As you may have heard by now, Hidden City is in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for our next book: PHILADELPHIA IN COLOR, 1950-1990.  Our goal is to create the first-ever color photographic history of Philadelphia, which is a book we believe Philadelphia needs—desperately.

The origins of this project actually go back to 2009 when I first read about the photographer Vivian Maeir. She was a nanny in Chicago who, unbeknownst to anyone, was also world-class street photographer. Her negatives documenting Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s were discovered in a storage locker. I remember thinking, “Why doesn’t Philly have a Vivien Maier?” For that matter, why do we have only two or three photography books that capture the life of the city during this period?

How do we understand Philadelphia’s past? Through books, films and material culture, which combine with personal experience to create our conception of the city. This is why it is so disappointing that there have been so few serious books of photography showing our city during this period, and none in color.

The sixties brought several boosterish efforts, the best of which was Philadelphia Discovered, and all were in black and white. In 1988, Temple University Press brought out Philadelphia Stories 1920-1960, a touchstone of social history, also in black and white.

So, we are aiming to make up for this visual history deficit it in a major way. How else to capture, for our own imaginations, the special textures of various eras, the cars, the fashions, the gestures, the social life, the signs, the storefronts?

First Steps

In 2013, two years after starting this website, I stumbled upon the photos of David Wilson on Flickr. Wilson was part of a subculture of “rail fans” who would photograph trolleys and trains. He had visited Philadelphia as a teenager in the late 1960s and took a bunch of color photos that showed major commercial intersections and neighborhood life, as well as the trolleys he loved so much. We published a selection of his photos, and they were a huge hit.

The same thing happened when we published color photos of Center City taken in the 1980s that one of our contributors, Rachel Hildebrandt, had purchased on Etsy.

In 2020, we published an amazing series from famed architect Denise Scott Brown. She had photographed South Street in the early and mid-1960s, around the time it was in danger of being torn down to build the Crosstown Expressway.

To this day, those three photo essays remain among the top 10 most popular stories Hidden City has  published. So, the wheels started turning. Philadelphia may never discover its own Vivien Maier, but perhaps we can create a  portrait of the city using the work of multiple photographers that is actually richer than the work of a single person. 

Five years later, and after more than a year of intensive effort, we’re ready to bring tell you about our project, which aims to fulfill that vision. We decided on the years 1950 to 1990 because prior to 1950 color photography was very rare, and after 1990 it was common. We chose color, despite its rarity, because it helps people connect to the past in a way that black and white photos do not. We wrestled with how to organize the book and ultimately decided to do so by decade, so that readers will be able to see how the city changed. Captions will only include the date, location and photographer so that the images can take center stage; we will include a detailed appendix to provide the necessary historical context.

Digging Deeper

We expanded our search for photos to include any and every source we can think of, from museums and libraries to newspapers and archives.

Astonishing material turned up in unexpected places. Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), for example, photographed almost entirely in color to emphasize its beautification efforts. Even in the 1950s PHS used color slides to document its window box program, which you see below.

Archivists across the city have been extraordinarily helpful allies in our search.  Temple University’s Special Collections Research Center (aka Temple Urban Archives) is scouring their boxes for Philadelphia in color. The John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archive at William Way LGBT Community Center scanned several dozen photographs, many of them taken by Bill Way himself. Taller Puertorriqueño welcomed us into their archive of photos of street life and street fairs along the Calle de Oro.

We recently went to the archives of the Philadlephia Chinatown Development Corporation. Coincidentally, they had just discovered in the back of their storage unit these streetscapes someone put together of Chinatown in the 1970s. There are six of these poster boards covering nearly every Chinatown block.

We knew that we wanted the book to show places that have been lost, with the area around Independence Hall at the top of our list. Fortunately, the archives of Independence National Historic Park document this period.

We also tapped into the world of serious amateur photographers, such as Harry Drasin, a med student at Temple in the 1960s, who took photos between classes.

Along the way we’ve connected with Philadelphia’s community of professional photographers active in those years, like Harvey Finkle, Jack Carnell, and Stephen Perloff.

eBay has been an ongoing source of slides, especially, including these images of Shibe Park; the first photo was taken the night of the final game , October 1, 1970 and the second during its 1976 demolition.

We’ve even gone to some truly unexpected places to track down photos. A guy who hosts a fishing podcast saved the photos on the wall of a bait and tackle shop in Northeast Philly when it closed.

And then, of course, we have recently asked our readers and followers to submit their own family photos. Hundreds of photos have been submitted through phillyincolor.org already, and we are hoping to double that by the end of April.

This project has a serious goal: understanding how Philadelphia responded to an era of decline. Here is a photo taken by Ed Bacon and another by Dick Swanson from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica project in 1973. You can see how photography helps you see things in different ways, particularly when they are intentionally juxtaposed.

This book is an opportunity to uncover so much previously missing history and paint a portrait of Philadelphia that can appeal to anyone who has ever lived in or loved this city.

To make it happen we need your help. We published our last book, Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City, with Temple University Press, but chose to do this one ourselves. A book like PHILADELPHIA IN COLOR, 1950-1990 is too expensive to be supported by an author’s royalty from a local publisher, and foundations rarely support books. This is what Kickstarter is for—projects that wouldn’t happen by traditional means.

PHILADELPHIA IN COLOR is our chance to bring these decades back to life.  It will be a true love letter to the city, made for Philadelphia, by Philadelphia.The more money we can raise, the bigger and better the book will be. Won’t you help us give Philadelphia the book it deserves?

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