{"id":14188,"date":"2020-05-19T11:56:57","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T15:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=14188"},"modified":"2020-07-01T09:42:08","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T13:42:08","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-southwark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2020\/05\/the-rise-and-fall-of-southwark\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise and Fall of Southwark"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen you enter the plaza,\u201d reported the Inquirer<\/em> in 1981, \u201cSouthwark surprises you with the makings of a nice community. The towers look into a community center, open squares and trees, and from these extend little streets of rowhouses with hedges and yards. It is a campus-like setting full of potential\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the idea<\/em>, anyway.<\/p>\n

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South 4th Street, Christian to Washington, 1964 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Inspired by Le Corbusier\u2019s Ville Radieuse, architects including Louis I. Kahn and Oscar Stonorov designed three dozen high-rise housing projects for thousands of Philadelphia\u2019s low-income families. Edmund Bacon at the city planning commission led the charge. Bacon, John F. Bauman put it, \u201cviewed public housing as part of the process of excising away Philadelphia\u2019s obsolescent industrial past and ushering in a modern and more physically attractive future for a \u2018Better Philadelphia.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Through the 1950s and 1960s, according to Alexander van Hoffman, urban high-rise projects \u201crising out of vast expanses of grass and greenery\u201d came to \u201cdominate the image of American public housing.\u201d The \u201cmovement for tall modernism\u2026gained support from city officials and developers who saw sleek skyscrapers as a way of modernizing the aging urban landscapes of postwar America.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few designers worried they might be creating a new generation of \u201csupertenements.\u201d No matter. According to van Hoffman, officials \u201cin New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago, embraced high-rise design with an almost insane tenaciousness.\u201d By 1960, Philadelphia had 22 low-income towers with another dozen, including three at Southwark Plaza, by Stonorov & Haws, on the drawing boards. By the late 1970s, 5,000 Philadelphia families occupied 36 high-rise projects, a social experiment that would soon become recognized as a profound city planning failure.<\/p>\n

Built in 1963 for about $12 million (the equivalent of more than $100 million in today\u2019s dollars) Southwark\u2019s three 26-story towers, along with adjacent low-rise neighbors, housed more than 2,700 residents in 886 units. Cheek-by-jowl and steeped in poverty, everyone there lived with crime, drugs, unrepaired plumbing and perennially dysfunctional elevators. “It’s like living in hell, only worse,” one resident told a Bulletin<\/em> reporter in 1977. “In hell, at least you are dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Aerial View from Southwark Building, May 11, 1965 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Southwark quickly became known as a \u201cmodel of the misguided public housing policies of the day: Build cheap, then pack ’em in,\u201d wrote the Inquirer\u2019s<\/em> Frank Lewis. This project was nothing short of \u201cnotorious for its failure in terms of people\u2019s lives,\u201d urban designer Jon Lang later wrote. \u201cOne of the city\u2019s worst public housing sites,\u201d confirmed John Kromer in Fixing Broken Cities<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The police \u201cdreaded\u201d Southwark. Responding to complaints, \u201cthey used the \u2018three-car\u2019 approach\u2014three police vehicles dispatched to handle one complaint. One set of officers was needed to guard the cars. Bricks flew from the high-rises, pelting cops and their vehicles.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Southwark stood out at all,\u201d wrote Buzz Bissinger in A Prayer for the City<\/em>, \u201cif there was anything that distinguished the complex, it was in the color of those\u2026towers\u2014a clammy, sickly yellow the human skin gets from chronic fever and stale air.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne didn\u2019t have to be a social scientist or an expert in public housing to understand a place like Southwark\u2026 Any adult\u2026or any child, for that matter\u2014could look at those towers in their ugly incongruous setting \u2026 and know that they had been doomed to failure from the very beginning, casting a potentially fatal effect not only on those who were sentenced to live there but also those who lived anywhere close to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were poor people in the city who desperately needed housing,\u201d wrote Bissinger, \u201cbut not like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAround the same time,\u201d reported the Inquirer<\/em>, \u201ceveryone had seemed to come to the same conclusion \u2026 high-rises and low incomes just don’t mix.<\/p>\n

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The successful explosives felling of [Southwark Residential Towers] two, 331\u2019 tall, 26-story, reinforced concrete apartment structures, 8:30 AM on Sunday, January 23, 2000. (Controlled Demolition, Inc.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>And so, early one frigid millennial morning [January 23, 2000], scores of police officers \u201ccordoned off an area bordered by Sixth, Moyamensing, Queen and Wharton.\u201d Traffic on I-95 was temporarily halted. Eighty-five pounds of explosives had been strategically affixed to 650 concrete uprights in each of two towers.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt 8:31 a.m. as light snow fell and police, officials and hundreds of residents watched, the two 26-story towers at Washington and Fourth Streets were imploded into giant piles of rubble. Loud bangs rang out, and for an instant, the towers stood intact. Then another bang sounded and the buildings crumbled straight down.\u201d Finally, \u201ca giant ball of light-brown dust rose and spread\u201d over a good part of South Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

Southwark was hardly the only low-income, high rise to meet its fate with a bang and a cloud of dust. For two decades, starting in the mid-1990s, no fewer than 23 low-income high rises came down. And implosion was the method of choice. The 8-tower Raymond Rosen Apartments in 1995 was followed a year later by the Schuylkill Falls Apartments. The Martin Luther King Plaza came down in 1999, one year before Southwark, two years before Cambridge Plaza and three years before the Mill Creek Apartments.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia, it seemed, had come to its senses as to what constitutes humane, low-income housing. And Philadelphians found themselves engaged in a newfound, post-modern spectator sport.<\/p>\n

[Sources: From The Philadelphia Inquirer:<\/em> Bob Frump, \u201cWhy \u2018Projects\u201d is a Dirty Word in Housing, April 16, 1978; Andrew Wallace, \u201cSouthwark: Trash,\u201d April 16, 1978; Mark Randall, \u201cAt Southwark Plaza\u2026\u201d Our Town, Today Magazine<\/em>, November 1, 1981; Laura Bunch, Vacant Towers Coming Down Amid Hope of Better Housing,\u201d December 2, 1996; Thom Guarnieri, \u201cTowers\u2019 Rubble Clears the Way for a Fresh Start,\u201d January 24, 2000; Larry Eichel, \u201cRising from Ruins,\u201d December 4, 2005. From The Philadelphia Daily News<\/em>: \u00a0Leon Taylor, \u201cProject\u2019s Towers go from Dream to Dust, April 18, 1995; Christine Bahls, MLK Towers Tumble Down, October 18, 1999. A Citizen\u2019s Guide to Housing and Urban Renewal in Philadelphia<\/em> (Philadelphia Housing Association, 1960); John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Urban Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920\u20131974 <\/em>(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); John F. Bauman, \u201cRow Housing as Public Housing: The Philadelphia Story, 1957\u20132013,\u201d\u00a0Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, <\/em>vol.<\/em>138, no. 4 (2014): Buzz Bissinger, A Prayer for the City<\/em> (Vintage, 1998); Ryan Briggs, \u201cBidding Farewell To Queen Lane, Looking Ahead For PHA<\/a>,\u201d Hidden City,<\/em> September 12, 2014; Jon Lang, Urban Design:\u00a0The American Experience<\/em> (John Wiley & Sons,\u00a01994); Frank Lewis, \u201cThe Philadelphia Experiment<\/a>,\u201d Philadelphia City Paper<\/em>, \u00a0April 17\u201324, 1997; John L. Puckett, Public Housing\u2019s Backstory, Part of Diverse Stories: Public Housing in West Philadelphia<\/a>, (West Philadelphia Collaborative History); Alexander van Hoffman, \u201cHigh Ambitions: The Past and the Future of American Low-Income Housing Policy,\u201d Housing Policy Debate<\/em>, vol. 8, no. 3, 1996.]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen you enter the plaza,\u201d reported the Inquirer in 1981, \u201cSouthwark surprises you with the makings of a nice community. The towers look into a community center, open squares and trees, and from these extend little streets of rowhouses with hedges and yards. It is a campus-like setting full of potential\u2026\u201d That was the idea, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}