Top: View of North Marshall Street, looking north from Poplar Street; Bottom: Pushcarts mural on 900 block of N.  Marshall Street, between Poplar and Girard

What’s in a name??  Today, my old neighborhood is considered a part of Northern Liberties, but when I lived on the 900 block ...]]>

Top: View of North Marshall Street, looking north from Poplar Street; Bottom: Pushcarts mural on 900 block of N.  Marshall Street, between Poplar and Girard

What’s in a name??  Today, my old neighborhood is considered a part of Northern Liberties, but when I lived on the 900 block of North Marshall Street, the boundary of Northern Liberties was from Front and Girard west to 6th Street and south to Spring Garden Street. We never knew what our area was called. North Central Philadelphia was an easy answer.  In doing research at the Library Company of Philadelphia, I found a map that listed a small area from 6th Street to Broad as Penn’s Land.  Did that make it different from Penn’s Woods which is the meaning of Pennsylvania?

The redevelopment of Northern Liberties is amazing. Take a ride down 2nd Street, a veritable throughway to Center City from Cheltenham Avenue at the far northern end of the city, to see the changes. Beginning at Girard Avenue, is the Piazza at Schmidt’s where the old Brewery stood. Condos and glass buildings sit on either side of the street. The place is busy with eateries and neighborhood stores all the way to Spring Garden Street.  New restaurants pop up along Girard Avenue towards 5th Street. Real estate on 6th Street is listed with prices unimaginable two years ago. Has the upturn reached Marshall Street, 7th Street, and further west towards Broad Street? Not yet.

Wouldn’t it be terrific to have Marshall Street finally become the central “off -street-parking” shopping area that it was deemed to be in the 1950s when the Redevelopment Authority designated it as part of the East Poplar slum area?  The neighborhood beginning at Marshall and Poplar and continuing west now looks like a well-kept residential Philadelphia place. Houses have trees and small gardens. Where do those neighbors shop? Should they drive to 2nd and Girard where eventually supermarkets will be part of the Schmidt’s Brewery area? Why not give Marshall Street a chance to also be redeveloped as a thriving city market for the surrounding neighborhoods?  The possibilities are endless. As a walkable street, it can be a place where ethnic and local foods can be sold; a place for street fairs, local organizations, and, yes, places for people to live in the Greater Northern Liberties.

Elaine Krasnow Ellison was born on Marshall Street and lived there until her marriage.  She is the co-author, with Elaine Jaffe, of Voices From Marshall Street: Jewish Life in a Philadelphia Neighborhood 1920-1960. She is a community advisor and a member of the PhilaPlace advisory committee. You can read her account of growing up on Marshall Street, “Life in a Bazaar,” at philaplace.org.

Max Krasnow selling yard goods outside his shop at 977 North Marshall Street. Courtesy Elaine Ellison.

Neighborhood boys standing in front of the Cambridge Dress Shop, 988 N. Marshall Street. Courtesy Elaine Ellison.

A. L. Klein clothing store, 922 North Marshall Street, 1975. Photo by Irv Orenstein.

Man in front of shoe store, North Marsall Street, 1975.  Photo by Irv Orenstein.

Boy on North Marshall Street, 1975. Photo by Irv Orenstein.

For more  Marshall Street photographs and to add your own story, visit PhilaPlace.org

Hi all, my name is Ian Charlton. A couple of weeks ago, I started my internship working on the PhilaPlace project –exciting stuff. I’ll be focusing mainly on the Kensington/Fishtown area for the next six months.  The first major essays ...]]> Aerial view of Stetson Hat manufacturing complex, circa 1940. Photograph of painting.

Hi all, my name is Ian Charlton. A couple of weeks ago, I started my internship working on the PhilaPlace project –exciting stuff. I’ll be focusing mainly on the Kensington/Fishtown area for the next six months.  The first major essays on the horizon involve Stetson Hats and the Old Kensington Redevelopment Corporation. In a way, Stetson Hats was the epitome of industrialism in Kensington, spanning over 100 years as a major employer in the community. At its peak, it employed 5,000 Kensington residents; its hats, donned by famous Western movie stars like Tom Mix, were wildly popular in the United States and abroad. It is the perfect example of Philadelphia, and specifically Kensington, as “Workshop of the World.” Yet it is also interesting in another sense: at a time when much of the country’s labor force was unionizing in groups like the American Federation of Labor, John B. Stetson maintained a system of relationships with his workers that has been described as benevolent feudalism– to the chagrin of the AFL. Both his paternalistic methods and workers’ responses to them will be interesting topics for study.

The story of Old Kensington Redevelopment Corporation seems like the next logical step to me in doing a history of Kensington. While Stetson Hats embodied industrial Kensington, OKRC provides a lens with which to view the transition to post-industrial Kensington. Growing out of the “Area E” group of Philadelphia’s Antipoverty Action Committee, the entity that implemented Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty in Philadelphia, OKRC officially began attempting to rehabilitate the neighborhood only a few years prior to the closing of Stetson Hats. In fact, before it closed, a high-ranking member of Stetson sat on the OKRC board.  The fact that these rehabilitation attempts occurred during a period of intense racial animosity is especially interesting, given the racial alliances on which the group was formed and on which it depended. Moreover, the city’s changing power structure is significant for this story: women who ran neighborhood associations like OKRC began to replace male ward leaders who had traditionally mediated between city hall and the neighborhoods.  Given that OKRC has been defunct since the mid- 1990s, it would also be interesting to view its successes and failures from the vantage point of the present, since sections of Northern Liberties and Fishtown have recently seen successful revitalization efforts.

Finally, these stories have broader implications for the identities of the people who lived and worked in Kensington over the past 150 years.  Did the majority of Stetson’s workers see themselves as Kensington residents who happened to work at a factory there, or as members of a parish that happened to be in Kensington, or rather as members of the Stetson family, as John B. Stetson would have wanted, living in a “city within a city” – that is, the Stetson community within Kensington. Also, since place plays such a vital role in the construction of identity, what does this mean for residents of Kensington in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and beyond, who spent so much of their time in what were racially contested spaces?

Workers making Stetson cavalry hats, 1918.

“Miss Anne Alexander, employee of Stetson Hat Co., 5th & Montgomery, wearing the famous 10 gallon Stetson hat & holding two of the new spring style hat for 1941.”

Stetson Hat Styles, Winter 1873-4

Demolition of Stetson building, 1979. Courtesy Temple University Urban Archives.

See more images of Steston Hats on PhilaPlace.org