That area from Broad to the Schyulkill has been "reclaimed" as far south as Lombard for 40 years; now the old sailor's home on Grays Ferry is redeveloped, and across the River, Penn has spread all down the waterfront. It's jsut a matter of time until gentrification spreads all the way to South Street and even down to Washington Avenue, as it has in Queen Village and Bella Vista. The only impediment in "SW Center City" is around Kenny Gamble's mosque at 15th and Catharine, which has become a no-go zone for whites. It wasn't so bad when it was mostly hookers and drug dealers.
People in DC have been going through this issue as well. The post WWII civil rights movement starting under Eisenhower suddenly started offering government jobs to blacks, which moved thousands of poor blacks from the South to the working-class section of DC, the NorthEast. With the postwar building boom, the nearby Maryland and Northern Virginia counties were quickly settled by whites fleeing the sudden takeover of their neighborhoods by unscrupulous real estate deals, red-lining, blockbusting and so forth that property speculators employed to grab NorthEast DC -- and the working class, not the power brokers, have been blamed ever since for "white flight." In fact they were refugees from the money men's property grabs from those least able to fight back. Segregationist real estate manipulations were eventually outlawed, but the older generations of DC white working-class residents who couldn't afford to move over to Georgetown and other parts of NorthWest were already pushed out of NorthEast.
Now, people whose parents and grandparents lived all over NorthEast DC are trying to move back, and getting told "this is an historically black neighborhood", when in fact their family photo albums and graveyards show their prior generations all over the area.
My (beloved) Grandfather and his older brother, Uncle Joe, decided to leave the shop to the younger brother, Uncle Tony, while they pursued jobs and life in the (at that time) "far-away suburb" of Mayfair/Frankford.
When I arrived on the scene in 1951, my parents bought on the same block with the result of three expressions of the family on the same block of row homes. It wasn't until the early 70's that they started locking the front door during the day. As a kid, it was unlocked until night.
Even in the early 60's when I went with the grandparents to visit Uncle Tony, the North Philly neighborhood had become a nightmare of mostly break-ins and thefts.
Now, the once beautiful Mayfair/Frankford neighborhood of my youth has become a nightmare of drugs, assaults and murders. A heroin stash house was busted a block away last year.
All sad beyond description.
ALL under the continuous watch of democrats ruling the city. Liberalism is a mental illness and it destroys everything that it infests.
One of my saddest Philly memories was in 1971 riding home on the Amtrak commuter train and seeing Connie Mack stadium in flames.