Date/Time
Date(s) - December 18, 2020
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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The speakers at our December meeting discussed the re-developing Point Breeze neighborhood. While Kensington was once the manufacturing hub of Philadelphia during the City’s manufacturing heyday, Point Breeze has long been a residential neighborhood, first settled by working-class European Jewish immigrants, followed by Italian and Irish immigrants, and then, in the 1930s, by African Americans migrating from the Jim Crow South. However, in the 1960s, the neighborhood began to face a number of challenges, including civil strife, followed by the heroin epidemic, and then, in the 1990s, the crack epidemic. Revitalization efforts, however, also began in the 1990s through the efforts of South Philadelphia HOMES and Universal Companies.
More recently, Ori Feibush, one of our speakers, has participated in the revitalization efforts in Point Breeze, including along the Washington Avenue and Broad Street corridors. And now, in an effort to make the neighborhood’s major thoroughfare more bicycle and pedestrian family, the City of Philadelphia has unveiled plans to reconfigure Washington Avenue, as noted in this presentation linked here by our other speaker, Lily Reynolds.