Re: RARA-AVIS: Philadelphia Stories

From: M Blumenthal ( blumenidiot@21stcentury.net)
Date: 08 Feb 2002


Joy Matkowski:

. The city flipped from Republican stronghold to totally Democratic
> almost overnight.

That was when the reform Democrats under Clark and Dilworth beat out the entrenched Republican machine to eventually have an equivelant Democratic one. It wasn't overnight. The two leaders were very able and the African Americans, Republican since Reconstruction, had became a big element in FDR's coalition.

    Square miles of homes and factories for the working class
> were gutted to create Independence Mall, downtown upper-class
neighborhoods,
> and public housing highrises for the displaced. Levittown was born.

The Independence Mall that exists now was built in the 70's. The Pennsylvania Levittown was just north of Bristol and was begun with the idea of building houses for returning GIs and their bigger famililies. That was started in the 50's, I think, or maybe even late 40's. Mark

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 08 Feb 2002 EST