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Old 06-13-2017, 05:11 AM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
13,948 posts, read 8,808,399 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MB1562 View Post
You seem to base your perception of neighborhoods or cities off crime reports on TV news. No wonder you're such a paranoid suburbanite.

First of all, North Philly is much bigger then either Chester or Camden. Its a simple fact that more violent crime will happen with more people, so it'll get reported more often. Look up per-capita crime if you want a more realistic, fact-based comparison. Even when I lived in Chester (and I lived off campus in Sun Hill my last year) it wasn't all that bad. Common sense street smarts and staying on "your side" of I-95 made it perfectly fine for me and thousands of other little white suburban kids to go to school there.
I worked at Widener for about 18 months in 2006-07.

The blocks to the immediate north of the campus were where the money lived when Chester was a little industrial powerhouse. You can find some very grand homes on these blocks, some of them now Widener frat houses. (There are also a few of these right around the main gateway to the campus at 14th Street and Providence Avenue.)

Someone asked me last night about what might turn Chester around. (By the way, the person who asked this question didn't even know about the soccer stadium - "Who plays there? The Union plays there? Really?" - so that should indicate how well that worked as a spark plug for revitalization.) I told him that Widener was just about the city's only hope.

And Widener is definitely calling plays from the Penn Urban Revitalization Playbook, which John Fry co-wrote with Judith Rodin when she was Penn's President and he its chief operating officer (job title: Executive Vice President). Just about every university with two nickels to rub together hereabouts has taken a look at this playbook and attempted to run plays from it, with varying success. La Salle, being small and poorly endowed, ran only one play, but the Shoppes at La Salle has proved to be an asset to its surrounding neighborhood and probably made such renewal as I now see taking place around me in East Germantown more salable. Temple has run more plays than any other school to date besides Penn itself, but the school's execution has produced a lot of fumbles - the university hasn't done as well at getting the neighborhood around it to buy in to its vision as Penn has, and that may be because it didn't crib the get-the-faculty-and-staff-to-become-neighbors part of it. Of course, Fry's running Drexel now, and he's basically rerunning and revising the entire playbook as he sprints towards his ultimate goal of creating Philadelphia's second downtown, with Jerry Sweeney of Brandywine Realty Trust as his quarterback.

Widener, unfortunately, doesn't have as good a field to play on as the Philadelphia schools do. To get back to 1ondoner's original misassessment, the difference is this: Chester is Detroit and Philadelphia isn't. Chester's economy was built entirely on heavy industry - Sun Shipyard, the Ford plant, Scott Paper, et al. When it decamped, Chester had nothing else to draw on. Thus its decline was greater and more thorough than that of Philadelphia.

However, as has already been noted by PhilliesPhan2013 and others, the areas of Philadelphia that experienced the greatest decline and disinvestment over the decades since 1950 have also been the heavy-industry areas. The difference is that Philadelphia as a whole had other strong economic sectors - the "eds and meds" one of the biggies - that it could use as a base for renewal. As that renewal has taken hold and spread, it's filtering into the heavy industrial areas.

Chester, OTOH, is a sad and depressing place almost from border to border, the part of the city north of I-95 the one exception. It's in that part of the city, the part it calls home, that Widener has executed its plays. I haven't been through that area recently, but if the growth of the campus and student body are any guide, the plays are paying off modestly, at least for Widener if no one else yet, and that's a little bit of good news.

Quote:
Originally Posted by cpomp View Post
A) the news and media are garbage to begin with, so that is not worth a response.
Broadcast and "print" are different animals. If your main impression of a place comes from local TV news reports, at least in this market, you'd never leave the house.

But as Flyers Girl's brief survey shows, crime in Chester does get covered - but not by local broadcast TV. Instead, it's Delaware County's main daily newspaper that covers it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phillyfinest View Post
North Philly is North philly. Upper north philly is called Uptown. Nobody considers uptown as North philly. And yes , 80% of north philly is a dump besides Fairmount and Temple campus and a lil bit of Francisville. Thats not even 10% of North Philly.Spring Garden and Northern liberties arent considered North Philly nowadays.
The only time I've heard "Uptown" used in the 30-odd years I've lived here is to refer to a theater that sits atop Susquehanna-Dauphin subway station on the Broad Street Line. If it was ever used to refer to any part of North Philadelphia, it seems to have fallen by the wayside.

I think a more interesting distinction to note is whether a part of North Philly - which does indeed extend all the way from Vine Street to the city line at Cheltenham Avenue from Front Street west to the Schuylkill or the Germantown border - is referred to more by a specific neighborhood name or just as "North Philly." Older neighborhood names iike Sharswood, Swampoodle, Tioga, Nicetown, Fairhill, and even Strawberry Mansion got subsumed in the "North Philly" mélange during the years of decline, while Logan, Hunting Park, East and West Oak Lane, Olney and the more southerly neighborhoods (Northern Liberties, East and West Poplar, Spring Garden, Fairmount, Kensington and its constituent subdistricts) did not. The older neighborhood names appear to be making a comeback, and IMO that's a positive sign.


Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilliesPhan2013 View Post
Let me rephrase that, because you are exactly right. Brewerytown is quite nice in its southern (along Girard Avenue) and western (west of 29th Street) portions. Development is slowly creeping east, and new properties are starting to go up along 27th Street. I wouldn't be surprised if Brewerytown's revitalization picks up and most of it looks nice by the end of the decade. Brewerytown's success will partially be tied to the success of the PHA's Sharswood redevelopment plan since they border each other. The PHA should have never touched Sharswood as it was undoubtedly going to be the next neighborhood to experience revitalization, in my opinion. I'm already starting to see new development spilling over from Francisville to Templetown/Cecil B. Moore's southern fringes.
Don't hold your breath expecting real renewal to come out of what the PHA is up to in Sharswood. The whole Sharswood/Blumberg revitalization plan looks to me more like a classic case of PHA overreaching, insider dealing, and inability to follow through. The Sharswood land grab is a story I broke, and it's the one I most regret not following up on, especially after every other media outlet in the city jumped on it, drank the PHA Kool-aid, then went off elsewhere. I've gotten some information that leads me to believe that this story should be dusted off again.

What was wrong with the PHA's plan? In short, it choked off organic renewal just as it was beginning to creep into Sharswood. As long as it sits on some 1,000-plus parcels that it will not have the money to do anything with, any organic redevelopment will be forced around rather than through Sharswood. There's energy in the place - projects in that neighborhood walked away with two grand jury awards at this year's Preservation Alliance awards - but the PHA is sucking it into a hole rather than providing it.

(Yes, the development announced for the area around North Philadelphia Station is nothing but positive, as is the restoration of the Beury Building at the next major node to the north. Here's more evidence that North Philly is in better shape than Chester: that renewal is actually taking place now, and it's not dependent on the urban gentry making their way up Broad Street.)


Quote:
Also, I had to be very strict with the definition of North Philly for the sake of argument, although anything north of Vine, west of Front (and others), east of the Schuylkill, southwest of Cheltenham Avenue, and southeast of Roberts Avenue and Walnut Lane, along with some other border points, is considered to be North Philly. Even neighborhoods in "Greater Center City" geographically rest in North Philly.
Walnut Lane is too far northwest to draw that border - it's two-thirds of the way to Mount Airy from Wayne Junction, the Regional Rail station that sits on the border between Tioga and Germantown.

Wister Street and the southerly Stenton Avenue form the eastern border of the old Germantown Township and of Germantown Borough after it was reconstituted in the 1820s. That's your western border of North Philly above the Schuylkill. The Roosevelt Expressway can stand in for it south of where it crosses Wissahickon Avenue.

Someone mentioned not feeling unsafe walking around Cecil B. Moore - I think it was you. I've gone on at some length in another discussion on this forum about how most people in even rough neighborhoods aren't bothered by crime or violence and can move about them in safety and comfort. One of the keys is chaining your fear, which is probably irrational to begin with and exaggerated by what you see in the news reports. And I know I have violence for a neighbor - I've seen its residue and its aftermath around me - and I still say this. If you look like you know what you're doing and where you're going, nothing bad will happen, because trouble isn't looking for you in these places unless (it looks like) you're looking for it.
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Old 06-13-2017, 08:42 AM
 
Location: Philadelphia
12,000 posts, read 12,850,823 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilliesPhan2013 View Post


I have never heard a Philadelphian consider "Uptown" to not be part of North Philly. As Fireshaker mentioned, the same street grid is continuous throughout the entirety of North Philly. If people in "Uptown" seriously consider themselves separate from North Philly, then they have the same problem as some of the more pretentious people in Chestnut Hill: they are trying to make it seem that their neighborhood/section of the city is separate from that section or the city itself. I literally cringe when I hear people say "Chestnut Hill, PA", and would do the same if I saw "East Oak Lane, PA", for example.
When people say "Uptown" they usually just mean West Oak Lane, Mt. Airy, Wadsworth and Germantown. It is not North Philly-it is most accurately Northwest Philly. It is a recent thing (seems to have started when I was in Junior High/High School), but Olney and East Oak Lane are usually seen as separate-North Philly, but "not" North Philly.


http://www.urbandictionary.com/defin...ptown%20philly
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Old 06-13-2017, 01:37 PM
 
Location: North by Northwest
9,310 posts, read 12,903,822 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilliesPhan2013 View Post
I have never heard a Philadelphian consider "Uptown" to not be part of North Philly. As Fireshaker mentioned, the same street grid is continuous throughout the entirety of North Philly. If people in "Uptown" seriously consider themselves separate from North Philly, then they have the same problem as some of the more pretentious people in Chestnut Hill: they are trying to make it seem that their neighborhood/section of the city is separate from that section or the city itself. I literally cringe when I hear people say "Chestnut Hill, PA", and would do the same if I saw "East Oak Lane, PA", for example.

Anecdotally, I still feel like I'm in North Philly when I'm in "Uptown". When I am at Broad and Olney, I still feel like I'm in North Philly; when I'm at 66th and Ogontz Avenues, I still feel like I'm in North Philly; when I'm at 11th and Champlost, I still feel like I'm in North Philly; and when I'm at 2nd and Cheltenham, I still feel like I'm in North Philly. You haven't left North Philly until you either enter Cheltenham Township, East Mount Airy, Germantown, or Lawncrest.
I haven't heard "Uptown" either (and seldom, but increasingly hear "Downtown," probably due to the uptick in transplants). But terminologies change over time, and AFAIK, the areas of North Philadelphia "beyond" Upper North Philadelphia (Olney, Logan, and the Oak Lanes) referred to themselves by neighborhood name over cardinal direction well before the region had a stigma attached to it.

MarketStEl has pointed out time and again that "Northwest Philly" is a recent invention, and I was still palling around the Eastern Main Line when it came into vogue. Incidentally, 191xx zip codes have additional place names as "acceptable alternatives," including ones that no one really uses (e.g., 19103/"Middle City West"). 19118 isn't among them, though I'm sure a few blue-haired old ladies still write "Chestnut Hill, PA," anyway. There's increasing Philly pride as the old-money top-of-the-Hill WASP and more outwardly progressive, crunchy granola Mt. Airy cultures meld into an interesting middle ground. I feel perfectly at ease throughout Chestnut Hill today but would have felt far less welcome as recently as twenty years ago (except for the Market Square section, which was probably more diverse in the days of yore).
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Old 06-13-2017, 10:16 PM
 
Location: Dude...., I'm right here
1,763 posts, read 1,528,064 times
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Thanks for taking your time to put down your thoughts comprehensively and for sharing your insights of the Philly area.

I'll limit my response to the paragraph quoted below.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post

Widener, unfortunately, doesn't have as good a field to play on as the Philadelphia schools do. To get back to 1ondoner's original misassessment, the difference is this: Chester is Detroit and Philadelphia isn't. Chester's economy was built entirely on heavy industry - Sun Shipyard, the Ford plant, Scott Paper, et al. When it decamped, Chester had nothing else to draw on. Thus its decline was greater and more thorough than that of Philadelphia.
I disagree with the notion that Chester's fortunes are tied to the return of jobs to the area. No where has anyone said the same of North Philly, and in fact the gentrification of North Philly is based on the influx of new residents into the area. So why is this not the same for Chester?

It is now clear to me that the crime in Chester is as worse as North Philly on a per capita basis though it may seem lower in absolute numbers owing to the much smaller population of Chester.
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Old 06-14-2017, 12:03 AM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
13,948 posts, read 8,808,399 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ElijahAstin View Post
MarketStEl has pointed out time and again that "Northwest Philly" is a recent invention, and I was still palling around the Eastern Main Line when it came into vogue. Incidentally, 191xx zip codes have additional place names as "acceptable alternatives," including ones that no one really uses (e.g., 19103/"Middle City West"). 19118 isn't among them, though I'm sure a few blue-haired old ladies still write "Chestnut Hill, PA," anyway. There's increasing Philly pride as the old-money top-of-the-Hill WASP and more outwardly progressive, crunchy granola Mt. Airy cultures meld into an interesting middle ground. I feel perfectly at ease throughout Chestnut Hill today but would have felt far less welcome as recently as twenty years ago (except for the Market Square section, which was probably more diverse in the days of yore).
They're pretty fond of me at both the Chestnut Hill Business Improvement District and the Chestnut Hill Conservancy (nee Historical Society), and I absolutely love attending events they sponsor because they offer me wonderful Only-Black-Guy-in-the-Room experiences.

But the scene on the Avenue itself has indeed gotten much more multiculti in recent years. I note that whenever I head up that way to shop or run an errand (and often create an excuse to hang out briefly at the bar at Paris Bistro*).

Mt. Airy was and remains funkier than Chestnut Hill, but I think you're on to something when you say the two neighborhoods are sort of converging culturally. "CHill", as I often abbreviate it (when I explained why, I got a nice note in response from the head of the CHBID), is a far more urbane place than the neighborhood I laid eyes on 20 or so years ago.

*As you may or may not know, the Bynum brothers - they of Warmdaddy's on the Delaware riverfront, South in Spring Garden and Relish in West Oak Lane - are co-owners of Paris along with its eponymous chef, and the restaurant's live jazz room downstairs is one of their signature elements. This is the third restaurant the pair have operated in Chestnut Hill and one of two they run now (the third, the much-praised BYOB Heirloom, closed a couple of years ago).
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Old 06-14-2017, 12:11 AM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
13,948 posts, read 8,808,399 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 1ondoner View Post
Thanks for taking your time to put down your thoughts comprehensively and for sharing your insights of the Philly area.

I'll limit my response to the paragraph quoted below.



I disagree with the notion that Chester's fortunes are tied to the return of jobs to the area. No where has anyone said the same of North Philly, and in fact the gentrification of North Philly is based on the influx of new residents into the area. So why is this not the same for Chester?

It is now clear to me that the crime in Chester is as worse as North Philly on a per capita basis though it may seem lower in absolute numbers owing to the much smaller population of Chester.
The part of my comment outlining the difference between Chester and North Philly that you glossed over is the "nothing else to draw on" part. Philadelphia did have something else to draw on as a source of jobs - the sectors that make up the "Bos" of Brookings' "Bostroit" - and the people slowly trickling into those North Philadelphia neighborhoods are by and large employed in those sectors.

Chester's "eds and meds" consist of the Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland, outside the city, and Widener University. Both are relatively small players in their respective universes, and together the two aren't strong or large enough to build a new jobs base the way Philly's universities and hospitals have been. And Philadelphia has other professional sectors that didn't flee the city: law firms, large banks (even after their acquisition by outsiders), major media corporations (coughComcastcough), insurance companies (don't forget who was One and Two Liberty Place's original anchor tenant). None of these exist in or near Chester. That's the difference.
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Old 06-14-2017, 08:14 AM
 
333 posts, read 278,717 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 1ondoner View Post
I disagree with the notion that Chester's fortunes are tied to the return of jobs to the area. No where has anyone said the same of North Philly, and in fact the gentrification of North Philly is based on the influx of new residents into the area. So why is this not the same for Chester?
Because the real issue is *proximity* to jobs. There was a recent article, I forget where, but it detailed how the MFL has spurred so much development in the River Wards, especially in greater Fishtown / Kensington, simply because potential residents enjoy the convenience of having a one-seat, rapid transit ride into Center City. So much so that the EL, which was never built to handle that kind of traffic, is now straining to keep up.

The same opportunity is now awaiting North Philly. There aren't a ton of jobs in North Philly itself, but with the BSL, which is an even bigger and badder subway line, it's remarkably close to where the jobs are. Mere minutes, in some cases. That's the difference. North Philly benefits from the existing infrastructure and transit, which make it incredibly convenient. Again, it's location.

The same can't be said for Chester. What is Chester near? What economic opportunities would someone be better poised to take advantage of by living there? The answer is, right now, virtually none. As MSE points out, Widener and Crozer-Chester aren't enough by themselves, and Chester itself is not particularly convenient to a lot of job centers, Center City included. That doesn't make it very desirable. Could that change? Sure, if jobs come there or if someone finds a way to better connect it to surrounding job centers. But that's a long ways off, while North Philly already has a lot of what it needs right now.
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Old 06-15-2017, 06:07 PM
 
Location: Villanova Pa.
4,927 posts, read 14,159,739 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fireshaker View Post

The same can't be said for Chester. What is Chester near?
Swarthmore College
Media County Seat
Neumann College
Septa Chester -Wilmington-Newark Rail Line.
Wilmington
Navy Yard
Airport which generates 150,000 jobs.
Boeing
Kimberly Clark
Harrahs
State Prison.
Thousands of blue collar oil + gas jobs in neighboring Marcus Hook, Trainer,Claymont .
Chester is also located in the 4th wealthiest county in Pennsylvania. Delco has a thriving economy

Chester is tiny in comparison to North Philadlephia. If the powers to be in Delaware County wanted to gentrify Chester they could do it rather quickly. Much quicker than sprawling North Philly could ever dream of.


But right now Chester is taboo and apparently better kept at arms length from the rest of Delco.
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Old 06-15-2017, 08:55 PM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
13,948 posts, read 8,808,399 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rainrock View Post
Swarthmore College
Media County Seat
Neumann College
Septa Chester -Wilmington-Newark Rail Line.
Wilmington
Navy Yard
Airport which generates 150,000 jobs.
Boeing
Kimberly Clark
Harrahs
State Prison.
Thousands of blue collar oil + gas jobs in neighboring Marcus Hook, Trainer,Claymont .
Chester is also located in the 4th wealthiest county in Pennsylvania. Delco has a thriving economy

Chester is tiny in comparison to North Philadlephia. If the powers to be in Delaware County wanted to gentrify Chester they could do it rather quickly. Much quicker than sprawling North Philly could ever dream of.


But right now Chester is taboo and apparently better kept at arms length from the rest of Delco.
Perhaps.

But of the places you list, only three are in Chester itself, and while I understand that there are small towns in the T that rely on the local prison to hang on, I'm not sure it would be that great a stimulus for a city of 30,000.

The refineries in Trainer and Marcus Hook could support a solid blue-collar middle class, and Boeing in Eddystone (which is itself in pretty decent shape) could support a blue-collar aristocracy (which may account for Eddystone's overall better appearance and condition). (Or is Boeing in Ridley? If so, then Ridley Park, which is the nicest of the communities along the R2 Wilmington line.)

But gentrify Chester off these? The rest are too far away to have the sort of spillover effect Center City Philadelphia is having on North Philly, and of the places you list, I'd say that only Media, Wilmington and Neumann College have significant amounts of professional jobs that require the sort of advanced credentials that boost wages into the urban-gentry zone.

To have the sort of spillover effect we're seeing in North Philly, the jobs would need to be in one of the following communities other than Chester itself:

Brookhaven Borough
Chester Township
Eddystone Borough
Nether Providence Township
Parkside Borough
Ridley Township
Trainer Borough
Upland Borough

and maybe

Marcus Hook Borough

In other words, they'd need to border Chester or be located only a short distance away, for the professionals who drive the sort of gentrification you have in mind are also into walkability and having the amenities close at hand. Give them walkability and they will take care of the amenities. Most of the places on your list are not walkable from Chester.
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Old 06-16-2017, 09:09 AM
 
Location: New York City
9,339 posts, read 9,200,501 times
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Not to mention Chester public schools, which I believe are ranked lower than Philadelphia. You have school districts literally down the road (Rose Tree Media, Penn Delco, Wallingford-Swarthmore, Ridley, etc.) that are good to excellent, that is another reason why people would never move to Chester.


I think both above posts are correct. Much of Delco does not want anything to do with Chester and would rather give it to Philadelphia then deal with it, and on the other hand and major source of jobs whether blue or white collar are not really close to Chester so there would be no spillover of work or residents into the city.
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