Before Northern Liberties became what it is — the neighborhood of craft cocktail bars, design-forward condos, and one of the most photographed dog parks in the city — it was something else entirely. Several something elses, in fact, depending on which decade you are looking at.
The row homes that survive from Northern Liberties’ pre-transformation era are a physical archive of a neighborhood that most of its current residents have never known. Walking certain blocks — particularly the streets west of Second Street, between Girard and Poplar — is like walking through a set of historical transparencies stacked on top of each other: the industrial city, the immigrant neighborhood, the period of abandonment, the artist colony, and the present all visible simultaneously in the same block face.
The Industrial Neighborhood, 1880–1940
Northern Liberties was one of Philadelphia’s first industrial districts. Its location — north of the original city grid, accessible to the Delaware River and its commerce — made it a natural site for factories, breweries, and the workers who staffed them. The Schmidt’s brewery, which operated on American Street from 1860 until 1987, was the neighborhood’s dominant employer and, in many ways, its social center.
The row homes that were built for Schmidt’s workers and the workers of neighboring industries in the 1880s and 1890s are still standing on the streets between Second and Fifth. They are modest houses — two stories, 14 feet wide, red brick with minimal ornament — built for large families with small incomes. The stoops are narrow. The rear yards are small. The houses were designed for function, not aspiration.
These are the oldest surviving residential structures in the neighborhood, and they have a character that is distinct from both the grander Victorian rows of West Philadelphia and the later, more regularized rows of the Northeast. They carry the specific weight of industrial Philadelphia — practical, unadorned, built to last.
The Immigrant Neighborhood, 1900–1960
Northern Liberties in the early twentieth century was a dense, diverse immigrant neighborhood. Polish, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian families dominated certain blocks. The churches — St. Stanislaus, Holy Trinity Lithuanian, St. John Cantius — organized neighborhood life around their ethnic congregations. The commercial streets — Second Street, Girard Avenue — were lined with the businesses that served these communities: delis, social halls, hardware stores, butchers.
The row homes built in this era — roughly 1900 to 1930 — are slightly more refined than the 1880s workers’ housing. Porch fronts appear on some streets, replacing the open stoop. Bay windows add visual interest to facades that might otherwise be uniformly flat. A few blocks have the wide, deep lots and three-story construction that indicate a slightly more prosperous market.
The Period of Abandonment, 1960–1990
Deindustrialization hit Northern Liberties hard. Schmidt’s closed in 1987, eliminating not just jobs but the social infrastructure that the brewery had anchored for a century. Population fell. Vacancy rose. Many row homes were abandoned, and the neighborhood acquired the particular character of a place that has been hollowed out — structurally intact in many cases, but emptied of the economic life that had justified the investment.
The row homes that survive from this period carry the marks of deferred maintenance and, in some cases, of emergency repairs made on limited budgets: aluminum replacement windows that are not proportioned to the original openings, vinyl siding applied over original brick facades, rooftop additions that do not match the scale or material of the original construction. These interventions are visible on every block, and they tell the story of owners trying to maintain houses they could not fully afford to maintain.
The Transformation, 1990–Present
The artists came first, as they always do: attracted by cheap rents in large industrial spaces, by the proximity to Center City, by the particular quality of a neighborhood that had been left alone long enough to become interesting again. By the mid-1990s, Northern Liberties had a small creative community. By 2000, it had galleries, studios, and the beginning of a restaurant scene on Second Street.
The row home market followed. Houses that had been abandoned or severely deteriorated were bought, renovated, and resold at prices that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier. The 2000s and 2010s brought continued appreciation, new construction in the gaps where houses had been demolished, and the gradual replacement of long-term residents by higher-income newcomers.
What remains of the pre-transformation Northern Liberties is not uniformly beautiful or historically significant. It is a mix: some blocks of genuine architectural merit, some blocks of merely old construction, and some blocks where new and old sit uneasily alongside each other. But taken as a whole, the surviving row home fabric of Northern Liberties is a document of what Philadelphia’s industrial neighborhoods looked like before the transformation — and a reminder of what was present, and what was lost, in the decades that made the neighborhood what it is today.