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a nutty novel

" Through all the change, and

through all the stories, there's
a common thread: this is a
working neighborhood.
Its history isn't the colonial
museum history of the old
downtown. It's the still-unfolding
history of industry, a history of
function and work and the
present tense.”

Matt Ruben
Former President
Northern Liberties Neighbors Association

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a nutty novel
It's got to be the stupidest car ever made. Look up "Nouveau Riche" in the
dictionary, and you'll find a picture of a guy standing in front of one. And
yet there it is, a stretch Hummer, shiny and white in all its phallic, bird-
flipping glory, right there on North Second Street. It's parked in front of a
trendy new spot called Deuce, which bills itself as a “Las Vegas-style"
lounge. Deuce, in turn, shares a building with several dozen just-built
"New York-style" loft.

It's nighttime, but I blink as if blinded by the sun, trying to comprehend

how this postmodern cosmopolitan overload—which didn't exist even five
years ago— could have landed not two blocks from my little 1830s
"Philadelphia-style" rowhouse. It costs more to fill up the Hummer than to
heat my place for the winter, and I'm a little worried the wheeled beast is
going to open its grill and swallow my happy home in one big bite.

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a nutty novel
It It's even more difficult to visualize this stretch of
Northern Liberties’commercial corridor as ground
zero for the Great Linoleum Wars of the 1950s. But
that's exactly what it was, this very block of North
Second, a half-century ago nearly to the day. Not
content to do battle with promotions and and
circulars, the shopkeepers of Linoleum Row
screamed obscenities across the thoroughfare and
pitched bricks at each other's windows. Press
accounts compared it to the Hatfields and McCoys,
and the Korean War. Proprietor Harvey Bell, who was
six at the time, remembers his father on the front
page of the paper, pointing to the place where his
skull had collided with a competitor's claw hammer.

Harvey and his sister,

Marilyn Bell c. 1950.

Above left: 700-712 North 2nd

Street, 1975.

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a nutty novel
Today Bell Floor Covering is the only floor store left in Northern Liberties, and Deuce
which has turned out to be a popular neighborhood eatery—is its amicable next-door
neighbor. Go into any similarly new restaurant or condo in Northern Liberties, and
there's a good chance you're walking on floors from Harvey's stock, installed by
Harvey's guys. Whatever else Northern Liberties has been, it's been nothing if not
strange. It has never been stately, quaint, quiet or precious. Crazy, raw, messy and
mismatched is more like it. It's a tiny hamlet, stretching from Callowhill Street up to
Girard Avenue and from the shores of the Delaware out to Sixth Street, but it ranked
among America's eight largest cities well into the 19th century (before being annexed
by Philly in 1854).

And it's almost certainly got more stories and characters per square foot than any
other neighborhood in America's First City—from Mr. Kitchens the neighborhood
pyromaniac, to the log cabin on Lawrence Street, to the guy who murdered his wife to
fund his obsession with a local stripper, to Harry Shur the King of Nails and his ten
buildings full of hardware, to the half-milliondollar lien that hung over the
neighborhood park, to Mr. Big Balls (the less said there the better), to the human torso in the abandoned rowhouse, to Henry the Bird Man,
to the four years it took to renovate neighborhood watering hole The Standard Tap, to the firebombing of the community zoning chairman's
car, to the house with the giant turret tower and the Guggenheim staircase, to the Great Floods of '04 and the Great Water Main Break of
'05.

1. Deuce: Liberties
Walk, 1040 N. 2nd
Street

2. Standard Tap: 901

N. 2nd Street

3. Log Cabin
house: 800 block of
Lawrence Street

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a nutty novel
From the beginning this place was off the grid, a
comical stepchild of colonial grandeur. In 1682 Billy
Penn needed a gimmick to sell land in the newly
created city of Philadelphia. His solution: give away
northerly estates to large buyers. Thus was The
Northern Liberties born—America's first "yours free
with minimum purchase" community. It didn't take
long for the "Liberties" to take on another meaning,
as the place quickly became freer, and more unruly,
than the central city. Its land got carved up into
small plots for servants. By the 1830s its population
had swelled past 30,000, with laborers, artisans and
lowlifes living on top of each other.

On the neighborhood's dirt streets, Nathaniel Popkin writes, "voices of gypsies and
hucksters competed with the sounds of sea gulls swirling above. Goats and chickens
wandered between the buildings."* Over the next century the community—and its air, no
doubt—was seasoned with breweries, tanneries, factories, warehouses, animal-
processing operations, even a record making plant. In the 1990s, residents toiling to
create what would become Liberty Lands, the city's only community owned public park,

Left: Ortleibs
Brewery and Bottling
Building, 800 Block
of American Street.

Above: An etching
from 1806 showing
2nd and Fairmount
Streets.

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a nutty novel
found old LPs beneath the points of their spades and pieces of broken 78s between the
teeth of their rakes. Stick a shovel anywhere in the neighborhood's soil and you'll hit old
concrete, brick, iron pipe, chicken bones, busted colonial china, headstones with typos
on them, and heaven knows what else.

Today, after decades of decline that made the neighborhood worth not much more than
the 1,000 pounds Penn originally paid the Lenni Lanape for it, and after a series of real
estate booms and busts, Northern Liberties finds itself ready to burst, its population set
to triple from the last Census to the next, with new buildings as high as 918 feet set to
accommodate them. It's home to a breathtakingly diverse group of folks: first and second
generation Eastern European immigrants who kept sweeping their sidewalks through the
worst years and can tell you the difference between Polish and Ukranian perogies;
African-Americans who helped keep it going, buying houses in the neighborhood where
they grew up with childhood nicknames like Worm and Hackadoo; artists who streamed
in during the 1970s and '80s to rehab buildings and create what Popkin calls "the
greatest artists' colony in the state"; young couples who settled down in the '90s and
started families, businesses, community gardens and dog parks; and of course those
young hipsters—Hummer-loving, Hummer-hating and Hummer-agnostic alike—who fill
the new apartments, frequent the new businesses, and will, in the blink of history's eye,
become old-timers themselves, complaining about the newcomers.

1. Liberty Lands, majority of east side of 900

block of 3rd Street.

2. 2nd Street Flea Market, 1980.

3. Immaculate Conception Roman

Catholic Church, founded in 1869, Front and Allen
Street.

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a nutty novel
Northern Liberties is changing fast—likely faster than it's changed in two hundred
years. The rising property values that have spurred new development and growth also
have shrunk the great artists' colony. And the market forces that are finally bringing in
new businesses and services are just as surely gentrifying the neighborhood. The
Eastern European churches are here to stay, as is Liberty Lands park and, apparently,
the log cabin. But the horse stables and the amphibious tourist bus depot are on their
way out, and the porno distributor is gone—not to mention many seniors and long-term
renters. No one knows how far it'll go, if the future will look like the next chapter in the
nutty novel that is Northern Liberties, or if we'll be closing the book on something
essential.

Above: 700-712 North 2nd Street, today.

Left: New development at 3rd and Poplar Streets.

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But through all the change, and through all the stories, there's
a common thread:

this is a working neighborhood.

Its history isn't the colonial museum history of the old
downtown. It's the still-unfolding history of industry, a history of
function and work and the present tense. It lives in the
wholesaling, production and artisan businesses that coexist
with the residences, restaurants and retailers. It subsists,
sinister, in the environmental legacy of the old tannery and
factory sites. It flourishes as gardens thrive in soil aerated by
buried demolition debris. And it speaks through the scorched
walls of old basement kitchens, the checked old ceiling beams
of artists' studios, and the faded scents of the old warehouses
converted to condos.

Right: 2nd and Fairmount Street, 1933.

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Left: Capital Flats, a contemporary renovation on the 100 block

of Laurel St. Architect Tim McDonald incorporated existing
elements that remained from the meat packing business.

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This has never been a bedroom community, an internal suburb, or a

homogeneous province. It's not part of Starbucks Nation. There's no
Blockbuster. McDonald's and KFC crouch just off the northeast border, but they
don't dare enter. (A small, storefront Dunkin' Donuts on our southern edge is the
lone invader.) Instead we have four local coffee shops and four local grocery/
delis. There's Honey's Sit-n-Eat, where you can get a side of bacon with your
potato latke and matzoh ball soup, and a half-dozen other chowdowns and
drinkups whose owners live here. Forget The Gap—get your jeans at Denim
Society, and indulge your indulgences at the local hottie corset shop, Delicious
Boutique. Northern Liberties has become prettier and more marketable, and it's
definitely become more yuppified—says I as I look into my Pottery Barn mirror
and behold my own yuppie countenance. But it remains defiant, mixed up,
resolutely unmanageable, as it has been for the past 325 years. It’s not smooth,

it’s SNAFU: Situation Normal: All F---ed Up.

SNAFU with a Smirk.

That's Northern Liberties for you.

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