![]() ![]() Houses were abandoned and fell into disrepair. Residents went into alleys to shoot up, and often never came out alive. iv Then, like adjacent Grays Ferry, Point Breeze was hit by the heroin epidemic of the 1970s and then the crack scourge of the early 1990s. Many Jewish shopkeepers sold their businesses and moved elsewhere, part of a pattern that repeated itself throughout the city of Philadelphia. The race riots of the 1960s - which triggered mass “white flight” –signaled the decline of Point Breeze as a self-sustaining, relatively integrated neighborhood. ![]() “If you had a problem,” Alice remembered, “you were told to ‘Go see Bill Barrett.’” During the 1950s, Wharton Square was the home of Congressman Bill Barrett, who made sure Point Breeze got its fair share of city services. The three story houses fronting the square were the largest in the neighborhood. Wharton Square, one of the few green spaces in the area, was a friendlier place for Point Breeze’s African-American community, popular with picnickers. They would often wait for a long time, then give up and go home. There was no “Whites Only” sign, but segregation at this movie theater was an unspoken rule.Īnd at the 26th and Morris playground, Alice and her friends would wait for the white kids to get off the swings. Alice stood in back, endured the tormenting, and never came back. But when she and her friends entered the theater, the white audience began harassing them. One day, she went to see a film at The Breeze, another theater on Point Breeze Avenue. Yet Alice realized she was not welcome in certain places. ![]() We were allowed to go as a group to the 1700 block of Point Breeze to buy water ice.” When she wanted to go to see a movie at the Victory or the Dixie on Point Breeze Avenue, her mother would give her 16 cents: 5 cents for a bag of pretzels, 10 cents for the movie, and a penny for the tax. “After church, we would look in the store windows and fantasize about what we could buy,” Alice remembered about her childhood. ![]() We knew one was white and one was black and that was it.”Ĭlaudia’s friend Alice Gabbadon, who grew up at 22nd and Dickinson, also had fond memories of life in Point Breeze. I could go to anyone’s house and eat a meal. “We had a beautiful community growing up. “It was a diversified community, with Caucasians and African-Americans living and working together,” she said. As a ten year old, Claudia took the lead in beautifying her block by planting the first flowerbox. The family had no refrigerator, indoor plumbing, or hot water until the early 1950s. “There used to be over a hundred stores on the Breeze.”Ĭlaudia spent her childhood in a rowhouse at 21st and Kater, just south of Fitler Square. “It was a very busy, beautiful area,” remembered Claudia Sherrod, whose parents came to Philadelphia from Georgia during the Great Depression. There were also kosher butcher shops that catered to the still-large Jewish community. There were two five and dime stores (Woolworth’s and Kresge’s), and the Curson family operated a dress shop patronized by residents for First Communion and weddings. At night, Point Breeze Avenue (known by residents as “The Breeze”) was illuminated by scores of shop signs advertising clothing, fresh produce, appliances, ice cream, and soda. Its residents almost never went into Center City, as they had everything they needed within a few blocks of their two story rowhouses. Until the late 1960s, Point Breeze was a relatively stable, self-sufficient neighborhood. DuBois as the “hereditary enemy” of urban African-Americans.” ii Many of Point Breeze’s African-Americans worked for Center City hotels, the Pennsylvania Railroad, local factories, and city government. This expansion often brought them into conflict with neighboring Irish-Americans, described by W.E.B. The Great Migration, however, pushed the boundaries of the African-American settlement west of Broad Street to Point Breeze. By the 1930s, these immigrant groups were joined by African-Americans from the Deep South, who had come to Philadelphia looking for work and to escape Jim Crow.ĭuring the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s African-American community was centered east of Broad Street, near Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church at 8th and Lombard. i Conditions were primitive: chickens in backyards were a common sight. Italian and Irish immigrants soon followed. It was first settled by Eastern European Jews, many of whom set up shops on Point Breeze Avenue and lived in apartments above their businesses. Since the time of its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, Point Breeze has been a no-frills working class neighborhood. ![]()
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