Jane Jacobs and the
Baldwin Park Neighborhood
The Baldwin Park neighborhood is one of the cleanest, greenest, safest and, by golly, best neighborhoods in Philadelphia. It is defined on the community online bulletin board NextDoor as the area from Broad Street to the Art Museum and from Vine Street to Spring Garden Street. This area was known in the 18th century as Bush Hill and in the late 20th century as Franklin Town. The history articles on this website have detailed the changes at physical sites within two blocks of Matthias Baldwin Park itself over these centuries. Having just read the 1961 book The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, I thought I would imagine how the neighborhood could have been different if designed (or left alone) by Jacobs.
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Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a journalist, urbanist and advocate for lively and safe city centers. She grew up in northeast Pennsylvania in the borough of Dunmore, adjoining the city of Scranton, where she was said to be a keen observer and a precocious writer. In 1935 she moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and developed many of her ideas about urban design and functions there. While there she was a thorn in the side of New York City urban planner and power broker Robert Moses. Her grass roots organizing against the urban redevelopment plans for Greenwich Village and against a major road through Washington Square in Manhattan earned her the lifelong enmity of Moses. In 1968 she and her family moved to Toronto and she spent the rest of her life there.
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In 1961 she published the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Its first chapter attacked the urban planning of people like Moses whose top-down designs she felt were contributing to the decline of large cities. Scorched earth plans that bulldozed whole neighborhoods, and running highways through those neighborhoods, tore up the existing fabric of those neighborhoods and the social connections of the people living and working there. She disdainfully uses terms like the "Radiant City" of Le Corbusier to mock the Ben Franklin Parkway, and equally deplores the progressive era slogans of the City Beautiful, the Garden City, or the White City as seen at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She calls the Philadelphia Independence Mall a "new vacuum uninhabited by any recognizable form of society, even Skid Row." These planning ideas were urban planning as an abstract exercise rather than as urban planning for people, and, she claimed, were doomed to failure. These two projects, the Independence Mall and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, still evoke criticism for being stagnant spaces.​​
Aerial photo looking south from Broad Street and Erie Avenue in 1930. The white gash across the cityscape is the Fairmount Parkway. The change in the character of the city is even more prominent in the high-resolution image here.
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Franklin Town
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The Franklin Town development caused a cataclysmic change in our neighborhood. In 1969 a 39-year-old urban renewalist by the name of Jason Nathan was lured to Philadelphia from New York City to become President and CEO of the Franklin Town Development Corporation (FTDC). Five private companies made up the consortium, these five being Smith Kline & French, the Philadelphia Electric Company, the Korman Corporation, I-T-E Imperial Corporation, all of which owned land in the neighborhood, plus the brokerage firm Butcher & Sherrerd. Their plan was to level 50 acres of land northwest of City Hall and construct a $400 million "city-within-a-city" for residential and commercial use, all within ten years, and without government subsidies. Star architect Phillip Johnson was brought in from New York City, home of both Jane Jacobs and her nemesis Robert Moses. At the time it was considered a newsworthy endeavor because of the private funding, although it conformed pretty much to then standard urban renewal playbook of the time.
Since the 1980s it has been labeled by many as a failure, due to its desultory construction and its deadening of the neighborhood. What would Jane Jacobs have to say?
1971 proposed model of Franklin Town as viewed from the northwest, looking down the diagonal canyon of the proposed Franklin Town Boulevard. This pedestrian-friendly tree-lined boulevard would extend from Vine Street to the new Franklin Town Park, which itself would be surrounded by mid- and high-rises. Smaller central court yards are in the middle of each block. This is a subdued version of Le Corbusier's "towers within a park" concept of the neighborhood ideal.
A theoretical feature, not a bug, in this model is that all the buildings have a central courtyard to allow residents to focus inward rather than onto the sidewalks. As will be discussed below, buildings turning their backs on the sidewalk, for Jacobs, is a definite bug.
For starters, Jacobs would say the model of Franklin Town pictured above is a triumph of artistry over function and people. The orthogonal view looking down the diagonal boulevard looks pretty, but that is not the perspective that people use to see the city. The inward-facing central courtyards provide the desirable green spaces needed for architectural models, but the resulting barren sidewalks are not visualized in the model, as will be discussed below.
People view the city mostly by viewing the sidewalks and streets at eye level. An analogy can be made with the design of Baldwin Park itself. Designer Athena Tacha developed a beautiful geometric plan for the central planting beds, which according to the Franklin Town development plans were meant to be seen from the tall buildings surrounding the park. Today's visitors to the park sometimes remark that the planting beds, which are off-limits to foot traffic, are confusing in their design. At path level the plantings are individually gorgeous, but the overall design is missed. Eventually, of course, towers like the Fountain View at Logan Square, the Tivoli and North x Northwest were built (the last thirty years after Franklin town was to have been completed) and provided viewers for the artist's conception, at least in those buildings.
Photo looking north taken from atop the Fountains at Logan Square East in 1991, the year then Franklin Town Park was dedicated. The multiple crescents each arc toward vertical granite plinths, what Athena Tacha likened to "nodes of energy." At that time the highest building directly adjacent to the park was the three-story townhome in Hamilton Townhomes. Otherwise the park was surrounded by surface parking lots or empty lots. Note the Railroad tracks in the foreground. This rail line in the Callowhill Cut would cease functioning in 1992. Also note the white gravel pavement of the vacated 1800 block of Hamilton Street on the north side of the park running from left to right.
For the purposes of our website articles on the history pages, we have considered the neighborhood boundaries to be Vine Street and the Ben Franklin Parkway on the south; Spring Garden Street on the north; 16th Street to the east; and 21st Street to the west -- basically the area within two blocks of Matthias Baldwin Park. For this article's demographic statistics, I will refer to the Logan Square neighborhood statistics, since the Baldwin Park neighborhood is not a separate entity for most statistics. The Logan Square neighborhood covers from Broad Street to the Schuylkill River and from Market to Spring Garden Streets. The Baldwin Park neighborhood is within the Logan Square neighborhood and fairly representative of it.
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Let's look first at the neighborhood circa 1900. Aerial views would show a sooty neighborhood dominated by heavy industry. There were Baldwin Locomotive Works, the William Sellers machine shop, Bement machinists, and several accessory machine shops like Pickering Spring and Stanley Flagg's pipe fittings. There was some light industry like Pequea Mills and the Graham Silk Trimmings factory, both with predominantly female workers to complement the male-dominated machine shops. Temple's medical, dental, podiatry, and pharmacy schools were adjoining the future Baldwin Park to the north. Hallahan High School, the Cathedral Parochial elementary school, Girls High School and the Central Manual Training School provided for the many children of the neighborhood and brought in children from throughout Philadelphia. Most corners were occupied by a bar or grocery store of some kind. Rowhouses were the infill, with up to 60 houses to an acre, each house filled with 8-12 family members or boarders and often with first floor retail space. Streetcars were only 5 cents a ride, but working folks preferred to live within walking distance of their jobs. Residential, commercial and industrial uses were intermixed. ​​
The Baldwin Locomotive Works (BLW) in 1884. Broad Street runs left to right in foreground and Spring Garden Street is on the right. The train along at-grade Pennsylvania Avenue is just left of center. BLW would extend from Broad Street to 19th Street by 1906, when BLW started its move to Eddystone, Pennsylvania, just south of what is now the Philadelphia airport. The dominoes began to fall, with a quickened pace after World War I. BLW left. The supporting machinist shops left. The jobs disappeared. The workers, coaxed by cheaper public transportation and automobiles, moved to the nether regions of Philadelphia or the ring suburbs.
​Some of our neighborhood was shaped prior to the Franklin Town project, for example, the current southern border of our neighborhood. As part of the city beautiful progressive era movement, 1,500 homes and businesses were demolished starting in 1907 to make way for a glorious boulevard modeled on the White City of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition. Massive neoclassical buildings were sprinkled along this wide boulevard, the Fairmount Parkway (in 1937 renamed the Benjamin Franklin Parkway), with the intent to inspire awe due to their scale and reproduction of ancient Athens and Rome. The Parkway Central Library (1927), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1928), the Rodin Museum (1929), the Franklin Institute (1924) and the Family Court (1941) were similar in design and materials. Jacobs would have had five issues with the Parkway:
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the destruction of buildings, using condemnation by eminent domain, for the sake of the government's perceived better use, in this case, a pretty city. In the case of the Franklin Town project, the sell was an enhanced tax base. The City used eminent domain to buy up the buildings, and then sold the properties to FTDC at a lower price as long as FTDC agreed to follow the development plan. Basically, the taxpayers partially funded a private development that used City resources to condemn the houses and businesses of some of those taxpayers. The intricate social connections that made a neighborhood, along with the good will built up by small businesses, were destroyed along with the buildings. All these transactions were given a legal basis in the United States Supreme Court case of Berman v Parker of 1954. The plaintiff in that case had the same complaint as the residents of what was to be Franklin Town: "Plaintiffs argued that this property was not slum housing and that it could not be taken for a project under the management of a private agency to be redeveloped for private use simply to make the community more attractive overall. The owners further argued that taking the land under eminent domain and giving it to redevelopers amounted to "a taking from one businessman for the benefit of another businessman" and did not constitute a public use, thus violating the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. " (Berman v. Parker from Wikipedia). The Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in favor of the developers, causing a unanimous howl of protest among libertarians;
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the segregation and isolation of one use, the museums, from the rest of the city. The museums should in Jacobs view have been interspersed with commercial and residential uses. For example, the Parkway Central Library had been proposed on the site of the current Municipal Services Building, already city-owned land. The vision of two matching buildings just north of the Logan Square fountain, replicating the Place de la Concord in Paris, was too enticing for the Franco-American parkway planners Jacques Greber and Paul Cret. For the pair of buildings four blocks of rather nice townhomes were taken by eminent domain, demolished, and massive neo-classical buildings took their place. There is a certain delight in walking by the rowhomes on Corinthian Avenue and suddenly confronting the marble columns of Girard College Founders Hall. The juxtaposition with the human scale of the rowhomes is the charm. In her book Jacobs singles out the Parkway Central Library as a suitable landmark that has been diluted in significance by its proximity to other landmarks. She would prefer a solitary placement surrounded by fewer neoclassical buildings and more mixed use buildings, a placement like that of the New York Public Library;
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the use of what she called "cataclysmic money" instead of slow money. When a district is bulldozed and replaced with buildings of the same age and usually the same material (as was the case with the monumental structures on the Parkway), the buildings are monotonous and have a similar lifespan. When they age out, another cycle of bulldozing and mass replacement begins. Piecemeal investment over a longer period allows time for architectural fads to fade and provides diversity of architecture. The Society Hill redevelopment of the 1950s was considered a success because preservation was prioritized over demolition. Owners of housing that could be salvaged by renovation were given the option of getting low-interest loans to accomplish that goal. Still, 600 families were displaced, in what Jacobs characterizes not as slum clearance, but as slum relocation;
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the prioritization of the car over the people. The Parkway has become a highway into Center City. In addition, Vine Street was widened to ten lanes in the early 1950s and then dropped below grade in the 1960s, both projects requiring more condemnation by eminent domain. Space and neighborhoods were sacrificed to the time demands of commuters. At the same time that the Vine Street Expressway was plowing through the neighborhood, Queen Village residents were opposing (successfully) the southern mirror image of it that was to go through the South Street-Bainbridge Street corridor. Jacobs herself in New York was fighting a highway plan to cut through Washington Square as well as a plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway (successfully on both). Jacobs claimed, in her chapter on automobiles, that a city has to make a choice: favor the inhabitants of the city or favor shorter commuter travel times. Like many transit experts today, she believed that cities should make auto transit less expedient to push people to use public transit;
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the combination of the Vine Street Expressway and the Parkway created what Jacobs called a "border vacuum." Massive areas of single use buildings create a dead zone separating one neighborhood from another. The Logan Square Neighborhood Association (a Registered Community Organization or RCO) covers the area from Market Street to Spring Garden Street and from Broad Street to the Schuylkill River. Yet some in the group refer to "north Logan Square" and "south Logan Square," with Vine Street and the Parkway being a no man's land between the two. Such border vacuum dead zones can be formed by waterfronts, highways, railroad tracks (think Chinese Wall of the Pennsylvania railroad), or even by a canyon formed by office buildings or residential towers (think Penn Center, which replaced the Chinese Wall).​
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Detail from 1895 Bromley map. Tatlow Street no longer exists, but here in 1895 bisects what is now Baldwin Park. 18th Street is on the right. Hamilton Street is the complete street at the top. North is towards the top.
There are 52 houses on the acre of land north of Tatlow Street. Building density was high, as was people density in those buildings. For example, in 1906, when Bridget Carey was arrested on suspicion of murder by arsenic, she ran a boarding house with twelve boarders at 1842 Hamilton Street. Today, fully 55% of households in the Logan Square district are single-person households (data here). Physical households per unit area may be higher today, but the occupants-per-household number is much less. Another 29% of households are basically roomate households, with only 15% of households being made up of a family unit.
Note name changes: Cuyler is now Shamokin and Rhoads is now Carlton Street. Tatlow is gone.
Let's turn to the Franklin Town project itself.
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In The Death and Life of Great American Cities the first three chapters discuss sidewalks in terms of three functions of sidewalks: preventing antisocial behaviors, encouraging social contacts, and assimilating children.
Safety: Jacobs coined the phrase "eyes on the street" to suggest that busy sidewalks are safer sidewalks. "Natural surveillance," by which antisocial behavior is ameliorated by maximizing visibility and positive social interactions, is the more formal sociology term. There are neighborhood public figures like shopkeepers and stoop-sitters who intuitively keep an eye on sidewalk activity. When these "natural proprietors" admonish miscreants, the community supports them. She recognized the fact that the community is more important than the police in proactively limiting criminal activity. Dead zones in a neighborhood are dangerous areas. The architecture of a neighborhood can enhance or restrict the areas for natural surveillance. The Franklin Town development eliminated residences, small shops, and whole streets, creating dead zones to be avoided. What was built often left no opportunities for residents to have a clear and close connection to the sidewalk space.
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Social contacts: Stoop-sitting among all ages was a welcome respite from the chores of the day in earlier times. Casual contact with passers-by, most of whom in a city are strangers, allow as much or as little personal information revealed as desired. These individual social interactions collectively enhanced the community watch and sense of security.
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Children's play: The main play area for children in a city used to be the sidewalk. Narrow side streets could be commandeered for more expansive games. Jacobs recommended wider sidewalks and narrower streets. Houses in the neighborhood pre-Franklin Town were chock full of kids. One can look at the number of graduating students at Hallahan High School, where most of the Catholics (and this was a Catholic neighborhood) sent their daughters. There were 977 seniors graduating in 1939! As manufacturers moved out, families moved out, leaving few children. Schools are a major issue: unless you can afford $42,000 a year for first grade at Friends Select, the quality of city public schools induces a move for those who can afford it. The child assimilation issue raised by Jacobs is no longer an issue. Using data from the Logan Square demographic statistical atlas here, you can see that today only 4% of households have children under the age of 18. Even for the households with children, kids are either in organized activities or inside on social media. The availability of informally supervised sidewalk play was an afterthought for planners by 1971. Even for those who remained and went outside, the play aspects of the sidewalk were relegated to the three playgrounds, plus a toddler playground, within three blocks of Baldwin Park.
Graduating class numbers by year at Hallahan High School at 19th and Wood Streets.
These falling numbers parallel the general population numbers of Philadelphia, peaking in 1950 at 2.1 million compared to 1.6 million today.
Eyes on the street
Google Earth view of the neighborhood in 2025. Spring Garden Street is at the top (north) and 16th Street runs vertically on the right.
The red lines mark sidewalk frontage that has homes directly facing it, some with stoops (or steps). There are nine blocks with homes that have sidewalk frontage. The area within the yellow lines is the superblock of the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP). Within this superblock, not only are there no residences on the sidewalk, but there is only one commercial front (the student-run Saxby's coffee shop inside the Mint Building). The Saxby's barely faces 17th Street, which bisects the CCP campus vertically. This significant section of the neighborhood is a dead zone. For half the year when CCP is not in session, and at night, there is no activity here.
Portion of 1895 map of the neighborhood with street-facing homes marked with red line. There are 67 such blocks. More streets, more homes on the streets, more eyes on the street, more complex interactions.
More on safe sidewalks due to eyes on the street: Apartment towers tend to have fewer passages onto the sidewalk. Even so, some could have been designed differently to allow a sidewalk-scape. For example, the Fountains at Logan View has 464 rental units for seniors, most of whom would love to go out on the adjoining wide sidewalk to watch the passers-by. Their sidewalk, however, was recessed below street level; any views outward are obstructed. Across the street, One Franklin Town has, except for the 7-11 convenience store at 18th and Callowhill, a solid facade on 18th Street, 17th Street and Callowhill Street. City View Condominiums is separated from the sidewalk on 20th Street and Hamilton Street by a high wall with fencing on top. The Dalian Apartments has two long sides with nothing, not even the trees that were promised. Spring Garden Tower, which has subsidized rentals for seniors, has a concrete porch, but it runs lengthwise along a concrete wall that doesn't face the street. Again, a lost opportunity for seniors. The only new structure with a sidewalk presence is the Tivoli Condos on Hamilton Street, with landscaped patios right on the sidewalk with a low fence. The Granary Apartments on Callowhill Street, the Fountains senior rentals, NxNW, City View, Hamilton Townhome condos, 1600 Callowhill and Dalian on the Park all have either inner courtyards or roof decks, with no sidewalk presence.
Any sitting done here at The Fountains is below the sidewalk. A lost opportunity for the seniors.
This and the photo above make up the two sides of Franklin Town Boulevard. Here the One Franklin Town Apartments have a dark fenced entry and no sidewalk presence.
The "porch" at Spring Garden Towers runs perpendicular to the street along a wall.
This was the only low income housing built for the Franklin Town project. Jacobs herself was a proponent of housing vouchers, as done today, rather than government built and managed housing projects for low income residents.
On the north side of the 2000 block of Hamilton Street a fortress-like separation from the sidewalk
One of the worst block and a half extends from 16th Street to 18th Street on Callowhill Street. Along this entire two-block stretch there is only one doorway into a residential building and two large parking garages.
The Tivoli Condos at 19th and Hamilton Streets show that homes and sidewalk can live together.
Speaking of apartment towers, Jacobs warned of the risk of too many transient residents in a neighborhood. She called them transient residents in a New York City context, because many New York renters live in rent-controlled apartments and are indeed long-term residents. This is not so in Philadelphia, so I will call these transient residents renters. Renters tend to lower the real estate values of the nearby buildings that are owned by people who live on the premises. In addition, generally speaking, renters tend to be less involved in the community. The renters are transient, so getting them to look to the future of the neighborhood can be disheartening.
How does one quantitate "community engagement?" One hyperlocal measure of community engagement is membership in the Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park, the volunteer group that works with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation to preserve and enhance Baldwin Park. Here are the membership percentages from the different buildings near the park in 2024, focusing on the larger buildings:
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Tivoli Condos (owners) 38 of 114 units: 33%
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Hamilton Townhomes (owners) 5 of 82: 6%
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City View (owners) 28 of 532 units: 5%
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The Fountains (senior renters) 13 of 464: 3%
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NxNW (renters) 4 of 572 units: 0.7%
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Spring Garden Tower (subsidized senior renters) 1 of 208: 0.5%
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The Granary (renters) 1 of 229: 0.4%
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One Franklin Town (renters): 1 of 335: 0.3%
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Dalian on the Park (renters) 1 of 293: 0.3%
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The Lofts at Logan View (renters): 0 of 108: 0%
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1600 Callowhill (renters) 0 of 95: 0%
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The trend is clear: owners are involved with the park an order of magnitude or two more than renters. One confounding variable in this analysis is age. The neighborhood age demographics show that 53% of residents are between the ages of 22 and 39 (compared to 26% in the United States as a whole). This age group, unfortunately, tends not to be involved with the community. They also tend to be renters. The 3% Friends membership at the Fountains, though low, somewhat clarifies the causality of the renter status vs. age variables and Friends membership. The participation rate for older renters is ten times higher than the younger renters.
How difficult can it be for the renters in the neighborhood to join? Not very. Membership in the Friends group is a voluntary donation of $25 a year, which works out to seven cents a day, so even the neighborhood owners could do a little better (keep up the good work, Tivoli!). The contributions pay for the plantings in the central beds, which are refreshed every year; the doggie bags and dispenser in the southwest corner of the park; capital items like the new park signage and the Little Free Library; the five trees that were planted in 2025; and events like the Halloween dog parade and story walks. Some members also give of their time and energy. Involvement in the park is one quantitative marker of community and neighborly engagement. ​Pragmatically speaking, politicians in the city respond more enthusiastically to the issues in parks that have a more robust Friends group. Numbers matter!
How many renters are too many? ​Homeowners' associations often have limits on the percent of renters in the complex. The decision is usually made not based exclusively on home values, but based on quality of life. Renters tend to be transient, less caring of common amenities and less involved in the community. Often these homeowner association renter caps are in the 20-25% range.
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The same principles can be applied to an entire neighborhood. Where does the Baldwin Park neighborhood stand? An analysis in March of 2025 shows that renters make up 80% of the neighborhood, and this is undoubtedly an underestimate. My methodology was the following:
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Count condo buildings as having owned units, carving out 20% of those units as rentals.
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For rowhomes in the neighborhood, count the building as owner-occupied if the Philadelphia tax records show that the owner is getting the homeowner tax exemption.
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For rowhomes on Spring Garden Street, count each building without a homeowner exemption as a single rental, even though most of these non-owner-occupied buildings have 4-6 rental units. This would cause an underestimate in the renter numbers.
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If a rowhome has a condominium structure, look at each condo separately, for example the Stetson Mansion at 1717 Spring Garden Street. In that building three of the four condos have the homeowner exemption, so I assume one is a rental and not owner-occupied. Public tax records are available at outside link here.
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The results:
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Owned 939 minus 20% of 939 (the 20% of condos or homes that are rented out) = 751
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Rental apartments 2823 + 20% of 939 = 3011
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Total units = 3762. Of the total number of units, 20% are owned and 80% are rentals.
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For a general comparison, the rental rate in the entire city of Philadelphia is 47%. Even in more expensive cities like Boston and New York City rental rates are about 60%.
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Did the Franklin Town project foster a rental neighborhood? The first three projects in the 1970s were Korman Suites (532 short-term furnished rentals in two towers, now City View), Spring Garden Towers (208 subsidized senior rentals), and the owned 82 Hamilton Townhomes Condos plus ten townhomes on 20th Street. Projects along Franklin Town Boulevard in the 1980s created 350 rentals in One Franklin Town; 464 senior rentals in Fountain View; and Museum Tower I with 307 rentals.
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In the first decade of the project that adds up to 1,861 rental units and 92 condo units, or 5% owned. Not a promising start for the neighborhood. In 2003 the twin towers of the Korman Suites converted into the City View condos. This substantially altered the rental/owned ratio.
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As discussed in our article about the Dinan Funeral Home, through the mid-20th century there were major neighborhood focal points (then Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral), social clubs, amateur athletic leagues for adults and teens, and a bar on every corner. Today in the Baldwin Park neighborhood, there is more diversity of religious affiliation and church attendance is down nationwide, especially in cities. In today's neighborhood there are no physical social clubs, no amateur leagues, few teens, and only three bars.
Jane Jacobs would probably conclude that more homeownership would boost neighborhood vibrancy. The reality, however, is that younger folks and renters are less attached to their residences, as well as to their jobs, their churches and community social groups. Perhaps this detachment is crucial for financial and social upward mobility. One solution is for everyone to tap in to their social justice proclivities: parks, neighborhoods and communities are tools for egalitarianism if nurtured. Baldwin Park is open to all, no matter the income level, race, gender identity or age. The only rival for such egalitarianism in our neighborhood is the Parkway Central Library. We are lucky to have both in the neighborhood.
The next chapter in her book discusses parks. Franklin Town Park was planned as the centerpiece of the Franklin Town project. It was dedicated as a Percent for Art piece in 1991, titled Connections by landscape artist Athena Tacha.
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According to Jacobs, the key to a successful park space is the presence of different uses and users at all times of day. She bemoaned the decrepitude of Philadelphia's Washington Square (remember, 1961) surrounded by office buildings and office workers who used the park only at lunchtime. The 1991 Franklin Town Park was even worse. It was surrounded by nothing except parking lots. If nearby residents don't take over ownership of a park, listless vagabonds will become the natural proprietors. This is exactly what happened to Franklin Town Park.
What changed? In 2003 the apartments at the Korman Suites went condo. In 2007 the Tivoli condos were completed. In 2007 these homeowners formed the Friends of Franklin Town Park and worked with the City to clean up the Park. The residents petitioned to change the name of Franklin Town Park to Matthias Baldwin Park and the mayor signed the change document in 2011. Baldwin Park is now acclaimed as a jewel in the Philadelphia Parks and Recreation system thanks to the work of the Friends group. Another example of the benefits of more homeowners vs. renters in a neighborhood.
Portion of aerial map of Philadelphia from 1995 showing extent of surface parking lots, and three parking garages. Franklin Town Boulevard is the diagonal street ending at what is now called Baldwin Park, with The Fountains at Logan Square East (built in 1984) on the left of the "boulevard" and One Franklin Town (completed 1987) on the right. The structures labeled PG are parking garages.
This view is 14 years after the Franklin Town Development Project was to have been completed. That original project promised green spaces, pedestrian-friendly transit, and no surface parking lots.
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Jacobs felt that diversity was the key to the vitality of a city. She spends five chapters discussing the generators of diversity: mixed primary uses, small blocks, need for aged buildings, and the need for concentration (both building density and household occupant density).
Mixed Primary Uses
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Before Philadelphia's first zoning laws in 1933, every neighborhood was mixed use. Factories centered the neighborhood and working households sprung up surrounding the factories. Some, like Stetson hats and Disston saws, were company towns within the city. There were often three shifts of work once electricity in the 1880s lit up the workplace. There was 24/7 foot traffic with workers and residents having different uses of the streets. There was no segregation of business from residences. ​
After World War I heavy industry left the neighborhood, taking advantage of the ability to spread out in one-story factories. The biggest was the Baldwin Locomotive Works (BLW), which completed its move to Eddystone by 1928. The neighborhood had been a de facto company town for BLW and its supporting machine shops like Sellers and Bement, with an industrial and residential mix, i.e. mixed primary uses of the neighborhood. Even in this 1946 image below, there were multiple businesses, including warehouses. Non-warehouse businesses included the Preston Retreat maternity hospital, Wills Eye Hospital, the third U.S. Mint, Girls High School and Hallahan High School, the Parkway Central Library and the Spring Garden Branch Library, and the Municipal Court. None of the warehouses currently exist. Masterman has replaced Girls High School and the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) occupies the Mint building. Hallahan may be repurposed as a charter school. The Parkway Central Library, but not the Spring Garden branch, exists and functions today. The Municipal Court sits vacant. The businesses dropped from fifteen in 1946 to three today. Certainly there are small retail stores and restaurants today, but in the first half of the 20th century many rowhomes had first floor retail and especially corner residences had first floor retail or bars. I suspect the numbers of small commercial establishments were comparable over the last 100 years. CCP is a major employer, but is open less than half the days of the year. The Parkway Central Library is the second biggest employer but open only 60 hours per week. Otherwise, the neighborhood overwhelmingly has a single primary use: residential.
The first Philadelphia zoning law of 1933 was relatively succinct. Mixed-use neighborhoods were to be separated into single primary use districts in five categories.
The more byzantine zoning code of today is discussed in our article on the Children's Crisis Treatment Center (now the Baldwin Apartments).
Portion of a Franklin Street and Business map from 1946 (credit here).
Heavy industry has been replaced by warehouses, which will all be gone by 1985:
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45 -- Gimbels warehouse in former Pequea Mills
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50 -- Quaker City Wholesale grocery warehouse in former Reading RR freight station
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56 -- Acme markets warehouse in former Stanley Flagg pipe fittings shop
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52 -- Lit Brothers warehouse in a building constructed in 1940
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54 -- Pennsylvania Warehouse and Cold Storage
Number 51 represents I-T-E and 53 the Sellers machine shops, both gone. The Sellers shops became warehouses in 1946.
The residential-warehouse mixed use has been replaced with the single primary residential use of today.
Franklin Town developers promised the creation of 20,000 jobs within the borders of Franklin Town. Only about 40% of that was realized (half of CCP, the Sheraton on 17th Street, and String Theory School).
Readers may understandably object to the idea of living next to a locomotive factory or another heavy industry. Light industry is still in neighborhoods in Philadelphia, like the Jacquin's Prestige Liquor factory in Kensington surrounded by streets and alleys full of rowhomes. Most modern zoning laws foster the separation of uses, which is exactly what Jacobs thought destroyed neighborhoods. She wanted a neighborhood to contain the diversity of homes, commercial establishments, bars, restaurants, cultural institutions and factory jobs.
The back of the Dalian on the Park luxury apartments looking west from 21st Street. The building was completed in 2016. Until 1958 this site was occupied by Pequea Mills textile factory which itself became a Gimbels Department Store warehouse.
This street-view seems not much different than that of a small factory.
Short Blocks​
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Short blocks create more paths in a neighborhood network. Smaller structures, like rowhomes, are favored. More rowhomes, with their first floor retail, means more eyes on the street. As the discussion about sidewalks and housing on the street makes clear, the Franklin Town project created superblocks by eliminating the smaller east-west streets. The buildings on these superblocks tend to lack human scale and have windowless walls facing the sidewalk.
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Jane Jacobs has been called a "new urbanist," an design philosophy that encouraged walkability to improve personal health and protect the environment from exhaust emissions. The Walk Score quantifies the walkability at any address, using a system that goes from 0-100, with 100 being the max. In the calculation of an address's Walk Score, short blocks and many intersections make for a higher Walk Score. This may seem counterintuitive, but when the Society Hill neighborhood was redeveloped in the 1950s, Edmund Bacon recognized the value of pedestrian "greenways" that acted as pleasant alleyways among the rowhomes and between the larger streets.
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Jacobs, in her list of solutions to the problems created by top-down urban planning, recommended that when lots become vacant in a line between two streets, those vacant lots should be used to create another street, i.e. make more streets.
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City street plan for Franklin Town in 1974.
The smaller residential streets between Vine and Buttonwood Streets have been vacated.
This created Jacobs' hated superblocks by eliminating small streets and also was a triumph of pretty city planning models over function. By 1980, when the development had slowed its pace, John Mitkus, executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, stated "this diagonal boulevard has never had many fans as a mover of traffic. It was supported by the City because it was the focal point to the whole development and it ended in the park."
In this architectural case, form does not follow function.
Very good walk, transit, and bike scores for someone living in Baldwin Park (which you shouldn't do: it is open from 6 am to 10 pm only!).
Need for Aged Buildings​
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Aged buildings allow for cheaper residential and business rents, that is, diversity of incomes, as well as architectural diversity. Jacobs expounded this need as an antidote to potential gentrification. Older structures would be more affordable for a longer term compared to what are now always built new as "luxury apartments." The liveliest block in the neighborhood is the south side of the 1800 block of Callowhill Street. The storefronts are all first floor occupants with rental apartments above, and almost all were built in the 1860s.
There were thirty homes that were, in the initial FTDC proposal, to be condemned and demolished. These are the very houses that were instead preserved, refurbished and now enhance the architectural diversity and human scale of the neighborhood. This "gradual money" for refurbishing over fifty years contrasts to what Jacobs calls "cataclysmic money." The latter is when developers with a big budget, like the $400 million in the initial proposal for Franklin Town, bulldoze a neighborhood clean and have urban planners design a new one from scratch. As discussed above, buildings of the same age, similar materials and often of a similar architecture result. The buildings in these rebuilt neighborhoods tend to have a similar lifespan and result in another mass demolition and rebuild in 60-80 years.
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A good example of wise preservation is Saint John Chrysostom Albanian Orthodox Church found at 237 North 17th Street. This simple building is charming inside and out, but had been slated for demolition to completely clear the superblock of structures. Due to protests, it was saved. Now its human-scale and masonry construction stand in sharp contrast to the glass and concrete 1970s towers that surround it. Jacobs was a fan of preservation of historic buildings via agencies like the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places (PRHP). For those with ambition, the Albanian Church (built 1848) is not yet on the PRHP list. Nomination forms are here.​
Well-cared-for owner-occupied homes on 19th Street. These all were slated for demolition due to "blight" in the 1971 Franklin Town project proposal. Older houses along 20th, 19th, Callowhill, and 18th were spared only to mollify the protesting residents. These 160-year-old rowhomes are the very buildings that have a human scale and attract our attention.
Notice the mural honoring the industrial past of the neighborhood on the south side of 417 North 19th Street.
Need for Population Density​
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This need follows from the first two of Jacobs' needs for diversity. Without a populace, the streets are dull and dangerous. It might be guessed, from looking at the tall apartment towers, that the density of today must be higher than the early 19th century. The housing unit density is higher today, but the human density per housing unit is much less. As noted above, fully 55% of housing units in the neighborhood are occupied by one person, with another 29% occupied by roommates. Only 15% are occupied by families.
To humanize the statistics, here are two more examples of household family density. Members of both families are still in the Baldwin Park neighborhood.
Inquirer photo from June 11, 1971, of Paschal Libonati in front of his home at 1729 Carlton Street. He and his family moved to the new replacement houses on the 500 block of North 20th Street in 1974. A retired taxi driver, he and his wife raised eight children and sent two of them through medical school. These houses would be comparable to the still-existing houses on the 1800 block of Carlton Street, which have about 1,200 square feet of space and frontage of 16 feet. Housing and inhabitant density were high.
The McCrossen property at 529 North 20th Street in 1971. This and other homes and business were condemned for Franklin Town development due to "blight," which seems a bit of a stretch.
In 1937 Neil (Cornelius) McCrossen bought the building and used the first floor as a bar and raised ten children in the apartment above the bar. In 1966 Neil Sr. died at his home at 2121 Brandywine Street and Neil Jr. took over the bar. At the time of this photo it was listed in the City phone directory as Neil's Bar, but unofficially known as the Dust Bowl (see outside article here). The bar was extended into the adjoining 527 North 20th in 1993, and the business is still in the McCrossen family.
Neighbors' protests preserved this building, as well as another neighborhood institution, Sabrina's Cafe at 1804 Callowhill Street.
The 1800 block of Carlton Street still exists because it was outside the perimeter of the proposed Franklin Town. In 1973 the 1700 block of Carlton was condemned because of "blight," although I suspect the 1700 block would have looked very similar to this charming block if it had been left alone and the owners given low-interest loans for refurbishing individual homes.
In the last section of her 1961 book, Jacobs describes the administrative levels of a highly-functioning city. There is first the street level. There are streets in Philadelphia that get together for block parties, unified decorating themes, or petitions to the city. There is only one intact street in the Baldwin Park neighborhood, the 1800 block of Carlton Street that was pictured above. There are no street level organizations in the neighborhood.
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The next level up is the neighborhood. Baldwin Park itself is the geographic and social center of the neighborhood, and although there is no specific Baldwin Park neighborhood governing body, there are two groups that empower the residents. The first is the Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park, mentioned above, which helps the city in maintaining the park. This group cares for the park and its immediate surroundings. The second, also mentioned above, has a wider perimeter. It is the Logan Square Neighborhood Association RCO, which includes the Baldwin Park neighborhood and a larger area south of the Ben Franklin Parkway. This RCO level is the next level up, what Jacobs calls a district. Every residential tower in the neighborhood has a representative on the LSNA board, and LSNA has many board members and officers from the smaller Baldwin Park neighborhood. LSNA at the district level can be the intermediary between the neighborhood and the next level up, the City.
The Baldwin Park neighborhood is a great place to live. Would Jane Jacobs have any suggestions for improvement?
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I think there is room for some immediate and relatively inexpensive adjustments. First, close 17th Street to vehicle traffic between Spring Garden Street and Callowhill Street. Give the CCP students a real campus! This may seem antithetical to Jacobs' wish for more, not fewer streets, but she would have no qualms about closing a street to vehicles to enhance pedestrian safety and use of the streetscape.
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Second, put some street trees on all the streets surrounding Dalian on the Park. The Dalian project presented to the Logan Square Neighborhood Association envisioned trees on all sides. Today, none exist. The sidewalks are wide on the north and south side of the building (thumbs up from Jacobs!) but need some shade to promote pedestrian seating and people-watching. While we're at it, move the loading and unloading of Amazon delivery vehicles from Pennsylvania Avenue to the parking garage.
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Do something with the old Family Court building. At least trim the trees that are growing out of the cornices and windows. Forget the massive development coordination tied to the Family Court and the surface parking lot behind the Parkway Central Library. Jacobs would probably prefer the organic development of individual parcels on the parking lot. No superblocks!
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Hold dear all the rowhomes in the neighborhood. This is not an adjustment, just a plea. The rowhomes on the 1800 block of Carlton Street and along 20th Street are precious.​​​​
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