To walk the streets of Francisville for the first time is to invite disorientation. Tilted at a diagonal from Philadelphia’s otherwise neat and tidy north-south grid, it’s easy to get lost among its small side streets and alleyways. The wanderer emerges, with seemingly even odds, among the pristine red brick facades of Fairmount or faded urban grandeur at Ridge and Girard Avenues.

This all made sense in the 18th century when Francisville first emerged as a vineyard-turned-community a few miles outside of Philadelphia, oriented toward the only major thoroughfare passing by–Wissahickon Road, now Ridge Avenue. Yet, it’s now undergoing another major transformation: gentrification that has transformed the neighborhood over the past 15 years, driven largely by its location at the border of Center City and North Philadelphia.

A Wednesday night last August saw the writing of another chapter in Francisville’s twisty-turny history. Packed into a recreation building at the Francisville Community Playground–a central hub–a few dozen neighbors new and old utilized their latest opportunity to voice their dissatisfaction to a developer who had come to seek their blessing on a zoning exemption. Like the scores of new condos and apartments built nearby in recent years, this one wanted to go big: eight apartment units over four floors–50-plus feet tall with the roof deck pilot house–on a plot that last held a single-story Baptist church. “It’s out of character,” the captain of an adjacent block briskly concluded. “I’ve talked to the surrounding neighbors. I haven’t had anybody voice support for this.”

As the name of their RCO suggests, members of the United Francisville Civic Association indeed banded together, ultimately voting 2 to 22 against the variance request. But make no mistake. It’s not all kumbaya in a neighborhood where Black families who came north and established new lives during the Great Migration have found themselves increasingly uprooted. Seated on a bench at the same Francisville park a week earlier, two members of the Morocco’s, a 20th-century street gang turned benevolent organization, struggled to juggle a desire to accept change and welcome newer residents, with the loss of the community they came up in. “The plan is, how can we work together? We want good for the neighborhood, just like they of course want good,” Salam Glass, a long-time Morocco member, said. “They may have more invested in the banks, but we also feel like we put our lives in here, you know? So we also have a vested interest.”

Penn’s Playground

Today, the adjacent neighborhoods of Fairmount and Francisville are densely packed with visual landmarks and well-known roadways–the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Eastern State Penitentiary, Girard College, Fairmount Avenue. However, only one predates European colonization: Ridge Avenue. Originally a Native American footpath by the name “Manatawney,” according to a history of the area assembled by the University of Pennsylvania’s Historic Preservation graduate program in 1996, European immigrants would later give it the names Plymouth Road (or Great Road to Plymouth), Wissahickon Road, Ridge Road, and finally Ridge Avenue.

“Ridge does not even follow a straight line,” the report noted. “It meanders a bit, deviating [with] a sequence of dips and jogs reflecting elements of terrain that are invisible to us today, but were certainly evident to those who traversed its course through empty countryside on foot.” Perhaps none more famous than William Penn, who eyed the rural expanse between the Schuylkill River and Ridge Avenue as an ideal location for a countryside estate–Springettsbury. Among numerous pursuits at the estate, Penn sought to cultivate grapes and commercially produce wine, going so far as to hire French Huguenot refugee Andre Doz to layout vineyards on 200 acres, about a fifth of the property’s land, according to a history compiled by the National Gallery of Art. “Wine production proved unsuccessful and, just prior to his death in 1718, Penn gave a large tract of Springettsbury land that included Vineyard Hill to Jonathan Dickinson,” the history notes, adding that further subdivisions resulted in the creation of several families’ countryside manors.

Where exactly the modern day Francisville–about 130-acres bounded by Broad Street and Corinthian, Girard, and Fairmount Avenues–fits in is unclear. Records reflect that Vineyard Hill was located along the Schuylkill River and became modern day Lemon Hill. Dickinson later appears to have passed the land of modern day Francisville to his grandchildren, who had the last name Jones.

According to a family history compiled by “Joshua Francis Fisher” in 1864, the Francises took over from there. A letter from July 9, 1768 written by “Tench Francis” details the final purchase of a “vineyard” from the Jones family, on which he established an estate. Tench Francis (1730-1800) had been an “agent for the Penn family” and cashier at the Bank of North America, whose father had served as Attorney General of the colony of Pennsylvania.

After Tench Francis’ death, the estate was “divided into the sites of ‘Francisville,’” the family’s history maintains. Indeed, an 1800 newspaper ad describes the sale of two subdivided lots on a “tract commonly called the Vineyard,” along Ridge Avenue. Another 1805 newspaper  ad by “T.W. Francis” also lists for sale 68 acres of a “vineyard estate” at the location of present day Francisville, while an 1808 map depicts much of the modern day, diagonally-aligned street grid coming into form beside an area marked “vineyard.” By the 1820s, records formally began to refer to the area as “Francisville,” and several of the listed street names, including Francis and Vineyard, remain today.

Entangled Into Philadelphia

By the mid-1800s, Philadelphia’s urban core was expanding northwest toward Francisville. The report complied by Penn’s historic preservation department notes the initial arrival of institutions such as Eastern State Penitentiary (1829), Girard College (1838) and a House of Refuge near present day and 15th Street and Fairmount Avenue.

Yet, one curiosity remained: an 1834 map showed that some 30 years after Francisville’s streets were laid out, there was still no artistic shading that would typically represent the presence of buildings. That “may provide a shred of evidence,” the Penn history report notes, to support a belief among some that Francisville began as a Black neighborhood in a pre-Civil War America.

“If so, it is conceivable that a mapmaker might not have considered it worthy of full documentation,” it concludes, adding that citywide population figures and abolition meetings held in the area might lend additional credence to the idea.

However, the somewhat enigmatic early decades of Francisville would soon end. By the mid-1850s, maps depict the neighborhood as heavily developed. After the city-county consolidation act of 1854 arrived modern amenities such as a water reservoir, hospital, and streetcars, including along Ridge Avenue, promoting even greater density. By the 1870s, maps depict Francisville as mostly built out and surrounded by the encroaching grid of the city.

The turn of the 20th century brought further advancements: numerous churches of the Episcopalian, Moravian, Presbyterian, and Lutheran faiths, as well as the Metropolitan Opera House (now The Met) in 1908. Later arrived architect Irwin T. Catharine’s Lydia Darrah School (1927) and the clearing of land for the present day Francisville playground by the early 1920s.

Another period of change was just around the corner.

Black Arrival, White Flight

In a 2018 documentary, Out of the Way – The Gentrification of Francisville, an 83-year-old Black woman named Ruby Sanders told the story of moving to the Philadelphia neighborhood in the 1960s after her husband fell into sharecropping debt in their native South Carolina. The couple bounced around in small apartments with their eight children before her husband was able to establish himself in the trades and purchase a house on Parrish Street.

“That was my happy day. My children were so happy. They came, they ran all upstairs, downstairs: what room they gone sleep in, who’s gone sleep in this room,” Sanders said. “The people was nice, the neighbors was nice, it was beautiful. I didn’t want to leave my house after I’ve been there for 50-some years.”

Today, gentrification has become a fact of life in Francisville, where generations of Black families find themselves pushed out of the neighborhood by swiftly-escalating development trends in the past 15 years. Notwithstanding the possible existence of 19th-century Black communities in the area, J.M. Brewer’s infamous “red line” map of Philadelphia from 1934 shows that certainly by then, Black residents had populated the western, southern, and eastern edges of Francisville along streets such as Uber, Oliver, and 15th Streets. By then a divide between Black residents in Francisville and white residents in Fairmount had already developed, with Corinthian Street marking its threshold, as remains the case today.

Yet, for a time coinciding with Sanders’ arrival, Francisville proved a thriving Black community. The 1996 Penn report notes that Ridge Avenue became a “vital main drag” by the 1950s, with “commercial needs well attended,” leaving little reason for residents to leave the neighborhood. “There was stores all up Ridge Avenue. We didn’t have to go into town for nothing,” Sanders said in the 2018 documentary. “Clothes stores, food stores, farmer’s market. We had all that on the avenue.”

What happened next is open to interpretation. The Penn report traces the neighborhood’s decline to 1960 era riots (presumably the 1964 Columbia Avenue race riot), which paired with looting along Ridge Avenue, “frightened many of the businesses away.” Combined with factors such as a loss of manufacturing jobs, banks’ persistent refusal to lend money for mortgages and improvements, and the deaths of long-term homeowners, the report notes Francisville lost half its population from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Yet, residents interviewed for the recent documentary offer a different take and one that begins with white residents fleeing the neighborhood upon the arrival of Black families from the south. Even still, some recall Francisville as a “close knit community” of families into the 1980s that was a “great place to grow up.” Then came the arrival of the crack cocaine epidemic and the federal war on drugs, which destroyed families through the downward spiral of addiction and mass incarceration. “Once the crack era came it just seemed like overnight it swept this whole neighborhood up,” one of Sanders’ grandsons recalled in the documentary.

Salam Glass and Bo Morocco, two members of the Morocco’s, recall a similar history. They said their organization was created as a gang in the 1940s by a man named Bunky Henshaw. For the most part, they explained, the Morocco’s were there to provide neighborhood protection, especially against encroachment from neighboring gangs. For its members, the gang provided a certain measure of organization, accountability, and even mentorship. “Being a gang member wasn’t just being… you know, when you say ganging, you get this negative effect,” Morocco said. “But being a gang member from down here, you learn some things about being a man. You learn some things about the world. Being a part of something that was, before we knew about God, the biggest thing we knew.”

To be sure, benevolence came later. Glass and Morocco said the gang life in Francisville grew increasingly violent over time, with disputes escalating from fist fights, to knives, to guns, especially during the “drug era.” They said Francisville’s diagonal orientation gave the Morocco’s a distinct home turf advantage: “The neighborhood’s got a lot of little twists and turns. You almost get trapped,” Glass explained. Added Morocco with a smile: “Once you come in, you can’t get out.”

Eventually, the violence of gang life gave way to something else. Many of the Morocco’s found religion–some Islam like Glass and others Christianity like Morocco. “When I go to mosque, I see the brothers that I used to fight,” said Glass.

The Morocco’s also became a Registered Community Organization with the city, replete with a board of directors and women’s group, holding social events and providing community and educational services like field trips to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. “It’s kind of like, that era we came to terms with,” Glass said. “But this new era is something we don’t have any control over.”

Harvesting the Fruit

Exactly how and why new development arrived in Francisville shifts with individual perspective, but there’s no doubt the neighborhood has rapidly transformed. Between 2010 and 2020, Census data show, three Census tracts that include areas of Francisville saw population increases of 32, 42, and 81 percent. To walk down a given street is to see it happening in real time: the neighborhood continues to see a proliferation of new construction, including apartments, condos, and other multi-unit properties, along with large new townhomes.

Long-time residents say the increase in property taxes and other living costs have led many to leave, while policing tactics like “no loitering” enforcement have also changed the community character of the past. Many take offense that long-term residents who suffered the ups and downs of the neighborhood, but ultimately cared for it now feel they’re being pushed out. “Gentrification is coming hard, and we can see it right before our eyes,” another of Sanders’ grandsons remarked in the 2018 Francisville documentary. “It’s just bad that people you came up with, for years and years and years, you just see somebody take they house, for small amounts of money. And these people sell it for triple the price.”

Francisville also holds a place in the hearts of members of other communities that often find a home in struggling neighborhoods. Ask Nicely, a 61-year-old trans person with they/them pronouns, points in particular to Gilbert’s Shoes, an aging two-story storefront with signage from Ridge Avenue’s heyday, now sandwiched between two large multi-unit buildings on the avenue near Poplar Street. Nicely chooses their words carefully about all that went on in the space, but describes it as a sort of DIY, “anarchist, lefty, something.” People lived in the building, including Nicely, for short stints of time in between other chapters of life, they said. Traveling musicians would crash there, a dance troupe practiced downstairs, there was hip hop presence–and Nicely heard it all through thin plywood construction when living there. “The upstairs was like a stock area. It’s a big huge space up above. And below was a shoe store, or what was a shoe store, and that front space became like an activist center for community members,” they said. “Intense work went in there, not just to resurrect the building, but also dealing with the functions and dynamics of a changing Francisville.”

Still, some are trying to find a way to make it work. Amanda Garlen, a Penn grad and professional social worker, moved to the neighborhood years ago and is now president of the United Francisville RCO, which was founded in 2018. She believes media coverage from the same year that portrayed the group as feuding with an existing organization, the Francisville Neighborhood Development Corporation, went too far in depicting the level of strife over the neighborhood’s direction.

Glass and Morocco refer to United Francisville as the “new people’s” organization and say it indeed seems to be “dominating” the dynamics at present. However, they also said there is only “minor tension” in the neighborhood and reiterated they see it as a goal to work together.

At the recent meeting of United Francisville, Garlen pointed out the organization’s members and board are also composed of a diverse mix of newer and older residents. They largely banded together to oppose the latest large multi-unit proposal. Yet, a fundamental difference of perspectives did emerge when a developer presented his plans to build affordable housing units on multiple lots in Francisville as part of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s H.O.M.E. housing plan.

The developer, Darren Coleman of the Prime Corporation, checked a lot of the boxes for the program: a Black business owner who would build modest rowhouses matching the height of existing residences. The City would also provide large downpayment assistance for the homes, which Coleman’s firm says will cost below $300,000. City workers are to get first dibs, and purchasers can’t make more than 100 percent of area median income ($120,000 for a family of four) and also can’t rent out the property for 15 years.

Many of the RCO members welcomed the developer’s focus on affordability, as well as its blueprints depicting homes akin to what presently exists. But Kendall Reese, a long-term resident of Francisville now in his 50s and vice president of United Francisville, lamented what he called a new definition of affordable housing: one that has moved from serving the most vulnerable of community members to those with means and incomes that historically have been defined as middle class. That still leaves the question of who’s there to help what’s left of the neighborhood’s long-term, most vulnerable residents. “It started at one space, and now they moved the goal,” Reese said, while adding that he felt the City was shutting out less-established building trade professionals from participating in development. “I don’t want people to be misled and think this is great for everybody. It’s not great for everybody.”

---

---