 So hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today for this week's lecture in planning series presentation. Our speaker today is Professor Francesca Rusello Ammon, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the Weidzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. My name is Joe Hennigans. I'm a PhD student here in Columbia's urban planning program, and I'll be moderating the session. And so I'll just start with a few logistical announcements and then I'll introduce our speaker. So during the talk, I'd like to remind audience members to please mute their microphones. We will be recording today's lectures anyone who wishes to not be recorded to just turn off their video input. And the chat box should be used only for discussion regarding the session. And if you have any technical questions that apply only to you, please just message me or my co host Maureen Abihanim privately. And we encourage all of you to type questions into the chat box during the presentation. And after the presentation will have time for question and answer session. So we'll start the Q&A around two or two 15. So we have enough time for everyone's questions. And I'll be coordinating the Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion. So if you've already had a chance to ask a question, please allow others to do so before asking another one. And to ask questions, there are two options, participants can either use the raise your hand feature and I'll call on you to unmute, or you can ask your, you can type your question into the chat box and I can read them out. So lastly, before introducing Francesca, I just want to acknowledge that PhD workers at Columbia, including myself are currently on strike. This strike action marks the two year anniversary of the start of collective bargaining process and the continuing failure of the university to bargain in good faith and reach a fair contract. And this lecture series is arranged by PhDs on a volunteer basis. It's not a part of our official work obligations. And because of this we feel it's appropriate to continue with the talk. So I did however want to note the strike at the beginning and encourage those of you who weren't aware to learn more at columbia grad union.org. So with that, I'm delighted to introduce today's speaker. Francesca Rusello Amin is associate professor of city and regional planning and historic preservation at U Penn Stuart Weitzman School of Design. She's a social and cultural historian of the built environment. She's the author of bulldozer demolition and clearance of the post war landscape, which is the winner of the 2017 Lewis Mumford prize for the best book in American planning history. She's particularly interested in post World War two American cities, focusing on the history of urban renewal and revitalization public history as a tool for community based research and engagement. And that visual culture has helped has shaped understanding of what cities are have been and should be. She holds a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Princeton University, a master's degree from the Yale School of Architecture and a PhD in American studies from Yale. She has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Society of Architectural Historians, Mellon Foundation, Lighting Foundation, and the Ambrose Monal Foundation. And she's currently working on a history writing a history of post war preservation and urban rule based upon the Philadelphia neighborhood of society of Society Hill. So Professor Ammon stock today is entitled urban renewal through preservation and rehabilitation. And it will consider the urban rule era in America cities, in particular the little known impact of the housing act of 1954, which for the first time introduced federal funding for rehabilitation based approaches as well. So I'm sure it'll be an insightful talk on the complicated implications of a lesser known aspect of a part of urban history. So, Professor Ammon, if you're ready, I will pass things over to you now. Thank you very much Joe. Thanks to Joe Marine for inviting me today. Let me share my screen. Can everybody see that we can. Great, thank you. Yes, so, so thank you again and I want to acknowledge, as Joe mentioned all the volunteer labor that when it's organizing the series of playing talk specifically for PhD students and the broader community here at Columbia. I'm really delighted to be a part of this diverse series of speakers. Let me get going here. Okay, I also want to recognize the many institutions repositories and research collections whose materials and now knowledgeable staff have informed this research to date. Many of these institutions are still closed due to the pandemic and are limited to digital access, but I want to encourage everyone to make use of these existing resources digitally and again once they're available to us in person. I could not do this research without their wonderful collections and support. I also want to highlight the effort of several society residents who set out to document the social history of the neighborhood by conducting almost 100 oral history interviews with area of residence those who lived there before we know those who moved in as part of the project. I saw their endeavor project Philadelphia 19106 that's the zip code of the neighborhood and I joined efforts with them and and some other members of the neighborhood to create a website where they could archive those transcripts. Those sources underpin the site that we call Preserving Society Hill and I have the link here and I encourage you to check that out as well I dropped on a lot of these materials in my comments today. Alright, so let me begin. When Congress passed title one of the housing act of 1949 it provided essential government support to enable the clearance of blighted areas of us cities and the stimulation of primarily private efforts to rebuild them. This was an effort to quote reverse the suburban tide as one new England mayor put it and support the growth of cities populations businesses and tax dollars within the context or post war urban crisis. Critically the act authorized federal grants to cover two thirds of the cost of acquiring and a clearing land for redevelopment. That act of clearance of creating deceptively blank plates for new modern development was a foundational element of the program right you couldn't get the money unless you had a plan to clear away with it was there before. And it built upon a similar provision of earlier public housing legislation from the 1930s. The politicians planners and then members of the public in fact celebrated demolition itself as progress. And you can see that sentiment expressed in both the smile on Robert Moses his favorite face in the photograph on the left. As he drives a bulldozer, as well as in the children's book depicted on the right, called the affable amenable bulldozer man doesn't he look pleased with himself as he tears down this building from 1880. And so nationwide, the housing act of 1949 spurred demolition on a scale that was previously unseen in the United States. During the 1960s which is really the peak moment for this disruption on average and cities across the country, one out of every 20 dwelling units fell. And it was much more pronounced than some of the cities we know well from our real history in New Haven, for example, was more like one out of every six dwelling units fell in the 1960s. But experience gained in practice, coupled with increased understanding of urban needs, soon made it clear that demolition alone demolition paired with new construction would not adequately or economically cure all cities problems. Nor could it help prevent the spread of light areas that were just beginning to deteriorate and that was the premise of the housing act of 1949 really was rounded in slum clearance as the way to way forward. So with the housing act of 1954 rehabilitation and conservation joint demolition as federally funded tools for new cities could use federal dollars now to conserve buildings not just to demolish them. I'm going to talk today really considers the prevalence, the character and the impact of the second approach to push for overall vitalization. And look specifically at one of the landmark projects where this was put into practice, the Society Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, with a particular eye toward understanding how different or not rehabilitation was from its demolition alternative. The work goes out of my teaching at Penn and ongoing research for a book project as well as the Preserving Society Hill digital humanities project so it's work in progress and I'm really happy to have this chance to share it with you. There are multiple reasons why rehabilitation appeal to post war policymakers and practitioners over clearance alone, at least as a compliment and certainly not as a replacement for for demolition, but cost and speed were really two of the primary motivators. In the book that Joe mentioned bulldozer large scale demolition proved to be both expensive and slow. It produced massive amounts of rubble, which was difficult and costly to dispose of some less frivolous developers sometimes resorted to bearing refuse underground on their projects they couldn't find a place to get rid of all these materials. Other pieces of debris littered cleared lots for years decades even as it often took much longer to rebuild than it did to tear down, particularly as developers were initially slow to sign on for new construction, thereby imposing a different kind of flight on renewal neighborhoods. It was particularly troubling for people who lost their homes for these projects to them return years later to see that nothing was even there and in its place. And although whole blocks were envisioned to come down and mass difficult relocations and legal opposition by some residents led structures to come down in a much more patchwork pattern instead. In the image you see here the entire block at the center of the photo will come down but it took actually about a decade for every, every one of those structures where has, you know, cities had priced things out assuming that contractors could come in and just tear down the whole lot. So contracts would have to switch to smaller less efficient equipment it took longer cost more money. This process even bankrupted some companies in the process while also costing cities much needed taxes when new construction was delayed. And many cities saw acres of parking lots as the extended replacements for the former areas that they were hoping to upgrade. Now by contrast rehabilitation could be a much swifter and cheaper effort for roughly the cost of demolishing a building never mind the additional cost of building something new on its site. A basic rehabilitation job could be completed. Plus much of the money for rehab work would come from property owners, not the government. For this reason as Stephanie Riber Webster, among others has shown it was actually often planners rather than historic preservationists who are at the forefront of advocating for rehabilitation over demolition. They were not suddenly converts to historic preservation, rather they simply supported the simpler, less expensive option. Of course rehabilitation also appeal to preservationists for its conservation of historic fabric and since a place and community members at times. The preservation synonymous with modernization required a real cultural leap, a leap of faith. As the housing and home finance authority wrote in late 1960, quote, architectural character in individual buildings blocks of buildings or whole neighborhoods can be achieved or retained if false conceptions of modernization are not followed. So what they're saying is that in acceptance of rehabilitation as renewal required that modernization, not be strictly synonymous with new construction, rather updated buildings from the past could also achieve a modern city. And we can see how much of a change of thinking this really was by looking at this photograph of Mayor Dick Lee of New Haven, Connecticut. See how proudly he stands before these life magazine photographers who photographed him in front of clear land behind him. This is land for the Oak Street expressway. For Lee and so many others demolition equal progress. And in places like Philadelphia planners would argue that the restoration of history equaled modern progress just as well. Now I'm struck in this image the way that that Lee if he's blocking anything he's walking the new building going up. What does he want us to see he wants us to see the clearance and that was his idea of progress but quickly. This will start to change as these as these locks remain empty for too long. So in November 1963, nearly a decade after passage of that 1954 housing act. William Slayton, the commissioner of the original administration, testified to Congress about the impact of the rehabilitation based legislation so far. Understandably, there was a lag between legislation and action. But by that point he recorded there were 225 projects nationwide that included a significant amount of rehabilitation about three fifths of which were already in execution. Thus out of a total of over over 1300 original projects that have been initiated by then those projects that included rehabilitation made up roughly 17% of the original program to date. The rehabilitation encompassed variable portions of these projects so maybe it's better to look at individual buildings how many buildings structures were rehab versus demolished. Again by mid 1963 or renewal had demolished approximately 129,000 structures and rehab over 17,000 structures so it's about 12% of the buildings. So it's a small number, but it's a start, and the future look bright as Slayton recorded he said, especially gratifying is the fact that the number of long units on which rehabilitation have been completed rose nearly 37% during the last fiscal year. Now several factors also limited the pace and scale of rehabilitation progress. The most among these were the higher touch nature of this enterprise relative to clearance, and also the challenge of financing for smaller scale property owners and developers. Whereas large developers would typically take the lead in remaking science for clearance, often utilizing super lock designs for towers and park rehab projects would require the efforts of many more individual investors. And Slayton noted that rehabilitation quote requires a personal effort by the staff of the renewal agency to work with these property owners, because these property owners are not particularly sophisticated. They do not know how to go about dealing with contractors or the particular kind of improvements that they ought to get or how much it's going to cost or how to go about getting alone. And so each property required Taylor solutions. This wasn't something that was going to be easily scaled. And financing was probably an even bigger challenge though the housing act of 1954 anticipated this by introducing section 220, which provided new FAA mortgage insurance for use in rehabilitating dwellings and constructing new dwellings In essence they tried to base the assessments of mortgage risk on the future development in the area not in the current conditions. It made it possible for larger loans as well as smaller equity investment by private capital. One exemplar case of the new mortgage policy and practice Slayton reported about to Congress took place in New Haven. He said that a homeowner there enable him to reduce his monthly mortgage premiums by half due to the lower interest rate and longer repayment term. And this was a game changer in making these projects affordable for the individual investors who are going to do the work. And he hoped that this financing would would be a kind of magic bullet. He said I call this the magic of 225 dancing is the real key to making rehabilitation work. The policy didn't always work like magic and practice though. For example in Philadelphia. Visuals reported about several challenges of property owners, facing as they applied for 220 mortgage loans in a low income area under get undergoing rehabilitation. In that project there were 490 properties to be rehabilitated. And by 1964 the city could identify only one example of any affirmative FF FHA action in that area over the past five years. And it was for a property located on a boundary street. What happened was that in practice insurers were still risk averse about investing in these properties in in these neighborhoods. And so it wasn't as easily applied as it was on paper. And further when mortgages were offered, they were often not in the amounts that owners required. While this type of housing was precisely that which the program was intended to address. Thanks hesitancy to land could partly be explained by the fact that relatively speaking, the highest volume of defaults occurred in projects located in areas and insured under section 220. So is it tricky undertaking. As you well know I'm sure there were many critiques of the clearance approach to urban renewal as encapsulated in some of these similar works that you see on the screen. The critiques related to the sometimes dubious definition of slums applied to these neighborhoods, the loss of salvageable even valuable architecture and since place. The economic inefficiencies of leaving such large swaths of often downtown land vacant and underused for so long. The perception of community was really one of the most poignant of the peaks across the country or renewal displaced nearly a million families and over 100,000 businesses by 1980. Nationally the burdens of renewal were not evenly distributed. Non whites experienced almost two thirds of the displacement aptly earning the program, the nickname of Negro removal. Rehabilitation however, offered the possibility of reducing displacement. As Slate and told Congress in 1963 rehabilitation is to bring the area to improve the area for the residents were there, so that there is not the exodus exodus, the movement of people, the relocation of families. Rehabilitation makes it possible for people to stay in their neighborhood. Now the federal government tracked a renewal displacement by project through 1966 in this report and these reports have been digitized and are available on a website wonderful digital humanities website called mapping inequality. And if real location were truly effective in reducing displacement, what would expect displacements per a renewal housing unit to have gone down following the Housing Act of 1954. And as you can see here that doesn't appear to be the case. Now some of this was likely due to the increasing prevalence of rehabilitation, but other aspects of it could reflect the proactive departure of residents from neighborhoods as they saw a renewal coming and therefore fled the neighborhood before they could be included in the official town. So it's, it's hard to, I don't want to overinterpret this but it is a trend that suggests displacements did go down. But in your projects I think you can tell us much more about the character and impact for rehabilitation and preservation based urban renewal projects. In 1963, the very same year that William Slaton was reporting to Congress about progress with rehabilitation. The renewal administration sought to further stimulate such projects by publishing this, this publication, historic preservation through urban renewal, which gave 14 example projects in progress to demonstrate the applications of title one to conservation. The 14 examples may seem like a reasonable list, the relatively limited extent of historic preservation within these individual 14 projects, suggest that there was still a long way to go in making conservation an integral rather than more token outcome of a renewal. So let me take you through just a few examples of these. The Gates House project in New York Pennsylvania was one of the projects featured. It was four tenths of an acre in size, admittedly tiny. And the report noted when the project was decided on rundown buildings covered the area. Now only the two historic buildings will remain. And you can see much of the site was replaced with a parking lot. The buildings that were saved were from the Revolutionary War period. So I suggest this very limited understanding of what was considered historic and worthy of saving. In the Marcy Washington Street's project in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, across nine and a half acres, 12 buildings were saved, but 60 were removed. Again, preservation is not the dominant method being applied here. Mobile Alabama's East Church Street project proposed to save 10 buildings across six block while clearing two thirds of the area for public use. Now, all of these projects really took a much more curatorial approach to preservation, endorsing demolition in order to help restoration worthy gems stand out. Some projects even relocated historic buildings or proposed relocated them from elsewhere in the city to create kind of out for history museums in these sites. Notably all the projects that I'm mentioning were located in predominantly white neighborhoods, nearly 90% white in fact, although on average roughly two thirds of those impacted or fired renewal were non white. This suggested that preservation was only deemed appropriate in communities of a certain racial character, otherwise clearance would dominate. The report highlighted at least one exception to that trend, and that was in Washington DC's Southwest neighborhood, which was 560 acres in size, and where African African Americans represented 70% of existing residents. This project incorporated historic preservation as well, but it integrated just six historic buildings into a new townhouse development. But our renewal destroyed roughly 99% of the buildings that previously occupied the neighborhood, making the six structures noteworthy but again largely token in their significance, and this was one of the 14 projects being celebrated for its embrace of historic preservation. By comparison, both the Worcester Square project in New Haven and Society Hill in Philadelphia stood out for their large scale preservation based approaches to urban renewal. This may be why William Slayton highlighted these two projects in his comments to Congress. Upon viewing the before and after photographs that Slayton presented, which I'm showing you here, one congressman noted, the transformation of those houses is so dramatic that I would think that either the rent or the cost would be so substantial that I would wonder if the same families could live in those. Slayton confirmed to suspicion that indeed there was still much displacement. Thus, large scale conservation practices when applied may have saved significant numbers of buildings, but they did not always save their communities as well. So let me dig down deeper into one of those two projects, Society Hill, to explore a bit further about what preservation and rehabilitation based renewal meant on the ground. We can hardly find a better subject in Society Hill. Planner Edmund Bacon, who's pictured here, often receives much of the credit for Society Hill's success, and I want to play just a brief clip of him speaking specifically about his rehabilitation based approach. I hope I've set up the audio so that you can hear it. Please interrupt me after if it didn't work. I would reduce the clearance to the absolute minimum. I would very carefully tailor the edges of it so that I didn't take anything away except that what was necessary to just. Restore strength and health. Society Hill took its name from the Free Society of Traders, which was a business entity that settled in the area during the 18th century. The name fell out of use over around the time of the Revolution. And at that time, the area only encompassed about two to three blocks heading west from the Delaware River. Charles Peterson, an architect with the National Park Service, who you may know from having established tabs, who moved to Spruce Street in the Society Hill neighborhood prior to the start of a renewal, rechristened the neighborhood with this historical name, and that's why it gets known as Society Hill in planning documents. It's called Washington Square East. Throughout the renewal of Society Hill, Peterson was an active advocate for preserving as much physical fabric as possible, sometimes to add bacon to grin. Here's a brief clip from Peterson. I'm a conservationist of buildings. That's my business. I believe in it. I've fought for it. I've covered with scars. They weren't all here in Philadelphia either. And you run into people that have these enormous pollen. Don't give a damn. You're bound to collide. Now, when the Free Society of Traders was active in Society Hill, mansions mixed with housing and businesses of tradespeople, alleys served different classes than the major streets. And over time, an African-American population concentrated in the southwest corner, extending into the seventh ward of WEB Du Bois' famous social survey. That's what's indicated by the pink color on the map here. At the start of renewal, African-Americans represented 20% of the neighborhood's population. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, much of the neighborhood came to be occupied by residents of Jewish, largely Eastern European descent. They're indicated on here in the blue shading. And owners gradually subdivided row houses into multi-family units. Commercial, industrial and residential development mixed throughout this area. By the mid 20th century, the neighborhood had grown increasingly physically dilapidated, as indicated by the ratings of D and E on the scale of A being the best, E being the worst on this appraisal map. And this is not a HULK map, but it's the same type of a real estate risk assessment map. Now planners applied a clearance approach in Unit 1 of the project. There were three parts of their real project in Society Hill, two of them being significant in size. And this is the northeastern part. All the area that was to be torn down was indicated by this hatched kind of gray shading. So you can see they started with clearance. And what they were doing was demolishing a wholesale food market that had gotten crowded over time in which the city wanted to relocate to closer to the southern portion of the city where we currently have our stadiums. So you can see what that market used to look like. And on that former site, they would build three high, three 31 story high rise towers designed by I am pay. He also designed some smaller scale row houses to and this is really classic clearance based urban renewal as practiced across the country. But Philadelphia showed its distinctive approach to renewal as it moved south and west of the towers. Observers came to call the city's combination of rehabilitation and infill construction the Philadelphia cure. That is, as, as bacon described it clearing cities or as an author. I'm sorry, and architectural forum described it clearing cities with penicillin not surgery. So Philadelphia was not alone in this approach implemented earlier and then a larger scale than most other cities and again national prominence for leadership and publications from architecture forum to time magazine you can see. Hey, I'm sorry bacon depicted on the cover here with the facade of society hill towers behind him and that lantern indicating the restoration work that occurred in other parts of the neighborhood. The most outset society hill was primarily populated with 18 through early 20th century row houses mixed use sometimes multi family buildings and industrial structures and I know you can't read this to clearly but this. I hope you take from this image, a mixture of uses in the neighborhood. And Hatchmark suggests this from 1942 get planners would deploy renewal to isolate uses, making society hill primarily residential in nature and federal Georgian and modern architectural style throughout. The Philadelphia redevelopment authorities plan for the renewal society hill drew partly upon a visual survey conducted by an unknown photographer. There was one card, this set of images for the survey one card for each block in the neighborhood and each numbered image corresponds to a street phase marked in red on the map. I can certainly imagine how they would have done this in GIS today but it's a really wonderful physical document that existed the library company now. The cards document the clutter of fire. Park cars that marred otherwise clear streetscapes or I'm marred. I'm channeling the planners here and what they were seeing and looking around the landscape. As throughout the country, these images helped illustrate the meaning of blight in advance of slump clearance for renewal. They were noticeably absent from most of these pictures, most of these before images, suggesting a perhaps implicit effort to focus attention on the physical over the social, although the two were intimately entwined. It's not surprising that that anti renewal activists often place people at the center of their resistance campaigns. In the history of our renewal though society hill stands out for its relatively fine grained approach to renewal that joined clearance with smaller scale infill construction and historic preservation. And that took place in unit two of the project, which is the southern portion of the neighborhood extending from spruce to Lombard second to seven streets if you know your filling geography. A third unit unit three was just a narrow strip to the west and I won't really touch on that today. Looking at a single typical property gives us a sense for the kinds of transformations that took neighborhood. In January 1957, a photographer captured a stretch of Philadelphia row houses are located at the northwest corner of south forth and pine streets. The surviving image reveals the dense mixed use character of this area at mid century. If you could zoom in on this photograph as I have a Spanish language electronic store occupies the first floor with housing above. This is a building class neighborhood where median income was half the city average. More than 80% of the housing units were rented rather than owned, and less than 4% of adults had completed college. Just over a year and a half after this photo was taken Philadelphia was Philadelphia approved society Hills first renewal plan. Now, when CJ Moore purchased 352 South 4th Street from the develop redevelopment authority in 1966 for about $10,000. His purchase agreement included these detailed restoration specifications for the exterior of the building. More recall spending an additional $130,000 on this renovation work right on top of the 10,000 that he spent to buy the property. Now, three decades later, a photographer named Bernie Clef, we could re photograph this same intersection. And all vestiges of modernist commercial and next door that building kind of Queen Anne style are now gone. They don't replace with the clean uniformity of high Georgian residential architecture. You can spot them the changes yourself, but I'll highlight a few the commercial and replacements windows have given away to historical replicas. The shutters have returned to the 1st and 2nd floors, their new marble steps, a new lamp posts on the on the street, street trees have been planted. These many modifications announced buildings residential rather than the excuse character while also covering over its more recent past. On the interior interior in the backyard though restoration standards did not apply and property owners had much more free reign. So you can see new modern windows going up in the back. And the interiors were outside the historical commissions purview and what did more do when that's a picture of him in his in his home really stripped the building down to the studs and rearranged it. The city's historical commission also supported maintaining interiors, but they lacked any power to require that. So these interior photographs which were commissioned by more the property owner should the completely modern interior post renovation. They capture the architect for the building for the restoration himself seated on the wall to all carpeted living room floor. The new central staircase and the contemporary kitchen. A restored exterior paired with the modern interior was not uncommon. Here's another property from just down the block. Which was renovated by its own its owner who was an architect himself Robert Parsky. owners chose to apply historical accuracy both inside and out and really this is where you get the small scale power of individual owners to tailor properties to their preferences. At this site to 17th Street Agnes and see Jared Ingersoll were among the earliest wealthy suburban nights to settle in the new neighborhood. As Agnes told the reporter in 1961 quote, we decided to put it back as nearly as possible to its 18th century condition, condition, adding nothing but heat electricity and a minimum of plumbing as unobtrusively as possible. My husband even suggested restoring the privy said putting in bathrooms, but he looked relieved when I said no. Yet another permutation on the possibilities is involved embodied in 419 Pine Street. These are all just in that unit two area that I showed you where the owner constructed a new building. This is a neocolonial design, but used discarded materials from other buildings. The yellow pine ceiling joys doors from other properties that have been demolished marble fireplaces that he that he acquired junkyards and teach shops and created a home of his own. The modern examples of new construction are more obvious. You have to look closely at the previous building that I showed and I think a lot of people are fooled that it looks like an older building. Here's another example on South Third Street, designed for Francis and Harold Kellogg by Hans Egley. And there are many other properties that I could point to, but I want to get us back to our focus on restoration. So how did the city and homeowners decide what a restoration should look like? The redevelopment agency included general rehab guidelines as part of the deed of sale as we saw for procedure more property and owners typically had 2 years to complete the work after they purchased that the property. Then the owner would have to check their proposed design with the historical commission. So how did the city and homeowners decide what a restoration should look like? The redevelopment agency included general rehab guidelines as part of the deed of sale as we saw for procedure more property. Then the owner would have to check their proposed design with the historical commission before proceeding with the construction review at the end would certify the restoration as complete. This is a drawing that C.J. Moore's architects, Kim Stowell, sent to the historical commission for his client's property in 1966. The commission though suggested some changes, including retention of a doorway on the fourth street facade and I've drawn in the streets there on the photograph to assist you here. On Stowell had only included a pine street entrance, as you can see in the drawing here. And the basis for the commission's recommendation that they put the door instead on fourth street was an 1860 photograph of the building. The chairman of the commission told Stowell, and this is the photograph they're referring to, because the record is incontrovertible, the commission strongly recommends that the doorway as shown in the 1860 photograph be restored for the sake of historical accuracy. The commission had discovered this image by chance in May 1962, half a year before the redevelopment authority had even acquired the property and someone had written a note on it, a must for restoration. So they knew that these photographs were going to be really important in shaping what the renewed neighborhood would look like. Moore responded to their request with a detailed counter argument. He went to the basement, he examined the interior, and looking at the foundation, the first floor concluded that that fourth street entrance was an addition. And that the one on pine was the original and he took some photographs of his own to prove it. His argument past semester. And so he was allowed to build the door as he preferred. This demonstrates historical commission's willingness to deviate from the historical photographic record, but in the absence of further evidence, the photographs were supreme. And they provided important evidence of what restoration should look like just as they were important evidence of what blight was when building should come down. But the incontrovertible evidence of these images was really only valued when it aligned with preconceived planning goals. Photographs were read selectively. And an example of this, how contemporary design preferences could really supersede photographic proof, comes from this same site. Moore pointed out in his letter to the historical commission that that 1860 photograph showed what one could clearly make out the word Cole next to the door, simulating that the building had actually have housed mixed use commercial for at least 100 years. Right, they were interested in where's the door in this photo they weren't interested in talking about this had been a mixed use property. Why because they were getting rid of the mixed use to align with contemporary design preferences to kind of mimic mimic the suburbs in the city as part of renewal. The photographs, again, were not incontrovertible proof as the historical commission mentioned in its letter. They were read selectively. The general eradication of the commercial portion of mixed use properties led to first full first floor facelifts across the neighborhood. Here you can see the many varied facades on South 4th Street with 352 more property at the far left end there. On the right you can see 352 undergoing its renovation so all along these blocks, the first floors were transformed as part of their restoration. A few doors north on South 4th Street. Here's another before and after pairing again mixed use giving way to strictly residential. Not all these neighborhood businesses easily gave in to her renewal. I have no record of that Spanish language. Records shop protesting their removal, but that was not the case here. At the southeast corners recent 4th Street for Harry Altman's Royal Hand laundry, which was just a collection space station for laundry that was it wasn't an industrial site and sent off site for that kind of cleaning. Where this was located by 1960 Royal Hand had been operation there for more than 25 years and various commercial uses had occupied the site for over 100 years. Altman himself ran the laundry, I lived upstairs with the onset of renewal Altman had an architect designed a new colonial front for the building he knew that's what planners wanted and he contacted the redevelopment authority offering to modify aesthetics but not use. And he was told as he reported it, your property will be condemned. Neighbors signed a petition asking for the businesses to stay. The petition noted we are desirous of Mr. Altman continuing to render laundry and dry cleaning services as he has done in the past and we therefore pray that Mr. Altman be allowed to continue and use and rehabilitate his property. And the signers even included Charles Peterson that important Philadelphia preservationist that I mentioned to happen to live a few doors down on this block. And even in the post war decades preservationist envisioned a version of their field that allowed for individual residents and uses to remain alongside restored architecture. But the planners had a more limited definition of preservation and felt that exceptions for commercial use with the whole project at risk. So all men lost out. You can see the removal of that commercial front and replacement with a purely residential facade. And this is how the building looks today. This is a video clip from a documentary produced in 1961 showing all men and residents discussing the multiple sides of this issue. First of all, I have my whole life invested in this neighborhood. I business was left to me when my dad died. I had to support my mother, sister, brother. In 1948, I finally was able to buy this building where I'm at. And I struggled very hard to pay the mortgage on it. And finally, in 58, I was through with the mortgage. And I felt a little more secure. I've been working all my life for that to try to make my middle age years a little more secure than what I had it before. I chose to live in Society Hill above any place in the world because of its great convenience, because of the wonderful neighborhood stores. And Harry Altman, I think, renders a great public service. He not only cleans my clothes beautifully, does all my laundry, washes sheets, and underwear. Everything washes things beautifully. And he's just a pickup. You know, they go on to other places. But he caches checks for me. If I say my heels are run down, where's the cobblers? I'll take it to the cobblers for you. Or I run out of bread and he loans me a loaf of bread or just anything. He's a magnificent neighbor. And I'm very proud to have him for a next-door neighbor. So, Arbor, renewal as implemented in Society Hill also required the demolition of entire buildings for a variety of reasons. One block over from Harry Altman's laundry on South Fifth Street was to be one concentrated location where shopping would take place. So they would get rid of all the mixed use throughout and concentrate a very smaller portion of those in a new central location. You can see the large amount of proposed demolition as indicated by the dark gray shading on this plan here on the left. This would be the site of new shopping facilities. The buildings that came down, at least on the east side of South Fifth Street, appearing the photo on the right. And here's the new supermarket that replaced it. It was initially an AMP. It still exists today as an ACME. The whole concept of a supermarket though had both the centers and supporters and we'll return to that video for some reactions. I think it's wonderful to have all the shops near you, especially when you're an old lady like me. I can't be running away to shopping centers six blocks away on rainy days and they won't deliver and they won't give service. I hate shopping centers and I hate supermarkets. Housewives Dream today is for a centralized shopping center where she can go in two hours complete all her shopping for the week and forget about it. As it is now in Society Hill, one place there's a grocery store, another place a laundry, another place a vegetable store, another place a bakery. And by the time you get done going two blocks here and three blocks there and two blocks the other way, it can take you at least five hours and a good pair of legs to do all your shopping. So debates about the shape of neighborhood change were really about much more than architectural style alone. They're also about the ability of built forms either existing or new to accommodate growing planning preferences for separation of use in this post war period. The neighborhood religious institutions also accounted for many spots of large scale demolition. Urban renewal office several these institutions the unique opportunity to expand their footprints with the addition of new buildings like schools or parking lot. And they often these institutions often took the redevelopment authority up on their offers. This was the case at St. Peter's and Episcopal church located on the bottom right of this map, an old pine of Presbyterian church in the middle bottom of that of that plan. Not pictured here is a Catholic church named Mary's located to the north where the story was similar and there are many other such institutions. Who doesn't zoom into old pine St. Peter's recall that on the left the gray buildings are those that are going to be demolished on the right you can see the illustrative site plan of what was to be built in its place. Old pine would demolish two streets of buildings in order to take over almost the entirety of its pine to Lombard fourth to fifth street block. Here you can see the former mixed use buildings on the north side of Lombard, all of which were eradicated to create this, this new development. And here are the residential buildings on Addison Street, both the buildings and roadway of which would be completely removed from the map. Residents pleaded before city officials to be able to save their homes from plans for them to become a parking lot. Specifically, they propose a rearrangement of the site that would still allow for the parking and new construction but also allow them to keep their homes. There's one homeowner who lived on Addison Street, stating her case, including her willingness to go back to work again in order to afford the changes required to rehabilitate our house. If it could be spared from demolition. Any objections to remodel your home according to the authority? We've been looking forward to all this because Mr. D. Ortona, when we moved in this home, the floors were termite and rejoice. And we had a coal stove for almost two years so we were able to put oil heat in. That was the reason I went to work and it took all these years to do it. We finally reached the goal when we paid off the mortgage about six months ago. But you would be willing to conform to the authority? You would go back to work just to live there. I'm in the local 195 for 19 years. Charles Peterson also lamented the loss of several historically certified buildings to make way for this old pine development. HABs photographed them in 1960 before the wrecking ball came through. These were located on Lombard in the place of these buildings and homes and community residents. Ever initial plan to build a home for the aged and a boarded attempt to build a swim club on the site and temporary use of the site as a community garden was built the old pine community center. This has become a neighborhood fixture, including providing him for St. Peter's school and serving as a site for cooperative daycare organized by new arrivals to the renewing neighborhood. Today it's an important site for distributing food in COVID. It's been very important. Centers like this one provide crucial space for community services and gatherings as the renewal of the neighborhood requires more than just improved housing. And on the northern end of the block was constructed the Presbyterian Historical Society, which is a national research repository. Here again, another valued part of the community and where I conducted some of this research in fact. But one of the unfortunate ironies, of course, is that historic buildings and long standing communities had to come down to make room for a neocolonial repository for historic records. Now beyond housing and institutions alone, the plan for society hill also incorporated an integral set of pedestrian walkways, known as greenways that knit the neighborhood together and created those kind of wonderful, you know, brick lined walkways that showcase the historic architecture and modern architecture as well. They also connected the neighborhood with independence National Historical Park to the north. Sometimes existing roads were closed to create these greenways but in other cases, as in the area that I've boxed in red here, making space for greenways required demolition as well. This, this red box would be the place for part of St. Peter's way. Here again we see a bacon standing in what's now Three Bears Park, seemingly pointing out the path where St. Peter's Greenway would be established, creating a direct visual connection to the spider of St. Peter's church. Now on the right, you can see the buildings that were removed to realize Bacon's vision, or you can't see them. They were, you can see that new, the swath of clearance. Landscape architect John Collins developed the specific design for the park. You can see in both his sketch and the photograph that the greenways were really important public spaces for neighborhood social life. Many residents reflect on them as one of the best part of the neighborhood and critical for making space for community. The greenways connected parks and play spaces like Three Bears. And here's one urban renewal arrival, Libby Brown talking about the significance of places like this park to creating a space for families, the types of households that society held successfully attracted. Delancey Park or Three Bears Park opened up around that time. So that was a great magnet for us all and much of the social life was there. And of course we were all helped by the babysitting co-op. And, you know, I couldn't have managed without that. I think we all felt the same way. And so developing good relationships, friendships with the other mothers and the little kids and, you know, watching them all grow up together was really wonderful. And Libby's commentary really speaks to the fact that the creation of a new community or a renewed community required much more than the new buildings, although I'm focusing a lot on the physical designs, spaces for these community members to bond were part of that. But whereas a former police station occupied the site of Delancey Park and that's how they were able to build that playground there, St. Peter's Way would require demolition of several houses, including two historically certified properties. At the time, the residents of this block were working class families, including Russians, Polish citizens, Germans, people of Austrian descent is an immigrant block and they typically occupied one floor of each property. So they were multifamily buildings. There was debate over which of these buildings to remove on both Delancey and Pine Streets. Now Carol Aberpoff was a young girl living with her Polish American family at 329 Pine Street, which is right near the location of the future of Greenway when development was, redevelopment was coming. Her family lived there because her father worked several blocks away on Jewelry's Row. And although their family took good care of their home, her mother feared that it would be taken from them to make way for the grant, the Greenway. So they sold their house in advance of having to take it from them. The city, here's Carol Aberpoff talking about the decision to sell. No, she didn't want to move, but she was convinced that the redevelopment authority, which had broad powers at that time would take our property because it was the only one that went all the way through to Delancey Street. And so the city did not ultimately choose their site. How could the Aberpoffs have understood that Bacon really was going to privilege that VISTA with the Spire. But they too were displaced by renewal, albeit indirectly, indirectly, and they wouldn't appear in any headcounts of people who were displaced because they left before the redevelopment authority knocked on their door. But displacement would occur even when no demolition had been planned. For example, when the cost rehabilitation priced out renters from being able to still afford their former residences. This is what occurred at properties in the southwest corner of the neighborhood where that red box appears. The Octavia Hill Association, a settlement house organization that had been providing housing for low-income Philadelphians since the Progressive Era, owned a row of properties on the 600 block of Lombard Street. In the course of upgrading their properties as part of their renewal, they determined that they would need to displace their residents. They couldn't afford to do the rehabilitation work that the city required and still keep low-income residents there. So Mabel Dodson and Dorothy Miller, who are pictured here, were among a handful of African American residents who fought back asking to be relocated with the Society Hill rather than moved elsewhere in the city. And here's a quote from Dorothy Miller, who was a crossing guard for the Neighborhood Elementary School, talking about her reaction to being told she would have to move. That's what I tell you what I think is happening. I think they're trying to get us out of here. And they're not shoving me just any old place. This is all we know. We grew up here. And I'm not going just where they want me to go. That's that is a question. So the battle over whether to construct new low-income housing for these longtime Society Hill residents divided the community with some new residents supporting the effort and collaborating with Miller and others arguing that the new housing would diminish their own property values. The debate nearly split the Civic Association in two. But after a protracted legal battle, the Octavia Hill seven, as these residents came to be called one, the city constructed three clusters of new modern low-income housing that exists still today. And while these properties are small in number, it's 14 units, their very existence demonstrates the possibility for neighborhood revitalization to occur without complete gentrification and displacement. In fact, the larger Society Hill endeavor demonstrates that as well, at least to some degree. Now Miller was a renter and she cannot purchase the property where she resided, but existing property owners were typically given the option to purchase their building if they agree to the requisite rehabilitation work. This was true of all the non-cheated properties in unit two on this plan, the ones that I haven't really been talking about today. I've been talking about those gray demolition sites. But of course, not all property owners could afford to take that work on, as even had Bacon himself noted. I guess you know that the redevelopment authority went around to each homeowner and asked them, gave them the specification, they wouldn't have to be done in the house to restore it to the standards of historical accuracy. And then asked them if they would do it or whether they wouldn't do it. Well, they don't ask them if they wouldn't do it, they would be condemned, inform them they would, but they gave them the option to do it. And of course, this obviously is a discriminatory thing in the sense that if they didn't have the money to do it, they had no choice. Of course, in most places you don't have any choice at all under urban renewal, whether you're rich or poor. And the condemnation is simply there because it's the plan and the public interest and you're compensated and that's the end of it. So in that case, if you couldn't afford to do the work, the redevelopment authority would acquire the property and the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation would market it to prospective purchasers, placing a sign like this one at the site by way of advertisement. By 1960, the redevelopment authority reported that it had sent 234 letters to unit two residents, asked me if they were interested in rehabbing their homes. Three quarters of those surveys said yes, they would like to enter into agreements to keep their homes. And when new residents moved into the neighborhood then they often lived side by side with long term residents. This was not the norm in the typical or real project in which clearance dominated, but it was possible in places like Society Hill, where rehabilitation was part of the new design. And here are two such houses where the existing owners perform the renovations. The one on the left, the, the Gugolsky family resided there and lived there for about five years before they sold it to some new arrivals who continued the renovations that they hadn't yet completed. The one on the right was the Schmidt family. They lived there from 1948 before renewal and only sold it passed down through generations. They only sold it out of the family in 2008. And there are many other such stories, of course, the exterior of the property does not necessarily immediately tell us the social history of who stayed and who left. And yet, as I wrap up now, even with the opportunity for some to stay, the official count was that everyone will displace 580 families from Society Hill. This is a figure that likely undercounts the total to think the families like Carol Abercoff moved without being officially displaced. Most of these families were not eligible for public housing, often because their families were too large in size. The majority of those families self-relocated to other rental housing. In most urban projects around the country, this new relocation housing was of a higher physical quality than that which they left behind. But as Mindy Fila love and others have shown the psychosocial losses of communities torn apart proved devastating in their own way. Population statistics from before and after renewal, perhaps best demonstrate the change that had occurred in the community. Even as, as I pointed out, several residents were able to stay. The dominant headline was of change due to both demolitions and the conversion of multifamily rental properties to single family owner occupied housing. The total population declined. But the population that remained was generally wider, more affluent, affluent and more highly educated. Thanks to the introduction of high rise apartment buildings, the number of dwelling units actually increased. The value of those units also increased from three quarters of the city average to seven times the city average. So it's a much more expensive neighborhood. Society Hill likely would have changed regardless over this 30 years span, but every new surely changed it more dramatically than otherwise. Overall, then, thanks to the urban plans focus on rehabilitation restoration rather than clearance. Many important aspects of Society Hill have stayed the same, particularly relative to how many, how many neighborhoods were typically physically wiped away by our renewal. For much of the neighborhood, however, preservation based renewal also meant transformation of buildings, land uses, and of populations. It yielded new built environments, new public spaces and new community formations, albeit sometimes at the expense of those that came before them. The striking before and after photographs provide the visual proof of these dramatic changes while making much of the complexity and tension behind them. And so today I hope I've helped illuminate some of that complexity, much more complicated than what Slayton laid out in 1963. And yet also a bit different from the dominant story that we know when we think of the urbanal program, which has progress and miss loss and innovation alongside resistance that have helped make Society Hill what it is today. And on a final slide to just remind you about the website, I included some brief audio clips if you're interested in hearing more of these stories of residents from before during and after renewal. Please check out preserving Society Hill it's a living site. We're still adding more interviews and I hope you'll find other material that peaks your interest there. So thank you and I'm happy to take any questions in the time remaining. Thank you so much Professor M and that was a super engaging presentation and the range and breadth of multimedia material you showed in one hour was was awe inspiring. I really enjoyed it. I'm sure others did as well so we can now open up for questions. As I mentioned at the beginning there's two options you can either use the raise your hand feature and I'll call on you to unmute and ask your question directly. Or if you'd prefer you can also just type your question into the chat box. I maybe I'll just go ahead and ask the first question to jump things off and get people thinking but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about like what I think in New York context so used to this dichotomy between Jacobs Moses and that there were just two schools of planning that we thought at this time and and and I wonder if in Philadelphia and this in Society Hill were were they responding to a kind of Jacobs asked critique and and and making their plans accordingly or were they, I guess that's the first question and the second part of the question is, did this different approach end up sort of preventing the creation of of a sort of Jacob style anti urban renewal coalition in Philadelphia or did that still emerge even though this was the softer gentler more preservation oriented form of urban. Thanks Joe, you know great questions of the time wise, you know this is all happening as Jane Jacobs is working out her thinking right so her book is 61 these plans are are 5859 so it's not, you know, she's obviously writing before that too I don't know that it's really a reaction to Jacobs although she came to Philadelphia and met with bacon and others talks about rent a square I think in death and life. And so she was thinking about this place and actually she was kind of celebrating it to so it probably is informed a little bit by Jacobs, kind of thinking but I think, you know, it really had to do a lot with the planners in Philadelphia to distinguish their city and trying to find a way to harness history as something that makes this place a little bit different, and then being really practical about this is going to be an affordable way for us to do this right now we're going to, we're going to just not fall into some of the traps that other people are having about the slow nature of the clearance work and everything and they do, as you know Joe from from having studied here and and others know to plenty of clearance in other projects. The question of which sites are kind of deemed worthy of rehabilitation a lot of the downtown development was clearance based for for office buildings a lot for high, sorry for public housing to plenty of clearance and high rises for those two. But again, you know I come back to the fact of, you know this was largely a white neighborhood and these are the neighborhoods that were picked out for something different. Now there, there are exceptions to, if you know Philadelphia there's the Mill Creek, the Morton neighborhood up in Germantown, which is another really important example of rehabilitation there was new instruction to but there was rehabilitation as well as a largely African American neighborhood, and a lot of residents were able to stay to so it's not entirely the case but it's the dominant story that this kind of centrally located white neighborhood was one that people thought was worth taking the kind of extra effort I think to do something a little bit different. So I don't know exactly Jacobs's place but your second question about where the coalitions that resulted different. I think you have a lot of the same sorts of things. You know, bacon. He didn't just he did smaller scale developments, not just towers in some other areas he partnered Quaker groups to try to provide affordable housing so it was trying to do some different things and I think that did get more people on board early on but highways or the exact same story as anywhere else and Jacobs's reaction and our rules anti urban renewal activism is intimately tied up with highways and we have that with the Vine Street Expressway which tore through Chinatown which the cross town, the cross town expressway would have torn through the South Street and parts of South Billy had it built and there was a very strong activist sentiment and organization that so you still have the activism, but I think there was a little bit more partnership in some of these in some of these projects that did make them, you know, there was more experimentation and partnership that was a little bit different in Philadelphia. And so Philadelphia is doing this kind of thing earlier, you see, you know, you see, Ed Loog is doing rehabilitation later on in his career to but the Philadelphia started doing it earlier than other places driven by that kind of pragmatism and driven by the architecture that inspired them I think a little bit to do something different. Thanks. Carolyn has a question. Hi, thank you so much for this really fascinating talk and I'll definitely look very differently at Society Hill buildings in the future I really never would have thought that so many of them had formerly been storefront. So also great to see you and speak with you again. So my question actually builds a bit off of your response to Joe's question. I'm wondering if you could speak to the process that was used to determine which of these neighborhoods would be appropriate for rehabilitation since it seems so clear right that there, there was a difference that these wider neighborhoods were more likely to be deemed worthy of rehabilitation rather than being cleared. And I know for clearance. My understanding is that to be deemed worthy of eminent domain or unworthy as the case maybe that a lot of states would pass laws requiring specific showings that areas were deemed blighted and would put forth some criteria of what that looked like. If there was anything like that for rehabilitation where they would say you know these criteria are for blighted neighborhoods that need to be torn down these are for rehabilitation or if there were other ways that they kind of managed to inject subjectivity into that process to create that bifurcated system. Thanks Caroline. Great great to see you again as well. You know that I don't know the answer to your question but I think there are sources that could help here so in the 40s Philadelphia conducted a health survey of many of the neighborhood and it would be interesting to compare how they applied to different neighborhoods and properties versus what kind of renewal approach was applied there. And that would that would get to what you're thinking about and does subjectivity enter into the equation I'm sure it does I'm guessing it does. But but can we map building conditions in any way to what kind of approach was applied. I don't know the answer and I haven't done that kind of you know extensive look but I suspect that it was a combination because blight was such an amorphous thing right and they really in Philadelphia in society health. They could have made the case for clearance I mean the surveys show you know the dilapidated conditions of the buildings the absence of certain utilities and services they could they had the ability to do that. But they still exercise eminent domain so even for rehabilitation. First, the gap for unit one. This is the case they acquired all the properties and then they would sell them back to the people who live there so they still had that same power because the properties were in this condition that for the public good you know they need the government needed to step in so that's an interesting step now in unit two they didn't acquire all the properties and I don't know why that was exactly to happen second. And I suspect it got, you know, they really did want to encourage much more people staying because you didn't have many people stay at all in one. And I suspect that getting rid of that rebind was the was facilitating that but I have to look into that more as well but you wouldn't necessarily expect there to still be eminent domain when you end up with the same people living in the property, but you do and that ownership also enables the government to impose those legally impose into the title. You know what's required in terms of the rehabilitation specifications so it's still an important tool whether you're rehabbing or clearing eminent domain was really crucial to giving governments power to exert their influence over what the neighborhood should look like. Physically. Anyone else have any questions. Yeah, thank you so much Francesca for this fascinating presentation I think I also echo Carolyn and and and Joe saying the mixed media approach to a PowerPoint presentation made it much richer and tangible for us to get it like a good feeling of what was happening at the time. I have a specific question about what would happen if families had initially agreed to the preservation guideline specifications, and then could not afford to complete that within the time limit. That they had you had set two years I've seen examples of this in different parts of the world, but I was wondering if they would get. You know I was wondering what would happen to families who had agreed who tried to invest started but then didn't make it on time. Yeah, it's a great question I think that the two year. time frame wound up being difficult for everyone so even you know CJ Moore who obviously had resources he spent so much on restoring his property and changing into your it's okay more than the two years so two years wasn't reasonable for anyone. So they didn't really harp on that and they gave people more leeway as they figured that out over time. And I think it's when you got more like at the five year mark and they still hadn't happened, then then the government could come in and and re acquire the property. And you did see that sort of thing happen I think more commonly they would be encouraged to sell, which which is probably what happened at that one property that I showed towards the end that they deliver for five years and then another couple came in. I think that was kind of like the informal way that the outcome was still achieved. They're generally trying not to be super confrontational they're trying not to physically displace as much as they could, although they had the power to so they wanted to let the kind of private market work it out and it set up this really robust private market where they they the city organized really their own realtors to market these properties so they had a very easy way to connect prospective buyers they organized walking tours to show people what the neighborhood was all about so that they could make those private market connections which is another one of the appeals of rehab, getting the government less involved in the mechanics of this and letting people kind of run at themselves, because it was, it was a vast bureaucratic undertaking that had to take place so that's generally what would happen. There were people who purchase properties who didn't deliver on what they said they would do to, and I found many examples of that where the property would turn over turn over you know 123 times the different property owners because they couldn't act they didn't, I don't think they knew what they were taking on or, or maybe they changed their, their mind for whatever reason and so, again it would just be kind of thrown back into the into the pool of properties being marketed. So the character of residents who really managed to purchase and stay were, were generally younger couples who did a lot of the work themselves because it was a big undertaking but they were able to, you know, save money. There were a lot of architects actually who are, you know, students at Penn who purchase properties and that would get the cost of this down because it really was quite expensive to do to do the work that was required both aesthetically on the outside but also from a perspective on the inside. So it was like clearance it was not as smooth and simple as they thought, but to the extent that the private market could solve it. I think that was appealing to planners. So that last comment is actually quite related to the first question we have in the chat, which is from Paul and he asks, if you could talk a bit more about the complicity of architects landscape architects interior designer sociologists other seemingly professions in the selective clearance of society hill and also, if you studied the implications that so many of those same professionals chose to reside in the revamped neighbor. Yeah, so I haven't exhaustively studied the professions of the individual but looking at the 100 oral histories and seeing what professions were part of that architects lawyers doctors, these are these are popular ones and I think it's about, you know, the money, the income levels of some of these professions, maybe not the architects but they could, they could use their own labor to support the cost here. But we have to remember also that people would have thought of this as better than the kind of displacement that was happening in some of these other projects they were living alongside people who had been resident there before. So I'm not even at these were actually, you see this come through in the, in the battle over the Octavia Hill housing that I talked about at the end of the top that these were people who definitely identified as progressives and wanted an integrated neighborhood when they had this chance to try to find a way for some of the residents to say it was often actually the existing property owners who are worried about the neighborhood diversifying even more and the value of their property going down and those weren't professionals. They were much more working class people so it's an inversion a little bit of what you'd expect, but at the same time we know that the arrival of these groups did displace right and I, and I think that that's certainly some people would have been aware of this too because the Dean of the School of Design called the Graduate School of Fine Arts at that time, he moved into the neighborhood to, and, you know, what's going on at Penn at this time you have, you know, Paul David off and advocacy planning and you have a very progressive kind of way of thinking about this profession and then you have the Dean moving into this gentrifying neighborhood to so I don't know I haven't found anyone reflecting upon this, but I didn't see people avoiding the neighborhood for that reason, and it was basically whoever could afford to live there. I don't know, I don't know that that was that anyone fit that bill there there could have been. There are also African Americans who moved into the neighborhood to affluent African Americans who some of whom I'm aware, moved into some of the newer properties to. So it was basically a function of ability to afford that shaped who selected to move to the neighborhood and it was a lot cheaper than anywhere else in the city if you're trying to get somewhere, because you had you've heard it out with this, the shell at least cheap at the outset right expensive in the end but cheap at the outset to actually buy that first home. I know it's a little bit rambling comment, I hope that I responded. We have one more question let's just ask you and then we'll wrap up that's from Jenna and she asks, what factors might have led to the decline of this preservation based renewal practice in cities for example did Community Development Block grants create a bias for larger development projects. I don't know that there was necessarily a decline. And I guess, probably the difference is preservation versus rehabilitation society hill spurred other rehabilitation based renewal practices Queen villages and neighborhood just to the south of society hill and they specifically looked to society and we want to do that, but we want to do it in a way that we can all stay. And so they did it they formed their own organization it wasn't there was no government. Government didn't come in and tell them to do it they organized and they took advantage of some Community Development Block grants to spur rehab work so I don't, I don't know that it. It went away it's just always been this kind of smaller piece of the pie as I showed those those charts before about that the demolition was dominating there were still CDBG grants that funded demolition as well. So it's always been there but I don't know that we've talked about it enough it just it was never flashy right it didn't get as much of the press, and if it wasn't organized at a neighborhood scale if it was a couple of homeowners here and there. I don't think we know as much about this kind of work and it's been left out of the narratives and, and I think what's really important about it is that I'd love to see me more rehabilitation be part of, you know contemporary efforts for affordable housing and things like this you know in cities like Philadelphia where we have a lot of vacant buildings. I'd like to see us think more about rehabilitation and, and the fact that we have historic fabric being something positive that can be contributing to a sense of place rather than that we need to clear that down and build something new so I want to elevate more of these stories and show how they worked and show warts and all right with the problems were, but I also want to look more into these other neighborhoods not Society Hill where it was done more cheaply and can potentially provide a model for today. Great. Well, we're at time. So, I just want to thank you again Professor Ammon for such a great talk today and for joining us and taking the time to join us. And thanks to all those who attended and make sure to join us next week as well for our talk with Dr. Romola son y'all. So, thank you again.