University City

History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District

Laura Wolf-Powers

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781512826913
• eBook ISBN: 9781512822717
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

A chronicle of neighborhood redevelopment politics in West Philadelphia over 60 years In twenty-first-century American cities, policy makers increasingly celebrate university-sponsored innovation districts as engines of inclusive growth. But the story is not so simple. In University City, Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around the communities of West Philadelphia's University City to illuminate how the dynamics of innovation district development in the present both depart from and connect to the politics of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Wolf-Powers concludes that even as university and government leaders vow to develop without displacement, what existing residents value is imperiled when innovation-driven redevelopment remains accountable to the property market.The book first traces the municipal and institutional politics that empowered officials to demolish a predominantly Black neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University in the late 1960s to make way for the University City Science Center and University City High School. It also provides new insight into organizations whose members experimented during that same period with alternative conceptions of economic advancement. The book then shifts to the present, documenting contemporary efforts to position university-adjacent neighborhoods as locations for prosperity built on scientific knowledge. Wolf-Powers examines the work of mobilized civic groups to push cultural preservation concerns into the public arena and to win policies to help economically insecure families keep a foothold in changing neighborhoods.Placing Philadelphia's innovation districts in the context of similar development taking place around the United States, University City advocates a reorientation of redevelopment practice around the recognition that despite their negligible worth in real estate terms, the time, care, and energy people invest in their local environments—and in one another—are precious urban resources.***
Pictured on the book's cover is a luncheon on Melon Street between 37th and 38th Streets in West Philadelphia, May 31, 2014. The community meal was part of Funeral for a Home, a project that honored the life and passing of a house at 3711 Melon Street in Mantua. Photo by Jeffrey Stockbridge. Funeral for a Home was commissioned by Temple Contemporary, Temple University. Original support for Funeral for a Home was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia.

CHAPTER 1 The Black Bottom and the Birth of University City

At 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday February 18, 1969, roughly four hundred people assembled on the green in front of the University of Pennsylvania’s College Hall. Largely students from Penn and other area universities, carrying “brightly-colored flags and hand-lettered signs,”¹ they were responding to a call from the university’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an activist group whose leaders were determined to cast light on the devastating consequences of university-led expansion a few blocks from campus.

The demonstrators’ destination was a muddy, snowbound construction site at 36th and Market Streets where a laboratory building was soon to rise under the auspices of a five-year-old nonprofit, the University City Science Center Corporation. Before they walked the two blocks in the “toe-curling weather,”² and again at the building site itself, speakers addressed the crowd. In an unusual turn for a campus demonstration at Penn, a Black activist from West Philadelphia, the Reverend Edward Sims, exhorted the students to advocate the interests of the community members outside the university gates. “This is your day,” Sims intoned. “The university has taken some thirty acres of land from the blacks of this community. Are you good enough to get one acre of it back for us?” “The administrators of the University City Science Center think that we students are a bunch of children,” asserted Steven Fraser, an SDS member from Temple University. “We will force them to use their wealth to help this community.”³

After staging a theatrical performance designed to dramatize the Science Center’s dispossession of households in a predominantly Black neighborhood known as the Bottom (as well as the organization’s sponsorship of controversial military research), the shivering demonstrators returned to College Hall, where they intercepted University President Gaylord Harnwell on his way back from lunch. In addition to being Penn’s president, Harnwell was also the president of the West Philadelphia Corporation, a multilateral organization (dominated by Penn), which constituted the main source of power behind the Science Center and other university expansion in West Philadelphia. Aggrieved students proceeded to “sit in” in the university building for the next five days, as they negotiated a set of demands, first amongst themselves and then with the university trustees.

On the evening of Sunday, February 23, the trustees and the students, with the support of the Faculty Senate and a delegation of West Philadelphia Black leaders, released a six-point agreement that ended the students’ occupation of the building. The trustees had agreed two days previously that the Science Center would expressly agree not to “accept secret, classified, or military-related research contracts,”⁴ extending to the Science Center Corporation a commitment that student protestors had extracted from the university itself two years prior. More tense and more complicated had been negotiations around a separate slate of demands related to the university’s relationship with former residents of the Black Bottom and the inhabitants of Black-majority neighborhoods nearby. The trustees had agreed to form an inclusive multilateral group to set the terms of the university’s activities in West Philadelphia going forward. They had also agreed to “raise $10 million for community renewal programs” while rebuilding housing demolished by university construction.⁵ A jubilant member of the student negotiating team announced, “We changed the decision-making processes and priorities of this institution. Nothing was destroyed, but we built a hell of a lot.”⁶ A March 1969 article in Penn’s alumni magazine presciently noted, “What was ‘built’ will be further determined … over the next months and years.”⁷

The University City Science Center’s emerging presence north of Penn’s campus in the second half of the 1960s furnished a symbolic link between the university’s support for wartime research and its perpetuation of racial injustice. This “perfect storm,” as one historian has termed it,⁸ made the Science Center a target for student activists in 1969 and briefly brought neighborhood representatives and student radicals together to demand alternatives to the status quo. As ecstatic students left College Hall on the night of February 23, there was reason to be optimistic that Black residents of West Philadelphia north of Market Street would (after years of fractious advocacy efforts) secure economic and political benefits from the area’s redevelopment; the university administration had recognized them in a written statement as a consequential constituency with some claim on the future of the area. The gains won by the protestors in the College Hall sit-in, however, ultimately would do little to interrupt the momentum of an “interlocking directorate”⁹ of city and university officials dedicated to a different vision for West Philadelphia. These officials exercised power and controlled resources on behalf of institutions whose rhetoric and actions, by 1969, had succeeded in creating a new West Philadelphia neighborhood called University City.¹⁰ Redevelopment Authority personnel were already working to relocate over one thousand households displaced from the Black Bottom; the interests and claims of the residents who remained in the area were at best an irritant.

Figure 2. UPenn President Gaylord Harnwell speaking with students at the February 1969 College Hall sit-in. University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania.

A New Name

The term University City first occurred in a public document as part of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission’s annual report of 1958. While the Commission’s 1957 annual report had referred separately to the “Powelton Redevelopment Area” (north of Market Street) and “University Redevelopment Area” (south of Market Street),¹¹ in 1958 parts of each had been amalgamated into the “University City Redevelopment Area,” which contained five distinct subunits.¹² The term University City referred (and continues to refer) to the multiple areas of West Philadelphia into which Penn, Drexel, and affiliated medical institutions expanded their footprints during the 1960s and 1970s. University City Urban Renewal Area Unit 3, an 82.3-acre tract of land stretching north from Market Street to Lancaster and Powelton Avenues and east to west from 36th to 38th Streets, is of primary interest here.

The Planning Commission’s adoption of the University City moniker occurred as Philadelphia’s planning and urban renewal politics underwent a reorientation. The 1951 election of Democrat Joseph Clark as Philadelphia’s first reform mayor in generations had aligned the city with a liberal urban consensus that tied big-city mayors and other municipal elected officials to the national Democratic Party and the post–New Deal administrative state.¹³ Clark and the highly educated professionals he recruited to his administration had eagerly used the tools and funding provided by the 1949 Housing Act to pursue physical renewal in central Philadelphia and its outlying neighborhoods throughout the early 1950s.¹⁴ In 1956, however, a study conducted by influential figures in the city’s civic and planning establishments concluded that while downtown projects had succeeded, comprehensive redevelopment in deteriorating residential neighborhoods had not. Private investment had not followed clearance as expected, and, as in most cities, renewal had dislocated residents at a rate that far outpaced the construction of new housing.¹⁵ The response to the Central Urban Renewal Area (CURA) study, as it was called, was twofold. First, there was a shift away from project initiation in the most distressed parts of the city. Funding and attention would now go toward “conservable” areas, where leaders resolved to focus on housing rehabilitation and code enforcement as opposed to demolition and clearance. Second, the post-CURA approach reflected growing alarm about the city’s unemployment situation. Economists had identified a dismaying dispersion of jobs—particularly manufacturing jobs—to the Philadelphia suburbs as well as to southern states, and the region’s economic base was adjudged to be weak as well.¹⁶ In their urgency to shore up the city’s employment base, Philadelphia officials and policy makers welcomed the 1954 revision of the federal government’s Housing Act, which was much more permissive than its 1949 counterpart had been toward projects that replaced deteriorated neighborhood fabric with commercial and institutional (rather than strictly residential) development.

Figure 3. Map of the University City Urban Renewal Area, 1965. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority.

As they sought remedies for the city’s economic decline, officials in the Clark administration and those of his Democratic successors Richardson Dilworth and James Tate took a strong interest in the expertise and potential economic role of local universities. In this, they behaved similarly to urban mayors across the United States. Universities were key members of postwar urban growth coalitions. Moored to city centers as industrial jobs and the middle-class population rapidly decentralized, universities (along with corporate headquarters, major corporate services businesses, and hospitals) exercised significant influence over municipal-level decisions, not least those involving federal urban renewal funding.¹⁷ Section 112 of the Housing Act’s 1959 reauthorization, conceived in the U.S. Congress with the close involvement of a group of academic advisors that included UPenn administrators, allowed America’s municipalities to count funding supplied by universities and hospitals toward the “local match” required to unleash federal dollars. Section 112 proved extraordinarily valuable to cash-poor city administrators, and beneficial to their academic partners. Together with the power to use redevelopment funding under the Housing Act to undertake nonresidential projects, the provision would be a key factor in the creation of university-compatible neighborhood districts in Philadelphia during the 1960s, as it had been or would be in Chicago, Columbus, Buffalo, and New York City.¹⁸ In West Philadelphia, university interests would soon overwhelm the city’s stated commitment to prioritizing rehabilitation over demolition in urban renewal projects.

The West Philadelphia Corporation and the University City Science Center

As changes to the city’s urban renewal program and the federal regulations governing it were getting underway, a consortium of academic institutions led by UPenn founded the West Philadelphia Corporation (WPC) in 1959. A multi-institutional collaboration dedicated to transforming the neighborhoods bounding West Philadelphia’s academic and medical campuses, the WPC comprised representatives from all of West Philadelphia’s academic institutions and hospitals and some of its neighborhood associations. Its goals aligned strongly with city leaders’ endeavors to shore up Philadelphia’s economic position in the Delaware Valley region and in the nation. In the Corporation’s 1962 annual report, a message from UPenn President Harnwell underscored the institution’s deep connections to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Map
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. A Twice-Cleared Place
• Chapter 1. The Black Bottom and the Birth of University City
• Chapter 2. West Philadelphia’s Great Society
• Chapter 3. Plans on the Ground
• Chapter 4. The Contradictions of Inclusion
• Conclusion
• A Note on Sources
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments