Northern Liberties: The Story of a Philadelphia River Ward

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INTRODUCTION

Standing atop the tower of Philadelphia’s City Hall is a monumental statue of William Penn, Quaker founder of both Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Some say that the twenty-seven-ton bronze sculpture was positioned to look northeastward in the direction of Tacony (the place in Philadelphia where it was cast), while others say that it faces Penn Treaty Park (where Penn made his famous friendship accord with Native Americans of the region). Either way, though, William Penn gazes first at Northern Liberties.

This is perhaps fitting, for Northern Liberties represents the best and the worst aspects of William Penn’s settlement on the Delaware River. NoLibs, as the neighborhood is often called, is fraught with ideas and things that made Philadelphia great: inventing, manufacturing, religious freedom, firefighting, urban renewal and so on. It also has a history of negative characteristics and influences: drinking, decadence, hostility, urban blight and so forth. Yet this varied panorama of history is precisely what gives Northern Liberties its peculiar air.

NoLibs is a portion of lower North Philadelphia, stretching from Vine Street (Philadelphia’s original northern boundary) to Girard Avenue and from the Delaware to Sixth Street (Eighth Street in this work). It’s one of the River Wards of Philadelphia, along with the communities of Fishtown, Kensington and Port Richmond. When incorporated as a borough in 1803, Northern Liberties was the fastest-growing precinct contiguous to Philadelphia’s northern border. It ranked among America’s largest cities into the nineteenth century, before the city of Philadelphia annexed it (and other municipalities) in 1854.

Native Americans were the first residents in the locale, for thousands of years. They lived in relative harmony with Quakers who had come to the New World with William Penn during the colonial era. Then came a considerable stock of diligent and inventive Germans who immigrated to Philadelphia and settled in NoLibs before the American Civil War. A high number of African Americans also established themselves in the region. At the same time, Irish Catholics arrived and encountered the violence of the Philadelphia Nativist Riots.

The 1854 consolidation of NoLibs into the city of Philadelphia helped bring peace to the area. This newfound calm made Northern Liberties a true immigrant haven. By the end of the 1800s, the neighborhood had become home to several Europeans groups: central European Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Hungarians and the like. These peoples established places of worship and moved into the homes of older immigrant groups that had left the area.

Newcomers found no shortage of work, for Northern Liberties was a manufacturing center from the beginning. Substantial creeks brought water to power a host of mills for grain, corn and textile production, as well as businesses related to everything from brewing to leather tanning to shipbuilding to tool making. From small workshops to enormous factories, the industrial might of this quarter was felt far beyond Philadelphia. This was where things were made and made well—a point of pride in the neighborhood.

The Liberties remained a center of industrial and technological advancement well into the 1900s. But the deindustrialization of Philadelphia during the mid-twentieth century left NoLibs a shadow of its former self. The southern section, from Vine to Spring Garden Streets, was already part of the city’s Skid Row/Tenderloin district. Shortsighted highway and urban revitalization projects of the 1960s and ’70s cut off this portion of town, leaving a wasteland where people had once lived, worked and played. About 30 percent of Northern Liberties was leveled.

The rest of NoLibs was spared and survived. Much of it lay empty and in ruin, but enough remained for artists, musicians and other urban pioneers to stake their claim and rebuild. This place—never quiet or quaint, yet always diverse and eclectic—has gentrified into one of Philadelphia’s most favorite neighborhoods. Hip and upscale restaurants, bars and shops have supplanted decayed and vacant structures, while innovative housing and high-rise condos have brought in new residents. NoLibs, most of zip code 19123, is an American renaissance story.

As Matt Ruben of the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association has stated, Through all the change, and through all the stories, there’s a common thread: this is a working neighborhood. Its history isn’t the colonial museum history of the old downtown. It’s the still-unfolding history of industry, a history of function and work and the present tense.

Northern Liberties can contemplate its three-hundred-year thread of history while being assured of its future—all while under the watchful gaze of William Penn high above Philadelphia.

Chapter 1

WHAT ARE THE NORTHERN LIBERTIES?

The Delaware Indians lived and traded among themselves and with other indigenous groups along the Delaware River for thousands of years. They called themselves the Leni-Lenape, meaning original people. When European colonists arrived in the seventeenth century, Lenape settlements were spread throughout present-day eastern Pennsylvania, western New Jersey and New York’s Hudson Valley.

William Penn established Philadelphia in 1682 by supposedly negotiating a treaty with the Lenapes at Shackamaxon, a Native American village on the Delaware at what is now Penn Treaty Park. Penn divided his purchase into two components: the capital city of Philadelphia (corresponding to modern-day downtown or Center City Philadelphia) and the surrounding county of Philadelphia.

The first purchasers who bought lots in the city often received bonus property in the rural territory surrounding the city so as to encourage the settlement of farms and estates outside the legal limits of the city of Philadelphia. Similarly, the first purchasers of extensive tracts in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania received bonus acreage in the city of Philadelphia. Each buyer of five thousand acres in the Pennsylvania wilderness, for instance, was entitled to a dividend of eighty acres in town. Since the city’s boundaries were fixed at roughly two square miles, it was necessary to grant this land in the open space of Philadelphia County.

This region, the Liberties of Philadelphia, consisted of 16,236 rural acres encircling the city. Of these liberty lands, Northern Liberties (north of Vine Street) was the most prominent. There were also the Western Liberties (current-day West Philadelphia) and liberties in South Philadelphia (including Southwark, now Queen Village). The bucolic lands and flowing streams of the liberty lands were appealing to farmers, millers and gentlemen during the colonial period.

Incidentally, the term liberty refers to a land policy common in Britain and the British colonies. It was a locale in which regalian rights did not apply and where ground was held by a mesne lord in feudal times. A liberty later became a unit of local government administration.

What is today known as Northern Liberties was initially part of the much larger Township of Northern Liberties of Philadelphia County, also referred to as the Unincorporated Northern Liberties. Ground not ultimately set aside for individual towns or boroughs composed most of this area. The township extended many miles north of Vine Street and encompassed much of what is North Philadelphia in this day.

Representatives of the yet-to-be District of Northern Liberties petitioned the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly for municipal regulation as early as 1765. An act dated March 9, 1771, gave inhabitants some limited autonomy from the Township of Northern Liberties. However, NoLibs’ boundaries were not as expansive as they subsequently became. Its population was then no more than a few hundred.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania initiated a building boom north of Philadelphia in the 1790s by selling off tracts in Northern Liberties Township. This was done to raise funds to pay off Pennsylvania’s debts from the War of Independence and to relieve overcrowding in the city. German artisans and tradesmen started moving into the region, usually putting up their own modest houses. Quakers with money also began relocating to the area to escape the congestion of Philadelphia.

On March 30, 1791, a statute enabled the inhabitants of Northern Liberties—north of Vine and east of Fourth—to elect three commissioners to levy taxes for the purpose of lighting and monitoring the streets (not yet paved), and to install pumps at public water wells. Sewers were laid out in the 1790s too. The settled area reached just above Third Street at that time.

Map of Philadelphia County showing political boundaries before the 1854 consolidation, with the District of Northern Liberties circled. Note that the Township of Northern Liberties appears above the Kensington District. This map was made by the City of Philadelphia on August 18, 1959.

The Pennsylvania General Assembly passed an act on March 28, 1803, to incorporate Northern Liberties—between Vine Street and Cohocksink Creek and between Sixth Street and the Delaware River—into a political body. This was augmented on March 16, 1819, with a law that officially formed the District of Northern Liberties. The legislation vested the municipality’s government in a board of twenty-one uncompensated commissioners elected for three-year terms. As per an 1840 statute, a mayor was elected annually and was authorized a salary of $500 per year.

Between 1810 and 1830, the highest jumps in population outside Philadelphia were registered in the Districts of Northern Liberties and Spring Garden along the city’s northern edge. The Northern Liberties District was described as Philadelphia’s first suburb and grew into the nation’s sixth-largest metropolis. It thrived as a center of industry and manufacturing, as many mills, breweries, leather tanneries, carriage and wagon makers, chemical works and iron foundries were established north of Philadelphia and close to the Delaware.

This zone also holds the distinction as one of the first criminal and red-light districts in America. Partially due to this, several proposals to consolidate the county of Philadelphia were made. The region, by mid-century, had nine incorporated districts (including Northern Liberties), six boroughs and thirteen townships, plus the city itself. Social and economic affairs of these twenty-nine municipalities were so interrelated as to make it logical that a single entity should be created. But the proposals were unsuccessful, owing to resistance within the towns; they wanted to retain their autonomy and avoid city problems.

Finally, on February 2, 1854, Pennsylvania governor William Bigler signed into law the Consolidation Act of the City of Philadelphia, which merged all the municipalities of Philadelphia County into one immense city. The city of Philadelphia ballooned from 2 to 129 square miles in size. This unification, moreover, helped secure the entire locality, with more integrated police and fire services. Street planning, election procedures and tax collection also became simpler. Residents of the city and the districts came to value the union as an essential step in Philadelphia’s progression as a city.

The District of Northern Liberties ceased to exist under the 1854 Consolidation Act. Its population at the time was about fifty thousand citizens. The old municipality initially came to be the Eleventh, Twelfth and Sixteenth political wards of Philadelphia. It’s part of the Fifth Ward these days.

Flanking NoLibs were the swelling ex-districts of Spring Garden, Penn and Kensington. These were cities in themselves that, like NoLibs, had been carved out of the Township of Northern Liberties.

The District of Northern Liberties was historically bordered by Cohoquinoque Creek on the south, Cohocksink Creek on the north, Sixth Street on the west, and the Delaware River on the east. This work, however, employs the following boundaries: Vine Street on the south, Girard Avenue on the north, Eighth Street on the west, the Delaware River on the east, and Frankford Avenue on the northeast. These enlarged borders incorporate some interesting areas and buildings that are on the Liberties’ periphery and that are part and parcel of the NoLibs story.

The western limit includes two blocks, from Sixth to Eighth Streets, that previously were in the Spring Garden District.

The northeastern limit includes the territory south of Frankford Avenue below Girard Avenue, an area that was once part of the District of Kensington. (The southern precinct of Kensington is referred to as Fishtown.) The idea that Frankford Avenue is the northeastern border of NoLibs has come about only recently, promoted by real estate professionals for the most part. Some denizens of Kensington and Fishtown will never accept that the ground north of the Cohocksink Creek’s former channel is within Northern Liberties. They maintain that Canal Street, built over the creek, is the irregular demarcation between NoLibs and Kensington.

Then again, the gentrification of the Liberties indicates otherwise, as realtors continue to cash in on the expanded territory of Northern Liberties. New home buyers are often unaware of the longstanding boundaries of these proud communities.

Chapter 2

LAYOUT OF THE LAND

The North End of Philadelphia

The District of Northern Liberties was traditionally bounded by two tributaries of the Delaware River: the Cohoquinoque Creek on the south and the Cohocksink Creek on the north. Cohoquinoque and Cohocksink were Native American names for these waterways that drained most of what became lower North Philadelphia. They were hardly inconsequential streams, to be sure.

As originally laid out, the high ground of the original city of Philadelphia ended, on its northern border, at a precipice overlooking Cohoquinoque Creek. The low-lying, swampy terrain farther north—between the two streams—was crisscrossed by many rivulets and was prone to flooding by the Delaware as far west as today’s Third Street. Boys would ferry passengers up and down Front Street during such inundations.

This land was first formally owned by Jurian Hartsfielder (circa 1654–90), a stray German or Dutchman who held a patent on the ground from the royal governor of New York, Sir Edmund Andros. The deed covered:

[A] certain parcel of land called Hartsfield, lying and being on the west side of Delaware river at ye lower end of Cohocksink Creek, to Jurian Hartsfielder, containing and laid out for 350 acres, he yielding and paying yearly to said Duke [of York and Albany] three bushels and a half of good winter wheat.

This conveyance was granted on March 25, 1676, six years before William Penn’s arrival in the New World. The deeded ground extended between the Cohoquinoque and the Cohocksink and westward about as far as where Sixth Street came to be. This was one of the earliest sections of the Philadelphia region developed by Europeans north of New Sweden, the Swedish colony founded in 1638 along the Delaware, near present-day Wilmington, Delaware.

On March 15, 1680, Hartsfielder assigned half of Hartsfield to Hannah, ye widow of Henry Salter, deceased. She later transferred the land to Daniel Pegg