ABOVE PHOTO: A memorial for the Black Bottom neighborhood—removed for the construction of the University City Science Center in University Redevelopment Unit 3—was displayed on a wall of the University City High School until the school was demolished in 2015. More images of and information about the mural are available on philart.net. (Attribution/Credit: Pilar Berguido)
By Constance Garcia-Barrio
At Christmas time in the Black Bottom, an area which ran from 40th St. to 33rd St., and from Lancaster Avenue to University Avenue, the number writers used to give coal and turkeys to poor families, said lawyer and former Black Bottom resident Walter Palmer, 89. Palmer is also an adjunct professor in Penn’s Graduate School of Social Policy and Practice. “I respected them for that,” he said.
Some number writers made more lavish displays.
“Mr. Ellick would throw silver dollars out the window,” Palmer said. “Bill White, another number writer but a reserved man, would go around the neighborhood and offer help quietly.”
People in the Black Bottom got excited about every holiday, but Christmas was special, Palmer recalled. “Every Black person had a picture of [boxing phenomenon] Joe Louis, [Olympic gold medal sprinter] Jesse Owens, and Jesus on their mantle,” he said. The neighborhood went all out in celebrating Christ’s birth.
Palmer, who grew up in two rooms at 3625 Market Street with his mother, father and eleven siblings, knew how to rustle up cash for Christmas presents. “I’d go down to the freight yard around 33rd Street to get trees,” he said. “I’d load them in my wagon, bring them back, and sell them to the neighbors. He also recalled gifts he received. “One of my brothers and I got a wooden pistol to share one year,” he said. “When we fought over it and broke it, my mother said, ‘Now you each have a piece.”
Palmer may recall the holidays of his youth more vividly this year because of recent excavations in what was once the Black Bottom. From this past August to November, Megan C, Kassabaum, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Weingarten Associate Curator for North America at the Penn Museum, led an archeological dig in the parking lot behind the Community Education Center (CEC) at 3500 Lancaster Avenue. The parking lot was an ideal site to excavate to retrieve buried bits of the Black Bottom.
“The parking lot is one of the least disturbed sites in the Black Bottom where development has not yet happened,” said Sarah Linn, Ph.D., Penn Museum research liaison and a member of the archeological team, “An old Quaker meeting house was built on this site in the 1840s. Then the CEC was built in 1901. There were also two wooden houses and three brick houses here, according to insurance records.”
The excavation team put the dirt through fine screens to capture small objects, Kassabaum said. “One of the coolest things we found is a bunch of pencils made of soapstone sharpened into a pencil shape,” she said. “We’ve found a fair amount of glass and ceramic pieces. We’ve also found a lot of clam shells. Clams were definitely consumed here.”
African Americans arrived in Philly’s Black Bottom as early as 1861, according to Palmer. The number swelled after the Civil War, he said. It jumped from 1910 to 1930, the first decades of the Great Migration, according to Kassabaum. Palmer remembers the vitality of Philly’s Black Bottom.
“It was a vibrant community of working-class and middle-class people,” he said. “Elders involved themselves in keeping… peace. People often left their doors and windows unlocked. When Joe Louis was fighting, my father would put the radio on the porch banister so everyone could hear it.”
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