The dream: A 'suburb in the city'

In the late 1950s, the neighborhood just south of Temple University was a teeming jumble of gritty streets, factories, bars, flophouses and rundown houses packed with multiple households.

Then the post-World War II passion for urban renewal - a movement that created Society Hill and Independence Mall - led the city to tear down the old neighborhood.

The city's Redevelopment Authority seized the area running from Broad Street to 10th between Girard and Cecil B. Moore avenues by eminent domain, and a new chapter in urban renewal was written.

Mayor Richardson Dilworth turned the first shovel of earth in 1959 for what would be called Yorktown, a "suburb in the city" marketed to a growing African- American middle class.

The community and its streets, one designated Betsy Ross Place, were named by the community's developer, Norman Denny, who had an interest in colonial history. Denny also built many houses in the then mainly white Northeast.

The first family moved into Yorktown in 1961.

According to published accounts, a family a day, many professionals, moved into the three- and four-bedroom brick homes, which had grass patches, patios and garages, and locations on quiet cul de sacs. The price tag then was between $10,000 and $14,000.

Among the new residents were civil-rights activist Charles Bowser and Augusta Clark, who would become a city councilwoman, and Karen Warrington, later press secretary to former Mayor W. Wilson Goode.

One Yorktowner, John Street, became mayor.

Yorktown's 635 townhouses replaced nearly 1,800 old dwellings, many of them housing more than one family.

According to news accounts, no effort was made to relocate the old residents of the neighborhood.

Pride in the new neighborhood was high, and the Yorktown Community Organization was formed, determined to keep up the new area.

Neighbors cleaned up each other's litter, kids didn't hang on the corners and no boomboxes could be heard.

The hope, according to one of the many newspaper accounts, was that as Yorktown flowered, its benefits would spread to rundown surrounding neighborhoods.

Mean streets still border Yorktown, but the little community now faces a new threat.

The children of the first residents have grown up, gone to college and moved on.

Some of them have been replaced by Temple students, renters, bringing with them the raucous noises of youth. *