Legacies of the Vine Street Expressway
1970s Urban Renewal & Contemporary Gentrification
This is Crane — an apartment tower at 10th & Vine Street in Philadelphia that opened in 2019, which hosts a community center, recreation center, educational spaces, and a daycare. As seen from a few blocks away, the tower looms over the Vine Street Expressway below, just past the traditional northern edge of Chinatown.
Crane is an anomaly in the Callowhill neighborhood where the only noticeable tall buildings are either industrial spaces or former industrial spaces.
The Callowhill and Chinatown neighborhoods border each other immediately east and northeast of center city, and northwest of the main historic district, Old City.
Callowhill and Chinatown are divided by the Vine Street Expressway.
The Expressway, originally proposed in 1966, was going to destroy the historic Holy Redeemer church and much of Chinatown in an expansion of a 12-lane roadway with additional service roads and ramps.
Source: https://hsp.org/sites/default/files/attachments/save_chinatown_movement.pdf
The proposal garnered the attention of Chinatown residents, and sparked major community pushback. In 1973, some gains were made, as the plan was revised to save Holy Redeemer. However, significant residential parts of the neighborhood were still destroyed. Not only was existing housing destroyed, but further growth of the neighborhood was limited.
In November 2020, a landscape installation documenting the neighborhood activism history was finished in the median at Vine and 10th Street, in front of Crane.
This would not be the first example of a state-led urban renewal project that caused major upheaval in a marginalized neighborhood. In tracing the history of highway projects and community protest against them in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, Eric Avila notes that the highway project "wrought new fissures upon the social and cultural geography of the postwar urban region." The same could be said of Philadelphia, or New York, and calls for situating the Vine Street project as part of a larger project of investment in the built environment via the displacement of marginalized communities.
The Vine Street Expressway now serves as a significant neighborhood divide between Chinatown and Callowhill. However, in recent years, and most significantly in the construction of Crane, Chinatown has begun to grow north of Vine Street. At the same time, significant neighborhood change — what many have deemed to be gentrification — has been occurring in Callowhill.
This map marks restaurants and cafes in the two neighborhoods, reflective of their differing nature. While the eateries are dense in Chinatown, they are far more sparse in Callowhill, and mostly concentrated along Spring Garden Street.
The map includes those eateries beyond the city's definition of the Callowhill neighborhood to show that the concentration of restaurants is more linked with the Spring Garden and Poplar communities north of Callowhill, many of which are predominantly Hispanic , rather than those of Chinatown.
Land use in Callowhill remains incredibly diverse. While the only green space is the Rail Park, there is hope that the park's future expansion will change this.
The existence of a significant number of industrial spaces also points to the fact that as of the current zoning regulations, a significant part of the neighborhood will not be turned over to housing overnight. In addition to religious and civic institutions, like Holy Redeemer and Roman Catholic High School, a significant amount of land has real estate that will not likely be turned over.
However, rent has significantly increased in the neighborhood — more than 15% between 2010-2016. This is not out of line with surrounding neighborhoods, though the story is not as simple as climbing rent prices.
This map from Pew Charitable Trusts shows gains and losses in low-cost rentals units between 2000-2014. Chinatown is visible as further north section in light green. Chinatown is one of three green sections on the map, reflecting a neighborhood that the Trust has deemed to be gentrifying while gaining affordable housing. Chinatown's affordable housing is in large part provided by the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation , which also built Crane.
Callowhill, the peach-colored section immediately north of Chinatown, reflects no substantial change in low-cost rental units despite gentrifying. This marks it as underperforming Chinatown by these metrics, but not among the city's worst neighborhoods.
However, the architectural shift is ever apparent, and while Crane is not the only building out of style with Callowhill's industrial past, it is the most obvious.
New construction on Wood Street, between 13th and 12th.
The typical narrative of gentrification being led by white people into neighborhoods that were formerly predominantly African-American, or home to distinct immigrant communities, is challenged by the fact that significant recent investment north of Vine Street has been driven by the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation. While they are by no means the only actor, they are on of the most prominent.
Neil Smith noted gentrification as early as the 1970s in Philadelphia's Society Hill neighborhood, which is southeast of Chinatown, on the opposite side of the major tourism district. Smith argued that gentrification was driven by rent gaps: "the disparity between the potential ground level rent and the actual ground rent capitalized under the present land use." It is hard to imagine Crane, whose affordable housing allotment is incredibly disappointing , as not taking advantage of factors like this.
Does this make the gentrification of Callowhill a story to be celebrated, as one that overturns the legacy of a large urban renewal project to the Chinese community's efforts reclaim a neighborhood that had once belonged to them, or will Callowhill follow the legacy of other parts of Philadelphia whose growing rents have almost entirely pushed out longterm residents?
Though the verdict may be hard to tell for years, the gentrification underway in Callowhill challenges traditional racial and ethnic norms associated with American gentrification, while potentially remaining in line with the earliest descriptions of gentrification as being driven by capital flows and rent gaps.
