Haddington

This map published by the Philadelphia Housing Association in 1960 shows the geographical relationship of three areas that were studied by the Housing Association, a private watchdog organization led by Philadelphia activists for housing improvement. Haddington Leadership Area contained Haddington Homes.

This photo shows a few vintage rowhouses on Race St. between 56th and Vodges—more houses of the kind that were targeted for the Housing Authority’s used house program. 

This 1950 digital census map shows nonwhite housing occupancy in Haddington’s core blocks between 52nd and 60th streets. 

J.M. Brewer’s Map of Philadelphia, 1934.

Brewer was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s chief appraiser for the Philadelphia district. His detailed block-level map, printed in two sections, North and South, was used by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), whose redlining maps were to govern the nation’s home-lending policies and practices for the next three decades.

Brewer’s color-coded map shows Haddington’s population as African American (brown), excepting a small concentration of Italians (green).  In the redlining scheme, the neighborhood had a D rating, which would disqualify it for federally insured mortgages or housing conservation.
Italians dominated the blocks west of 63rd St. below Haverford Avenue.

By the 1950s, vintage rowhouses of this kind on the 5501 block of Vine Street were decaying or abandoned. The Public Housing Authority proposed to conserve 200 single homes to be occupied by single families, in the Authority’s first experiment with used housing.

In 1940, 5533 Vine St., the house shown at right in this photo, was the home of Robert Jones, age 49, an African American laborer in building and construction, whose family had resided here as early as 1935. Jones and his wife, Eleonora, age 42, were participants in the Great Migration, born in Georgia and Virginia respectively.  Both had seven years of education. Likely a victim of the era’s depressed housing market, in which blacks were the last hired, Robert was unemployed throughout 1939 into 1940. Eleonora was employed for 60 hours weekly throughout 1939 as a maid. Her earnings of $600 for the year ($11,057 in 2019 dollars) may have been this poor family’s only source of income. Their daughter, Eleonora, age 14, was born in Pennsylvania, a fact that suggests the Joneses had migrated north at least by the mid-1920s.