On a May morning in 1910, a woman named Anna Kowalski stepped out of 1823 East Passyunk Avenue and swept her stoop. Her neighbors — the Petrellis at 1821, the Murphys at 1819 — were doing the same. The rhythmic scratch of broom bristles on marble steps was the soundtrack of Passyunk Square, a neighborhood of Polish, Italian, and Irish immigrants packed into 14-foot-wide row homes that had been marching down these blocks since the 1870s.
More than a century later, the stoops are still there. The marble is a little more worn. But nearly everything else about Passyunk Square has shifted — some things dramatically, some things barely at all.
The Grid Hasn’t Changed
Philadelphia’s great gift to its neighborhoods is permanence of form. The row home blocks of Passyunk Square look almost exactly as they did in the 1910 Sanborn fire insurance maps. The lot lines are the same. The block faces — dense, shoulder-to-shoulder, two- and three-story brick facades — remain unbroken. What was built to house the working class in 1880 is still standing, still occupied, still defining the street.
This is not an accident. Philadelphia row homes were built to last. Solid brick construction, party walls shared between neighbors, and relatively modest proportions meant that the economics of tearing them down rarely made sense. You’d spend more demolishing than you’d recover in the land value. And so they stayed.
Compare this to neighborhoods in other American cities — Baltimore’s rowhouse blocks, Boston’s triple-deckers — and you see a similar story. But few cities preserved their working-class housing stock as thoroughly as Philadelphia. The city’s population decline from the 1960s onward was a tragedy in human terms, but it preserved an architectural record that wealthier, faster-growing cities lost to the wrecking ball.
Who Lived There Then
In 1910, Passyunk Square was overwhelmingly immigrant. The streets closest to the Italian Market — Ninth Street had been a produce market since the 1880s — were heavily Italian. Move east toward Broad Street and you found more Polish and Irish families. The occupations listed in census records are a catalog of industrial Philadelphia: machinist, spinner, laborer, packer, tinsmith, teamster.
Families were large and houses were full. A three-bedroom, 900-square-foot row home might house parents, five or six children, and a boarder who rented a room to help the family make rent. The street was an extension of the living room — children played out front, women exchanged news on the stoop, men gathered on the corner. Privacy was scarce. Community was unavoidable.
The church was the anchor of each ethnic enclave. St. Paul’s for the Irish. St. Thomas Aquinas for the Italians. Each church ran its own school, its own parish hall, its own calendar of feast days and processions that moved through the street in elaborate, neighborhood-halting ceremonies.
The Transformation: 1960–2000
The decades between 1960 and 2000 were hard on Passyunk Square. White flight, deindustrialization, and urban disinvestment hollowed out the block. Families who could afford to leave — usually moving to the Northeast or the suburbs — did. The neighborhood’s population fell. Some blocks became distressed. The Italian Market contracted.
But the bones stayed strong. The row homes, too modest to attract speculative demolition, sat waiting. Some were maintained meticulously by elderly residents who’d lived there for decades. Some fell into disrepair. Some were quietly bought up by landlords and converted to rentals.
Who Lives There Now
By 2010, Passyunk Square had begun to turn. The East Passyunk Avenue commercial corridor — a diagonal street that cuts against Philadelphia’s grid, a legacy of the old Lenape trail it follows — had new restaurants, new bars, a new energy. Young professionals who wanted walkability, character, and affordable (by then-current standards) housing found it here.
The demographic shift has been dramatic. Where Italian and Polish immigrants once dominated, the neighborhood is now largely younger, college-educated, and white — a pattern repeated across gentrifying Philadelphia neighborhoods. The Italian Market still operates, though it’s now as much a culinary destination for visitors as a practical grocery for residents. The churches are smaller. The block associations are active.
And the stoops are still swept. Not always at 7 a.m., and not always to the scratch of broom on marble. But the habit persists, because the architecture demands it. The stoop is still the transition between private and public, between the house and the street. That hasn’t changed since Anna Kowalski’s time.
What the Archive Tells Us
Looking at 1910 Sanborn maps alongside a contemporary Google Street View image of the same block is a vertiginous experience. The structures are identical. The street is the same width. The proportions — building height to sidewalk width, lot width to building setback — are unchanged.
What the archive tells us is that Philadelphia row homes are not just old houses. They are an urban system. They create a specific kind of street life, a specific relationship between neighbor and neighbor, house and block, block and neighborhood. That system has survived immigration waves, deindustrialization, white flight, and gentrification.
The people change. The houses stay. And the houses, to a remarkable degree, shape the people who live in them.