[PRCo] Re: Suburban shopping areas

[Richard Allman]

My parents moved to Westgate Hills, a trolley suburb on the PSTCo. West 
Chester line, in 1940. Single brick home, two story colonial, 3 br-$5000, $5 
down-3% 20 year mortgage. Those houses now sell for $250,000-they're 67 
years old. Westgate Hills was marketed as a trolley suburb. The same builder 
developed almost identical tracts further out WC Pike in Broomall, though I 
think those houses are some bit larger.My father often, and my mother and I 
always rode the car line to 69th. St. to either connect w/ the El to go 
sowntown or to my grandmother's in Kensington or to shop or do movies @ 69th 
St., a vibrant retail hub. There were 3 movies, including one in the 
terminal. That's where the super markets were: a Penn Fruit up on the hill @ 
south end of McClatchy's 69th St. shopping complex and an A&P up the hill 
from the PTC parking lot on Market St. on the border of the  Borrough of 
Millbourne. I preferred the latter-I could sit in the car and until I was 5 
years old in 1949, watch the P&W and Liberty Bell cars come into the 
station. EVERYTHING was @ 69th St, including the first suburban branch of a 
downtown department store in our , Frank and Sedar Company (weren't they in 
Pittsburgh as well?) It later became Lit Brothers. They had a lending 
library my mother used. Her hairdresser was on 69th St. Our dentist was a 
short walk up Long Lane from the Terminal. ur doctor had an office in the 
McClatchy Building @ 69th & Market two evenings a week.When my father would 
leave the car for my sister to drive after she got her license in 1951, he 
would take the trolley  and there was a shoe repair place in the Terminal 
where he would drop off shoes in the am and pick them up in the pm. What a 
parade of trolleys out WC Pike-he usually caught a 2-car Center Door 
Westgate Hills Local, though he could take the West Chester or Larchmont 
Express, since Westgate Hills was the first stop. I got to ride the St. 
Louis cars on the first day they entered service in June 1949. We always got 
our Christmas Tree and saw Santa @ the 69th St. Penn Fruit. There may have 
been an outdoor train ride there as well @ Christmas. 69th St had evening 
shopping hours on Monday and Friday, a real innovation. Westgate Hills, like 
all of Haverford Township, is now a mature inner suburb with a relatively 
stable population. To the extent that it is prosperous, it is as a starter 
home destination for first or second generation Asian Americans. 69th Street 
is to be politically correct, a scary place. The old retail outlets are gone 
and replaced by what is distinctly downscale, including check cashing 
places, tattoo parlors, cheap electronics venues, a couple fast food joints, 
chain pharmacies, etc. The only remaining movie house is the old Tower at 
69th and Ludlow. It's used for occasional Rock shows. The terminal has a 
coffee shop which is fitfully open, a SEPTA store, some "community living 
homeless" aka schizophrenics whom the state hospitals have dumped onto the 
streets. A visit to 69th St. is sad for the nostalgic, and scary for the 
general public. The Terminal once had a couple decent restaurants, but long 
gone. The area has a few glimmers of hope with a SLOWLY budding Asia Town, 
including an outstanding Korean restaurant, a very nice Vietnamese 
restaurant, and a vibrant all-Asian supermarket. When I was  kid there was a 
great record store, a nice book store, two hobby shops, all of the shoe 
store chains, a Woolworths, and a Kresge's (ancestor of KMart)and JC Penny.I 
would venture that a substantial chunk of the ridership on the old Red Arrow 
is now counterdirectional, for low skills entry-level people heading for 
jobs in the 'burbs. The P&W(alright-Route 100) carries a lot of city people 
to jobs @ Bryn Mawr Hospital and to Gulph Mills to catch busses to  King of 
Prussia Mall. SEPTA has on the drawing boards a short extension from Hughes 
Park to King of Prussia, involving minimal new site acquisition, no NIMBY 
issues, no need to acquire new rolling stock(enough N-5's were purchased to 
roster this service, since they have more cars and many more seats than they 
had in 1946, their peak year of service on 2 lines!) As usually happens w/ 
SEPTA,  unlike some of the pipe dreams with gargantuan price tags, this low 
budget project, with an instant market will almost certainly never be built! 
Thanks a lot Fred for winding me up! RICH
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Cc: "Dennis Lamont" <ge13031 at yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:13 AM
Subject: [PRCo] Suburban shopping areas


> My wife gets on me because my definition of suburban and hers do not
> match.   I refer to suburban as anything beyond the original and then
> existing core ... there were foot suburbs, then horsecar suburbs,
> then trolley suburbs, then bus suburbs, and eventually automobile
> suburbs, and then we got to acre building lot suburbs made possible
> by expressways into the city.   Her idea of a suburb is what she
> called suburbs in her lifetime.
>
> If you become adept at identifying the ages when buildings were
> erected you can play a neat little game of recognizing how houses
> were built when or just before the trolleys came to an area.   In
> Lancaster County it's astonishing how many homes alongside the major
> rural highways were built in the teens and twenties because the
> trolley was there, often even before the road was paved.   If you are
> lucky you might find a program in your local historical society that
> will teach you how to recognize the ages of buildings.   It can be a
> lot of fun.
>
> So go back and think of those earlier suburbs in our cities.  Each of
> them had their own shopping districts.   Mount Lebanon, Carson
> Street, McKees Rocks, Wilkinsburg, Homestead, Allegheny, Dormant
> (ooops, Dormont), Mt. Lebanon, Squirrel Hill, etc.
>
> If Rich Allman is still reading, he'll remember when 69th St.
> Terminal in Upper Darby vibrant ... and Lancaster Avenue and
> Frankford and we could find other neighborhoods all over Philadelpha.
>
> Most of them also had neighborhood theaters.   I think East Liberty
> had seven of them at one time.
>
> As much as I don't like chain merchandising, we can probably all
> remember some early chains ... F. W. Woolworth (instead of Woolco),
> S. S. Kresge (instead of K-Mart), G. C. Murphy (instead of
> Murphymart), Sears Roebuck (before the malls there used to be one on
> the North Side and one in East Liberty and probably quite a few
> others scattered around Pittsburgh).   Remember Fanny Farmer candy
> stores.   And all those bakeries that served wonderful granulated
> sugar donuts?   Thy were everywhere.   Every neighborhood had them.
> And Isalys was everywhere purveying chipped ham and milkshakes and
> Klondikes.
>
> As I pointed out before, my Pittsburgh grandparents lived off
> Perrysville Avenue ... 3462 Delaware Avenue to be precise ... one
> block up Chemung Street from the car stop.   It was a streetcar
> suburb.   They moved there from an earlier home on Veteran Street
> just off the north end of the Fineview line.    Grandma patronized a
> little corner grocery store down at Perrysville and Chemung; it was
> still there a couple of years ago.  But she was in between two
> neighborhood shopping districts.   One was Perrysville and Charles
> Streets.   I remember being asked to take a hike down there to a
> hardware store once when she needed a toilet plunger.  I also
> remember a small store with a black sign across the front emblazoned
> with gold letters with read THE GREAT ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC TEA
> COMPANY.   Long before A&P had supermarkets, they were the champion
> of the chain corner grocery store.   This one was on the west side of
> Perrysville Avenue just south of Charles Street.
>
> The other neighborhood shopping center that she could use was at
> Perrysville Avenue and East Streets.  My mother went to high school
> at Perry High School (now Perry Academy) out there and she even
> remembered a girl friend who came in on the interurban from
> Warrendale (PHB&NC).   Why, because cities had high schools and most
> rural areas did not.   Oh yes, Perrysville and East had a movie
> theater.   Wasn't it called the East Street Theater?   I remember
> that before I learned how to do, I at least knew how to watch.   Went
> there once when I was 14 or 15 to watch Marilyn Monroe in the movie
> Niagara.   As the neighborhoods turned, the shopping district at
> Charles Street faltered.  I'm not sure what is out at East Street any
> longer.
>
> Even the little city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where we moved in
> 1949, population 65,000 in 1950 and 55,000 today, once had at least
> one neighborhood shopping districts.   The Laurel and Filbert street
> car served the intersection of Old Dorwart Street and Manor Street,
> not even 3/4s of a mile from the main shopping district.   Yet this
> little neighborhood then nicknamed Cabbage Hill because of all the
> Germans cooking sauerkraut had its own supermarket, the Manor five
> and dime, a hardware store, and the Manor Theater.   They're all
> closed today.   The highlight of the neighborhood today is a couple
> that made the mistake of standing up during a wedding reception on
> Old Dorwart Street last spring and got nailed by a hail of
> bullets ... the court room replay was going on in the paper last
> night.   The wedding reception just happened to get in the way of a
> drug deal gone sour.   Oh yes, the Germans are  gone.   Columbians
> moved in.
>
> Hope it brought back a few memories.
>
>
>
>