Exiles on South Street

How the famed strip got its mojo: An oral history from the people who made it happen 40 years ago.

by Jonathan Valania

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Published: Nov 3, 2010

Neal Santos

Forty years ago, South Street was doomed, left for dead by city planners who had scheduled the street for demolition to make way for a proposed Crosstown Expressway that would connect I-95 to I-76. South Street then was nothing like South Street now — a funky post-hippie/post-punk/post-cool amalgam of shops, bars and fooderies, aka Philly’s Haight-Ashbury, a land-locked asphalt boardwalk where teenagers from across the tri-state area flock to see and be seen (and stage the occasional flash mob).

Back then, South Street was hardly a jewel in the city’s crown; in fact, it wasn’t even considered part of Center City on officially drawn tourist maps. Likewise, the demographics of the street were radically different. South Street’s eastern end was made up of Jewish delis and synagogues, while the western end was dominated by African-American-owned businesses, soul food restaurants and jazz/R&B venues; in the middle was a string of bridal shops. All of these suffered a long, slow decline thanks to the death sentence that had been hanging over the street’s head ever since the Crosstown Expressway was first proposed by city planners in the 1930s. Banks redlined the street and the city refused to issue building permits to property owners foolhardy enough to want to shore up the street’s crumbling infrastructure. As a result, property values plummeted, and many buildings stood empty and boarded up.

Enter a small ragtag volunteer army of artists, hippies and assorted misfits — initially drawn by the edgy repertory theater staged at the Theater of the Living Arts — that took a shine to the street’s über-cheap rents, shockingly low mortgages and the fact that everyone knew this was nowhere. It was a place where like-minded bohemians could establish a safe harbor from the stifling social mores, groupthink mentality and profit-driven motives of polite society.

First came the Zagars — Isaiah and Julia — who set up a shop called Eyes Gallery on Fourth and South to sell the Peruvian folk art they had amassed from a recent stint in the Peace Corps. In South Street’s creation myth, the Zagars would play the role of Adam and Eve in a hippie Eden built atop a blighted urban wasteland, bringing to bear the community-building skills they learned in the Peace Corps. Then came the Snydermans — Rick and Ruth — who opened The Works Gallery, which also specialized in global folk and ethnographic arts and craftwork. With the freak flag firmly planted, more soon followed, drawn by South Street’s burgeoning rep as the place where the ’60s were putting down roots and flowering in Philadelphia, all believing they could change the city’s mind about building the Crosstown Expressway with a mix of grassroots activism, street theater protests and by building a thriving community and proving the street was worth keeping.

Slowly but surely, boarded-up buildings were replaced with thriving coffeehouses, gourmet restaurants and artisan retail shops. In the process, these South Street revivalists would unwittingly sow the seeds of the city’s currently flourishing dining, shopping and nightlife scenes. Meanwhile, a coalition of community activists, pro bono lawyers and sympathetic urban planners banded together to fight City Hall head on. Though it took years, the city eventually relented, the Crosstown Expressway project was killed and, in a textbook example of poetic justice, the federal dollars earmarked for the project were funneled into SEPTA.

Last month, this first wave of South Street revivalists, who dubbed themselves the South Street Renaissance, staged a reunion to mark the 40th anniversary of the strip’s rebirth. City Paper took the occasion to interview some of the key players and assemble this first-person oral history.

Neal Santos

Joel Spivak (author/artist/architect) Back in Colonial times, the land that South Street sits on was this unclaimed territory between the Swedish colony to the south and the British colony to the north that later became Philadelphia. Back then, there were these dramatic cliffs at the edge of the Delaware — later, around the time of the Civil War, they filled it in to enlarge the city, all that area down by the river, Delaware Avenue, etc., was all under water — but back before that happened the land would just drop off at the river, and there were caves in the cliffs that were used by pirates to hide their booty. And the area that is today South Street was rife with whorehouses and taverns and things that pirates would like. Later, South Street was the location of the first theater in America, because Philadelphia was a Quaker city, and you couldn't have a theater in a Quaker city because theaters were considered immoral. Let's just say that all the things that couldn't happen in Philadelphia happened just past the southern border of the city, which eventually became South Street.

Isaiah Zagar (co-owner, Eyes Gallery) We wound up back in Philadelphia in 1968 after serving in the Peace Corps working with artisans high up in the Andes mountains of Peru and eventually found our way down to South Street. We had all this folk art in crates, because that was one of the fringe benefits of serving in the Peace Corps — free shipping. We opened the Eyes Gallery in December of 1968 and made $2,500 that first month. We were ecstatic, especially considering our rent was $100 a month. But then the next month we only made $45, we didn't understand the impact of Christmas on retail. So we struggled for a while, but by 1970 we were able to buy the building we had been renting for $10,000.

Ruth Snyderman (co-founder, Snyderman-Works Gallery) Rick and I met at Temple [University] in the mid-'60s. We went out on a date once, but I didn't hear from him after that. Somehow his mother got a hold of my phone number a year or two later, and gave it to Rick, who promptly threw it in the trash, not wanting girlfriend recommendations from his mother. And then we ran into each other at a concert at the Academy of Music, and afterward, Rick ran home and dug my number out of the trash — and we've been together ever since. We started going down to South Street to see plays at the Theater of the Living Arts and we just sort of knew right away that we belonged there.

Rick Snyderman (co-founder, Snyderman-Works Gallery) We married in 1965, and that year Ruthie opened The Works Gallery in a tiny former office basement at 20th and Locust with a focus on ethnographic and folk art from around the world. We had a subscription to the TLA, which was a repertory theater back then. One day Ruthie went down to South Street to exchange some tickets at the box office with our toddler-aged daughter Ami in tow. She saw an odd store, its sagging entranceway drooping like a pair of old eyebrows, covered with bits of broken tile and mirror shards. Inside they were selling the same Peruvian crafts we were selling at The Works. While she struck up a conversation with the owners, Julia and Isaiah Zagar, Ami wandered off and fell through a hole in the floor and got stuck. Isaiah had to go downstairs to the basement to pull her through to get her out — fortunately just with some scratches. But out of that experience grew the close friendship we have maintained to this day. A few years later, in 1970, we moved The Works Gallery to South Street.

Neal Santos Isaiah and Julia Zagar

Joel Spivak Back in the 1930s, the federal government came up with this grand plan to connect all the cities with highways and make it easy for people to move out to the suburbs, because back then cities were pretty run-down and the conventional wisdom was that nobody would want to live in the city or raise a family there. It really was just a way to enrich the car companies and the trucking companies and the oil companies. The plan for Philadelphia was to build a "ring road," and they used the original William Penn lines of demarcation, Vine Street on the north, the Delaware River to the east, the Schuylkill to the west and South Street to the south. Basically there were just a lot of lines drawn: "I want to build a highway here and here," without even taking a look at what they were building over. There were a number of planners involved in Philadelphia, but it was Ed Bacon [who] formalized the plans in the late '40s. The whole plan was, you would just hop in your car after work and drive home to the suburbs without having to sit in a big traffic jam. So for the next 30 years, South Street had this death warrant hanging over its head — which eventually turned it into a ghost town.

Isaiah Zagar The city's master plan was to build a medieval city with a moat around it, and the rich on the inside and the poor on the outside. Society Hill Towers was the linchpin, but back then, they couldn't even fill it up because nobody wanted to live in a dying city.

Julia Zagar (co-owner, Eyes Gallery) I remember when we first came down here it was so desolate. There were no cars on the street, no people on the sidewalk. I remember watching this one piece of paper blowing all the way down South Street.

Mickey Lubell (co-founder, Lickety Split restaurant) The parking meters cost 5 cents an hour and nobody bothered to check them.

Ron Kaplan (publisher, South Street Star) We would play Frisbee in the street on Friday nights and the only time we had to stop for vehicles was when the bus would come by once an hour.

Rick Snyderman It looked like Berlin after the Russians invaded it. All boarded-up buildings and trash-strewn lots. If there were 40 buildings on a block, maybe 15 of them were occupied.

Isaiah Zagar We thought the expressway plan was crazy and it would destroy the city. It was a fight, but we loved it. Protesting the Vietnam War was like fighting a 1,000-headed dragon — cut one off and another pops up. But we thought this was a fight we could win. There were people who fought it through official channels, but we could bring the street theater to the protests. We would have the crazy ragtag parades. I remember one time we hired all these hearses to circle City Hall over and over again with signs that said, "THE CROSSTOWN EXPRESSWAY DESTROYS COMMUNITIES."

Denise Scott Brown (architect, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates) I graduated from Penn in the '60s, when there was a lot of talk of combining urban planning with social activism, that planners were meant to represent the will of the people and almost all the people who lived on South Street were low income and had no voice in City Hall. Our firm did an urban planning study that showed just how disruptive this [expressway] would be to the community. I remember one public hearing that was attended by Damon Childs, who was the executive director of city planning under Mayor [Joseph] Tate. He got up and said, "In the 19th century some civic-minded people gave up their estates along the river and that's how we got Fairmount Park, so why can't some of you give up your houses for the expressway?" I got up and said, "These aren't rich people giving up their summer homes. They are poor people with nowhere else to go." He was later heard to say that as long as I was with the firm, we would never get a city contract, and that's pretty much held true. But ultimately, what killed the Crosstown Expressway project was the Watts Riots [in Los Angeles in August 1965]. Tate was afraid of something like that happening here if they went through with the project, so he shelved it.

Rick Snyderman Then [Frank] Rizzo became mayor in 1972, and he appoints Bernard Meltzer, a real estate agent, as the city's planning commissioner. They thought the Crosstown Expressway was a brilliant idea, and why didn't it go through? Liberal wimps! They added a new twist: The expressway would be sunk into a tunnel and on top would be 20 40-story towers — or 40 20-story towers, I can't remember which — with apartments and shops and restaurants.

Joel Spivak They were going to call it Mega City. And Meltzer was going to be the real estate agent for the whole thing. So they were really pushing this thing because he could have basically gotten all that property from the city of Philadelphia for almost nothing to develop his dream. Ultimately, the federal government decided it wasn't worth the huge sums of money they would have to invest into it, which came out in something called the Vorhees Report [by Alan M. Vorhees and Associates in 1970] and the city tried to hide it. Even after the Mega City plan was defeated, they still planned to put in all these ramps on and off I-95. The on-ramp was going to be South Street and the off-ramp was going to be Bainbridge Street. So then there was the "Stop the Ramps" battle, which took another five years.

Neal Santos Rick and Ruth Snyderman

Rick Snyderman We hired a lawyer named John Hunt, who figured out that the state had not done any of the environmental impact studies they were required to do before beginning major construction projects — not just in Philadelphia, but all over the state. He threatened to tell the judge, who would have shut down every public works project all over the state. The state's reaction was, "Wait a minute, now don't go doing anything rash," and basically they agreed to sign a consent decree promising not to build the expressway if we just went away quietly.

"WEIRD MUSIC AND CANDLES AND LSD"

Isaiah Zagar What drew us down here in the first place was the Theater of the Living Arts, which was putting on this incredible, cutting-edge theater.

Tom Bissinger (creative director, Theater of the Living Arts, 1969-70) I was hired on as guest director in 1969 and moved down here from New York. I brought Morgan Freeman, Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch and Sally Kirkland with me. We did all sorts of crazy experimental things like covering the audience with a big sheet that had holes in it for their heads to stick out, and the actors would pop up in the middle of the audience and that's where the play would happen. We did one play that featured a huge inflatable penis that ejaculated white foam all over the stage until it was 2 feet high. Don't even ask me why we did that. Another night we staged something we called a Black Mass, which started at midnight and it was basically a lot of weird music and candles and LSD.

Joel Spivak Back then, there was very little nightlife in Philadelphia, maybe two restaurants in the whole city open after 10 p.m. If you wanted nightlife, you went to New York or New Hope, because there was more going on there at night.

Tom Bissinger The TLA was run by a board of directors made up of wealthy people from the Main Line. The theater had been running in the red for years before I got there, but by 1970, the board decided they were no longer going to keep writing checks and that was the end of live theater at the TLA. It became a movie theater after that. Which was fine with me: I was burned out on theater and looking for a new way to live my life. By then, I had fallen in love with South Street and became sort of a community development guy. Out of all these ruined, abandoned buildings came these little green shoots, people from all over the world were moving in and starting businesses and a real community and that seemed very exciting to me, much more exciting than putting on plays for people.

Kenn Kweder (musician) I heard there was a lot of music going on down at Third and South. I was 21 and full of hormones and certain I could change the world, so I quit my job to make music and never looked back since.

Julia Zagar By 1974, all the old people were gone and it really was a hippie village. We had a Hippie House Tour in response to the Society Hill house tours.

Stan Pokras (owner of Everything for Everybody Philadelphia): Everything for Everybody was sort of like the pre-Internet version of Craigslist. We connected people with goods or services. Basically, it was a bunch of want ads on index cards tacked to the wall and you had to buy in to advertise or respond to the ads. It only cost people $5 a month, so we held rent parties to make ends meet. There was this group of about 25 middle-aged couples from Cherry Hill called Surprise Night Out; each month they would plan some event that none of the members would know about until they showed up. They called us up and asked what we could do for them and we were like, "How about a hippie party?" We had hippie food, a jugband and a lot of pot-smoking hippies and 25 non-hippie couples from the suburbs. Everyone seemed to have a good time and we made our rent.

"THE WILD, WILD WEST"

Rick Snyderman There was no hierarchy down here. If you were different, there were no judgments.

Mickey Lubell I grew up in the suburbs; I'm gay, but back then I wasn't allowed to be. But I came down to South Street and I could be who I was, I could be myself. Believe me, there were a lot of fancy cars from the suburbs that pulled up and parked at those 5-cent parking meters, and I saw people in love with food and music and just being who they were. And there were a lot of divorces out in the suburbs after that, people coming out of the closet or moving out to California.

Ron Kaplan The general attitude was, "I don't care what you do over there as long as you don't bother me over here."

Joel Spivak It was sort of the wild, wild west and it could still get a little rough. Before it was [J.C.] Dobbs it was called Wexlers [at Third and South streets], and it was a rough-and-tumble shot and a beer place with a largely black clientele, and there would always seem to be a knife fight breaking out. I remember a female friend coming to stay at my place, and I was showing her around and she asked me if the neighborhood was safe, and I told her, "Oh yeah, nothing bad happens here." And I opened the front door, and there was a guy crawling by on the sidewalk bleeding profusely from a stab wound in his side.

Kenn Kweder I don't want to over-romanticize it; there was a lot of flim-flamming going on. I thought everyone was reading from the same book as me on sharing and I loaned microphones to people, and couple weeks later you would run into them and they would just shrug. Turns out the book they were reading wasn't about sharing, it was about stealing.

Tom Bissinger We were stoned, we were raw and we were open and ready. And we tasted freedom. We rented a building on Fourth Street, which is today a U.S. Post Office, but back then it was community hangout. We called it WPCP, which stood for Work Peacefully Communicate Patiently. It was open to everyone, not just white hippie types. We rented space to the South Street gang, which was this bunch of young black ne'er-do-wells that tagged the whole street with graffiti. That was frowned on by some, but our attitude was that it was better to get them on our side instead of working against us. We also rented space to the Nation of Islam — bow ties and bean pies, the whole nine yards — and they would hold these fiery meetings where they would denounce whitey. We would organize parades where everyone would wear crazy costumes. We were a little naÏve, but we built up enough goodwill with everyone that nobody wanted to wreck it. Once we staged a block party inside a large inflatable structure, everyone was invited and brought food and drink. There was a live band, and it turned into a big dance party. We never bothered to get permits; [we] just shut down the street for a few hours while the cops just looked the other way. It was pretty crazy, but nobody got hurt. That was our mantra: Nobody got hurt, so it was a success.

Mickey Lubell When John Waters' Pink Flamingos premièred at the TLA, we hosted a party for John Waters and Divine at Lickety Split, because our first bartender was in the movie. She's the one who pulls up her dress, and she has a dick.

Tom Bissinger When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose — and then you can have everything. During the student uprisings in Paris in 1968, there was this slogan that they spray-painted on the walls: "Imagination takes power." We sort of felt like that was what we were doing. There was plenty of drugs and enough sex to make everyone happy, although there were no orgies — at least not any that I got invited to.

Ron Kaplan There were a lot of drugs around in those days, but drug use wasn't blatant and there were no big scary drug dealers with guns. It was all soft drugs back then — pot, and maybe a little powdered cocaine. The cops liked us. We made their job a lot more fun. There were lots of pretty girls to look at and invariably people streaking. Remember, it was the prime time of the sexual revolution. The neighborhood was very incestuous; you would be somebody's boyfriend or girlfriend one week and then somebody else's the next and everyone remained friends. If you were looking for a long-term relationship, this was not the place. But if you wanted a good time, well, South Street was always a good time.

Mickey Lubell Lickety Split was named after a James Brown lyric, but everyone just assumed it was a cunnilingus joke, which, of course, it was. But we were one of the pioneers of the Philadelphia restaurant renaissance. Stephen Starr was a customer.

Neal Santos Joel Spivak

"THE DREAM WAS OVER"

Isaiah Zagar The threat of the expressway was lifted, but it was already too late; real estate people had bought up everything and prices were rising out of the reach of young people with little money. We were young and had little understanding of ownership. By the end of the '70s the dream was over, somehow life got in the way. There were the realities of raising children and needing to earn a living and that spelled the end of collectivism.

Tom Bissinger The first nail in the coffin was the first chain store that showed up. That's when it started to become the boardwalk. The more money was involved, the more people started looking out for their own self-interest, and the tighter the controls became, more paperwork, more permits, more "sign here, please."

Ron Kaplan By '76 people up in New York saw what was going on and came down here to make money, buying up properties and raising the rent and forcing people out. That was the point where people became more concerned with making money than having a good time.

Barbara Blau (antiques dealer) These days I think the street is in sad decline. So much redundancy, all cheap Chinese jewelry and a bajillion shoe stores. I remember when the retail mix was very creative and people would help each other out. Now it's very much every man for himself. A lot of independent retailers disappeared under cover of night; one day they were there and the next day they were gone. And then the big national chains came in — Gap, Tower Records, McDonald's — and one by one they left, too. Nobody knows of any place on Earth where a McDonald's didn't thrive, but they couldn't make it on South Street.

Charles Neri (owner, Neri Antiques) The national chains were a detriment. It's like a strip mall now: all jeans and sneakers and telephones. South Street still gets a lot of foot traffic, but it's all kids. It wasn't like this back in '76; back then at 2 a.m. on a Friday night, you couldn't walk through this store because it was so crowded.

Isaiah Zagar It's all relative. I remember a young man saying to me in 2003 that South Street ain't what it used to be. I asked him when he got here and he said 1994. Sometimes we go over to Frankford Avenue and check out the galleries and the shops, and it reminds us of when we were young and among the avant-garde of a city reinventing itself, like the torch has been passed and it's in good hands.

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Jonathan Valania is the editor in chief of phawker.com.