Thom Nickels: Port Richmond elegy
There’s not a single vacant space in my Riverwards Fishtown-Port Richmond neighborhood that hasn’t been rezoned for rehab by developers.
One night as I was making my way to a friend’s house in the neighborhood, I passed the spot where one of my favorite little houses once stood. This tiny house used to sit next to a large overgrown wooded area. I’ve always called this house, “The Little House That Could.”
It wasn’t a beautiful house by any means, but the way it was situated next to a small patch of urban wildlife near the Belgrade Street overpass has always given it a unique “house in the mountains” look. For years I’d see the owners of this house working outside on their trucks and cars. At Christmastime there was always a simple string of lights placed on the home’s humble door. The truly odd thing about the property was that the overgrown yard wasn’t fenced in. For years anyone could walk in and out of the wooded area which had the look and feel of a little house in the Poconos.
Then, developers invaded the area. They purchased the small wooded area next to the little house and soon built two unsightly, out-of-scale, four-story, cookie-cutter houses with large picture windows and exterior steel prefabricated stairs with inboard rails.
The new houses dwarfed the little old house but one could easily see that the old house was built of solid materials while the new houses looked to be built with cheap materials from Home Depot, especially the cheesy hollow interior doors that one could easily punch a hole in with a fist. Despite the exorbitant price, the new houses were built with little or no insulation and without a garage.
Classic Riverward houses are a dying breed. For the most part they are small, imperfect structures (no insulation, antiquated plumbing) that have no place in today’s all style and no substance world. Despite their outdatedness, they have a charm that cannot be replaced by the boxy, industrial warehouse new house design that has now become the signature look all over the city.
The little Pocono house used to have a house just like it on the street where I live. I often referred to the twin house on my street as the Sea Shore House, which was set back from the sidewalk and had the look of a shore house because of its partial wooden construction and second-story deck that faced the street. In some ways, the house evoked the look of an odd-looking tugboat. Years before I moved to the Riverwards, the house had a pond with goldfish in the front yard. The original owner was said to have built a huge wooden boat that he kept in the backyard, like a small Biblical ark. Things don’t get much stranger than this.
I never met the original owner of the Seashore House because by the time of my arrival, the house had become a rental property. The fate of most rental properties is well known. Renters don’t set down roots in neighborhoods; they also come and go like 1960s door-to-door salesmen. Unfortunately, all the Seashore House renters weren’t exactly nice people either. One couple that rented the place had a lot of deck parties. They’d sit on the deck that faced the street and make comments about the people passing on the sidewalk below. The neighbors tolerated these upstarts because they knew that, as renters, that their days on the street were numbered.
One day the seashore house was demolished and a few months later an army of trucks and a construction crew arrived to build an out-of-scale, five-story monolith Northern Liberties-style house that towered over all the other houses on my street. The huge new house was like King Kong pounding his chest in victory while laughing at all the other residents of the neighborhood in their tiny little Lionel Train homes. The new house at least had real exterior steps rather than those abominable steel prefabricated stairs, but that was the only plus.
The new monolith house imposed itself on the street like an occupying army. For months after it was built my life felt dwarfed. My little house was under its huge shadow, a small garage or water closet by comparison. The new house also blocked the view outside my bedroom window. I used to be able to see treetops but now I saw big picture windows and grey slate. Sometimes I’d sit on my stoop and stare at the monolith’s observatory deck that was so high in the sky it resembled an astronomy lab. Our street was now a little medieval village surrounded by a large castle.
How did this happen to our fine little street?
Friends would visit and say, “Oh wow, your street has an upgrade. How tall is that house? A bit out of scale, wouldn’t you say?”
The new house became a magnet for other King Kong houses. Very soon I noticed a lot of cars with out-of-state license plates, most of them from New York.
New York developers had discovered our hidden-away neighborhood and now real estate agents, many of them young women dressed to the nines in tight dresses showing plenty of cleavage, swaggered from expensive cars in a rush to show these new cheap homes with exterior glitter to potential buyers.
Armies of slick-looking men in suits began crawling all over the neighborhood. Most of them were eyeing the two vacant properties further up the street. These men would arrive early in the morning and walk up and down the street with a “take no prisoners” look. They accompanied surveyors who scoped and measured the land. Eventually plans were drawn up for two monolith 400k+ houses towering six or seven stories on the same side of the street as my house.
Things were on a roll. For months the sound of construction filled the air. The blunt, relentless crash of industrial hammers on steel made the ground and the walls of my house shake. Outside on the street, Brooklyn accents mingled with the clang of equipment and machinery. Suddenly it was a whole new world.
Some neighbors could be heard muttering under their breath: “Go back to New York! We don’t want you here!”
When the monolith houses were finally built, more real estate agents returned in stilettos and killer skirts, their long blond hair complimenting their new silver cars. For months, all I heard was the sound of high heels on asphalt as the agents showed the new homes to prospective suckers. The suckers were other New Yorkers escaping a doomed city, most in their twenties and thirties, or Californians (escaping a doomed state), arriving in groups of five or six. Many also had dogs, which meant a lot of dog poop.
Construction started on a house on the far end of my street. This house had been boarded up for decades. The rehabbed design for this structure was the same utilitarian warehouse design all new houses currently have. This means lots of wires, cable gizmos and PECO meters on the front of the house, a terrible look that calls to mind housing projects in China. The building materials used were generally cheap and of course had those steel prefabricated exterior stairs.
My little street was changing faster than the climate.
In conjunction with all this, the oldest indigenous family on the block moved away, meaning that all the original people that were on the block nineteen years ago when I moved here from Center City were now lost to the ages. Where did the time go?
It’s easy to wax nostalgic, especially since I numbered myself as one of the first “gentrifiers” from Center City. I thought about the old neighborhood that I knew then, especially the look of the broken walls of the old paint factory at Thompson and Huntingdon.
I recalled the Port Richmond Shopping Center when it was a real shopping center with a first-class Chinese restaurant, a large user-friendly Dunkin Donuts, a bank, a restaurant other than Applebee’s, a dry cleaner, a Hallmark Card variety store that sold gourmet chocolate, and one of the best thrift stores in the city.
Today the shopping center has several for rent spaces. One can hardly even call it a shopping center. Who needs so many dollar stores? Or nail salons? Later came a Starbucks and a Nifty Fifties restaurant but hardly anybody goes to the latter. The New York outfit that owns the shopping center charges exorbitant rent. They would rather have empty stores sit for years rather than lower the rent.
Everywhere I walk in my neighborhood now I see 400K townhouses that look more and more like housing projects in China.
All of these homes when sold will bring in more people, more congestion, more traffic, and more parking problems. Henry Miller in the 1950s called America the air conditioned nightmare, but what will we call this area of the Riverwards when it becomes so congested that people will be living on top of one another?
I’m wondering what these new neighbors will be like. Will they be disaffected New Yorkers? Or will they be students who are here today and gone tomorrow?
Everyone knows that students are not authentic Philadelphians but transients who view the city as an amusement park for their weekend pleasure.
This brings me back to my first days in the neighborhood when I’d ponder the obscurity of the area. This was when you couldn’t find a taxi to save your life, when nobody lived here except old families with ancient roots. In those days I prayed for rapid-fire gentrification; sadly, I got my wish.
Now I’m stuck in an area that will soon be as crowded as the city of Shenzhen, China, the fifth most crowded city in the world, trailing India’s Mumbai and Calcutta.
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.
You’re not Mr. Rourke and Philadelphia is not Fantasy Island. This is a typical response from a Philadelphia resident when positive change happens, blame it on imaginary outsiders.
Agreed, he fails to mention that many sections of Port Richmond have been decimated by the opioid epidemic. And he seems to prefer vacant lots to new homes that families will actually live in? If Port Richmond were so desirable, there wouldn’t be vacant lots, there wouldn’t be so few “indigenous” residents.
There is nothing positive about developers destroying neighborhoods originally built to provide affordable housing for working class folk, most often immigrants trying to integrate into the American Dream. What you get in return from the developers are homes that are, as they might say in Texas, “all hat, no cattle” These neighbourhoods are in large part, inhabited by financially well off, detached, elites who do not form an attachment to the neighbouhood or the lower-class inhabitants. They move on and leave the economic problems created (ever increasing cost of housing, neighbours detached from each other) behind. In other words, they would sell grandma for a nickel if they thought needed. It is ironic that Port Richmond was originally built by the Reading Railroad as a coal loading pier for anthracite coal shipping to New York City, and in this way helped to build the American Dream. The irony is the original economic benefits, and the creation of the neighbourhoods are almost gone.
You and Mr. Nickels are romanticizing what he describes as; “For the most part, they are small, imperfect structures (no insulation, antiquated plumbing)”. In other words shoddily built, badly maintained, short-term housing. There are plenty of residences in Philadelphia that are worth preserving, but these are not one of them. Otherwise, people like you and Mr. Nickels would have bought and restored them.
“There is nothing positive about developers destroying neighborhoods originally built to provide affordable housing for working-class folk,” – These neighborhoods were built for poor Americans to live in, times have changed. I can take you back to the neighborhoods where my working immigrant, working-class grandparents lived, they have changed. The same can be said for the upper-middle-class neighborhood where I grew up, that has changed as well. Change happens.
Social and economic changes are not development. Development is the build-out of housing in a manner that maximizes return on investment. it is not neighbourhood creation. As immigration increased and the Western movement lost steam, the nineteenth century version of development appeared, which is why you see row homes and small cottages in immigrant neighbourhoods. The difference is that these became neighbourhoods. where economic, social and educations resources were available. The aim was for the children to have the opportunity to have a better life. I grew up in a neighbourhood of every type of house style you conceive of, included were small businesses, religious institutions, including their schools (also public schools), various fraternal and social organizations. The population was of various racial and ethnic backgrounds. You don’t find that in today’s developments, even in planned communities. As to poorly built and badly maintained. my grandfather grew up in a four-square company house in Centralia. He often remarked about he and his brothers sleeping under a heavy quilt, waking up with fine powdered snow on the covers and the water in the wash basin frozen solid. This house was lived in and used until the town was abandoned in the 1980s due to the underground mine fire. By the way, it was not shoddy construction, the shingles were laded according to long time accepted construction methods and house insulation was unknown in construction.
Would any of us want to live in an uninsulated home today? Today’s homes really are built better.
Yep, they are built better when considering amenities (indoor plumbing, electricity, HV/AC and so on.) In spite of that. there are many old homes sought-after in rehabbed neighbourhoods. If you have ever seen HGTV program on restoring working-class Detroit neighbourhoods or Magnolia Network’s “Restoring Galveston.” Current amenities are added when possible.PS I grew up in an old Victorian that was not built with insulation or double-paned windows. Woke up in my third=floor bedroom many winters where I was cold as a witch at the bottom of a 40 foot well.
HGTV shows are fiction. They select homes that are best suited for the storyline, not reality.
The reality is that your grandfather grew up in a former company town, where the company provided housing for workers, which was built to minimal standards. As witnessed by your grandfather waking up with snow on his blanket.
I grew up in a Victorian and lived in the 3rd-floor bedroom. This bedroom had less insulation than the rest of the home, fewer windows, and was abutted by the attic. This bedroom was for the live-in help and was colder, just like your room.
If these “small, imperfect structures (no insulation, antiquated plumbing)” were worth saving people like you should buy them.
People like me and my wife do buy them.