What makes a neighborhood?  Certainly it is shaped by its architectural design, both in its buildings and its streets, as well as its businesses and its government.  Most importantly, it is people - those who live there and those who don’t.  Northern Liberties was the first planned suburb in the New World when William Penn scrolled the words Liberty Town on his design for the “City of Brotherly Love.”  From the beginning, the neighborhood attracted artists and innovators, including the studio of one of the greatest artists of the Federal period - William Rush.  Photographs of its storefronts testify to the innovative pottery and craft companies located there in the early 19th Century.  Well into the 20th Century, it was home to creative dreamers, such as Larry Fine of The Three Stooges fame and the mercantile family who created processed American cheese, now known as Kraft.  Once the sixth largest town in America, Northern Liberties was home to a wide range of European immigrants, including large Irish, German and Jewish communities.  Then in the 1950’s a great number of people left the neighborhood to move to the suburbs, made accessible by the new interstate highway system.  As they left, so did the businesses and the government’s economic support.  A near deathblow was dealt by the construction of I-95, together with the disaster of Ed Bacon’s planned industrial zone starting at Vine Street.  Northern Liberties was definitely in a decline.  Fortunately, in the 1970’s things started turning around.  The city had no more money for planned renewal.  Artists looking for inexpensive studios and living spaces discovered the empty factories, workshops and row houses.  Left alone, the neighborhood began to attract the same sort of rugged innovators it had started with nearly two hundred years earlier.  In the past four decades Northern Liberties has become “hip, trendy and New York City’s sixth borough.”  Northern Liberties: A Transformation is the pictorial story of this change.

Jennifer Baker’s Northern Liberties studio was established in 1978.  Since that time, her paintings have documented the events in this gutsy neighborhood.  She has chronicled the destruction and the resurrection, the traditions and the people and the urban life of a city neighborhood going through a rebirth.   Baker’s and the works of nine other Northern Liberties artists present an exhibition that tells the story and hope of this unique place and the people who have been changed by it.  Participating artists include Joe Brenman, Tanya Murphy Dodd, Anda Dubinskis, Ray King, Rob Matthews, Ray Metzker, Bruce Pollock, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen and Ira Upin, with works in a variety of media.  During the opening, short readings will be given by Nathaniel Popkin, author of Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape and The Possible City: Exercises in Dreaming Philadelphia; Inga Saffron, Architecture Critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer; Stephan Salisbury, senior Culture Writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer and author of Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland; and Jennifer Baker.  A commissioned John Thornton (aka Rusty Scupperton) “Northern Liberties” video will also be shown.