Photo of excavations carried out by Deirdre Kelleher and her team of volunteers in 2012.
Continuing our exploration of the history of home construction, Part II digs into the archaeological record on Elfreth’s Alley and covers some of the big housing trends of the 20th century.
As we mentioned in this episode and last week, here’s the Philadelphia Rowhouse Manual which Rachel Schade and her team put together: https://www.phila.gov/media/20190521124726/Philadelphia_Rowhouse_Manual.pdf
Our lead sponsor is Linode. Linode is the largest independent open cloud provider in the world, and its Headquarters is located just around the corner from Elfreth’s Alley on the Northeast corner of 3rd and Arch Streets, right next to the Betsy Ross House Museum. The tech company moved into the former Corn Exchange Building in 2018 and employees have relished the juxtaposition of old and new: Outside, concealed LEDs light up the historic facade, inside are flexible server rooms but also a library with a sliding ladder, and a former bank vault is now a conference room. Linode is committed to a culture that creates a sense of inclusion and belonging and is always looking for new team members. Learn more about job opportunities at linode.com/careers.
This episode of the Alley Cast is supported by the Carpenters’ Company of the City and County of Philadelphia. From the 18th-century members who erected Independence Hall, the steeple of Christ Church, and Carpenters' Hall to the members of today, innovation in design and technical achievement have contributed to the Company’s pre-eminent reputation. The Company’s mission includes preserving and maintaining Carpenters' Hall and interpreting the significant events that took place there including the First Continental Congress. The Company also works to provide encouragement, education, and support for people entering the construction industry. You can learn more about the Carpenters’ Company at carpentershall.org.
This season is also sponsored by the History Department and the Center for Public History at Temple University. Many of the people who have worked on this podcast over the past two years have been alumni or graduate students at Temple University. A special thanks to Dr. Hilary Iris Lowe and the students in her “Managing History” course during the Fall of 2020 who did preliminary research and scriptwork for several episodes this season. Learn more about the department at www.cla.temple.edu/history/ and the Center at sites.temple.edu/centerforpublichistory/
Support also comes from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia.
SOURCES
Bauman, John F. , “Black Slums/Black Projects: The New Deal and Negro Housing in Philadelphia” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies , JULY, 1974, Vol. 41, No. 3 (JULY, 1974), pp. 310-338
Bowen-Gaddy, Evan, “Mapping Philly’s black homeownership gap” Plan Philly: https://whyy.org/articles/mapping-philly-s-black-homeownership-gap/
Burnley, Malcolm, “In 2017, is white supremacy still alive and well in this Philadelphia building trades union?,” Plan Philly, July 25, 2017: https://whyy.org/articles/in-2017-is-white-supremacy-still-alive-and-well-in-this-philadelphia-building-trades-union/
Dent, Mark, “Philly’s Union Diversity Problem,” The Philadelphia Citizen, May. 31, 2018: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/phillys-union-diversity-problem/
Gillen, Kevin C., “Demographic and Geographic Composition of the Philadelphia Building Trades,” Mss, April 2008: http://thetruthaboutplas.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/DemographicGeographicCompositionPhiladelphiaBuildingTrades-Gillen-UPENN-0408.pdf
Mayor’s Advisory Commission on Construction Industry Diversity, “Report and Recommendations: Executive Summary,” March 2009: https://www.phillytrib.com/mayors-advisory-commission-on-construction-industry-diversity/pdf_b70d1dae-2c7d-5a52-b6cc-d34104a1a952.html
McGinnis, James, “City’s lack of diversity in building trades persists,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 7, 2019: https://www.phillytrib.com/news/local_news/city-s-lack-of-diversity-in-building-trades-persists/article_63b94eb0-7263-5010-a99f-17f24cd550bd.html
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, University of North Carolina Press, 2019
TRANSCRIPT
Ted Maust: As I’m recording this, I’m surrounded by boxes and empty bookshelves. We’re in the process of moving out of our home, a home we have loved living in. It’s a little rowhouse, narrower than some on Elfreth’s Alley, two stories tall with two bedrooms. It was built around 1920 and received a major renovation perhaps five years ago. This house is in a neighborhood called West Powelton, though a canny realtor would tell you it’s part of University City, the loosely-defined area around the universities in West Philadelphia. This area creeps further west each year, raising home values, rents, and property taxes as it does.
I’m recording in the evening because during the day, the air is filled with construction noise from across the street where a new building is rising from what was recently an empty lot. Before that it was a Pep Boys. The new building is called University Place 3.0 and while it will contain scientific labs and tech startups rather than luxury apartments like other recent developments in the neighborhood, it is part of the continuing changes occurring here. On our block, several row homes are in the process of being gutted and rebuilt. These changes are not why we’re leaving but I find myself getting a little nostalgic in advance for the brief period we have lived in this modest home, on this street that has seen many cycles of building and rebuilding, of investment and disinvestment, and demographic shifts.
What are some of the forces that have driven these cycles? Who built houses like this one? Who is building structures like the one across the street today?
Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace the stories of people who worked, lived, and encountered this special street for over 300 years. While the stories we tell often center on Elfreth’s Alley and the surrounding Old City neighborhood, we also explore threads which take us across the city and around the globe.
In our last episode, Part 1 of our examination of housing construction in Philadelphia, we learned about how the first Europeans in this area improvised housing, and how the growing city was built by craftspeople trained through the apprenticeship system and organized in societies such as the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia. We talked about how the fear of fire and need for insurance shaped early architectural styles in Philadelphia, and how financial tools such as ground rent enabled speculative building which fuelled the city’s growth.
In this installment, we will be looking at how house construction in Philadelphia changed to meet the needs of new populations in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially on Elfreth’s Alley. We will also explore how public programs attempted to address inequality in housing and look at the ongoing struggle to make building trades viable opportunities for all people who want to join them. Finally, we’ll talk a little about cycles of redevelopment in Philadelphia and the enduring appeal of the row house.
Episode 3: Building Houses, Part 2
19th Century
Let’s pick up pretty much where we left off. Over the 19th century, several trends continued in Philadelphia’s patterns of development. The city’s boundaries continued to move outward as homes were built out of wood and brick. Ground rent and other financial tools continued to encourage builders to speculatively build row houses. But this century also saw many changes in how the housing needs of the city were met, both on Elfreth’s Alley and throughout the city.
For instance, the role of the builder was changing. One mover of this change was Carpenters’ Company member Owen Biddle, a master builder and proto-architect who had building ventures at 525 Delancey Street and at 717 Spruce Street, which still remain standing and who designed Arch Street Quaker Meeting House in 1803.
Biddle is most well known for publishing the book called The Young Carpenter's Assistant in Philadelphia in 1805, a manual and pedagogy explaining interior and exterior building designs. It became one of the first American books on architecture to rival the wealth of English literature that dominated building practices in the colonial era.
The Young Carpenter's Assistant focused on architectural draftsmanship and indicated the growing separation of the designer and the builder into two different professions. An independent architectural profession would emerge in the mid-19th century.
19th Century Building on Elfreth’s Alley
During the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing moved from the home to the factory. In Old City, factories lined Second Street, and immigrants came to the Alley to take advantage of the job opportunities from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Russia. In the early colonial times, each house was limited to an artisan and his family, or a widow with a couple tenants. However, in the 19th century, residents lived compactly. Between 1870 and 1930, at least two families lived in #123, and 26 people lived in the structures at #124 and #126.
To accommodate this influx of people and demand for low-cost housing, many Alley houses were expanded and more back-buildings were built. These extra rooms or standalone structures were often rentals or in some cases possibly sub-lets and informal boarding agreements.
Deirdre Kelleher was a Temple University anthropology doctoral student when she organized a public archaeology project at Elfreth's Alley in 2013. She wanted to learn about the lives of immigrants living on the street during the 19th century through the trash they left behind, but ended up learning more about the buildings built behind the original houses. Behind #124 and #126, the 19th-century outbuildings and expansions built by Lewis Kolb and John Haley had mostly been torn down by the mid 20th century, but in Kelleher’s excavations she was able to examine the foundations of those buildings and learn a lot about when and how they were constructed. We chatted with Kelleher about what she found:
Deirdre Kelleher:
Other things I can say about the construction is I looked at it and I kind of looked at it from that anthropological perspective of what can this tell us about the people who resided there. And we saw a lot of improvisation going on a lot of reuse of materials. And it kind of gave us a view of what was going on at that time, and how people were using the space. So the walls that we found were comprised of brick and some dressed stone, and the brick, we could see where is reused. So there were some reused brick that had remnants of like mortar on it from a previous wall. So we could see that some of it was being reused. One wall had some brick as well as dressed stone. So it looked like it was kind of expedient construction in the sense that they were taking materials that were available in the area, and building up to create these structures in the back. So they were improvising and using the resources that were there. And one of the other takeaways was just how much the backspace changed, both for the immigrant owners and the people were living back there, it was lots of iterations of adapting to what was going on creating more space for living and kind of organizing space as those needs arose.
We asked Kelleher who might have been doing the actual physical work of building these additions:
Kelleher: So at this time, it wouldn't be totally uncommon to be involved in some labor, but you would typically hire out builders. So I would imagine that Haley and Kolb hired builders to come, but I would guess that they were local builders, they could have been other immigrants. There were builders on the alley, too. It could have been people that they knew. But they don't have a great answer for knowing exactly who those builders were.
One of the most intriguing finds from Kelleher’s digs was a privy behind #126:
Kelleher:
Yeah. So behind 126. We knew from both the HABS documentation that kind of showed a little shed at the very rear of 126, as well as the 1850 [Philadelphia] Contributionship kind of document explaining that there was a privy. In those documents. So we, we saw it referred to as a privy, but we weren't totally sure what to expect in terms of that. So privy can be a catch all term for kind of an outhouse. But there are many different types of privies. So they're like wooden box privies that are detached. Oftentimes, privies are detached from structures, because you don't want to have your bathroom close to where your house is. So it's usually like diagonally out the back door. But in really congested spaces, like urban centers, especially in Elfreth’s Alley that's been built and rebuilt a bunch of times, we found that there was a privy shed potentially at the end of 126. So we saw that on some documentary records, and when we opened up the excavation unit in that area, what we found was that what we believe we found was the wall to what was called a privy shed, or kind of noted as a shed on the HABS document in 1931. But when we were able to open it up a little bit more, what we realized is that while it was actually bisecting a larger circular shaft feature below it, so it again goes to this narrative of adaptation and reuse that there was a larger, potentially kind of 18th century privy that was truncated and built on top of to the shed that could have been reused as a privy. And then later had other possible reuses, too. We didn't get into excavating that, because there were a number of kind of logistical challenges with having a volunteer crew and safety concerns. But it is possible that the deposits for that larger was about six feet across privy are still intact below where we were excavating. And they actually could predate some of the immigrant occupation, although Philadelphia, arguably, has always been an immigrant city. So it could have been 18th century deposits from earlier inhabitants on that alley as well.
Mid-19th century industrialization also changed the perception of the city. Animosity grew between the working class and the middle class, as well as tensions between recent immigrants and those who had been born in Philadelphia. Areas in the core of the city, such as Elfreth's Alley, appeared to be a hub of crime, overcrowding, and disease, while the outer city was characterized by picturesque cleanliness and nature. The working class was further confined to the city with the advent of streetcars in the late 1850s, which ran on rail. Transportation was too expensive for the working class to afford, and so commuters were usually middle class.
Here’s architect Rachel Schade, who we heard from in Part 1:
Rachel Schade: Philadelphia became the workshop of the world. There's lots of great information about if you needed anything, if you need to make anything, anything you need, you can find in Philadelphia. And that was that was what made us the powerhouse that we were in that sort of mid 19th century to later.
Not all of that industrial activity was centered downtown, and by the end of the 19th century, working-class, even poor Philadelphians were living in brand new neighborhoods built up around factories. To make housing affordable for the working person and profitable for the builders, much of this construction took the form of row houses, sometimes called workingman’s homes. These were very like the homes along Elfreth’s Alley and the other old, narrow thoroughfares of the city--narrow lots 2 to 3 rooms deep, and 2 to 3 stories tall. They varied block to block as builders built speculatively, betting that the market would reward the risk they took on building them. For potential homeowners, savings associations helped make homeownership a reality.
Schade:
the part I like talking about is sort of the big boom in construction, right around the Industrial Revolution, what it was that people could afford to buy a new home, that was more than decent, that was well built, that was had sort of all the modern conveniences, including, you know, some inside plumbing and central heat. And they could do it for a reasonable amount of money.
This broad expansion of affordable housing across the city earned Philadelphia one of its many nicknames: “The City of Homes.”
Last season, in Episode 6, we talked about the Progressive era, and organizations such as the Octavia Hill Association, which hoped to improve living conditions for Philadelphia’s poorest residents. The modest row home was seen as one workable way to ensure quality housing for all, and it was hailed as such an innovation that a Philadelphia row home was put on display at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, a full century after very similar houses had been built on Elfreth’s Alley.
Yet even as the brick row house had a moment in the national spotlight, building technology was leaving the brick behind. While the abundance of local clay had allowed brickmaking to flourish in Philadelphia, the brickmaking industry began to decline in the 20th century as clay deposits were depleted. Concrete blocks became the more economical choice as the turn of the 20th century also brought changes such as new architectural styles and other building materials. One eight-inch-wide concrete block could take the place of 12 bricks. House builders began to use concrete blocks in foundation walls and backup for wall facings instead. By the mid-20th century, most brick manufacturers in the Philadelphia area halted operation, and by the 21st century, brickmaking disappeared from the region.
20th Century
But let's rewind to the early 20th century: Philadelphia was booming. With the continuing influx of immigrants from Europe and the addition of Black Southerners drawn North by work during the Great Migration, the city needed more homes than ever. In the 7th ward, which for generations had been the center of Black life in the city, landlords squeezed more rental units into buildings even as they delayed maintenance and allowed the buildings to fall apart. By the end of the 1930s, a huge portion of the houses and apartment buildings in that neighborhood had been razed by the city as unsafe following tragic house collapses. The people living in these houses were left searching for affordable housing, and in 1937, the city created the Philadelphia Housing Authority which built two housing projects in North Philadelphia.
While Black Philadelphians had lived throughout the city through the end of the 19th century in addition to the 7th ward, by the 1930s, they increasingly lived in North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia. The deliberations about where to locate the new housing projects of the late 1930s revealed that authorities were invested in racially segregating the city. They didn’t want the projects, which would predominantly house Black residents, near white neighborhoods, and placed them further into North Philly. The razing of housing in the center of the city and the construction of low-income housing in the North were some of the forces which drove increasing segregation of neighborhoods.
And while those neighborhoods were desperate for investment, lenders began discriminating against Black would-be home buyers as well as some immigrant groups through the practice of “redlining,” drawing lines on maps to identify neighborhoods seen as worthwhile investments or not. This practice, used by both federal agencies and private banks, denied house financing to buyers in minority neighborhoods. New construction was waning in Philadelphia, but federal funding was driving construction outside of the city.
While the row house was the attainable goal of the white middle class and European immigrants since the 18th century, the housing opportunities that opened up after World War II changed the meaning of the American Dream. The row house no longer became the symbol of the middle and working class, but was replaced by the single home with white picket fence and manicured lawns. Here’s Rachel Schade again-
Schade:
50, 60, 70 years ago, when people were feeling like they needed more home, regardless of how many kids they had, but just that, that there was an association between, you know, consumerism, and, and, you know, a bigger house was better. Having a yard for your children was considered like, a necessity after World War Two, when that was really not something that people thought about much, or at least, you know, middle class people didn't, didn't have that as a goal until kind of afterwards, until after the suburbs really became more open to a middle class and then therefore, you know, urban, the whole sort of city life was seen as a negative thing for raising families, rather than, you know, the green suburbs with new housing... And so there was this stigma, I would say it attached to living in a row house and, and not being able to sort of afford to do better.
This move to the suburbs left behind a poorer population, disproportionately of Black residents. Many Black neighborhoods which had been redlined in the previous decades were further neglected as the city’s tax base shrank. In 1968, the federal government tried to undo some of the damage it had done, passing the Housing and Urban Development Act. The Department of Housing and Urban Development hoped to undo the racial segregation and barriers to Black home ownership which it had contributed through redlining, by making financing available to those previously discriminated against. However, scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor shows how this actually inadvertently further contributed to the entrenchment of racial inequality. Predatory lenders found they could make a profit from the Federal Housing Authority government-backed loans whether the recipients of these loans were able to pay back their debts or not. Taylor shows how lenders targeted poor Black women and reaped the rewards while leaving Black neighborhoods in debt and decrepitude.
Even half a century after the housing discrimination was made illegal, Philadelphia still has a significant gap between white and Black rates of homeownership attesting to the ongoing legacy of racial inequity in this arena.
Schade:
Communities changed more people moved into the city that had less money, or were left in the city as people with money left. And and this whole snowball effect of sort of disinvestment in certain communities, certainly, starting with the redlining and banks, not lending money to people who weren't, didn't fit certain profile
ed to all the problems that we have, I would say in living in town, right disinvestment in schools, in infrastructure, and public transportation, all sorts of things that have that are very difficult to repair once they get broken down. But we have such a, you know, a good system to start with, but it's it's many pieces of it are beyond repair.
This may seem like a big digression from where we started in Part 1, yet the supply of housing, and housing conditions in general have a direct impact on ongoing construction. As neighborhoods that were neglected for years become valuable areas for redevelopment, contemporary builders know there is money to be made. And many parts of Philadelphia which were once written off by redlining are becoming booming markets for construction as the city once again becomes a place where affluent people want to live.
21st Century
In the 1980s, a new trend called New Urbanism encouraged a revival of walkable communities with plenty of green space organized around a central municipal area. This grew a newfound interest in row houses-- preserving the historical architectural elements of the home, but also making renovations to match the times. Here’s Rachel Schade again:
Schade:
I like to think that people are getting all smarter about maybe not needing as much house as they have, and, you know, more recent sort of 70s 80s and 90s. And it's a manageable amount of space and property. And if, if it's built, well, it's gonna last for a while, and not a whole lot of maintenance is required on them, unlike large houses with big, you know, properties around them. So I think that's one thing, I think, perhaps there's an awareness of energy efficiency, also, that we all are much more aware of that than we used to be. But I think there's also just a, you know, there's in many post industrial cities and not and newer cities, also, there's a huge attraction, particularly for people buying houses right now to be in town. And it's, it's nice to be able to, you know, not have to get in your car to do anything.
More and more of the big corporations are relocating, or at least opening a satellite office in town, knowing that they're not going to be able to hire talent if they can't provide decent housing. And so a lot of people are not, you know, people sort of,
in their 30s buying their house for the first time I'm not so interested in in the suburban lifestyle anymore, but rather sort of be where it's happening being in town.
While newer row homes may have garage doors and modern gadgets, the row house structure continues to be a core characteristic of the city of Philadelphia. Just walls apart, neighbors live independently in their own colorful bubbles, but the survival of their dwellings that carry deep historical value bring the community of Philadelphia together.
In the area around Elfreth’s Alley today, the industrial buildings that made this city the Workshop of the World have become art galleries, theaters, and apartments. And while new variations on the row-house form have also been built in this neighborhood, the current trend in construction in this area is toward large apartment blocks, many of them marketed as luxury housing.
As the tide has turned and the city has become more attractive, there has been plenty of profit to be made. Just as builders in the 18th and 19th centuries speculated on Philadelphia’s vacant lots, builders in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have invested in neglected and aging rowhomes, demolishing them for new builds or gutting and flipping them. Many of the same areas of the city which were once overlooked by lenders, are now hot commodities.
Who is doing all of this construction? We talked to Alex Palma in Part 1 about the origins of the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia and asked what that organization looks like today
Alex Palma: but so today, however, you know, obviously, the category of master builder no longer exists, because we live in a completely different labor schema, if you like, right, it's not, you know, you know, people don't usually go from apprentice to master, you know, craftsmen.
So today, um to be a member of the carpenters company, you have to be either an architect, structural engineer, or construction manager. And to be a full member of the carpenters company, you have to be a principal, a partner, or an owner in the firm that you work for. Now, that being said, we at the carpenters company, have recently begun to introduce alternative paths through which you can become a member. So we now have, we're working on building different membership categories.
So that full members, for example, can nominate associate members that don't have all those requirements, for example, and that hopefully, will break down some of the gatekeepy structure of, of the company itself.
While the Carpenters’ Company is working to diversify its membership, the building trades as a whole are still overwhelmingly white and male. While the population of Philadelphia is only about 45% white, a little over 70% of workers in construction-associated trade unions are white. The effort to change this has been underway for over 50 years at this point. In the 1960s, the federal government attempted to racially integrate federal contractors through executive orders and affirmative action. Throughout the 1970s, there were a number of racist incidents in Philadelphia, including the beating of a worker named John Dent outside of the Local 542 office, which led to a federal anti-discrimination lawsuit against the union.
In 2008, Mayor Michael Nutter formed an Advisory Commission on Construction Industry Diversity, which issued a report the following year. A contemporary analysis of construction workers on major city projects found that 72% of the workforce studied was white. The same study found that only 41% of the workers on these city projects had a Philadelphia home address, with many commuting from the broader region. As a result, the mayor’s Commission issued a clear call to action:
Rob Holtzinger, reading the Mayor’s report: “In addition to examining the causes of this under-representation and making recommendations to remedy it, the Commission believes it is important to articulate the compelling arguments for increased inclusion.
The first argument is one of equity or fairness. Since construction workers receive good pay and benefits and are likely to be in demand in the long run, any segment of the community that does not fully participate in the industry faces starkly reduced economic opportunity. Simply stated, increasing the inclusion of minorities and women as workers and contractors in the Philadelphia area construction industry is clearly the right thing to do.
The second argument is one of economic efficiency. Full access to the construction industry is probably one of the most effective ways to help minorities and women move up the income distribution. As they move up, they will pay more taxes and increase their personal expenditures in their communities thereby raising the incomes and qualities of life of others.
The third argument is subtle, but equally important. The Commission believes that at least a part of the reluctance to embrace diversity and inclusion is the misconception that one person’s economic progress must come at some cost to another. That is, many believe that in order for minorities in the Philadelphia region to make gains, whites in the region have to lose, but that is not true for three reasons. First, the age distribution of the current construction workforce is such that there will be a large number of retirements in the next 10 years or so. There will be an opportunity to increase the minority shares of the unions without displacing current white members. Second, the large number of future retirements will heighten the interests of area contractors and building trades unions in recruiting new workers of the highest productivity by extending opportunities to all segments of the population.
Finally, we know that a substantial amount of construction work is currently performed by workers coming from outside the Philadelphia region. If more of that work were performed by workers from the Philadelphia area, there would be a second opportunity to increase the minority shares of the unions without displacing current white members.”
In the years since this commission, Mayor Nutter’s successor, Jim Kenney has also encouraged diversification of the building trades to include racial minorities and women to better reflect the demographic make-up of the city. These efforts have made some strides but continue to fall short of the goals that the city has set.
While the construction industry outside of unions displays more racial diversity, union wages and benefits are significantly higher and the vast majority of government building contracts are completed by union workers.
We have often begun the story of Philadelphia with William Penn’s plan for the city, which laid out a vision for a fireproof city full of green spaces. But looking at the built history of this place provides us with a more complicated and even chaotic vision of the young city--houses carved out of riverfront caves coexisting with brick rowhomes, the edges of the urban space moving outward with each speculative development. There is a romance to the history of the master carpenter, who had worked their way up from an apprenticeship, but the reality there is also more nuanced--not all journeymen were able to become masters and construction often relied on the labor of indentured and enslaved workers. As the city boomed with newcomers, the housing they found was not always safe, and government attempts to intervene generally exacerbated racial segregation.
City-living has gone in and out of style, creating cycles in the profits which builders can reap. It’s also offered evolving challenges for those architects, engineers, and builders. As we wrapped up our conversation with Rachel Schade, we asked what she thought was exciting in the field of row homes.
Schade: Well, the exciting thing is that there's some great designers, architects in town that are doing wonderful work with new new construction.
But the the ones that are really being innovative with, with the traditional sort of set of tools, Brian Phelps with ISA doing a great job sort of studying how far can you push the model, and he's doing it by by making houses smaller and smaller, rather than bigger and bigger and more affordable is his his main sort of goal I think is to is to sort of shy away from these somewhat sort of, you know, urban mansions and sort of what what can people reasonably afford but also take care of and, and also raise a family and, and even, you know, sequester when necessary. I'm on the third floor of our row house. And for a while when neither of us were going outside at all, you know, the fact that we have three floors, rather than just two floors and a door. You know, makes it so that we actually could work at home together; my husband, who’s also an architect.
For some workers, including Schade, home has become a place of work during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, an arrangement that would be all-too-familiar to early residents of Elfreth’s Alley. The crisis, and the blurring of work and home may have kicked off a new cycle in house building. We will have to wait and see what forms the next generation of Philadelphia homes take.
Credits:
History is a group effort! This episode was researched and written by Enya Xiang and Ted Maust and narrated by me, Ted Maust. Thanks to Deirdre Kelleher, Rachel Schade, and Alex Palma for sharing so much of their expertise with us. As we mentioned last time, Schade helped literally write the manual on the Philadelphia row house, which is available for free. We’ll include the link to that manual on the episode post on our website.
Thanks again to our sponsors Linode, the History Department of Temple University, and the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia. Support is also provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
In addition to the sources cited by name, this episode drew heavily on the work of Marcus Anthony Hunter, Donna Rilling, and John F. Bauman as well as past volunteers and staff of the Elfreth’s Alley Association who have collected various records related to the street’s residents.
A transcript of this episode with sources is available on the episode page at ElfrethsAlley.org/podcast and the link in the show notes.
The music in this episode is the songs “Open Flames” and “An Oddly Formal Dance,” both by Blue Dot Sessions and both used under Creative Commons license. Thanks to Rob Holtzinger for performing the excerpt from the Mayor’s Commission on Construction Industry Diversity.
This podcast is recorded on the unceded indigenous territory of the Lenni-Lenape people, who were and continue to be active stewards of the land. We recognize that words are not enough and we aim to actively uphold indigenous visibility and sovereignty for individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. By offering this Land Acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the Elfreth’s Alley Museum accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Season 2 of The Alley Cast! Remember that one of the best ways you can support our work is by telling other people about this show and rating us on podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts.
You can sustain the work of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by making a donation at elfrethsalley.org/donate or by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/elfrethsalley.
We’ll be back next week with an episode about the smallest workers on Elfreth’s Alley--children. What kinds of work did the youngest residents of this street do? How did our understanding of childhood change? Tune in to our next episode to find out!
Thank you and take care!