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Someone with $600k for a house moving to PHilly from NYC looking for a good, diverse urban experience and recommending ANY PLACE IN THE NORTHEAST... would be like someone from Philly having $2million to spend in NYC, looking for a cool diverse urban place...and a poster from there recommending Staten Island (no offense to SI).
As an aside, not to derail the thread - the NE offers ALL of the "life in the big city" problems (crime, congestion, bad schools, filth) with almost NONE of the benefits (walkability, culture, convenience, access to regionally iconic amenities/locales, haute cuisine). I also find the residents to be the MOST Negadelphian, generally angry, and, in my own experience, more racist than your average Mid-Atlantic/New England bear. Other than that, it's paradise.
(Siiigh) Well.... You're wrong. I grew up in Philly and can tell you that your opinion of it being racist and negadelphian was 100% true....30 years ago. I'd say now it's about 60%.
Sorry, but that's not going anywhere as much as North Philly residents and attitudes are going to leave because of gentrification in certain areas of it. (i.e. Spring Garden/Fairmount/Liberties/Fishtown/Brewerytown /Kensington, etc Northeast will become a declining crime ridden hood just a much as N. Philly will become One Giant Fairmount....Not happening. There's probably 3 bad areas that fit that description but about a dozen that don't and not even section 8 can penetrate that.
As far as the Staten Island remark., you might be right but I've always felt it was more in-line with Long Island and when my family and friends back in LA where I've recently resided for two decades, ask am I in West Philly, I describe NE as Philly's version of "The Valley." For me, being older with teens, I like Northeast and feel that since it's the largest section of the city, that it has lot's to offer and lot's of diversity that just wasn't there 20-25 years ago....Do many of the former residents dislike that? I'm sure they do and I don't blame for the way some of the lower areas heading towards the river wards have turned.
If I decide to plant roots permanently in Philly, I just may choose one of the upper NE neighborhoods because I like the fact that it's a bit suburban within city limits and is very walkable in most parts. Having kids who are into sports, and hiking, as well as the arts. It seems that nice spacious homes with yards and lawns, and pretty parks and ball fields would work well for my family. I did a walk thru on a single-gated 2 story 4 Bdrm with front & back yard and master bedroom balcony, pool (2800 sq feet) for $380K.. As much as I like brownstones, etc; I'm tired of folks right next-door to me...I went to a friend's church potluck. He attends one that meets at the Philadelphia Mills.., anyway the people who attend there seemed to reflect the area, very multi-cultural families from various places from other states as well as other countries , and they weren't factory or dock workers.... I think your speculations are a bit dated.
I haven't checked in the last few years but I know a few years ago that the effective acceptance rate (with the lottery in place) by like 1st grade for both schools was something like 95% - only 1 or 2 kids who wanted to go...couldn't. A lot of kids, even in these catchments end up going to private school anyways, plus natural outflow migration - means there's generally a seat for everyone. In other words, it's a bit of a bogeyman that drives crazy clicks. Anyone have the current numbers/experience?
Mmh-you may be right. I only remember one article about the situation-which was presented as dire, but then have not heard anything else. That would be great if true.
The OP said it was a possibility not a certainty. Hopefully she will come back and clarify it.
The company I work for is about to open a position that has a great opportunity to be remote. It's up to them however. But if it isn't I would consider looking for a job in Philly. I really can't see myself commuting four hours every day to the city.
That's exactly correct. It's a very stable neighborhood, been that way for years, and has only gotten better over time. I live in an adjacent neighborhood, Spring Garden, so you might want to look there as well. There are newly constructed townhouses, (you did mention being interested in a house) that's part of the Museum Towers complex on N. 19th. St
Most of the new construction I know about near me are condos or rentals though. Older buildings, like the Philadelphian(a landmark in Fairmount), are almost impossible to get into.
One observation. I see NY license plates all the time in Philly nowadays. I'm sure lots of those are not the result of day trips! They're checking things out re moving.
I'm looking for a place to retire to, for the last time (I've moved over 15 times in my lifetime and I'm tired of that). I'm a city girl by heart and would like to live in Philly in a neighborhood with a downtown vibe. I've been to Philadelphia a few times in the late 80's-90's and have lived a long time in both NYC and Washington, DC. I don't plan to work and can afford a decent rent ($1200 max including utilities). Is that doable in a decent neighborhood there?
I'll check out Spring Garden and Fairmount listings for apartment rentals. I don't want to own a home; just rent and I don't plan to own a car or drive -- just rent, if a car is needed, or take public transport or Uber. Can you recommend an agency for apartment rentals? Any help and guidance would be much appreciated.
I am from Sheepshead Bay myself so whatup Brooklyn! I agree with the post above, don't move to the Northeast. Those Google street views don't look that great anyway, and you will be very far from Center City and the subway.
Fitler Square is a great area. There is the awesome Schuylkill River Trail nearby, Rittenhouse is walking distance, tons of trees and vibrancy. I would say it is a lot like Park Slope for comparison. Fairmount and Spring Garden are other solid choices. I'd say those neighborhoods are sorta like the area around Dekalb/Fulton St, near Brooklyn Tech HS which is where I went. I live in Fishtown, which is gentrification central, so think (at this point) Bushwick or Bed-Stuy.
Heyyyyy lol Sheepshead wow not far from me at all, thanks for these comparisons.
I'm looking for a place to retire to, for the last time (I've moved over 15 times in my lifetime and I'm tired of that). I'm a city girl by heart and would like to live in Philly in a neighborhood with a downtown vibe. I've been to Philadelphia a few times in the late 80's-90's and have lived a long time in both NYC and Washington, DC. I don't plan to work and can afford a decent rent ($1200 max including utilities). Is that doable in a decent neighborhood there?
I'll check out Spring Garden and Fairmount listings for apartment rentals. I don't want to own a home; just rent and I don't plan to own a car or drive -- just rent, if a car is needed, or take public transport or Uber. Can you recommend an agency for apartment rentals? Any help and guidance would be much appreciated.
Philadelphia has changed significantly since you were last here. It might be useful to look at the philly.curbed website to familiarize yourself with what is going on with various options.
You might also want to look in S. Philly. Some great neighborhoods that might fit your budget.
It's a mixed bag wrt public schools. A lot of it has to do with funding which is actually better than it has been in a long time. The School District of Philadelphia is not locally controlled by the city, btw. The state, essentially, controls the district via the, so-called, School Reform Commission.
Since you are in Fairmount(I'm in Spring Garden), maybe you might have some insight into Bache-Martin elementary.
One of the best high schools in the state, for example Masterman, is part of the SD of P but extremely selective and hard to get into.
Fairmount might, indeed, be a good choice for you, OP. Lots of families, amenities, etc. Again the whole commute to Manhattan may swing you against moving. There are people who live in Philly who do commute to NYC though.
Anyone else here recall a Philadelphia magazine cover story titled "Being White in Philly"?
That article was the cover feature in the May 2013 issue. When I read it, I had two reactions.
One was, "This has D. Herbert Lipson's fears written all over it." (D. Herbert Lipson is the guy who bought Philadelphia from the Chamber of Commerce in the 1960s and turned it into what it is today. He no longer runs the company - his son Dave does now - but he has an editorial on the first inside page of every issue called "Off the Cuff." Read it and you will quickly reach the conclusion that this area is still going to hell in a handbasket. His fears are more than a little racial in nature. His son is blessedly unburdened by them.)
The other was, "This should have been titled 'Fear and Loathing in Fairmount.'" Its main subject I would characterize as tensions between oldtimers (white), new arrivals (mostly ditto) and near neighbors (not white) in the neighborhood. Bache-Martin Elementary has a cameo role, but most of it is of the crime-and-violence stuff.
It was because of that article, btw, that I got an in at the mag.
Regarding Masterman: remove "one of" from that sentence - it's the best high school in the state, period. It is also the only high school in Pennsylvania to regularly appear in or near the top 50 schools in U.S. News' annual rankings of "America's Best High Schools." But it is a citywide magnet, as is second-best-in-the-city Central (which is also a top-20 high school statewide).
kyb01's description of Fairmount is more accurate than that cover story's was.
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Originally Posted by TheBklynWay
Schools in New York are also a toss up. Better neighborhoods have the best schools. If your kid is really smart and you do the leg work you can get them into a decent school though. Getting my daughter into a decent middle school was a headache but I know there's more freedom with choosing a High School.
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Originally Posted by KansastoSouthphilly
I would look into Mt. Airy in NW Philly. The area is proud of its diversity and, for the most part, people get along well. My neighbor a few houses down recently moved here with her kids from Brooklyn and loves it. You can find a very nice house for well under $600k. However, the public schools are just "ok" at best but there are very good private schools nearby if that is something you are willing to consider.
I've started collecting a mental file that I've labeled "the public schools aren't as bad as everyone says they are." It consists mainly of positive comments from parents of children in schools in the "Greater Center City" neighborhoods they've moved to and become active in supporting. These include Andrew Jackson in Hawthorne, George Nebinger (just below Meredith) in Queen Village/Southwark, Chester Arthur in Graduate Hospital, Kearny in Northern Liberties and the aforementioned Bache-Martin. There is an active citywide network of "Friends of" groups whose mission is to provide the schools with the resources they can't get from tax revenues or 440 North Broad Street. (BTW, something that I don't think is widely known is that management of the schools has been decentralized to a great extent; most of their principals enjoy a great deal of autonomy, and there's all sorts of surplus space now at 440, itself now a financial albatross around the School District's neck.) If you're at all interested in making public education in Philadelphia great again, you might want to check out the Friends of Neighborhood Education, a project of the Philadelphia Crosstown Coalition, an alliance of some 40-odd neighborhood and civic organizations with a stake in making the city a better place to live.
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Originally Posted by Lenses & Lights.
There are also other neighborhoods in the city, such as this one in Northeast. I am looking for a place for my parents on one of these blocks, just a short walk from Castor Avenue which has many amenities.
I love the choices for food shopping and dining that ranges from Brazilian, Mexican, Russian, Jamaican, Dominican, Columbian, Vietnamese, Chinese,Italian, etc; and the face of this muti-cultral community reflects it.... There are 24hr bus lines that run to the El that heads to Center City, West Philly/U-City, and Upper Darby
Here's another view a couple of miles down Castor Ave, closer to where I live but just a bit more seedy but has more amenities within close range. It's kool for me as I am single and my kids are older and reside in another state. The first GMap photo will probably work better for your family as it's a bit more residential,
The next is farther up Roosevelt Blvd and Byberry Rd area... Even more residential and older residents but very close to I-95 and multiple bridges heading across the river to the Jersey Turnpike.
So you live in Castor Gardens/Oxford Circle?
The 18 months I spent as an Oxford Circle resident were an eye-opener.
You can still find remnants of the old Northeast, the vast in-city suburb that many white ethnics (mainly but not entirely Italian and Irish) moved to to get away from Them, throughout the district, but much of it has become a little United Nations, and few parts more so than Castor Gardens/Oxford Circle/Rhawnhurst.
24/7 transit service to this district, however, is inconvenient: it consists mainly of the 14 bus up Roosevelt Boulevard. Everything else disappears between 1:30 and 5 a.m.
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Originally Posted by PHLondoner
If good public schools are what you're looking for - then it simplifies neighborhood selections considerably. The 3 best public school options are Meredith, Penn Alexander, and Greenfield.
For 600k - you could buy a truly, beautiful victorian 3000sf house with 5bedrooms in the Penn Alexander catchment in a 'hood called Spruce Hill. It's incredibly diverse, has one of the largest parks in the city (Clark Park) and a booming family/children population. Penn Alexander is a public school but has a partnership with UPenn and it's, in a word, phenomenal. The neighborhood is gorgeous victorians under 100year old oak trees. Example: https://www.trulia.com/property/3274...lphia-PA-19104
600k will also buy you a 3br house in Queen Village/Bella Vista east - which gets you into the wonderful catchment of Meredith. Super markets (whole foods, super fresh), diversity, tons of nightlife and restaurants - access to Italian market, tons of kids are all pluses. A little lighter on the park space front, however. Example: https://www.trulia.com/property/3269...lphia-PA-19147
The last option is Greenfield - which is Fitler Square/Rittenhouse square area. It's a bit trickier b/c you'll get a lot less house for 600k here, but imo (I live here) it's the best urban 'hood in the city - and one of the best urban areas anywhere, period. Both Squares (Fitler and Rittenhouse), access to the riverfront parks (Markward, Schulykill River Park) - countless amenities, access to Center City shopping/nightlife, etc. Its also beautiful and safe. NOt sure what you'll get for 600k outside of a very small (1000sf rowhome)?
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Originally Posted by PHLondoner
To the OP, don't move to the Northeast.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PHLondoner
Someone with $600k for a house moving to PHilly from NYC looking for a good, diverse urban experience and recommending ANY PLACE IN THE NORTHEAST... would be like someone from Philly having $2million to spend in NYC, looking for a cool diverse urban place...and a poster from there recommending Staten Island (no offense to SI).
As an aside, not to derail the thread - the NE offers ALL of the "life in the big city" problems (crime, congestion, bad schools, filth) with almost NONE of the benefits (walkability, culture, convenience, access to regionally iconic amenities/locales, haute cuisine). I also find the residents to be the MOST Negadelphian, generally angry, and, in my own experience, more racist than your average Mid-Atlantic/New England bear. Other than that, it's paradise.
1. Schools. You left out a couple that are definitely in the same class as Nebinger/Greenfield/Penn Alexander: George McCall in Society Hill, which children in Wash West and Chinatown also attend (the latter are the reason the school has excellent Chinese language and culture programs) and Samuel Powel in Powelton Village (drawback: the parents have to go school-shopping when their kids enter 5th grade). As for the rest, there are groups in parts of the city (Mt. Airy most notably) that stage tours for real estate agents to showcase what's really going on in their local schools. You may consider this a form of excuse-making, but there are a growing number of parents who argue that those standardized tests on which so many school rankings hang don't accurately capture everything that students do and learn in a school. Some of those parents whose comments go into that mental file I mentioned consider having teachers who care and a diverse community of learners assets in themselves, and if the school enjoys the active involvement of parents and the community (in contrast to Home and School Associations [the Philadelphia equivalent of the PTA], residents need not have kids in a school to join its "Friends of" group), it may actually prepare kids for what comes later just as well as those schools with the stellar test scores. Grades for individual students are often better predictors of how they do in college and later in life than standardized test scores are.
2. The Northeast. We get it; you hate the Northeast. I didn't like the Northeast you describe either, but that Northeast is disappearing, and faster than you think (and the oldtimers would like). Some of the people active in performing the disappearing act are themselves children of the Northeast, like Mike Scotese ("Scoats"), the owner of the Grey Lodge Public House at Mayfair's southern tip ("giving Northeast-haters one less reason to hate the Northeast since 1997" and once dubbed one of the 50 best bars in the country), the Hop Angel Brauhaus in Fox Chase and a bar in Port Richmond whose name escapes me now (he's a really good guy, salt of the earth, and someone I'm proud to know) and Troy Everwine, who owns the Sawtown Tavern in Tacony (Scoats is a silent partner in this enterprise) and runs it with his same-sex partner, a (half-African-American, half-Native American) choreographer named Charles Tyson. Maybe you saw Inga Saffron's column on "middle neighborhoods," where she mentions the Sawtown? (We're supposed to meet there sometime for a beer, she and I.) And while the cuisine may not be "haute," it's increasingly diverse, as KansastoSouthphilly has already pointed out. (The Picanha Grill at Castor and Hellerman avenues may not quite be up to the quality level of Fogo de Chão, but it's also half the price, and the meat is very good - good enough for Craig LaBan to give the restaurant two bells when he reviewed it about a decade ago. There's a West African/Jamaican restaurant called Nanaa Xtra-O in the next block south that I never tried while I lived there, and there are Korean and (yes) Mongolian establishments on the same stretch of Castor. My experience of driving around the district was that all the congestion was found on Roosevelt Boulevard and I-95. Transit isn't as good as it should be, true - blame the oldtimers who killed the BSS Northeast Spur ("Boulevard subway") back in the 1950s when the city could afford to build it for that; as I've remarked on several occasions, "When the city could afford to build it, they didn't want it; now that they want it, the city can't afford to build it." But it does have nodes of walkability of the suburban-downtown style in places like Tacony, Mayfair, Fox Chase and Five Points, and the potential exists to create more (the new zoning district CMX-2.5 was created with streets like Castor Avenue in mind). A new Northeast is emerging from the ashes of the old one, and it's a completely different version of our vast in-city suburb. Now if they just could turn the Northeast's "downtown" - the district along Cottman Avenue from Roosevelt Boulevard to Castor Avenue - into something more like a real one, an admittedly tall order.
Sandy, for heaven's sake, I thought I was back taking a college course , with a huge, laborious reading assignment, with that long af post! lol
Anyhow briefly speaking, 2013 feels like a lifetime ago wrt Fairmount(and Spring Garden). So much has changed in just that short amount of time. Most of the length of Fairmount Ave, from the Philadelphian condo to the Divine Lorraine(now renting) is better than I have ever seen it. My first contact with Fairmount Ave was probably 1971 or '72 right around the time when ESP was closing...so it's pretty different today to say the least. This is purely anecdotal but the population in Fairmount is quickly changing with an enormous number of millennials now living there and many of them have young children.
Lipson, pere, is an oddball, imo. He created a local magazine which had some impact on reviving the city but he tends to come off as one the biggest Negadelphians ever (??).
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Northeast will become a declining crime ridden hood just a much as N. Philly will become One Giant Fairmount....Not happening. There's probably 3 bad areas that fit that description but about a dozen that don't and not even section 8 can penetrate that.
