Zion Baptist Church opens its doors to a sustainable future and a North Philly revival. Rachel Hildebrandt has the story

Since 2009, 28 churches have been demolished in Philadelphia. Is development pressure to blame? Partners for Sacred Places staffer and Hidden City contributor Rachel Hildebrandt says yes and does the math on the unabating trend

Demolition permits have been pulled for the church where the great contralto Marian Anderson first sang in a choir and began her groundbreaking career. Contributors Rachel Hildebrandt and Oscar Beisert rushed to file a nomination to place the building on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places only to find an ineffectual administrative procedure still firmly in place

Philadelphia preservationists have taken a wrecking ball to the gut in recent days, with the Boyd Theatre currently coming down and the fate of the legendary Blue Horizon sealed by the Philadelphia Historical Commission’s choice to not designate its interior. Meanwhile, just up North Broad Street, Temple University is in the midst of a demolition spree, in some cases with no plans to replace what it’s knocking down. Rachel Hildebrandt surveys what’s been lost through almost 70 years of campus expansion

We’ll celebrate the Hidden City Daily’s 3rd anniversary October 3 in one of city’s best remaining roller rinks. Once, there were roller rinks in just about every neighborhood, says Rachel Hildebrandt, and like movie houses, you can spot some of them today

A Tiki bar soon will join in the Frankford Avenue renaissance. That may be Fishtown’s first Tiki bar, but as Rachel Hildebrandt explains, it’s hardly the first in Philadelphia, where we once had several Tiki bars at once

As readers of the Hidden City Daily know all too well, longtime houses of worship often struggle to survive. But some, including many along Germantown Avenue, have found ways to adapt—and reuse old, nondenominational spaces. Rachel Hildebrandt sits down with Katie Day, author of a new book about this very phenomenon

As the future of the SS United States toils in jeopardy, the future of another massive ship just downstream is just beginning. Rachel Hildebrandt looks at a plan to move the USS John F. Kennedy from the Philadelphia Navy Yard to New England, where it would become a museum