Long before it was in the vanguard of the Center City real estate boom, decades before it was a hip outpost of artists and urban pioneers, Northern Liberties was a working-class neighborhood.
It existed not because of Center City but because of a hub of factories where many neighbors walked to work: the Henry F. Ortlieb and C. Schmidt & Sons breweries, the Northern Liberties Gas Co. and, a little farther north, the John B. Stetson hat plant.
All are gone, except in the memories of some old-timers and snapshots taken years ago, stuffed in drawers and forgotten.
And that's what Joan Saverino and Joan Decker want: pieces of the collective memory of the neighborhoods of Northern Liberties and South Philadelphia.
PhilaPlace - the project's formal name - is a novel collaboration in cultural history by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the city Department of Records, the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design.
On Wednesday in South Philadelphia, Saverino, Decker and company will begin the project with "Your Place and Mine" meetings, soliciting residents for photos and memories of spots that made their neighborhood special.
Each community will have two meetings: Wednesday evening and Nov. 3 in South Philadelphia, and Nov. 1 and Nov. 10 for "Greater Northern Liberties," including almost-forgotten Poplar and parts of Kensington and Fishtown.
The first meeting is about preserving neighborhood character, Saverino said. The Preservation Alliance will discuss saving historic architecture and "creative reuse" of historic buildings.
The second meeting - on Saturday afternoons - is a neighborhood history fair; residents are encouraged to bring photos and their memories.
Those who agree can have their photos scanned for display on a Web site being developed by the Historical Society and an existing Records Department site. Residents will also be encouraged to talk about their memories for a videotaped oral history, parts of which may be linked to the Web site.
"We call it 'Beyond the Bell,' " said Saverino, the Historical Society's assistant director for education, referring to the one stop on nearly every city tour. "We're interested in telling the lives of everyday people. . . . We also want for people to understand that they are part of history, part of the larger historical story."
For Decker, commissioner of the Records Department, the project will supplement her agency's popular Web site, www.phillyhistory.org, which displays more than 40,000 historic photos of Philadelphia dating to the late 1800s.
What the site lacks, Decker said, is a sense of lives lived.
"I grew up at 12th and Bigler," in South Philadelphia, Decker said. "It was a small brick rowhouse, but it was in a real neighborhood where people watched out for each other . . . and had a real concern for the old traditions."
Saverino said she felt it important to launch the project now, before rapid development overtakes neighborhoods like Northern Liberties and South Philadelphia.
"History is being erased from the landscape every day," Saverino added. "A lot of the old residents have moved away or died."
David O'Donnell, a board member of the Queen Village Neighbors Association in South Philadelphia who heads its historic preservation committee, said PhilaPlace complemented his group's efforts to chronicle Queen Village's past.
Queen Village is where Swedish settlers built a community in the decades before William Penn arrived and renamed it Southwark. O'Donnell, of Second and Christian Streets, lives in one of the few surviving 18th-century wood-frame houses.
Much of Queen Village's history vanished when the federal government razed blocks of it to build I-95.
O'Donnell said he hoped PhilaPlace turned up a photo of the town hall erected when Southwark was a separate municipality in Philadelphia County.
A Wawa now is on the Second Street site, north of Christian. The association has a 1956 photo of a gas station there, but nothing earlier, he said.
Saverino said she hoped to have the PhilaPlace Web site operating by November 2008, and a companion neighborhood history curriculum for the schools.
That's where Penn's School of Design and Amy Hillier come in. Hillier, assistant professor of city planning, specializes in creating interactive computerized maps.
A New Hampshire native who came to Philadelphia for graduate school 13 years ago, Hillier said she had "no intention of ever leaving. I love this city."
Hillier, who has lived in Northern Liberties and South Philadelphia, said she thought PhilaPlace would bring history alive for residents and students.
"It's clear that people are very invested in their neighborhoods," Hillier said. "I think it will be a terrific way of bringing all these elements together. We can create a map where you see an historic photo of one site and then hear someone describe where she had her first kiss, or a favorite stand of trees she used to walk through."
"Your Place and Mine," a project to chronicle the history of the neighborhoods of Greater Northern Liberties and South Philadelphia and create an interactive cultural-history Web site, PhilaPlace, begins this week.
A project of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the city Department of Records, the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, it is funded by grants from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Heritage Philadelphia Program is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Walter J. Miller Foundation.
All events are free. For more information, call the Historical Society at 215-732-6200, Ext. 227.
South Philadelphia
Wednesday: Introduction and workshop on historic neighborhood preservation, 7 to 9 p.m., Queen Village Neighbors Association, Weccacoe Playground Building, 400 block of Catharine Street.
Nov. 3: Photo and history fair, 1 to 4 p.m., Weccacoe Playground Building.
Greater Northern Liberties
Nov. 1: Introduction and workshop, 7 to 9 p.m., St. Michael the Archangel Orthodox Church, 335 Fairmount Ave.
Nov. 10: Photo and history fair, 1 to 4 p.m., St. Michael the Archangel.
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