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By Thom Nickels
There’s not a single vacant space in my Riverwards Fishtown-Port Richmond neighborhood that hasn’t been rezoned for rehab by developers.
One night as I was making my way to a friend’s house in the neighborhood, I passed the spot where one of my favorite little houses once stood. This tiny house used to sit next to a large overgrown wooded area. I’ve always called this house, “The Little House That Could.”
It wasn’t a beautiful house by any means, but the way it was situated next to a small patch of urban wildlife near the Belgrade Street overpass has always given it a unique “house in the mountains” look. For years I’d see the owners of this house working outside on their trucks and cars. At Christmastime there was always a simple string of lights placed on the home’s humble door. The truly odd thing about the property was that the overgrown yard wasn’t fenced in. For years anyone could walk in and out of the wooded area which had the look and feel of a little house in the Poconos.
Then, developers invaded the area. They purchased the small wooded area next to the little house and soon built two unsightly, out-of-scale, four-story, cookie-cutter houses with large picture windows and exterior steel prefabricated stairs with inboard rails.
Why It Matters. My little street was changing faster than the climate.
In conjunction with all this, the oldest indigenous family on the block moved away, meaning that all the original people that were on the block nineteen years ago when I moved here from Center City were now lost to the ages. Where did the time go?
It’s easy to wax nostalgic, especially since I numbered myself as one of the first “gentrifiers” from Center City. I thought about the old neighborhood that I knew then, especially the look of the broken walls of the old paint factory at Thompson and Huntingdon.
Everywhere I walk in my neighborhood now I see 400K townhouses that look more and more like housing projects in China.
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