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Old 05-25-2020, 09:26 PM
 
Location: Johns Island
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post
So they moved to Ardmore; where did the others go?
Willingboro, NJ
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Old 05-25-2020, 11:37 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post
So they moved to Ardmore; where did the others go?
Not Ardmore.

Many went to Yeadon. Others to Cheltenham. Others left the area altogether to California.

Wrt to Yeadon you may have heard of the Nile Swim Club. A couple founders of it were family friends.

My aunt's family stayed in W. Phila.
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Old 05-26-2020, 02:25 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Escondudo View Post
Philadelphia County is nearly half black, and it's a major city. Why isn't it in the discussion of being a "Black mecca" like Atlanta or Washington, D.C.?
It depends what you mean by a black mecca. I think among black people, it is talked about a lot. I think throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Philadelphia was regularly brought up as such, more comparable to Atlanta and Chicago back then. Atlanta is in a precarious position regarding its status as the capital of blackness.It seems like its becoming even moreso like the "Black Hollywood" and not in a good way. I've seen lots of black people saying that Atlanta is losing its culture and flavor, that it's becoming to expensive and people are too stuck up. Also that it's becoming less black as the black middle class heads for the suburbs, and complaining how its gay scene has become too over the top, so to speak, I guess similar to San Francisco. Washington DC is seeing the same patterns...gentrification, city limits becoming less black.


Something else you might not have thought about: Although Chicago had a peak black population of about 1,100,000 in 1970, that number has fallen to about 750,000 now. Philly's peak black population is right about what it is right now, about 690,000. Within 10 years, Philadelphia could overtake Chicago as the city with the highest black population outside New York for the first time in modern history. This would mostly be due continued decline in Chicago's Black population, rather than large increases in Philadelphia's.

Last edited by KoNgFooCj; 05-26-2020 at 02:37 AM..
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Old 05-26-2020, 02:33 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nephi215 View Post
Because Philly is not that black athough there is a plurality. The low 40% range isn't "nearly half" of the population. Philly is a lot more diverse. With that said, Philly historically has been a strong city for black culture but overall I'd say that Philly's standing of being seen as a "black mecca" is on par with it's other fellow northern cities such as NYC or Chicago.
True about the plurality. Blacks don't make up most of Philadelphia's population, but there are more black people in Philadelphia than any other race.
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Old 05-26-2020, 05:35 AM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kyb01 View Post
Not Ardmore.
Okay, my memory must be fuzzy here. ISTR you did say you grew up on the Main Line.

If you grew up on the Main Line, and you grew up in a mostly-black community in it (not a safe assumption), your choices were, in decreasing population order: Ardmore, Tredyffrin, Bryn Mawr.

I thought you had referenced South Ardmore wrt your own youth some years back.
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Old 05-26-2020, 08:12 AM
 
Location: New York City
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post
More affluent African-Americans are flocking to those two cities. Prince George's County, outside Washington, is the wealthiest majority-black jurisdiction in the country, and Atlanta has a sizable and growing black upper middle class.

None of these things can be said about Philadelphia.
You might know more of the statistics, but isn't the Philadelphia region (and Chicago) one of the most segregated via white/black, wealthy/poor metros in the country? Basing on zip-code perhaps?

I read an article about two years ago diving deep into the issue and Philadelphia and Chicago were confidently referenced in various charts and graphics.
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Old 05-26-2020, 12:42 PM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cpomp View Post
You might know more of the statistics, but isn't the Philadelphia region (and Chicago) one of the most segregated via white/black, wealthy/poor metros in the country? Basing on zip-code perhaps?

I read an article about two years ago diving deep into the issue and Philadelphia and Chicago were confidently referenced in various charts and graphics.
I think the last time I read something on this subject, Philly was listed as the fourth-most-segregated city in the country. Chicago does rank above it. I think the metric used is something called the "index of dissimilarity" based on Census tracts. This index lists the probability that a given person or household will have a person or household of a race other than their own living nearby.

The funny thing, though, is this: In Chicago and in my hometown of Kansas City, the racial divide is sharp and uniform — there's a clear line of demarcation between the "black" and "white" sides of the city and no real area of mixing between the two. This seems to me to be a common pattern in many Midwestern cities: St. Louis' north side vs. its south side, Chicago's south and west sides vs. its southwest and north sides, and so on.

This city does have some large swaths where everyone's black, but not on the scale of any of the Midwestern cities, and there's a patchwork-quilt quality to residential segregation here. Even in the overwhelmingly black parts of the city — most of West, Southwest and North Philadelphia — you will find pockets where some other racial or ethnic group dominates (whites in University City, Hispanics in the Zona del Oro, for example). There are some neighborhoods — mine, for instance — where the index of dissimilarity is low for most of the residents but high in sections (Germantown's northwest quadrant, for instance, where most of the whites wo make up 15 percent of the neighborhood's population live).

And as far as I know, neither Chicago nor Kansas City have an answer to Mount Airy. That neighborhood is whiter on one side and blacker on the other, but you will find members of both groups on both sides of Germantown Avenue, resulting in a rather high index of dissimilarity there.

I think one reason why Philadelphia may rank high here compared to, say, Kansas City is because blacks make up a plurality of the residents of the city of Philadelphia as a whole; that's not the case in either Chicago or KC.
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Old 05-26-2020, 03:47 PM
 
Location: Philadelphia/South Jersey area
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disclosure: I grew up in Harlem, lol I married into Philadelphia n

Now maybe it's because us NY'ers have the horrible habit of thinking nothing else exist outside their city but was Philly every thought of as a black "mecca"?

after I graduated in 1980, I know everyone was thinking of moving to Atlanta, mainly because it was seen as very youthful and upward moving black folks. I went to Pitt and it seemed like the majority of Blacks were from Philly. my roommate and all my friends seem to be from Philly and Baltimore. most were first generation college students.

lol my family is from Charleston and Tennessee and most of my relatives fled like many during Jim Crow so it took us a long time to even consider moving back to the South.

I think one issue as someone else mentioned is that my community here in Philly is fighting abject poverty. loss of manufacturing and decent paying entry level jobs has seem to hurt the city.
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Old 05-26-2020, 10:08 PM
 
10,787 posts, read 8,663,690 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post
Okay, my memory must be fuzzy here. ISTR you did say you grew up on the Main Line.

If you grew up on the Main Line, and you grew up in a mostly-black community in it (not a safe assumption), your choices were, in decreasing population order: Ardmore, Tredyffrin, Bryn Mawr.

I thought you had referenced South Ardmore wrt your own youth some years back.
I grew up in Haverford. The part that's in Haverford Twp. My mother also grew up on the same street I did. My family left W. Phila. ( Carroll Park) in 1954. I was 4 years old not quite 5.

It was a small black community consisting of two streets. One in Haverford and the other in Byrn Mawr.

My maternal grandparents never lived in the city. My paternal grandparents did.
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Old 05-27-2020, 02:51 PM
 
8,968 posts, read 21,050,255 times
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For Greater Philadelphia to be considered a Black mecca IMO , there would have to be a considerable swath of upper-middle class+ majority Black neighborhoods. The ones that come closest to that have already been mentioned and don't compare in number or depth to the Atlanta metro or PG County, MD adjacent to DC.
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