South Street and Greater Philadelphia

The forces shaping South Street's postwar history flow into the neighborhoods from downtown. Postwar city planning in Philadelphia, codified in the

City Planning Commission's Comprehensive Plan (1960) and supplementary Plan for Center City (1963), begins from this basic premise:

The well being of Center City Philadelphia is basic to the well being of the entire Delaware Valley region.

Center City must always remain the principal place for doing business, much of which, after all, depends on person-to-person contact; for purchase of those special things which give richness to our lives and for those great cultural activities which set the tone of our contemporary civilization.

In addition, Center City serves as the springboard from which waves of revitalization spread outward as suburban families are reattracted to urban living.^[7]

In 1960, Philadelphia's City Planning Commission delivered to Mayor Richardson Dilworth and the City Council its comprehensive plan, a "blueprint for the Philadelphia of tomorrow." It envisioned "a new kind of city, its beginning already in evidence, which is within the financial and physical means of Philadelphia's people to bring to full realization in the remaining decades of this century."^[8] The plan undertook to structure Philadelphia's engagement with forces shaping postwar America, remaking the city in ways that would allow it to compete successfully with other cities and, more important, with its own booming suburbs. The principal struggle would be against the decentralization of capital and the increasing tendency of private investors to look elsewhere than downtown for economic opportunities. Recognizing that "the term 'Philadelphia,' as customarily used today, refers to a complex reaching far beyond the City proper," the plan outlined strategies for retaining and attracting business, jobs, and middle-class taxpayers that would otherwise be lost to the suburbs.^[9] Putting the plan into action would cost the city at least $3.5 billion, but the alternative was decline and slow death.

The city the plan envisioned took shape around a vigorous downtown serving its historic function as the center of the Delaware Valley region's networks of business, government, and culture. ^[10] The plan framed its principal arguments as a case for "revitalizing" Center City in order that it continue to attract capital on every level: corporate investment, upscale residence, the suburban family's consumer dollars. Mustering historical support for—or anachronizing the image of suburbanites commuting downtown to work, shop, attend a concert, or eat out, the plan invoked William Penn's colonial-era Philadelphia as "the seat of a great rural region, farmed by large landholders, each living on his own farm," who "looked to Philadelphia not only as a market for their goods and a source of supply, but also as the center of much of their social and cultural activity."^[11] The plan sought to make certain that Center City Philadelphia, occupying the site of Penn's original city, sustained itself in this traditional relation to its region well into the next century.

The plan for Center City, a second volume devoted to the comprehensive plan's key Center City component, detailed the massive transportation network and physical redevelopment required to remake Center City: "A basic policy which underlies the Center City Plan is to provide the limited core area with the richest possible series of interrelated transportation facilities serving all parts of the region and encouraging the concentration of all major region-oriented activities within walking distance of these transportation centers."^[12] More than half of the comprehensive plan's total expenditure would go to fund an elaborate system of expressways designed to carry traffic from the region's furthest reaches (and beyond, via the interstates) into Center City, where new parking facilities and rail stations would absorb the cars and commuters. The flows of cars from periphery to center would intersect with three progressively larger highway rings—the Center City, Five Mile, and Ten Mile loops—cut through the metropolis. This complex transportation network would channel people and money into a new urban core of tall office buildings, refurbished shopping strips, major cultural centers, pedestrian walks on the rivers, and fashionable residential areas like Rittenhouse Square and Society Hill. Bracketed east and west by the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, buffered from lower-income residential areas to the north and south by the Vine Street and Crosstown expressways, Center City would be a showpiece central place, a self-contained walking city for the next century.

This 1950s-vintage vision of a "limited core area" was realized in important and lasting ways; however, it is crucial to the story of South Street that the plan was not, and probably never will be, executed in its entirety. In particular, many components of its expressway network were never built—among them, notably, the Crosstown Expressway, which would have erased South Street from the map (figs. 7 and 8). The rise of suburban centers rivaling, rather than subsidiary to, Center City made for less periphery-to-downtown traffic flow than the plan expected. Also, the plan's ability to pay for itself rested on overly optimistic projections of growth in inner-city population, economic vigor, and a continuing and stability-encouraging "reasonable balance of income groups, family sizes, and races."^[13] The erosion of Philadelphia's tax base, combined with the formation in the 1960s of local groups opposed to urban renewal projects, weakened the public sector's ability to complete those projects. Government-assisted private development in the "limited core area," like office towers and shopping complexes, continued to flourish, but necessarily public-sector projects (like the Crosstown Expressway) ran into unforeseen difficulties.

The plan made clear that the private sector, not city government, had the leading role in their partnership. Although the plan had been assembled by a government agency, its authors noted that "much that is in it already has been planned or built by private initiative, and many of its ideas had their origin in the minds of professional or business men."^[14] Two alliances, forming the two main

elements of the progrowth coalition, were behind this exercise of private initiative in the public sphere. First, in 1951, the postwar Democratic alliance of latter-day Progressives, trade unions, blacks, and the party's white-ethnic "rowhouse regulars" defeated the Republican machine that had dominated Philadelphia since the city's political consolidation in 1854. The Democratic alliance's tenuous network of common interest soon began to dissolve under the multiple pressures of industrial decline, a changing calculus of racial and ethnic politics, and the discrediting of the urban renewal agenda, but while it lasted the Democratic alliance provided political support for a second, private-sector alliance of planners, bankers, lawyers, and other business and professional interests committed to fostering downtown redevelopment.^[15] Elite activist business groups like the Citizens' Council on City Planning (CCCP) and its successor, the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM), undertook, in close cooperation with city government, to reshape the city's physical plant, transportation networks, and governmental order for a postindustrial age. The City Planning Commission's two-volume plan codified the vision of the CCCP and GPM.^[16] The plan continued to serve as a blueprint for postindustrial Philadelphia into the 1980s, and further redevelopment proceeded in keeping with the plan's concentration on Center City.^[17] Although planning-oriented reform mayors held office from 1951 to only 1962, the coalition of interests represented by CCCP/GPM continued to determine the shape of redevelopment. Private dollars, not governmental administrative decisions, had the ultimate say in the success or failure of necessarily cooperative redevelopment projects, and private investors heavily concentrated their commitment of capital in Center City projects.^[18]

The progrowth coalition felt that Philadelphia needed to take such drastic measures to ensure its future economic and social viability. One of the nineteenth century's great manufacturing centers, Philadelphia took mature industrial form in the period 1880-1930, bequeathing to the twentieth century a cityscape of loft buildings, warehouses, narrow streets and alleys, two- and three-story rowhouses, an aging port and rail network. Like industrial Chicago, Philadelphia in this period was a city of urban villages: a patchwork of ethnic blocs grouped around factory workplaces, the whole surrounding a downtown government center and ringed in turn by streetcar suburbs. Again, as in Chicago, a common reliance on manufacturing and the brokering influence of the entrenched political machine (Republican in Philadelphia; Democratic in Chicago) stabilized this distinctively industrial urban system.

Philadelphia's manufacturing economy was especially reliant on small manufacturers of nondurable goods—as opposed to the vast plants that characterized heavy industry in Chicago or Detroit—a condition that only increased the speed and effects of postwar deindustrialization. Small manufacturers were particularly responsive to the notion that the relative cost of doing business, from taxes to union wages, in the inner city had become too high: they were less tied

to place than larger manufacturers (who tended to make significant investments in fixed equipment and real estate), and smaller businesses tended to place a premium on paying lower wages. Between 1955 and 1975, Philadelphia lost three out of four of its manufacturing jobs, a particularly sharp fall within a general decline of manufacturing in America's older industrial centers after World War II.^[19] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, with decentralization of capital and population clearly in evidence during the great suburban boom, the plan's authors saw themselves entering into a crucial competition with the suburbs and other cities for remaining manufacturing jobs and the industries of the growing service sector.

Philadelphia, like Chicago, had matured as an industrial city, and postindustrial transformation reshaped the city's fundamental arrangements of people, resources, power, and space. John Mollenkopf's general assessment of this transformation, applied earlier to the case of Chicago, is worth repeating here: postwar change "dismantled the mosaic of blue collar ethnic segmentation which developed within the occupational and residential order of the older industrial cities."^[20] Again, as in Chicago, the progrowth coalition worked to reconcentrate capital downtown, revaluing land in and around Center City. On the southern fringe of Center City, South Street came to be poised on an edge created by these processes: between the decline and contraction of South Philadelphia's industrial-era neighborhood order and the postindustrial refashioning and expansion of Center City.

In the 1950s and 1960s, South Street became an "inner-city" thoroughfare in a distinctively postindustrial sense of the term. As was the case in postwar Chicago, a substantial black migration from the South to Philadelphia in the 1940s and 1950s combined with the outflow of money, whites, and middleclass blacks to the periphery to set the stage for the transformation of Philadelphia's inner city. The new black Philadelphians entered the citydrawn by manufacturing, especially defense, jobs available during and just after the war—at a time when, as one account puts it, "many Philadelphians were looking outside of the city for both their housing and their employment."^[21] At the same time, Philadelphia's established black communities were becoming destabilized by population growth, changes in the structure of job opportunities, and redevelopment. Economic and cultural constraints on blacks helped to confine them to the inner city, which in the 1950s and 1960s began to take on distinctive postindustrial form: white-ethnic enclaves, redeveloped core, and second ghettos. South Street traversed this emergent landscape, the three principal terrains of which met along the thoroughfare.

Forming a traditional spine for Philadelphia's most established and relatively affluent communities of blacks, South Street touched upon a Black Metropolis of nineteenth-century vintage, black neighborhoods shaped to fit into the industrial city's mosaic of urban villages. Straddling the central portion of South

Street, especially, were solidly respectable neighborhoods in which black middle- and working-class families owned and patronized local businesses, attended churches and clubs, and saved to buy rowhouses. This established order underwent a series of upheavals as the Crosstown Expressway plan drove down property values and Center City moved south into the real estate "vacuum." Beginning in the 1950s and increasingly in the 1960s, with the entire area under the threat of being gutted by the planned highway, South Street's preexisting black neighborhoods eroded significantly. Those who could moved out, and a new population with nowhere else to go drifted into flophouses, furnished rooms, and condemned buildings that proliferated around central and western South Street. The breakdown of South Street's prewar black neighborhood order in the 1950s and 1960s left a mishmash of survivals—enclaved remnants of the old order, housing projects, transients—that seemed at the time to augur the formation of the second ghetto. The city did erect high-rise housing projects, the second ghetto's signature form, just below South Street in the 1960s, but the proximity of Center City and its southward movement obliged public and private authorities to prevent the second ghetto of South Philadelphia from developing on the same scale as in North Philadelphia.

Black South Philadelphia had been part of an ethnic and racial patchwork in which white ethnics predominated. Forming the northern edge of South Philadelphia, South Street touched white-ethnic neighborhoods, relics of the urban villages of crowded rowhouse blocks that had been shaped during the decades of peak European immigration before 1920. In the 1960s, these neighborhoods came to be seen as aging white enclaves squeezed between second ghetto and gentrified core. As Center City expanded south after the war and black neighborhoods along South Street were thrown into upheaval, many of South Philadelphia's white ethnics moved away from South Street: farther down into the heart of South Philly, to other, more stable neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia, or to the suburbs. This unraveling of the urban village in a generally prosperous, suburbanizing period was part of a larger historical process of acculturation: as the descendants of European immigrants continued to negotiate the complex generational process of shedding immigrant-ethnic status, they followed the general flow of capital and opportunity away from the old neighborhood. The comprehensive plan, drawn up before the urban crisis took the form of a racial crisis in the mid-1960s, admitted that there would be aggregate outflow from inner-city areas (and tacitly admitted that whites would be the ones moving out) but could not conceive of such movement at the scale and pace it assumed in the 1960s. Expanding black neighborhoods and the panic associated with riots and crime (and, on South Street, the dislocations attendant upon the Crosstown Expressway scheme) accelerated this movement into what has been called white flight—shorthand for the elevation of push factors (getting out of the inner city) over pull factors (entering America's subur-

ban middle class) in the departure of white ethnics from the inner city. Some merchants on South Street, white and black, came to support the Crosstown plan, hoping to cut their losses by selling out to the city.^[22]

The pressure on both white-ethnic and black communities around South Street was coming from Center City. Forming the southern edge of Center City, South Street ran along the border of one of the nation's showcases of downtown redevelopment: not just the office towers and large municipal buildings that house business, government, and cultural centers but also elite residential neighborhoods with access to restaurants, shops, and other cosmopolitan attractions. Rehabilitated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses and Society Hill's trio of skyscrapers, designed by the celebrated modernist architect I. M. Pei and built in the early 1960s, became architectural symbols of stylish downtown living. Philadelphia's chief planner, Edmund Bacon, likening the Pei towers to Pope Sixtus's obelisks in Rome, saw them as defining the new Center City's image and articulating the successful integration of past and future cityscapes: the towers were formally sensitive to "the delicate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures that form their foreground on the west and south, yet at the same time they serve as a powerful articulation point in relation to the fast movement on the Delaware Expressway dominating the sweep of the regional flow of the Delaware River."^[23] The towers marked the heart of the postindustrial metropolis defined by expressways and "regional flow," but they also acknowledged the historical richness of the preindustrial and industrial layers of cityscape uniquely available to Center City's residents. Similarly, the style of life pursued by this new, preponderantly white workforce of professionals, managers, and office workers in service industries constituted a kind of postindustrial urbanism distinct from the white-ethnic, black, and bohemian urbanisms that it simultaneously displaced and drew upon for cosmopolitan texture.^[24]

By the early 1970s, the industrial city was becoming a persistent but succeeded component of the postindustrial landscape around South Street. The old neighborhoods around South Street were not yet redeveloped and gentrified by Center City's service professionals, yet it was clear that they would be in time. They could no longer be identified as industrial villages, but the physical, social, and cultural orders typical of those villages were still in evidence. The old neighborhood order was in disarray, but the new order was not yet in place. South Street occupied yet another edge position, this one between phases of urban change.

The key to South Street's postwar history of change is an unbuilt expressway. South Street did not appear on the comprehensive and Center City plans' maps and views of the future. In its place, an expressway would form the southern verge of Center City, feeding cars into Center City and connecting 1-95 on the east to the Cobb's Creek Expressway farther to the west across the Schuylkill

(figs. 7 and 8). The planned South Street expressway—which had different names over the years but is best known as the Crosstown—would also serve to divide Center City from the variously gritty, seedy, and solid neighborhoods of South Philadelphia: the commission intended that the "Vine Street and Crosstown Expressways will reinforce the margins of Center City to the north and south."^[25] The decision to build the Crosstown along South Street, made in the 1950s and reversed in the 1960s, became the great determining fact of South Street's history from that point on.

South Street has a longer history than do most American streets, extending back to the 1682 survey commissioned by William Penn for the purpose of establishing the city, of which it formed the southern edge.^[26] Philadelphia's blacks, particularly the black middle class, had established themselves around South Street in the nineteenth century, and since the 1850s there had been a concentration of Jewish merchants on South, especially between Second and Fifth streets.^[27] Along with Girard Avenue to the north of Center City, South was one of the main shopping streets for industrial Philadelphia's wage-earning populations. The intricately layered and intermixed Polish, Italian, Jewish, black, and Irish populations of South Philadelphia made for a heterogeneous shopping strip, with ethnic businesses and enclaves strung along South "like beads on a string," in the words of urban planner Denise Scott Brown.^[28] Although some of its industrial-era merchants sold to a fashionable carriage trade drawn from aristocratic Rittenhouse Square just to the north (a trade that was diminished by an early wave of suburbanization in the 1920s), the whiteethnic and black neighborhoods of South Philadelphia provided South Street with its principal constituency.

The Great Depression, World War II, and postwar suburbanization combined to diminish South Street as a shopping street, especially as residents in surrounding neighborhoods moved out, but South was still a lively commercial strip in the early 1950s. A regional trade of ethnic shoppers returned to patronize favorite stores from the old neighborhood, and, especially west of Broad Street, South Philadelphia's growing black population used South Street as its principal commercial avenue. Denise Scott Brown argues that after World War II South Street "could, in fact, be called the main street of Philadelphia's center-city black community."^[29]

If the urban planner Brown saw South Street as the commercial backbone of at least one community, the City Planning Commission's blueprints for the future conceived of it as the border of Center City—in planning parlance, an "edge" rather than a "seam." Starting in the late 1950s, as the threat of the Crosstown put a stop to local investment in the South Street area, owners of homes and businesses sold out, prospective buyers from the neighborhoods looked elsewhere, many stores closed, and only a few businesses opened to

replace them. Center City's encroachment from the north accelerated the breakup of upper South Philadelphia's neighborhood orders, leaving the area's decreasing population older, poorer, and more black.^[30] This typically early1960s limbo between slum clearance and redevelopment became a lasting condition for South Street over the next two decades because the Crosstown, an idea that had transformed South Street, was never built.

A loose but increasingly effective alliance of neighborhood representatives and urban professionals opposed the expressway, one of many such local blocs formed in response to urban renewal projects throughout urban America in the 1960s. Black leaders from neighborhoods around central and western South Street made a rough common cause with representatives of two preponderantly white groups: the proprietors of new arts-and-crafts shops and cafés on eastern South Street, known to some as "the South Street Renaissance" and to others as "the hippies"; and a crew of lawyers, professors, and planners interested in fighting City Hall. A 1964 riot in North Philadelphia and recurring rumors of impending violence in South Philadelphia lent new urgency to both the city's case for a southern buffer for Center City and the continuing exodus of businesses and taxpayers from the neighborhoods around South Street. But the Crosstown's opponents raised difficult questions about the highway's displacement of 5,000-6,000 mostly poor people, the scarcity of affordable relocation housing, and the wisdom of placing another visible barrier between City Hall and black neighborhoods.^[31]

By the late 1960s, the national mood had turned against urban renewal as it was conceived in the 1950s, and the increasingly sophisticated anti-Crosstown forces could draw upon a growing national and local critique of urban renewal's equity and efficacy.^[32] Robert Mitchell, a University of Pennsylvania professor who had been one of the transportation plan's original architects in the 1940s and 1950s, argued against the Crosstown in 1967, describing it as a relic of the transportation-obsessed planning of the 1950s that neglected "the social aspects." In 1970, a consultant hired by the city reported that the Crosstown would be underutilized and overpriced and that its necessity had been predicated on drastic overestimates of population increase and retail employment downtown.^[33] Despite these authoritative judgments, and even though other highways to which it was supposed to connect were never completed, ambitious planners and developers were still periodically reviving the Crosstown proposal into the 1970s, and neighborhood organizations were still successfully opposing them.

In 1968, members of the anti-Crosstown coalition asked the architectural firm of Venturi and Rauch to draw up a counterplan for South Street that codified their ideas. The firm, which in the late 1960s and 1970s became one of the most important influences in the field of urban planning, had a historical connection to South Street: Robert Venturi's parents had made their living selling

produce from a South Street storefront, and Denise Scott Brown, the architectural firm's principal planner and Venturi's wife, has said that in the firm's fledgling period "the fruit business supported the architecture business."^[34] Brown, who was in charge of drawing up the South Street counterplan, saw herself as part of a new generation of planners, influenced by populist critics of traditional city planning like Herbert Gans and Jane Jacobs and opposed to the 1950s model of the "value-free technician" working in a social vacuum. She argued that, in the absence of "governmental and societal commitment to social programs . . . Bauhaus ideals as well as our most recent large-scale architectural urbanistic dreams will be used as they were on South Street to betray rather than support the social concerns from which they sprang." Her counterplan envisioned South Street as the "strip center of a vital commercial, cultural, civic life" supported by programs to increase local employment and ownership of businesses and homes. Brown saw  South Street as positioned within the metropolis to serve local clienteles (blacks, remaining white ethnics, Center City urbanites) and a regional market of ex-South Philadelphians returning to the inner city from the suburbs for weekend shopping.^[35]

The contest over the Crosstown, codified in metropolitan plan and local counterplan, was a contest between two visions of South Street as a relic of industrial Philadelphia. If the anti-Crosstown forces prevailed in their argument that South Street was the spine of a community or communities, it was, from the point of view of the preexisting neighborhood formations, a qualified victory. By the 1970s, more than twenty years of disinvestment, uncertainty, and decay had emptied storefronts, destabilized the surrounding neighborhoods, and dispersed the regional shopping trade. On its eastern end, South Street, bracketed by Society Hill to the north and Queen Village to the south, was becoming a commercial and entertainment strip for the new Center City urbanites. In the center and west, Center City was extending feelers—"urban pioneers" fixing up old houses, landlords stockpiling properties for the coming revival—into what had been the hearts of black and Irish neighborhoods. "Precursors of the yuppies," Brown writes, "were approaching from both ends and the centre."^[36] The city, having done everything possible to discourage landlords from investing in the blocks around South Street, stepped up enforcement of building codes to encourage those landlords to sell out to Center City urbanites and the speculators who facilitated their southward movement.

If the pro-Crosstown forces failed to build a clear southern bulwark for Center City, the threat of the Crosstown helped to lower land values and open the way for the urban pioneers and fixer-uppers who gradually moved the zone of gentrification down to and past South in the 1980s. A character in Tumbling, discussed in chapter 7, goes so far as to argue that the city never intended to actually build the Crosstown, that the expressway plan was never more than a way to clear the ground for the affluent householders of Center City. As Center

City in the 1990s fills in the areas around South Street and extends south toward Washington Avenue, expanding beyond the limits the planners drew for it with the Crosstown plan in the 1950s, it absorbs a revived South Street. The main shopping street of South Philadelphia's industrial villages now provides food, clothing, books, entertainment, edgy merchandise (a condom store, body piercing), a "historic" industrial infrastructure of"atmospheric" brick walk-ups widely regarded as congenial to arts-and-craft uses, and strollers' ambience to service the consumer profiles of postindustrial urbanism.

The two chapters that follow examine the South Street literature's imaginative engagement with this city in transition. Chapter 6 situates John Fury and Smith's South Street in a midcentury moment of incipient transformation; chapter 7 traces the literary reverberations of that transformation through the 1970s (Bradley's South Street), 1 980s (God's Pocket), and 1990s (Tumbling).

In what follows, I will shuttle back and forth between more local and more global scales of analysis in at least three ways. First, the relationship of South Street to the city of Philadelphia, the problematic fit of the local to the metropolitan, commands a good deal of my and the authors' attention. In their novels, the tension between local order and city-structuring process always informs the problem of neighborhood, both literary and social. Second, I will ask individual texts to speak to the composite text I assemble from the novels and satellite documents—histories, plans, maps. Among other things, this allows characters and figures to participate in the composite postwar narrative and to move through the composite city of feeling, traveling in edifying ways beyond the horizons of their historical moment or the text in which they appear. If at times it seems that I am being "unfair" to a novel by introducing characters and ideas from other texts into it or by expanding upon the blind spots in its imaginative range, I do so in the service of tracing and reading the larger narrative to which all the texts contribute.

Third, the discussion that follows will suggest various ways in which stories of South Street and Philadelphia have meaning that can be applied to other cities and their literatures. By the early 1960s, Philadelphia enjoyed a national reputation as a model for how cities might navigate the stresses and traumas of postwar urban change. National magazine stories and professional journal articles on urban renewal featured Philadelphia's reform mayors, its "business community," and its celebrated chief planner, Edmund Bacon. Martin Meyerson observed that "no municipal reform movement more captured the imagination of observers, both nationally and locally, than did that of Philadelphia . . . during the mid-fifties and early sixties."^[37] To the extent that the story of Center City is exemplary (as success or as failure, depending upon whom you might

ask and when), representations of South Street might also be exemplary, suggesting resonances with representations of the multiple and particular localities that add up to urban America. The readings of the South Street literature that follow in the next two chapters argue, among other things, that narratives of white-ethnic decline and black community formation are inextricably entangled with one another—both formally and in their relation to a shared urban history. That generic entanglement, traced on the terrain mapped by the South Street literature, suggests in microcosm the stormy and fruitful encounter of white-ethnic and black urbanisms that has been at the center of postindustrial life in America's old industrial capitals.