Ross Gallery exhibit, West Philadelphia: Building a Community, West Philadelphia Community History Center

Map of Philadelphia area placing West Philadelphia in context

Faculty and Students at the University of Pennsylvania inaugurated this heritage site in the spring of 2008.
This virtual history center will be an ever-revised and expanded resource by and for members of the
West Philadelphia community, and especially for teachers and their students.

SPECIAL EXHIBITS:
Construction of the Market El Transforms West Philadelphia

"Market Street ‘L’ Proves What Transit Does:
Best Argument for Improved Service Found in West Phila.,
Where Land Values Trebled in Nine Years"

Scenes along Market Street before the construction of the el, photographs from news article
Market Street, from 60th to 61st streets in 1904

This newspaper headline, from November 1914, said it all. Between 1903, when construction began on the Market Street high-speed elevated railroad, and the mid 1920s, when the automobile began to take the more prosperous residents to the suburbs, West Philadelphia experienced extraordinary growth in population, commerce, and industry. A Philadelphia historian, Joseph Jackson, writing in 1915, summarized this change well:

Market St. under the newly constructed el, photograph from the news article
Market, from 60th to 61st streets in 1914

"The opening of the Market Street elevated and subway railroad, in 1907, was responsible for the building up of Market Street from Forty-sixth Street to the City Line, at Cobb’s Creek. Before the advent of the road, there were numerous vacant lots and even farm lands in the neighborhood of Fiftieth Street and westward, but within a few years, or while the elevated structure was in the course of erection, these lands were rapidly covered by rows of houses and stores, and a new city came into being, thus proving the correctness of the prophecy made as far back as 1840."

Quoted from Joseph Jackson, Market Street, Philadelphia: The Most Historic Highway in America, Its Merchants, and Its Story, published as a series of articles in the Philadelphia newspaper, the Public Ledger, in 1914 and 1915 (and re-published in book form in 1918).