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Chestnut Hill and Overbrook Farms are suburbs that are within the boundries of Philadelphia.
(emphasis added)
A couple of you have beaten up on this poor (fellow | gal) for writing this sentence, which you clearly misread.
By "suburbs" here the poster is referring to the spatial character of the neighborhoods, not their political status.
On that scale, Chestnut Hill and Overbrook Farms are both suburban in character (they're also both National Register Historic Districts, but that's not really relevant to this discussion, though that fact does attest to their uniqueness and importance).
So is most of the Northeast, which I usually refer to as "our vast in-city suburb." (Pssst! You'll find these in other Northeast cities too: Boston has West Roxbury and Hyde Park, New York has Staten Island and eastern Queens.)
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I know Philadelphia is improving, look at my previous statements but thats not the point. You can point out all the exceptions but it still stands that a lot of North Philly like Strawberry Mansion, Tioga Nicetown, and Fairhill are a long way from being close to Spring Garden or Nothern Liberties. A lot of West Philly outside of University city like West Parkside, A neighborhood with really beautiful architecture, are still in terrible shape and are getting worse.
I'm not sure I'm willing to follow you with that "getting worse" part about Parkside (I don't believe it's called "West Parkside" if the area I'm thinking about is the area you're thinking of).
Many of those beer barons' mansions along Parkside Avenue have been restored; they were in much worse shape in the 1980s.
And there are signs of renewal and development in several of those neighborhoods, in particular Tioga-Nicetown, but Strawberry Mansion too (Eastern Garage, e.g.)
And that brings me to Germantown, the neighborhood I call home, which you mentioned in passing.
You need to pay a visit.
First, overall, Northwest Philadelphia (Germantown, Mt. Airy and Chestnut Hill, above the Wissahickon, are usually what people are referring to with that phrase, but technically, it also includes Roxborough and Manayunk on the other side) is as much a world apart from the rest of the city as Northeast Philadelphia is, but IMO in a good way (I've heard stories of Northeast residents who talked about never venturing into the center of the city as though it were a badge of honor - and FTR, I lived off Oxford Circle for 18 months - and while this is changing, and fast, a good chunk of the Northeast's older residents are the people who moved up there to get away from Them; that's why we don't have the Roosevelt Boulevard subway now and quite likely will never get it even though Northeast residents want it now).
The three core neighborhoods have loads of character (and a healthy tree canopy, a feature not found in many other Philadelphia neighborhoods) and diverse populations (I would say Germantown is the most socioeconomically diverse neighborhood in the city). Germantown adds a bunch of history (including the only Revolutionary War battle fought within the present-day city limits) to the mix.
And there are signs of reinvestment and renewal in Germantown (which is not as bedraggled as those North Philly neighborhoods you mentioned) too: I live in one of the neighborhood's poorer sections, on its eastern edge, near La Salle University, and on the blocks around me, I can now point to seven vacant and abandoned homes being rebuilt (not counting the house next door to my own, whose owner I met last Saturday, about six months after he finished rehabbing it to the point where he could move in with his girlfriend). And the parallel streets to the north of me are all in very good shape, with rowhouses that are rough contemporaries of those immediately adjacent to Oxford Circle on tree-lined streets, two of which have landscaped medians that are well maintained (probably by the neighbors, because I doubt Parks and Rec or Streets gets around to them that often). Over in the central business district, the Germantown United CDC is set to launch a makeover of Maplewood Mall, a one-block lane just south of Chelten Avenue (the main shopping street, on which I live) lined with small shops and art galleries, and they're working on strategies to renew the main shopping streets themselves.
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Originally Posted by cpomp
Not totally... I wrote Chris Friend a lengthy reply to his article though. I dissected it by each paragraph, I would like to see if he responds.
Please let us know if and when he does. He has some good points, but (like most of his stuff) he goes way overboard in his criticism. Boston's mass transit system's in great shape? Snow is a regular occurrence every winter in Boston. A much larger blizzard than the one that brought the MBTA to its knees this past winter, knocking out the entire rapid transit and commuter rail system for nearly a week, blew through in 1978 and shut things down totally for only the day after it was over. And I'm glad he didn't say a thing about the Washington Metro, for I would have laughed him out of the room if he tried calling that system in great shape.
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Originally Posted by phillytransplant13
Chestnut Hill, Overbrook Farms and other outlier neighborhoods are not suburbs, no matter how you put it. Any neighborhood within the city limits is Philadelphia. It really irritates me when people say "oh that's not the city" when referring to these neighborhoods. It's simple geography.
No; as I wrote above, it's not just geography, it's urban form. I can think of a few suburban communities that are more urban in form than Overbrook Farms, for instance: Media, Doylestown and Collingswood, to name three.
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Originally Posted by PhilliesPhan2013
I see a market for the area bounded by 33rd, Oxford, Glenwood, Ridge, and Diamond. This is one area that I am paying close attention to, as I have my eye on certain properties after I graduate college next year and attempt to establish myself as a Philly real estate developer. I believe that this will be the first area of Strawberry Mansion to be revitalized as Brewerytown chugs along!
I think I may have said this to you before, but please keep me posted on your progress. You might even rate a "Who's Building Philly" profile once you really get going. And I believe you said you were African American, and I'd love to feature a few more black developers and builders in that department on "Property". (Relevant aside: I'm working on an article about Jumpstart Germantown, the program Ken Weinstein, Northwest Philly's largest developer/property manager, launched to teach youth from disadvantaged backgrounds the fundamentals of real estate development; four of the houses being rehabbed around the corner from me are being rebuilt by program graduates.)
Oh, and: The Eastern Garage project, which I mentioned above, is within the boundaries of that triangle you mention.
"Suburbs that are within the boundaries of Philadelphia" makes no sense. Call them what you want, but as long as I pay city taxes and write Philadelphia, PA on snail mail I won't consider the Northwest (or other chunks of Philadelphia) to be a vast swath of "suburbs". Whether or not the word suburb was used loosely or not by the OP, it's an incorrect way to depict these neighborhoods and leads to general misunderstanding by not only visitors but people who have lived here their whole life.
I get that the vibe for some of these neighborhoods might be suburban-like, and that not only geography comes into play when people "feel" that they're outside of Philadelphia. But I think it's insulting to those that live there (ok, it's insulting to me, but I can't be the only one right?).
"Suburbs that are within the boundaries of Philadelphia" makes no sense. Call them what you want, but as long as I pay city taxes and write Philadelphia, PA on snail mail I won't consider the Northwest (or other chunks of Philadelphia) to be a vast swath of "suburbs". Whether or not the word suburb was used loosely or not by the OP, it's an incorrect way to depict these neighborhoods and leads to general misunderstanding by not only visitors but people who have lived here their whole life.
I get that the vibe for some of these neighborhoods might be suburban-like, and that not only geography comes into play when people "feel" that they're outside of Philadelphia. But I think it's insulting to those that live there (ok, it's insulting to me, but I can't be the only one right?).
You're probably not the only one, but the word has two distinct meanings, one political, the other physical, and both are valid.
As I said above, urban scholars use "suburb" to refer to physical form as well as political status: for instance, "streetcar suburb" is a common phrase. University City gets referred to with this phrase often, as that describes its evolution perfectly. The term originated with the title of Sam Bass Warner's influential 1963 book Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth and Development in Metropolitan Boston. The Boston neighborhoods described in the book lie largely in the section of the city known as Dorchester, which was a separate town until it was annexed to Boston sometime in the 1870s. They are, as Chestnut Hill is, within the present-day City of Boston, but the label was applied to them because of their pattern of development.
And nobody would confuse Chestnut Hill, Spruce Hill, Dorchester or Rhawnhurst for, say, Upper Makefield or Levittown. (Some might confuse Chestnut Hill for Bryn Mawr, though, and there the political status is a relevant distinction.)
The author is a professor of history at Chestnut Hill College.
I don't live in the neighborhood - I'm downhill from it, in Germantown, a community in its own right at the time of consolidation in 1854 - but several of the people who run its civic institutions and its largest commercial landlord all know me, in large part from the reporting I've done on the neighborhood. I don't think too many of them would disagree with this characterization of the place, even though the business district there is now way more urbane (note final "e" on the end) than it was when I moved here in 1983.
Most people I know can grasp both senses of the term and not regard them as incompatible. That's why we can have both this book and David Rusk's Cities Without Suburbs. (Rusk is a former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., which is one such city.)
Same here. In fact for me it's insulting to the city to call it a "suburb".
FWIW, I consider the use of modifiers before the word "unique" a grave offense, and I've gone postal on some people who've done that in conversations or correspondence with me.
I've since learned that grammarians and dictionary editors do consider this acceptable now, and that the word has a second sense that's closer to "distinct," "exceptional" or "unusual" than to the original sense of "one of a kind" or "like nothing else".
So I've dialed down my outrage.
I'd like to suggest you do the same here. You may consider it an insult, but the people who use this terminology, as I've shown here, are not committing an error. It's not like assuming that Kansas City is in Kansas.
In the political and geographic sense Chestnut Hill is a part of Philadelphia. I think it would be reasonable to describe Chestnut Hill's physical attributes as suburban. Most houses have front yards and many streets don't have sidewalks. A lot of houses were built by industrialists who wanted clean air away from Philadelphia and commuted by railway thus making it a streetcar suburb.
If you want to define urban as anything within city limits and suburban as anything just outside of city limits rather than their physical attributes thats fine but it seems like defining development like that is a of product of having an "us verse them mentality" rather than looking at physical attributes. An urban environment should be walk-able and dense. Chestnut hill is neither. I have seen neighborhoods on the mainline that have more sidewalks and are just as dense like Narberth. Would you call Narberth suburban or urban.
In the political and geographic sense Chestnut Hill is a part of Philadelphia. I think it would be reasonable to describe Chestnut Hill's physical attributes as suburban. Most houses have front yards and many streets don't have sidewalks. A lot of houses were built by industrialists who wanted clean air away from Philadelphia and commuted by railway thus making it a streetcar suburb.
If you want to define urban as anything within city limits and suburban as anything just outside of city limits rather than their physical attributes thats fine but it seems like defining development like that is a of product of having an "us verse them mentality" rather than looking at physical attributes. An urban environment should be walk-able and dense. Chestnut hill is neither. I have seen neighborhoods on the mainline that have more sidewalks and are just as dense like Narberth. Would you call Narberth suburban or urban.
I understood what you meant, and I think the term you are searching for is the "inner city". Which is defined as:
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the area near the center of a city, especially when associated with social and economic problems
Do I think the inner city ghettos will ever fully gentrify? No and they haven't all the way in the cities you mentioned either. It will take a societal change for that to happen. The best we can do right now, imo, is to increase education levels and intelligence so people are more capable of intra-generational mobility.
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