I. The Changing Heart of the City
Building and Rebuilding Western "Wash West"
This exhibition focuses on the buildings of a section of Center City Philadelphia
west of Washington Square, running from 11th to Broad Street and from Market
to South Street, a neighborhood remarkable for its scale, its diversity,
and its surviving historic fabric.
At various times the area has accommodated, often simultaneously, major
portions of the city's elite residential quarter, its African American population,
its high-end retail corridor, its most visible centers of night life, high
and low, bookish Philadelphia and clubbish Philadelphia, its gay and lesbian
community, and a host of small households at the heart of the city. This
diverse character has been shaped since the area's initial development in
the 1820s and 30s by the carving of minor streets and alleys within William
Penn's grid, which brought different classes and uses together within his
outsized blocks. The district still bears marks of the westward migrations
of the fashionable elite and of high-end commerce along its northern half,
and of the redefinition of its northern and western edges with tall office
and commercial buildings whose deeper invasion was forestalled by the Depression.
Its history has made the neighborhood a rich array of different moments
and uses that can shift every dozen footsteps, a rare survival at the heart
of a great city.
Recent and pending reinvestment in this western part of "Washington
Square West" -- by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical
Society of Pennsylvania, by residential and commercial development interests,
and in civic and institutional initiatives on all four edges -- seems to
signal a new, potentially transforming chapter in this neighborhood's history
after decades of relative stasis. This moment seems an opportune one to
explore this area's architectural past, the urban forces manifest in its
present, and prospects for its future.
Section I: [exhibition]
Last revision. 03/10/00 eb.