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The program that preceded Dick Clark’s American Bandstand at WFIL-TV was deejay Bob Horn’s locally popular Bandstand.
For three quarters of the past century, public housing has controversially served low-income residents of several West Philadelphia neighborhoods.
Completed in 1962, West Park Apartments is the only high-rise public housing still in operation in West Philadelphia.
At the turn of the Millennium, Mill Creek Homes was in a state of neglect and disrepair. The project’s replacement would be the vibrant and radically different Lucien E. Blackwell Homes.
Carl Greene was executive director of the Philadelphia Housing Authority from 1998 to 2010. Greene championed the “New Urbanism” design concept that inspired new low-rise, low-density projects like Lucien E. Blackwell Homes. His tenure as the city’s housing czar was clouded by accusations of unethical and unprofessional behavior, for which he was fired in 2010.
The name Lucien E. Blackwell Homes memorializes the West Philadelphia politician Lucien E. Blackwell (1931–2003). This photo shows Blackwell when he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In the late 1950s, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, as an alternative to building elevator towers, experimented with “conserving” (i.e., renovating) used housing as public housing in Haddington, a working-class neighborhood in racial transition.
Opened in 1961 in the working-poor, black-segregated neighborhood of Mantua, Mantua Hall was an 18-storey, 153-unit modernist apartment tower built to house 495 people.
The architect Louis I. Kahn’s design for Mill Creek Homes—three 17-storey high-rise buildings and a cluster of two- and three-storey low-rises—was implemented by the Philadelphia Housing Authority in the Mill Creek neighborhood beginning in 1953 and extending into the 1960s, though with reductions in Kahn’s original design.
This photo shows the greenspace in the low-rise complex. Mill Creek Homes had 100-percent African American occupancy.
This aerial photo highlights the high-rise apartment buildings in the Mill Creek Homes development.