"The Taking of Northern Liberties"

By Patrick Starr - August 1982

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Published: Sep 28, 2006

Northern Liberties, just one of the city's booming real estate markets, is often the first neighborhood cited in reference to the ultimately unanswerable gentrification question. Today, longtime residents deal with the pros and cons of new neighbor (read: rich neighbor) influx. But in 1982, NoLibs was a political battleground — a low-income, largely ethnic area that wanted to change, but didn't know how.

In the '60s, "changing neighborhood" was a whispered euphemism which conjured visions of block-busting realtors and mindless White flight. To Whites, "changing" meant an onslaught of unfamiliar Black faces and certain neighborhood decay. To Blacks, "changing" meant better housing, and then the pain of rejection as Whites fled as if from the devil himself.

Today, changing means gentrification and displacement. It is a change of a different kind, but it still brings fear and conflict. Fear of rising rents and eviction notices and the constant temptation of riches, real and imagined, beckoning from behind the neighbors' barred windows and alarmed doors. For the sophisticated urban pioneer, there is the fear of the macho street culture where brute force rules, defiantly flouting the effete sophistication of modern civilization.

Some say that Northern Liberties is the next Society Hill — a fearsome buzz word in Philadelphia. I doubt it. This area north of Spring Garden Street and bounded by Front, Fifth and Girard has too many hulking abandoned factories and overgrown vacant lots. It isn't within walking distance of City Hall or New Market, but it is changing.

Decline and poverty became accepted as inevitable facts in many Philadelphia neighborhoods. On the TV news, we heard about unemployment and despair. But according to Joe Tyson, pastor of the St. John's United Methodist Church at 1018 North Third Street, "Northern Liberties was a place where you could be comfortable in your poverty." It isn't anymore.

From here, Starr's story became incredibly convoluted — by no fault of his own. The writer simply recounted the telenovela-esque nature of the area's struggles, rife with deception, vote buying and even murder. It was quite controversial at the time: CP founder Bruce Schimmel dumped an entire press run after lawyers advised him that a paragraph of the piece was possibly libelous. Starr, now VP of the city's Pennsylvania Environmental Council, doesn't recall the contents of that passage, but he's almost certain it was related to a particular power player. "I had interviewed one particular developer, and he literally had a bodyguard present in the room with me," he recalls. "He insisted on taping the entire conversation to hold me accountable for what I wrote. He said, 'If you don't write the truth, I'm going to get you.' Of course, that part wasn't on the tape."

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