The abandoned houses of Philadelphia are lonely places, the neglected vessels of forgotten human lives. They plague the city's poorer neighborhoods in the north, west, and south, an entire ghost town, like those of the mythic West, planted within the city's living ranks. Recognizable by their crumbled porches and their doors and windows, which are lidded with plywood or metal sheets, they often bear warnings of of "No Trespassing" and "Keep Out," though occasionally their front doors are left wide open. Some are covered with graffiti, short impoverished phrases like Disheen is ugly, All womyn are beautiful, and Here today, gone tomorrow.
The neighborhood around Bartram's Garden in West Philadelphia is pockmarked with abandoned structures, which are often stripped of any functional items. Sometimes this even includes the sheetrock and insulation; other times, the insulation lays grounded in wet clumps. They are all scented similarly: a dusty odor that is not so much smelt as it is felt as a tickling coolness in the nostrils. Many serve as illicit dumps, filled with tires, which are too expensive to dispose of legally. Nature and time have undermined their integrity; items that were once animated by human lives now sit beneath the dust of structural rot. A mattress and a dresser have fallen through the floor, a yellow couch drowns in a pool of tires. Charred bouquets of wires are exposed behind burnt-down walls. Suspended between the first two stories, a cheap laminate wall with a doorway and a light switch; the floor that once supported it has collapsed into the basement. A forgotten t-shirt reads, I used to be a white American but I gave it up in the interest of humanity and near it, a road sign, upside down: Speed Limit 45. In a room that must have been a kitchen once, the appliances and cabinetry are gone, but containers of Nesquick, Aunt Jemima's, ketchup, Pork Chitterlings, and Campbell's Cream of Celery remain. On the walls of a room with nothing but an old desk, the white paint peels to reveal a deep and bodily red undercoat. A house is entirely sealed, except for two windows in the back, which are dressed with white curtains and potted plants. In the corner of a room there is a forty-ounce bottle, empty except for the dregs of malt liquor, and a balled-up winter coat. Such items press the realization that Abandoned housing is a bit of a misnomer, since some of the garbage - Doritos bags, pizza boxes, shattered bottles of discount vodka - signifies a transient human presence. Some rooms carry signs of lives more permanent, like: a throw pillow and a bed sheet twisted over a makeshift mattress. For the squatters who occasionally occupy them, abandoned houses serve a basic but essential function - to protect human life from nature's whims. But for those with the benefit of more permanent roofs over their heads, vacant properties are problematic. Many are dangerous and their boards bear yellow signs warning of an imminent collapse. Less dilapidated structures are eyesores. This may seem a superficial complaint but eyesores affect how neighborhoods are perceived and too many can wreak havoc on property values. Despite their high volume - estimated to total 26,000 in 2,000 - most vacant properties are dispersed enough throughout Philadelphia so that there are only one or two per block. This puts most of these blocks at what John Kromer, Fels' Institute of Government's senior consultant and former Director of Housing of Philadelphia, calls a "tipping point:" continued neglect of such structures will lower property values on the entire block, and other residents will likely abandon. However, if abandoned lots can be repaired quickly, then property values will stabilize and the block will be preserved.
Philadelphia's abandoned properties are a symptom of what Kromer calls "post-industrial economic disinvestment." In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Philadelphia economy was centered around city-based manufacturing firms, like the Chambers Brothers Machine Works and Foundry in West Philadelphia and the Quaker City Dye Works in the North. Most of these firms were vertically integrated - they controlled all aspects of production, from the raw materials to the finished good. Because private and public transportation were expensive and most workers populated the neighborhoods surrounding their factories, usually living within walking distance.
With the rise of the automobile and the subsequent flight of the middle class to the suburbs, urban neighborhoods began to depopulate. Huge advances in communication technology after World War II further undermined the necessity of physical proximity to the factory, and globalizing forces opened up foreign and cheap labor markets that rendered the vertically integrated factory obsolete.
Philadelphia's major factories closed and the suburban office park replaced them as the dominant structure of the American economy. With their jobs evaporating, city residents left: Philadelphia has consistently lost population since 1950, and it and Detroit were the only two of the nation's ten largest metropolitan areas to shrink in the nineties. As Philadelphia's workers abandoned the city in pursuit of jobs, so too did they abandon the houses in which they had lived, and because there were no incoming citizens to replace them, the deserted structures of their former lives deteriorated into their present states.
Less than 10 years ago, the neighborhood south of Lombard and parallel to Rittenhouse Square was largely abandoned. Today, the sidewalks quake with nearby construction. Most abandoned structures are either torn down or dressed in scaffolding. Where once there was only the silence of bygone lives, there is now the repetitive din of hammers and the fuzzy radio music of construction crews.
This is clearly a neighborhood in transition. Abandoned structures are almost entirely gone: the only remainders of their existence are the occasional patchworks of wallpaper that pattern the sides of neighboring houses after they have been demolished. In many cases, demolition was the only option, since the original structures were so decayed.
Local developers, like Dawn Mallin, credit the neighborhood's resurgence to its proximity to Rittenhouse Square and the general housing boom. Mallin owns five properties in the area, including three neighboring row homes on Christian Street that are currently being renovated into nine condos. She intends to retain as many of the buildings' original features as possible including the facades, because "I just like the old buildings. They have more character."
Despite this modest justification, Mallin's buildings are unique when compared to other local development, so much of which assumes the unwavering form of a three-story townhouse, with a garage on the first floor and a multi-leveled bay window joining the second and third. At $240 to $300 thousand, Mallin's condos aren't exactly cheap, but they are priced significantly lower than the townhouses next door, which sell for $600 thousand. Expensive constructions of the latter mold infuriate people like Jeffrey Stockbridge, a photographer whom Mallin hired to shoot the interiors of her properties before they were renovated.
Stockbridge denounces these "condominiums with garages to park your SUV" as "disgusting" and it would be easy to dismiss such statements as hysteria were he not so familiar with the forgotten structures where these new condos stand. Stockbridge feels a personal connection to abandoned structures, having photographed them for the past three years and he is enraged by developers who level them without any concern for the histories they contain.
What began three years ago as a Drexel University senior photography project has gained momentum over time. "I've been told this project is still in its infancy by people who know it well," says Stockbridge. He has always worked in the neighborhoods in which he has lived: first as a student in West Philadelphia, and then in South Philadelphia. Now he works primarily in North Philadelphia and he shares a nearby studio with five other people and an African Gray Parrot named Dot.
Stockbridge has received significant accolade for his work - runner-up in a New York Times' student photography competition, an Independence Foundation Fellowship of the Arts, and an upcoming show at The Fleisher Art Memorial. So far, he has taken thirty exhibit-quality photographs, which seems a low output given that he occasionally enters thirty abandoned houses in a single day, relying on nothing more than "a good flashlight and a crowbar."
Conventional wisdom regards abandoned structures as blights, to which any alternative is preferable. Stockbridge, however, sees them differently. "I'd like to challenge the stereotypes of the ghetto as ugly," he says, and in viewing his photographs it is easy to see why. Brightly painted walls and graffiti contrast with solitary forgotten items of furniture and empty doorways, creating a tragic juxtaposition that underscores the quiet solemnity of such places while it reminds one of the vibrancy of their former lives. "I think the ghettoes are more beautiful than most of downtown Philly," he says. "They don't feel as structured and sterile as a city sometimes can," and he compares their sporadic, unexpected placements of their houses to the growth of trees in a forest.
He is not na've about his work: he acknowledges that the neighborhoods he works in aren't safe and he approves of some redevelopment efforts, like Mallin's. What bothers him is that "rather than adopting the structures that exist and offering housing at a reasonable price," private contractors "tear down houses full of historical stuff. Who decides what's historic?"
The houses Stockbridge enters are often filled with discarded personal mementos, letters, divulging their author's terminal illness, or personal photographs - an entire album, in fact, from a black sailor named Mack. Mack's photos are from his tour of duty in Korea: in one, he sits happily in the center of a group of heavily made-up Asian women; in another, a nude Korean stripper performs before a standing crowd. Stockbridge retains all of these mementos, even hanging the discovered old portrait of an unknown African-American man beside his bed, and he exhibits them alongside his photographs. Such findings lead Stockbridge to fantasies of an "Urban Archeology Museum," a "pipe dream" of an "association that's dedicated to preserving this city's citizen's histories."
In addition to Mallin's projects, Stockbridge approves of efforts by communities, like those in West Philadelphia, to create public gardens on lots occupied by abandoned houses. The efficacy of such lots as gardens is questionable. Their perimeters tend to favor stray cats chasing blown litter through weeds over local residents greening their thumbs in beds of daisies, but according to Kromer, even such minimal efforts can greatly protect property values. Their fences wear plaques crediting "This Beautification Project" to Mayor John Street and Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell. Blackwell, despite numerous requests, was unavailable for interview.
The gardens in West Philadelphia are a small example of projects being undertaken by the Philadelphia government to alleviate the negative effects of abandoned housing. "Because many of these areas are unattractive to private investors," says Kromer, "local government is necessary." The city identifies dilapidated structures and maintains the right to seize them if they are not repaired within a given window. The city then demolishes the most damaged structures, "the dogs of abandoned housing," according to Kromer, and repairs the most salvageable.
If there is a silver lining in the cloud of abandoned housing, it is that the widespread vacancies in Philadelphia allow for neighborhoods to correct some of their former flaws. In a 1997 report called "Neighborhood Transformations," Kromer wrote of "the opportunity to rebuild residential areas based on land-use plans and buildings designs that are more relevant for the future than the conditions which existed before." If the image of the early twentieth century city is of an infested and claustrophobic brick squalor, then depopulation and abandonment have at least allowed for the possibility of a renovation more suited to healthy living - larger homes, lower population densities, wider roads, landscaping, and more public spaces. Such a vision might reek of gentrification, but Kromer says gentrification is not as much of a problem for Philadelphia as it is some other cities, since the disinvestment that Philadelphia has experienced over the past fifty years is essentially the opposite of gentrification. And positive models exist within Philadelphia of how to deal with the displaced citizens of those neighborhoods that do gentrify: for example, the neighborhood of Jefferson Square offered displaced citizens new houses at a monthly payment that did not exceed the monthly payment of their previous properties.
Many of these new developments lack the character that Stockbridge and Mallin savor in old buildings, but it is hard to dispute better and affordable living. Stockbridge reflects with an understandable ambivalence that "most of the abandoned houses I photographed in South and even West Philly are gone." Redevelopment is the final passing of the eraser over lives barely visible, but it also spells the beginning of Philadelphia's economic future. It is in the efforts, then, of artists like Stockbridge that the lives of families hidden beneath the crumbled skeletons of their former homes may be revealed and remembered by future citizens who, under the guidance of men like Kromer and the personal investments of women like Mallin, will hopefully have healthier and happier lives.
