaware) with 22%.
I've been bopping around looking at census data, and it seems that the blackest places in Delco (like Chester [city], Upper Darby [township], and Darby [township]) tend to be very poor. Meanwhile, the wealthier areas (like Springfield [township], Radnor [township], the Providences [townships], and Haverford [township]) tend to be very white.
And yeah, it's true that Boston's biggest, blackest suburb (Brockton) also isn't super well off but Randolph is just as black percentage-wise and is aggressively middle class.
Milton, Holbrook, Malden, and Everett are all at least 15% black. The first is generally upper-middle class while the other 3 are generally lower-middle class.
There are a bunch of predominantly black, lower/straight middle class suburbs like Yeadon, Lansdowne, Sharon Hill and Collingdale next to SW Philadelphia and on the NJ side, Willingboro is predominantly black(68%) with a median household income over $75,000. Next to Willingboro, Burlington Township is 31% and has a median household income over $89,000. Nearby Westhampton Township is 23% and its MHHI is $109,527. There are others in PA and NJ, as well as in DE within the metro with towns at least 20% and middle class.
What is this supposed to mean? Also, I'm still waiting for the list of Philly suburbs that are comparable to Randolph in terms of population, blackness, and income. If the Philly area is much better than the Boston area (as the poll suggests), then there must be quite a few comparable towns?
Well, of the towns BostonBornMassMade listed, only Randolph, Milton, Avon and Stoughton had Black population shares above the national figure (we make up 12% of the country's population IIRC). Most of the other communities had Black population shares comparable to these:
Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County: 5.2% Black, MHI $136,288 (South Ardmore, which I mentioned in my most recent post, lies partly in this township)
Haverford Township, Delaware County: 3.1% Black, MHI $111,287 (the rest of South Ardmore lies in this township)
Radnor Township, Delaware County: 4.9% Black, MHI $127,161 (Wayne is its commercial center)
Tredyffrin Township, Chester County: 3.1% Black, MHI $136,429 (locus of the 1930s school-segregation fight)
Abington Township, Montgomery County: 11.1% Black, MHI $94,863
Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County: 34.6% Black, MHI $85,217
(Black History Note: This community also has a historically Black settlement dating back to the pre-Civil War days: La Mott, named for Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott. Camp William Penn, where one of the first regiments of U.S. Colored Troops trained for service in the Civil War, was located in this community as well)
Springfield Township, Montgomery County: 10.4% Black, MHI $104,417
Springfield Township, Delaware County: 1.2% Black, MHI $116,313
Media Borough, Delaware County seat: 6.1% Black, MHI $77,708
West Chester Borough, Chester County seat: 7.9% Black, MHI $61,837*
(What was it BBMM was saying about poverty here? Worth noting: West Chester is the only one of the four collar-county seats that's a college town: it's home to the oldest and largest of the 14 former state normal schools (teachers' colleges) that together comprise the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, West Chester University. The student population that counts the borough as its home probably also puts a dent in the MHI)
West Goshen Township, Chester County: 3.2% Black, MHI $101,452*
East Goshen Township, Chester County: 2.2% Black, MHI $86,358*
East Bradford Township, Chester County: 4.5% Black, MHI $129,452*
West Whiteland Township, Chester County: 4.8% Black, MHI $114,837*
Westtown Township, Chester County: 2.5% Black, MHI $119,177*
Thornbury Township, Delaware County: 7.5% Black, MHI $163,047*
*These municipalities, along with Thornbury Township, Chester County, comprise the West Chester Area School District. The Chester County Thornbury has a population less than the 5,000 required to be included in the Census Bureau's Quick Facts database.)
The county seats are clearly not as affluent as the suburban townships, but I'd say these places stack up against the Greater Boston communities in BBMM's list. (Doylestown Borough, the Bucks County seat, has a small black population share (1%), and Norristown, the Montgomery County seat, is not at all affluent (37.2% Black, MHI $48,414).)
There is no Greater Philly suburb that is both as affluent and as Black as Randolph, but as you see above, Cheltenham Township comes close. There is also no Philadelphia analogue for Cambridge, which isn't really a suburb but rather a separately incorporated part of the urban core and a college town to boot. For Boston to cover as much territory as Philadelphia (135 square miles), it would have to annex Cambridge, Brookline, Somerville, Everett, Chelsea, Newton and half of Winthrop. That would give the combined city a population of about 1.3 million, slightly below Philadelphia's 1.5 million.
In terms of educational attainment, Philadelphia (city and metro) remains below Boston's level. But the share of college-educated residents has been rising here of late.
You really need to visit this region to see how the stats don't tell you the whole story.
All of the county seats of Philadelphia's collar counties save Norristown (the county seat of Montgomery, the most populous of the four and the second-most-populous in the Commonwealth) are considered great and desirable places to live. Pennsylvania's metropolitan areas have good schools overall*, and the West Chester Area School District is considered one of the best. Its third and newest high school, Bayard Rustin**, usually ranks among the 20 best in the state — and it was built to serve the less-affluent part of the borough and its surrounding townships.
As far as what the "middle class" is, remember that the median household income in the United States is ~$63k per year. Many of the places you cite around Boston have MHIs that put them solidly in the upper middle class, the territory I call "affluent" usually. And given the Black percentages of the communities you posted above around Boston, I wouldn't knock Philly's 'burbs for lack of diversity were I you. (By the way, the Federal poverty line for a family of four is $28k per year; $41k may not be a princely sum but it's not poor either, and in this area, it will enable you to afford housing in acceptable neighborhoods. I wouldn't want to see what sorts of places you could live in around Boston or New York on that income.)
There's a little pocket of affluence four blocks from me in East Germantown; it also happens to be in my very much impoverished Census tract. It's an island of free-standing Victorians, Colonials and Dutch Colonials on tree-shaded streets amidst the kind of nearly-denuded rowhouse blocks you find so unpleasant (and I'm a crusader for TreePhilly, the city-sponsored program that aims to create a 30 percent tree canopy in every city neighborhood; Philadelphia's overall tree canopy of 20 percent is the lowest in the Northeast (including bosky DC here)). The people who live in these houses are overwhelmingly Black (though I've met at least one white resident of this pocket) and all affluent. Here's what our local public radio station wrote about my home neighborhood two years ago. The supermarket James Earl Davis mentions is the one three blocks from me — the result of the only play La Salle University, which sits on East Germantown's edge, could afford to run from the Penn Urban Revitalization Playbook — and Marc Lamont Hill and I are acquainted; here's what I wrote about the coffee shop and bookstore he owns shortly after it opened three years ago.
Meanwhile, three of those 12 murders that took place in East Germantown over the two years prior to that WHYY report took place at opposite ends of the block I live on.
I guess you could day it takes some intestinal fortitude to make it as a middle-class Black family in parts of Philadelphia, but for every East Germantown there's a West Oak Lane, where people do keep up their houses and take pride in their neighborhood. WOL is IMO a true middle-middle-class neighborhood, though I do see that its average household income is below the national median.
Up the road from both it and Mt. Airy is a neighborhood most people call Cedarbrook and whose residents hate it when they do: the Jews who first bought houses in this neighborhood when it was built right after World War II were told they were buying in Mt. Airy, and so were the Blacks who succeeded them. It too is what the academics now call a "middle neighborhood" — a community where the residents have incomes close to the national median but is facing stresses. (Yeah, I wrote about it too.)
Want to read what I wrote about the schools this past September? I might also point out that the #1 and #9 ranked high schools in Pennsylvania are both Philadelphia public high schools; the #1 ranked school almost always appears on the U.S. News Honor Roll of the nation's 50 best high schools, and the #9 ranked school, which I ride past whenever I head into Center City, has the most diverse student body of any public high school in the state. These are both college-prep schools that you have to meet minimum academic standards to get into (and win a lottery in the case of the higher-ranked one), but the kids who go to them didn't go to private or parochial schools — they just about all attended city public grade schools or public charter schools. This, I submit, should indicate that the public schools aren't as bad as the conventional wisdom says they are, and the two Anna Lingelbach parents (both white) who double-teamed me after church services one Sunday two years ago to tell me how great the school their kids attended was would probably agree with that statement. (Both their kids got into Masterman, that #1 ranked high school, which you generally have to enter in 6th grade or you won't get in at all; Central High School, the city's oldest, is the #9 ranked school. (I include one of those two parents in that article.)
Basically, if you just go by the numbers, you might dismiss Philly as a place where a middle-class Black family can do well. But you know what Mark Twain said about statistics, right? They can conceal as much as they reveal.
*Not so sure about the smaller rural districts, but the suburban schools are some of the nation's best, and as far as city schools are concerned, you can read that article.
**I was most pleased to hear at the time the district announced its construction that it was going to name that third high school for the openly gay Black Quaker, a West Chester native, who was the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and the power behind the throne in the Civil Rights Movement. I got to hear Rustin speak at a Black and White Men Together convention here a few years before he died in 1987.
Comparing PA to MA on schools and desirability is an L. Mass. is a notch above so I'm not terribly impressed by what's considered best for PA-maybe that is unfair. As ar as comparing top schools I'm sure you've heard of Boston Latin School- the number 1 high school in Massachusetts?. John D O'Bryant is 10th.
I do need to go to more of the middle-class black areas, but it's not like I have a surface view of Philly-I'm really over there, have been my entire life. You haven't been to Boston in a real way since the 1980s..
Comparing those incomes- at those black percentages-Philly doesn't really have black people living in areas that are that high income in that percentage AFAIK. Boston has a good number of very high-income black individuals scattered around the area, and its very white colar. I left off a few higher black percentages places of course because they're lower middle class or working class but not impoverished (Holbrook, Everett, Malden, Lynn, even Salem)
41k in Philly is basically poverty. COL is higher Philly than national and urban life, in general, is expensive. Why is Philly's median black income lower than many cheaper southern cities? It doesn't get a pass on that number. Not at all.
And i don't cosign the mark twain comment on statistics. you cant invalidate my stats while simultaneously pulling up your own stats about schools. And you cant invalidate objective stats on city-data
But 58k isn't middle class for black people in MA. Thats the median-half make more than that (this also is true for Philly of course). I had a subscription to social explorer and I believe the Median Black Family income for Suffolk County (Boston) was 76k. If I can find that number elsewhere I'll share it.
What your describing as affluent is more so what it takes to be middle-class MA (at least 70k but more like 90k up).
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