Philadelphia: The University and the Block

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on the Black Bottom in West Philadelphia: the working-class Black neighborhood that was certified as blighted and cleared in the 1960s so that a consortium of universities led by the University of Pennsylvania could build the University City Science Center, the nation's first urban research park. This is the second metro-spine course after the Indianapolis pilot, and it exists to test one argument: that the Black Bottom is Indiana Avenue's closest twin anywhere, because the instrument that did the work at both campuses is the same, a university assembling land through a public redevelopment authority under a 1945 state blight statute. The prerequisite courses teach the method and the model: The Green Book: How to Read a Route teaches you to read a record and research an address forward, and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It found that a university plus a redevelopment authority, not the highway, cleared that corridor. This course draws the comparison explicitly and stays precise about what is parallel and what is merely similar. You will learn the certification instrument under Pennsylvania's Urban Redevelopment Law, eminent domain and federal urban-renewal financing, and the West Philadelphia Corporation as the university's land-assembly surrogate; you will handle, with care and by way of the official commission report, a second and very different West Philadelphia decision, the MOVE bombing of 1985; you will look up a real parcel in the city's own Atlas, find the live civics of Penn's payments to the schools, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction. A 360 tour of the corridor is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.