Still Image

This contemporary photo shows House One of the Free School fifty years after the alternative school opened. Straddling the corner of Walnut and 39th street, 3833 Walnut is still owned by the School District of Philadelphia. 

Penn GSE today faces Walnut Street. Fifty years after its involvement in developing the Free School, Penn GSE continues to prepare urban educators and assists local schools with curriculum and instruction, general planning, and resource development. 

The University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE), shown here as a new building in 1965, provided staff to support the operation of the Free School. The project’s first director, Aase Eriksen, was a junior member of the Penn faculty. The primary source of teachers for the Free School was Penn GSE’s Experimental Program in Urban Education, many of whose students were graduates of Ivy League colleges. Entering this Master’s-degree program in the fall of 1969, they were expected to work as part-time interns in the local schools. Yet Eriksen recruited seven of them, all White, to begin full-time teaching in the annexes in the winter of 1970. Whiteness and youthful progressivism were a source of tension with the Free School’s community board.

Novella Williams was the legendary president of the grassroots organization Citizens for Progress. In the scattered-site Free School’s first year of operation, Williams and her conservative allies on the school’s community board opposed the annexes’ free-wheeling progressive orientation and their idealistic White teachers. Demanding a traditional academic curriculum grounded in fixed rules and regulations, Williams and her allies forced the removal of Aase Eriksen as Free School director and her replacement with Ola Taylor, a traditional administrator. 

Penn President Gaylord P. Harnwell’s leadership team provided $60,000 in seed funds to help establish the West Philadelphia Community Free School. The motivation was starkly political. In the late 1960s, the University faced ominous budget deficits accruing from large-scale campus redevelopment projects in the 1960s urban renewal era. The University sought to protect its huge investment in an expanded and modernized campus by controlling development in the low-income Market Street corridor a few blocks north of the campus.

Acting through a non-profit coalition of “higher eds and meds” named the West Philadelphia Corporation, which Penn dominated, Harnwell’s leadership team and their allies took a heavy hand in establishing the University City Science Center along Market Street. And they promised financial and logistical support for the creation of University City High School, which Penn and the School District of Philadelphia planned to be a specialized high school of science, comparable to Bronx Science High School of New York City and affiliated with the University City Science Center.

In Becoming Penn: The Pragmatic American University, 1950–2000 (Philadelphia, 2015), John Puckett and Mark Lloyd offer a “reasoned speculation” as to why the Harnwell administration decided to shift University support from the high school project to the Community Free School. First, vocal Black and White activists strongly opposed a high school of science, believing it would favor the children of University City’s white-professional-managerial elites. Perhaps of greater significance, Penn worried that the perennially underfunded school district would be unable to fulfill its end of the bargain and leave the now cash-strapped University holding the bag. “With Jessica Orliff, who wrote a scholarly paper on University City High School, we would also conjecture that the University’s role in the West Philadelphia [Community] Free School presented an honorable and relatively inexpensive way out of this dilemma” (p. 113). 

Deprived of public transportation access since 1946, Woodside Park in the postwar era may have been worth more to real-estate developers than to amusement park entrepreneurs. At all events, the park was demolished in 1955, and a sizable portion of the land was sold for residential and commercial development. Woodside Park’s famed Dentzel Carousel, now housed at the Please Touch Museum, only a mile from its original home, is the park’s only surviving attraction.

Crystal Pool’s thinly veiled Whites-only membership policy and various subterfuges denied Blacks access to facilities that could accommodate 5,000 swimmers. Crystal Pool was integrated only after the City took control of its management in 1952.

This aerial photo shows the design of Woodside Park in the late 1930s. The four-acre Crystal Pool appears in the upper-left corner of the image. From its opening in 1926.

White children floating in a boat on a water ride in Woodside Park. We find no images of African American visitors in the historical collections. From its opening in 1926, four-acre Crystal Pool’s thinly veiled Whites-only membership policy and various subterfuges denied Blacks access to facilities that could accommodate 5,000 swimmers. Crystal Pool was integrated only after the City took control of its management in 1952. 

A popular Woodside Park ride in the postwar era. The happy faces are White. Though legally the rides were open to all, Woodside Park was well-known for its notorious Jim Crow practices in places like the rollerdrome (picketing resulted in its closure) and the Crystal Pool, which was not integrated until 1952.