From Desolate to Dynamic

Publication Date: Originally published in July 2011 in the Foundation's 2010 Annual Report

By Patrick Kerkstra for the William Penn Foundation, based on a PlanPhilly series

In September 2010, the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government published a report titled “Vacant Property Reclamation Through Strategic Investment,” consisting of 55 pages of carefully researched facts and figures documenting a decade of dramatic renewal in a North Philadelphia neighborhood.

It was a university study like so many others: important, even revelatory, but perhaps a little dull for the lay reader and incomplete on its own. The data it contained did not and could not tell the full story of how and why the neighborhood of Eastern North Philadelphia—arguably among the most devastated in Philadelphia just a decade ago—had so thoroughly transformed.

In years past, a local newspaper might have seized on the report, seeing it as an opportunity to tell a larger story about redevelopment in Philadelphia. Today, in a time when newspaper staffs are lean and in-depth coverage of anything save scandals is vanishingly rare, it seemed a given the Fels report would be all but ignored by the local press. Fortunately, newspapers are no longer the only outlets for local public interest journalism.

With support from the William Penn Foundation, PlanPhilly, a local news website specializing in development and urban planning coverage, assigned a team of journalists to cover the transformation of ethnically diverse Eastern North Philadelphia, which sits due east of Temple University. Using the Fels study as a foundation for their reporting, a reporter, photographer, and graphic artist from PlanPhilly spent seven months exploring the neighborhood, learning its history, talking to its residents, and examining the record of the local community development corporation that led the area’s redevelopment.

Along the way, the journalists consulted with the academics who wrote the report, Christopher Kingsley and John Kromer (Kromer previously worked as Philadelphia’s senior housing redevelopment official). While PlanPhilly retained editorial control over its work, the project was a collaboration between the reporters and the researchers.

Ultimately, PlanPhilly published nine stories about Eastern North Philadelphia’s rebirth, covering subjects ranging from the state of race relations in the area to the surprising emergence of cutting edge architecture in the community. Each major article featured videos and interactive graphics, many of which were created using data collected by the Fels researchers. PlanPhilly titled the series “Desolate to Dynamic.”

The project received extensive local attention. The region’s Spanish language daily, Al Dia, printed some installments in Spanish, the first PlanPhilly stories translated into any language for publication. A diverse array of local news organizations favorably linked to the series, including Newsworks, Philebrity, Technically Philly, and Brownstoner. Redevelopment professionals took note as well.

The city-run blog NoVacancyPhilly.org called Desolate to Dynamic an “incredible series” and the Pennsylvania Association of Community Development Corporations directed its members to the project as well.

The series also demonstrated what is possible when journalists of different backgrounds and experiences collaborate. It was reported and written by a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, enhanced with photos and videos shot by a City Paper staffer, and supplemented by interactive graphics created by one of Technically Philly’s founders, who came together under PlanPhilly’s flag for this project.

Desolate to Dynamic chronicled the decline of Eastern North Philadelphia, once an industrial powerhouse until the 1960s, full of textile plants, tanneries, rug makers, and meatpackers. The neighborhood’s single largest company was the John B. Stetson Hat Manufactory, which employed as many as 3,500 workers in a sprawling 20-building complex at its peak. Stetson made its last hat in Philadelphia in the 1950s, and it was not alone. Like so many other rust belt neighborhoods, Eastern North Philadelphia was devastated as factories moved their operations overseas or to sunbelt states where the cost of business was lower.

In some respects, Eastern North was worse off than most neighborhoods that depend on manufacturing jobs. The factories in Eastern North Philadelphia were not just the employers, they also were a major physical presence in the neighborhood itself, standing cheek to jowl with row houses. When they went dark, residents were left living next to empty industrial relics. Those residents who could leave did, increasing the sense of abandonment and decay. Then came the bulldozers, under the banner of urban renewal. They knocked down many, though not all, of the crumbling buildings.

What was left was an eerily empty and desolate district less than two miles north of Philadelphia’s bustling city core, a neighborhood of last resort for a mix of low-income residents unable to afford better sections of the city. In time, the area became a destination for low-income Puerto Ricans, many of whom had moved out of the then racially combustible neighborhoods of Spring Garden and Fairmount.

In 1970, a city clerk who doubled as a community activist, Jesus Sierra, got a few friends together and formed an organization called Asociación de Puertorriqueños en Marcha, the Association of Puerto Ricans on the March, or APM. Those were difficult days in Philadelphia, and not just because the full scale of the city’s industrial collapse was setting in. The city was a racial tinderbox as well, with a notoriously aggressive police force openly hostile to minorities, including Puerto Ricans.

“We were tired of being pushed around. We wanted to be counted. The only way you can be counted is by getting together. We called it Puerto Ricans on the March because that’s what we wanted to do,” says Oscar Rosario, 70, who helped found the group with Sierra, who died in 2006.

APM set up shop in Eastern North Philadelphia where so many of the city’s lowest income Puerto Ricans were then living. At first, the organization was purely a social service provider. It contracted with the city or state to offer mental health programs, drug and alcohol treatment, housing counseling, and other programs to thousands of Latinos and non-Latinos every year.

In time, the organization turned its attentions to the blighted neighborhood so many of its clients called home. APM wanted to build low-income housing for the people it served. It wanted to lure basic services such as a grocery and a bank to the neighborhood.

APM found a willing partner in the city of Philadelphia, which had long seen Eastern North Philadelphia as an area ripe for redevelopment, despite the blight that had taken hold. In 1998, John Kromer was head of the city’s Office of Housing and Community Development. To get a handle on the scope of the challenge, Kromer conducted a survey of properties in the small neighborhood on which APM had chosen to focus. The completed survey read like an index of urban despair: The neighborhood contained 2,173 abandoned lots and empty buildings. The vacant properties outnumbered occupied homes and businesses by more than two-to-one.

Last year, Kromer returned to Eastern North Philadelphia for another survey. What he found was remarkable.

Of the 2,173 abandoned properties he catalogued in 1998, only 687 remained; 475 parcels had been redeveloped, mostly by APM. The vacant parcels had been filled with homes, a grocery store, a credit union, and apartments. More than 900 of the abandoned lots had been cleaned up, including 285 properties that were converted into grassy, publicly accessible lots maintained by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in cooperation with APM. The other empty parcels were turned into parking lots, side yards for row houses, and other private uses.

Using Kromer’s studies to inform its reporting, PlanPhilly delved into the community and into the organization that had done so much to revitalize it. Its stories showed how APM’s political savvy helped it navigate Philadelphia’s bewildering bureaucracy to obtain and develop huge swaths of vacant land. Having a coherent development plan, and demonstrating an unusual level of commitment to that plan, helped convince city officials that APM was serious and competent, as did the hiring of Rose Gray, a veteran of both city government and the private development world, who brought badly needed expertise and contacts to APM.

Just as critical to the community’s redevelopment was APM’s deft handling of race, an explosive issue in the multicultural neighborhood the organization serves. Indeed, APM’s redevelopment zone sits astride 6th Street, an avenue that for decades has served as an informal boundary dividing African American Philadelphia to the west and Latino Philadelphia to the East. Although it was founded by and largely for Puerto Ricans, APM’s leaders recognized early on that it was in the organization’s best interest, and in the neighborhood’s, to become an equal opportunity service provider. Sierra, APM’s founder, forged partnerships with key African American leaders in the city, such as State Senator Shirley Kitchen.

“We actually did a handshake, and agreed that we would work together and would split everything 50-50, that we would serve Latinos and blacks equally,” Kitchen told PlanPhilly.

Over time, APM de-emphasized its Puerto Rican identity, adopting a new logo and slogan (“APM … for everyone”). It was not an easy decision, given the importance ethnic identity played in the creation of the organization, but the board felt it was a necessary one.

“Eastern North Philadelphia is a different community than it was when APM first started, and APM is a different organization. We are not just here to serve Puerto Ricans, and we are being very purposeful in telling people that,” Pelayo Coll, chairman of the APM board, said to PlanPhilly.

APM’s board made a far more agonizing and pivotal decision in 2004, when it ousted Sierra after a protracted and ugly debate that divided the organization and the community. The story, which had never been reported in the English language press before PlanPhilly’s series, was a pivotal moment in APM’s history and a turning point in the redevelopment of Eastern North Philadelphia.

A new executive director, Nilda Ruiz, updated APM’s information systems and strengthened the financial systems. Funders’ confidence in the agency grew, and redevelopment work continued.

In 2008, APM completed the final phase of its Pradera townhome project, a 128-unit home ownership development featuring suburban style homes with pitched roofs, spacious yards, and driveways. The development’s visual impact on the neighborhood has been striking, lending the feel of a Montgomery County cul de sac to what used to be badly blighted North Philadelphia blocks.

More recently, APM has embraced cutting-edge energy efficient architecture. Work is finishing on a small LEED-certified 13-unit home ownership project adjacent to the Pradera development. Unlike those townhomes, these new “green homes” would fit right into the pages of Dwell magazine, with their boxy, avant garde looks.

Late this year, the nonprofit expects to break ground on its largest and most complicated project yet: a mixed-use apartment building adjacent to the Temple University train station that APM is jointly developing with New York-based Jonathan Rose Companies. APM hopes the complex helps to connect the neighborhood to the Temple University community, and serves as a regional example of the benefits of transit-oriented development.

The final story in PlanPhilly’s series on Eastern North Philadelphia profiled three local families whose experiences shed light on both APM’s impact on the community and its changing demographics. Catherine Leigh Birdsall and Ben Riesman are relative newcomers who have converted a huge warehouse on a shoestring budget into a mixed-use arts center, featuring cultural performances, a recording studio, and office space. Long-time resident Joseph Wanamaker is nervous about just that kind of thing, because he sees the potential for gentrification that could push out residents like himself. And then there was Norma Morales, a woman who in 1993 was homeless and living with her three children in an APM shelter. Today, thanks in large part to the services offered by APM, Morales owns her own home and works in the office of a City Council member. Her youngest daughter is a student at Temple.

For all the light it shed on redevelopment in Eastern North Philadelphia, the Fels report said nothing about the stories of these individual families. For that, you still need journalism: reporters on the ground talking to real people, gathering individual stories, and knitting them together into a narrative tapestry that tells us something about our communities and how to improve them.

As editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, Sandra Shea is a member of the traditional media, but she appreciates the value of non-traditional outlets such as PlanPhilly because of series like Desolate to Dynamic, which she calls “an object lesson in what is lost with the scaling back of traditional journalism outlets.”

“PlanPhilly is producing fine-grained stories that allow us to see our city in terms beyond zoning maps and district boundaries: as a vital, breathing living creature, constantly evolving, constantly changing,” says Shea. “After all, this is how we experience the city as we live in it day to day, and whether or not we succeed in the city depends on the stories we know. By telling the story of APM and Eastern North Philadelphia, PlanPhilly is publishing a road map for community change all over the city.”


Patrick Kerkstra is a Philadelphia-based freelance journalist who has covered the city and region for 12 years. He is a writer-at-large for Philadelphia Magazine, a special projects contributor for PlanPhilly, and a regular guest columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked as a staff writer for a decade. Patrick’s career has included stints covering subjects ranging from higher education to the war in Iraq to Philadelphia’s City Hall. His work has appeared in publications across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and Newsday.