To survive decades of disasters, Nicetown developed its tight-knit culture

If you view Nicetown only as an exhausted industrial neighborhood in need of revitalization, you’re most likely an outsider.

Insiders, like Don “Ike” Jones, 50, have a vision shaped by deep friendship and kinship bonds. Jones moved to Nicetown from Anderson, S.C., when he was 7 years old, and grew to love it.

“My community is beautiful,” he said. “All the kids played with each other from blocks around. It was clean, it was safe, it was ideal.”

Both perceptions — exhausted and beautiful — are of the same upper North Philadelphia community. Nicetown is bordered by the Logan and Germantown neighborhoods to the north, Allegheny West to the south, and Hunting Park to the east.

Eleanor Johnson Womack, 73, says that Nicetowners today are trying to survive the impacts of long-ago decisions made in corporate boardrooms and City Hall chambers.

Named after Dutch immigrants who purchased the land in 1699 when it was a rural part of Pennsylvania, Nicetown became an industrial neighborhood by the late 1800s. By the 1900s, it was a solid working-class area with a plethora of nearby union jobs that paid a living wage, had good benefits, and provided pensions.

But in the 1970s, factory workers found themselves living through the brutal end of the deindustrialization transition as the city shifted to a service economy. For many, it meant lower-wage jobs without benefits or pensions. Philadelphia, once called the world’s largest manufacturing center, was now obtaining a new moniker — the poorest big city in America.

“We had to be tight-knit,” said Johnson Womack, who moved to Nicetown as a young girl in the late ’50s. “Everybody looked out for everybody. The closeness was essential for survival.”

She easily ticks off devastations: the controversial Roosevelt Boulevard Extension, which connected the Boulevard and the Schuylkill Expressway; the collapse of the manufacturing job base; and the rise of drug trafficking, especially crack.

“It was disaster after disaster,” she said.

Johnson Womack remembered when her parents attended community meetings at a church near her house at 1917 Dennie St. to protest plans to connect Northeast Philadelphia with the Schuylkill Expressway via a freeway.

“Most of our parents were against it because it was changing the atmosphere [of the neighborhood],” she said.

At the meetings, irate neighbors argued a high-speed expressway would tear the community apart and wipe out hundreds of homes. They predicted it would depress their property values and create a massive barren area underneath the proposed expressway. They proposed alternatives that the state rejected.

“They weren’t able to stop it,” Johnson Womack said.

Building a network of modern high-speed highways leading to Center City was one aspect of the city’s revitalization plan, hoping to save drivers money and time by easing congestion. But the Boulevard’s extension was drawn through the heart of densely populated Nicetown.

“The highway will benefit all of the citizens,” then-City Councilmember John Kelly said at the time. “Unfortunately, some must be hurt.”

Johnson Womack recalled a grueling construction process and how she lost friends who fled, lost places to shop as stores on Germantown Avenue closed, lost neighbors as houses were demolished. Living in an expressway construction site was “dirty, messy, the air quality was terrible, the noise was horrible,” Johnson Womack said. “It seemed like it lasted forever,” she said, adding, “We learned to navigate.”

In 1961, the 3.5-mile, $3.6 million project that extended Roosevelt Boulevard from Ninth Street to the Schuylkill Expressway opened. Johnson Womack recalled that the workers had to come back after the opening to make modifications. “They didn’t anticipate the cars speeding and come off the expressway [and crashing] into the homes.”

The neighbors’ worst nightmares came true. In 1965, the Nicetown Redevelopment Area Plan recognized that one of Nicetown’s major problems was the isolation caused by the Roosevelt Boulevard extension.

“That was a disaster. We were traumatized,” Johnson Womack said.

Ike Jones remembers when men in the neighborhood would tell of finding work at a plant as an unskilled teenager and retiring with a good union pension. But those stories sounded like fairy tales, because when Jones moved into Nicetown in 1982, those legendary factories were just abandoned, hulking shells.

From 1970 to 1985, the city lost 180,000 manufacturing jobs. On Hunting Park Avenue, there were factories like W. Atlee Burpee, the seed company, which left for Warminster in 1974. Midvale-Heppenstall Steel Co., where 9,000 people had been working in its heyday, closed in 1976. The Budd Co., which had employed upward of 6,000 at its Nicetown plant, closed in 2003. Tasty Baking Co. stayed open but moved to the Philadelphia Naval Business Center in South Philadelphia in 2010 with the aid of $80 million in loans — half of which came from the state.

John Dodds was 26 in 1975 when he started the Philadelphia Unemployment Project (PUP) in an effort to organize the unemployed. He remembered the older union workers telling him his battle against plant closings was a lost cause, but he refused to give up.

Now Dodds is retired, and his optimism has faded.

He’s most proud of PUP’s role in getting City Council to pass the first municipal plant closing bill in the country in 1982. The law required companies to give 60 days’ notice to the city, workers, and the union before a closing or mass layoff.

When good jobs fail and the available jobs do not provide a living wage, Dodds explained, it results in an increase need for public benefit supports for income, rent, utilities, food, and healthcare. Johnson Womack remembers the factory closings, which forced people to search for work that wasn’t there. “Some lost their homes. We pretty much went into survival mode.”

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“I had a great childhood up until ’85, ’86. Then I started really noticing some adults in my community looking strange, acting strange, begging for money out on the street,” Jones said. “That was the time crack cocaine hit Nicetown.”

“By ’87, I’m about 12, and me and my friends are hanging out with the guys on the corner. One day, we alert them that the cops coming,” Jones said.

In appreciation, the dealers gave Jones and his friends $100 each. “At that age, it was a lot of money,” Jones said. It also gave Jones an entrepreneurial idea — purchase walkie-talkies for him and his friends, stake themselves out on the roof, and become lookouts for the dealers.

He did this with mixed emotions. He wanted to make money.

Jones recalls his mother, a single parent, constantly working two or three jobs. “She worked for PNC, the bank. She was a housekeeper. She also was a CNA [certified nursing assistant],” Jones said. But there was never enough money to make ends meet.

But he also saw the harm of crack’s addictive power.

“I saw a lot of my friends with parents hooked on drugs,” he said. “Lots of my friends ended up moving in with their grandparents or other relatives because their parents could no longer take care of them. I’m looking around my community, and it was devastating. Everybody was getting hooked on it.”

Jones’ ingenuity earned him a promotion, and he started selling drugs. Then he started robbing drug dealers, which was faster than waiting around all day for customers. When one robbery ended in murder, Jones was sentenced to life in prison at 17. He served 27 years for murder and robbery before being released in 2019 at age 44. He was freed as a result of a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said mandatory life-without-parole homicide sentences for those 17 and under were cruel and unusual punishment.

His partner, who was 20 at the time of the robbery, is still in prison.

In his current role, Jones is now a “trusted messenger,“ working with the Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network (PAAN) to help steer teenagers from the lure of the streets.

“[Nicetown] has had a bad rap for a long time. We still do,” said Sandra Murdock, a Nicetown resident since 1979 and block captain for 20 years. During Black History Month, Murdock and five other Nicetown residents were recognized for their longtime community service by City Councilwoman Kendra Brooks, a Nicetown resident herself.

Brooks’ resolution spoke to Murdock’s desire to transform crime and violence into neighborly affection, and decay and blight into green spaces and parks with more youth activities. “There is a lot of goodness here. I have a problem with people moving out. Stay where you are and build.”

There are signs of restoration. The Nicetown Community Development Corp. spearheaded the construction of affordable housing on the 4300 block of Germantown Avenue. The Salvation Army Kroc Center, a state-of-the-art recreational and community facilities, opened in 2010. The Philadelphia Youth Basketball organization’s Alan Horwitz “Sixth Man” Center opened last year.

Wayne Junction has been designated a historic district because of its industrial past and is anchored by the Wayne Junction Train Station, originally designed by Frank Furness. After a $31.5 million rehabilitation by SEPTA, it received the 2015 Grand Jury Award from the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. The community is considered the newest and most prominent example of a transit-oriented development in the region.

“Imagine being able to roll out of bed, jump on the train, and get to Center City in minutes, to jobs around the region — or to the airport or 30th Street Station,” Ken Weinstein, a major Nicetown developer, said. “You can go anywhere from here.”

But that renewed interest in revitalizing Nicetown brings distrust from longtime residents, who have years of experience surviving plans created by outsiders. Rent in Weinstein’s Autograph Apartments starts around $900 for a studio apartment.

Murdock is afraid that Wayne Junction’s renovation is just the beginning of another disaster for residents — the hike in housing costs and ultimate displacement that comes with gentrification.

“Over here at Nicetown Park, we once had a meeting that became extremely heated,” Murdock said. “[The park’s] renovation was put in place 10 years ago and community knew nothing about it. They’re bringing pickleball, a garden, and skateboarding. Who plays pickleball? Who skateboards?”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated the cost of a studio rental at the Autograph Apartments.