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Louis I. Kahn (left), with G. Holmes Perkins, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts (second from left), and students. Kahn planned Mill Creek Homes. At Penn, 1957–61, Kahn designed Richards and Goddard Laboratories, today a National Historic Landmark.
Mill Creek Homes, a modernist public housing project designed by architect Louis I. Kahn, 1953–55; in its first phase consisting of three 17-storey elevator towers at 46th St. & Fairmount Ave. overlooking a cluster of two- and three-story houses on Aspen St.
In the decades after World War II, segregated public housing was planned to provide “safe and sanitary housing” for low-income residents—an aspirational goal that lacked both resources and political will to bring to fruition.
A subway-tube extension, constructed between 1952 and 1955, replaced the Woodland Avenue surface-trolley lines between 32nd and 39th streets.
An undeveloped tract of land at 48th and Spruce streets became a baseball field that in the early 1930s was home to Black professional and semi-professional baseball teams. In the wartime 1940s, the field was home to hundreds of Victory Gardens. From the 1950s on, it was home to West Philadelphia High School’s football and baseball teams.
Employment of Girls from Households of Cotton and Woolen Mill Workers, West End Mill Area
Employment of Boys from Households of Cotton and Woolen Mill Workers, West End Mill Area
Employment of Girls from Households of Cotton and Woolen Mill Workers 1880
Employment of Boys from Households of Cotton and Woolen Mill Workers, 1880
The Boothroyd and Goodyear families of West Philadelphia’s West End sent their children into West End Mill, a producer of cotton fabrics and some woolens, in the decades around the turn of the 20th Century.
Two generations of Boothroyd and Goodyear children attended the West End elementary school at 60th and Cedar. West End School No. 2, which opened in 1903, supplemented an older school building next to the site. Archival photos suggest that the two buildings were joined in 1913, the year the school was enlarged and renamed William Cullen Bryant School.
Fully restored and operational, Woodside Park’s Dentzel Carousel is housed today in Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum, in Fairmount Park’s Memorial Hall. This photo shows the hand-crafted beauty of the carousel’s lead horse figure.