Mid 1900's Urban Planning in Philadelphia

Here are a few urban planning items to close out Philadelphia month. Hope you have enjoyed the journey.

Cathedral Road:

There are many discontinued highways and roads to nowhere throughout the United States, including Woodhaven Road, a dead end expressway in Northeast Philadelphia. Cathedral Road was planned as a major four lane highway connecting the affluent areas of Chestnut Hill and Bryn Mawr across large parts of Northwest Philadelphia and across the Wissahickon Creek. 

via Hidden City

While this is mainly a local story (extensively documented in Hidden City), I find it interesting to see a four lane, empty tree lined highway on Google Street View,

eventually ending at the woods.

images via Google

Here is an overall plan of the area via Hidden City

Mid-century city planner Edmund Bacon was one of the era's primary visionaries though some of his early projects were more beneficial to suburban commuters than to city residents. Here is a picture of his 3D model of the city.

via Philadelphia Inquirer

Bacon believed in a top down approach to planning. As an antidote, University of Pennsylvania professor and landscape architect Ian McHarg advocated for a nature based approach to planning. His book Design With Nature influenced many future planners including me in college. He was also an early pioneer in the idea of creating overlays (showing natural features such as soils and aquifers underneath the built environment), one of the foundations of GIS.  Here is a piece of a very large map he created with his students showing the area's geology under the city's grid.

via WHYY Philadelphia

More on McHarg here.

Philadelphia Bookstore Map

Note: As September comes to a close so does Philadelphia month. There will be a couple more posts today and tomorrow before I return to my normal weekly schedule.

This one is personal. Several years ago I was working with a Philly-based computer programmer and an artist to create a map of bookstores in Philadelphia. We put together lists, artwork and I made a few mock up maps but we never got much interest from the store owners. Apparently someone else did because the Philadelphia Bookstore Map is now a reality. A creation of artist Henry Crane (I don't know him) and the booksellers (unlike us he got them to buy into the project), the map succeeds pretty well while incorporating some similar artwork to what we were going for-images of the stores and some local sites.

As a disclaimer, I have not yet seen the paper copy, only what is available on the web page and on Instagram. It looks like there is an inset map (not shown online) of the stores on South Street, a good way of the solving the density problem we also faced.

A few minor points of criticism. I would have muted the background map to make the points stand out more though he could have also done that using bolder point colors. I'm not a big fan of the overly Google-looking teardrop shapes but they work fine here. The colors for different categories of stores could also be more distinct. 

One of the best things about this is that in the online version there is a page to access sub-pages for each store by clicking on the bookstore drawings.

I chose this image of Bindlestiff Books because that is one of the stores we visited on our journey. One last nice detail - he used one of my favorite Rittenhouse Square statues from my childhood, Billy the goat on the cover.

via Instagram

 

Innovation in Segregation

Before the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps encouraged segregation (documented extensively including on this blog), there was this 1934 map by property analyst J. M. Brewer. It showed real estate conditions in Philadelphia with a wary eye towards immigrants, Jews and people of color and provided a model for the HOLC maps and accompanying practices of real estate segregation.

via Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network

The legend shows concerns about certain groups and their effects on the neighborhoods,

and the "quality" of local businesses.

There is a note at the bottom of the legend saying "All location ratings and racial concentration quotes are the opinion only of J.M. Brewer after careful investigation of the location."

Here is the South Philly neighborhood where my family lived at the time. They were in a transition zone between the predominantly Jewish and Italian areas. The neighborhood grades are generally D and E (Decadent!), while the business blocks range from third to fifth class.

Here is a neighborhood north of downtown where some of my family had previously lived, much of this area is now part of Temple University.

Later in her life my grandmother moved to an "A" neighborhood near Rittenhouse Square. Nice area but look out for that scary red "E" blocks just to the south!

Brewer consulted with the HOLC on their 1937 map of Philadelphia, where the prejudicial language became more obvious with map notes such as "Infiltration of Jewish into area have depressed values". These maps were used to deny mortgages to people in "hazardous" areas, generally immigrant and minority neighborhoods, making home ownership almost impossible to most residents of these areas. The resulting inability to grow wealth and stabilize neighborhoods has effects that have persisted ever since.

Hidden Hydrology

In my day job I've mapped buried streams to give an indication of areas that are most likely to flood in major storms. It turns out that buried streams in older urban centers is common everywhere. Hidden Hydrology is a great resource for exploring disappeared waterways throughout the country. I stumbled across their extensive PhillyH2O page. Here are some maps, from the extensive Water History PHL site.

The map below shows just how few of the original streams (in blue) remain and shows the sewers that have replaced these streams in red.
 

An inset from the Lenapehoking Map, mentioned last week also does an artistic job of showing these same waterways.

Here is an 1895 map from the Water Department showing the proposed and existing sewers and how they head for and follow streams to take advantage of the gravity flow.

Here is an exaggerated topographic model of the city

Finally a diagram of Frankford Creek. The "A Snake That Will Be Straightened Out" says everything about the attitude of conquering nature that was prevalent at the time.

There's plenty more to read about Philadelphia's water system here and other cities here.

New Sweden

New Sweden was the first European colony in the Delaware Valley, established in 1638. It was a short lived colony meant to be Sweden's answer to the New Netherland colony (now New York). 

via Wikipedia

 "Nya Sverige" or "Niew Sweden" was originally proposed by Peter Minuit, a native of Germany who had served as director of New Netherland. The Swedish government was eager to promote itself as a great power and approved the creation of the colony. They set up a trade relationship with the native Lenape peoples of the area and built Fort Christina, named for the Swedish Queen at the mouth of the Christina River, where Wilmington, Delaware is now located. 

via Wikipedia

 The colony only lasted a couple of decades before the Dutch took over the area. More on this colony can be found in the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.

The above map is from the New York Public Library - here is a detail or the river's mouth, rotated to better fit the page.

I found one more interesting and colorful map in this video but have not been able to find it elsewhere online.

 

America's Garden Capital

 I have more way more items to post for Philadelphia month than there are weeks left so in the next few weeks I will be doing some extra postings, and a few minor notes thrown in like this one.

Did you know that Philadelphia is America’s Garden Capital? A bit of local boosterism perhaps but the claim is based on having “38 public gardens arboreta and historic landscapes within 30 miles”. On a visit to the Morris Arboretum, I saw that they were giving out passports that you can stamp. 

The passport has a map. It’s not much and certainly not good for navigation but at least gives a sense of the lay of the land.

Lenapehoking-The Delaware Watershed

A more modern take on last week's Coaquannock map, Lenapehoking is a map of the Delaware Watershed's natural environment. The title means land of the Lenape people.

The map was created by Illustrator Meg Lemieur and is available on Etsy. The map is beautifully illustrated with various animals and includes a species list in the upper left corner. This includes a list of traditional Lenape uses for plants.

There is a map of the current and historic waterways of Philadelphia in the bottom right corner. There will be more on these historic waterways in a future "Philadelphia month" post.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the text at the bottom of the map for perspective

"The Delaware River, or Lenapewihittuk in the Lenape language is the lifeblood of the Mid-Atlantic, supplying drinking water and habitats for millions of humans, animals, and vegetation."

"The relationship that the Lenni-Lenape have with the land started over 10,000 years ago and will continue far into the future.

The Coaquannock Map

I will begin Philadelphia month at an early stage, just before European settlement.

via Historical Society of Pennsylvania

This 1934 map showing the homeland of the Lenape people when the first white settlers arrived in Philadelphia, was funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) . The full title is Philadelphia Region when known as Coaquannock "Grove of Tall Pines" and As First Seen by the White Men. 

 Here is a detail showing the villages of Coaquannock and Shackamaxon (still a street name having inpired this wonderful song), just north of center city. These are two of the four circular villages of the Turtle Clan, as described in this blog post.

The text on the map provides some place name translations such as Kingsessing (place of large shells) and Wingohocking (a favorite spot for planting) and, of course Manayunk (where we go to drink). There are also now buried creeks with name translations such as "where we were robbed".

This map is listed on the Temple University digital collections as "Map of Philadelphia at the time of the arrival of the first Swedes" and was originally published in the Philadelphia Bulletin, an evening newspaper that died in my youth. If you want to dig into the individual neighborhoods and see what remains, take a look at this post from Philly Trees. 

Heat Islands of Philadelphia

Program Note: This month is Philadelphia month! Don't get too excited.  In the past I've done San Francisco Week and New Jersey Week. Much of that content was posted to Twitter. These things happen when I suddenly find a trove of information about a specific place. In this case I was doing some family geo-history studies (most of which took place in Philadelphia) and came across a bunch of unrelated but interesting maps. 

Since I have more to post than there are weeks in September, I will do a few off-day micro-posts. These are the kinds of things I used to put on Twitter back when that platform was still worth engaging with. Now you can see them here, and possibly on Mastodon. Being a hot week, I will start with a map of the hottest places in the city. As with so many other cities, these are also some of the lowest income and most poorly served, with few trees and parks.

This is from the Philadelphia Inquirer, though I've lost the original map link.