Workshop of the World draft stops

2: 3^rd Street

Society Hill today is one of the most elite neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Going back in time of 100 years the elegance and quiet of its streets would disappear, and you would find a commercial and industrial area full of immigrants, shops and traffic. Between 1880 and 1910 white collar workers gradually moved from Center City to better houses in the suburbs. The big industries left the city for areas near the Schuylkill or in the North Philly. Society Hill, then an immigrant area, was a densely populated neighborhood where houses, workshop, small industries and big warehouses coexisted together. As you can see from picture n X (3^rd Street on  google drive) 3^rd Street’s atmosphere resembled closely the one you can see in movies such as Once Upon a Time in America; walking out of the Powel house you would have seen between the townhouses a candy and cigar factory (final stop).

3: Dock Street

Clear cobblestone on the ground, exclusive restaurants and trees create the modern day distinctive appeal of this particular street. As you can easily notice, the street does not follow the regular perpendicular pattern of Philadelphia’s streets. Its sinuous shape and its name come from the fact that the street was actually a creek (Dock creek) until 1820, when it became a sewer. By 1840 it was completely covered and transformed into a street. In the early years of Philadelphia on the sides of the creek there were the workshops that needed a water source, in particular potteries, brickmaking and tanneries[i]. All these industries were highly polluting and we can imagine how pleasant the smell would have been at Powell house! In the mid-nineteenth century, these workshops moved to the outskirts but Dock street remained a highly commercial area (as you can see from the photo n. X) surrounded by the various warehouses of the port. In the 1960s it was at the center of the major urbanistic review which resulted in its present-day appearance; the project also comprised the rebuilding of City Tavern, the most famous colonial tavern of the city, which had been demolished in 1854.