Author Archives: Ken Finkel
Grocery Chains and the Origins of Philadelphia’s Food Deserts
In the 1920s, the average working-class family spent about one-third of its budget on groceries. “Most households spent more to put dinner on the table than for their rent or their mortgage.” And where “food was hugely expensive, relative to wages” neighborhood grocery stores delivered “only moderate amounts of nutrition” according to Marc Levinson. “Only […]
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It’s 1901: Time to go Grocery Shopping in North Philadelphia
It’s the turn of the 20th century and I live in a tidy three-story rowhouse on Clarion Street, near Diamond Street. North Philadelphia is such a great place to live. What’s not accessible easily on foot is available by streetcar: schools (including Temple College at Berks Street and the Wagner Free Institute of Science at […]
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The Culture of Conformity in Gritty Philadelphia
Francis Biddle was one of the few who escaped. While other Philadelphia patricians stayed at or very near home, Biddle migrated to Washington, D.C, where he quickly “achieved a reputation of talking little, thinking fast and acting faster.” As the U. S. Attorney General during the World War II, Biddle acted way too fast when […]
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“As long as City Hall existed the city would never completely be free to grow up to the dreams of those who loved her.”
“You could be critical of your city and laugh among yourselves at its quaintness, its political corruption, its provincialism, its charming, absurd, easy-going conservatism, its heat and dirt, its faint enthusiasms dying so easily before a stouter longing for pleasure,” wrote Francis Biddle in 1927. “But you mustn’t let an outsider laugh at it. For, […]
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Celebrations of Underdogs
Having just celebrated the Eagles Super Bowl win with a procession witnessed by nearly three-quarters of a million, we have to ask: has Philadelphia ever before experienced so sweet a victory? Then we recall October 21, 1980, when the Phillies beat the Kansas City Royals 4 to 1, winning game 6 of the World Series. […]
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The Last Piggeries of Maiden Lane
“A curious thing about Philadelphia,” wrote Edith Elmer Wood in 1919, “is that pigs were permitted to be kept in the thickly settled parts of the city until quite recently. A start was made to do away with this condition, the 40,000 piggeries of a few years ago having been reduced to almost 10,000. Then, […]
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The Clinical Ampitheatre and Surgery as Spectacle
Demolition for the Parkway proceeded through the northwest quadrant of Center City like Sherman’s March through Georgia. Promising a civic and cultural boulevard, planners took no prisoners, even as they encountered the city’s best architectural gems. Only one hiccup in the way of progress (as we learned last time) was the Medico-Chirurgical Hospital. But this, […]
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Death and Destruction: the “Last Real Impediment” to the Completed Parkway
“Entire Parkway Is To Be Open Within 5 Months,” read a headline in late December, 1916. “City Officials Make Definite Promise” to demolish everything in the way of a mile-long, blacktop boulevard stretching from City Hall to Fairmount. Everything, that is, except for a cluster of buildings at 17th and Cherry Streets, the Medico-Chirurgical College. […]
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A Corner Store Museum in Philadelphia? Why Not!