Sharswood

Sharswood

Type	Neighborhood
Location	North Philadelphia
ZIP code(s)	19121, 19132
Named for	George Sharswood, jurist
Boundaries	Roughly Cecil B. Moore Avenue to Jefferson Street, Broad Street to 22nd Street
Adjacent	Francisville, Brewerytown, Temple University Area
Major streets	Ridge Avenue, Cecil B. Moore Avenue, 22nd Street
Transit	Broad Street Line (Cecil B. Moore Station), SEPTA bus routes
Landmarks	Sharswood/Blumberg redevelopment, Norman Blumberg Apartments site

Sharswood is a residential neighborhood in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, situated roughly between Cecil B. Moore Avenue to the south, Jefferson Street to the north, Broad Street to the east, and 22nd Street to the west. The neighborhood takes its name from George Sharswood, a prominent nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice and legal scholar whose influence extended far beyond the city he called home. Once a working-class enclave of tightly packed rowhouses, Sharswood experienced severe disinvestment throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, culminating in its association with the Norman Blumberg Apartments, a sprawling high-rise public housing complex that came to symbolize concentrated urban poverty. In the twenty-first century, Sharswood has been the focus of the Philadelphia Housing Authority's most ambitious redevelopment undertaking — the Sharswood Transformation Plan — a multi-decade, mixed-income revitalization effort that has drawn both praise for its scale and criticism for the displacement it has caused among long-standing residents. Today, the neighborhood exists in a prolonged state of transition, with new townhomes and community facilities rising alongside blocks of older rowhouses and vacant lots, as the community grapples with questions of affordability, identity, and equity.

History

Origins and Naming

The neighborhood of Sharswood bears the name of George Sharswood (1810–1883), one of the most distinguished jurists in Pennsylvania history. Born in Philadelphia, Sharswood rose to become a justice and later Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, serving from 1867 to 1882. He is perhaps best known in legal circles for his influential 1854 essay An Essay on Professional Ethics, which served as the foundation for the American Bar Association's first formal code of professional conduct adopted in 1908. Sharswood was also a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and a celebrated legal commentator, producing annotated editions of Blackstone's Commentaries that remained in use for decades after his death. The assignment of his name to this stretch of North Philadelphia reflects the common nineteenth-century practice of honoring prominent civic and intellectual figures in the naming of city neighborhoods and streets.

Settlement and Early Development

Like much of North Philadelphia, the area that would become Sharswood was farmland and sparsely settled countryside through the early nineteenth century, lying well beyond the original boundaries of William Penn's surveyed city. Development accelerated significantly in the decades following the Consolidation Act of 1854, which merged the City of Philadelphia with surrounding Philadelphia County and opened vast new territories to urban growth. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the neighborhood's street grid was largely established, and modest rowhouses — the characteristic architectural form of working-class Philadelphia — began to fill the blocks in earnest. Ridge Avenue, which cuts diagonally through the area, had long served as an important artery connecting the city to its northwestern hinterlands, and its presence helped anchor commercial activity along the neighborhood's western edge.

By the early twentieth century, Sharswood had emerged as a densely populated working-class neighborhood. Its residents were drawn primarily from the waves of European immigrants and African American migrants who were reshaping the demography of North Philadelphia during the Great Migration era. African American families moving north from the American South in search of industrial employment and relief from the rigid racial caste system of Jim Crow found in neighborhoods like Sharswood — and the adjacent Francisville and Brewerytown — some of the few sections of the city where they could legally rent or purchase housing, owing to discriminatory real estate practices that effectively confined Black Philadelphians to specific corridors of the city. By mid-century, Sharswood and the surrounding blocks were overwhelmingly African American in composition, a demographic pattern that has persisted to the present day.

Mid-Century Decline and Public Housing

The post–World War II decades brought dramatic changes to Sharswood, as they did to many inner-city Philadelphia neighborhoods. White middle-class flight to the suburbs, enabled by federal mortgage subsidies and new highway construction, drained population and purchasing power from the urban core. Industrial employers who had sustained working-class families closed or relocated. Deindustrialization left behind unemployment, poverty, and a housing stock that was increasingly difficult to maintain as property values fell and tax revenues declined.

In this context, the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) constructed the Norman Blumberg Apartments — a massive public housing complex named for a former PHA board chairman — on a large tract of cleared land in Sharswood during the 1960s. The complex ultimately comprised several high-rise towers and low-rise buildings, housing thousands of residents at its peak. Like many large-scale American public housing developments of the era, the Blumberg complex was shaped by the "towers in the park" planning philosophy associated with modernist urban renewal, which prioritized density and open green space at the expense of the traditional street grid and neighborhood commercial fabric. Over subsequent decades, the complex became emblematic of the problems associated with concentrated poverty: underfunded maintenance, high crime rates, social isolation, and the systematic neglect of residents by municipal authorities.

Late Twentieth Century

Through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Sharswood continued to struggle. Beyond the Blumberg complex, much of the surrounding neighborhood suffered from abandonment, with vacant lots and boarded rowhouses becoming increasingly common features of the streetscape. The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s compounded existing social challenges, and the neighborhood's population declined sharply as residents who were able to leave did so. By the early 2000s, Sharswood was consistently identified in city planning documents and journalistic accounts as one of Philadelphia's most distressed neighborhoods, characterized by extreme poverty, very low rates of homeownership, high unemployment, and deteriorated physical infrastructure.

The Sharswood Transformation Plan

Origins and Planning

The Sharswood Transformation Plan emerged from a decade-long evolution in federal and local public housing policy that increasingly emphasized the dispersal of poverty, the demolition of large high-rise complexes, and the creation of mixed-income communities as alternatives to the concentrated-poverty model embodied by developments like Norman Blumberg. Nationally, the federal HOPE VI program, launched in the early 1990s, had funded the demolition of numerous failed high-rise public housing projects across the country, replacing them with lower-density mixed-income developments. Philadelphia undertook similar efforts in other neighborhoods — most notably the demolition of the Hawthorne neighborhood's Southwark Plaza and projects in West Philadelphia — before turning its attention to Sharswood.

The Philadelphia Housing Authority formally adopted the Sharswood/Blumberg Transformation Plan in 2012, after an extended period of community planning and outreach. The plan called for the phased demolition of the Blumberg towers, the redevelopment of the site and surrounding blocks with mixed-income housing, and broader neighborhood revitalization efforts including improved retail, community facilities, and infrastructure. The plan area encompassed approximately 1,200 acres extending well beyond the immediate Blumberg footprint, making it the largest single redevelopment initiative undertaken by the PHA in its history and one of the largest public housing transformation efforts in the eastern United States.

Demolition and Construction

Demolition of the Norman Blumberg high-rise towers commenced in 2016, with implosions of the towers attracting media coverage and drawing crowds of onlookers, many of them former residents with complicated feelings about the end of a place that had been home to generations of families. The demolition was not without controversy: community advocates and housing scholars raised persistent concerns about the adequacy of relocation assistance provided to displaced residents, the sufficiency of replacement affordable housing units, and the risk that the transformation plan would ultimately accelerate gentrification rather than create genuine opportunity for existing low-income residents.

In place of the towers, the PHA and its development partners have been constructing a new neighborhood fabric of low-rise townhomes, apartment buildings, and mixed-use structures. The new housing is intended to be indistinguishable in appearance from market-rate construction, deliberately eschewing the institutional aesthetic of traditional public housing. Units are distributed across income levels, with a mix of public housing replacement units, affordable rentals, and market-rate homes for purchase. The Ridge Avenue commercial corridor has been targeted for retail revitalization, with new storefronts and a grocery store among the amenities envisioned to serve the emerging mixed-income community.

Controversies and Criticisms

The Sharswood Transformation Plan has generated substantial debate among housing advocates, urban planners, and community members. Critics have pointed to the slow pace of replacement housing construction relative to demolition, arguing that former Blumberg residents — many of whom were given vouchers to find housing elsewhere in the city or region — have been effectively displaced from their community without a realistic path to return. Studies of similar transformation projects nationally have found that only a minority of original public housing residents ultimately return to redeveloped sites, raising questions about who ultimately benefits from such large-scale efforts.

Supporters of the plan, including PHA leadership and city officials, have countered that the concentrated poverty of the Blumberg complex was itself harmful to residents, and that dispersal, combined with the creation of a genuinely mixed neighborhood, offers better long-term outcomes for low-income families than the failed model of high-rise public housing. The plan has received federal Choice Neighborhoods Initiative funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provided significant resources but also imposed accountability requirements intended to ensure meaningful replacement housing.

Geography and Architecture

Sharswood occupies a roughly rectangular section of North Philadelphia's densely gridded street network. The neighborhood sits at a modest elevation typical of North Philadelphia's gently undulating topography. Ridge Avenue, the neighborhood's most prominent commercial street, bisects the area diagonally, running from the southeast to the northwest and reflecting its origins as an old road following a natural ridge line predating the formal city grid. This diagonal cuts across the otherwise regular pattern of east-west and north-south streets, creating triangular intersections and irregular block shapes that distinguish the Ridge Avenue corridor from the surrounding residential fabric.

The architectural character of Sharswood, as in most of North Philadelphia, is defined by the brick rowhouse. The neighborhood's older housing stock dates primarily from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, featuring two- and three-story attached homes built of red or buff brick, with front stoops, modest cornices, and narrow lots typical of speculative working-class Philadelphia construction. Many of these older rowhouses have been significantly altered over the decades — with added aluminum siding, replacement windows, and modified facades — while others remain in more original condition. Vacant lots, the legacy of decades of abandonment and demolition, interrupt many blocks, lending the streetscape an uneven, gap-toothed quality that the ongoing redevelopment is gradually beginning to address.

The new construction associated with the Sharswood Transformation Plan has introduced a different architectural vocabulary: two- and three-story brick townhomes with contemporary detailing, designed to align with the existing street grid and create a more traditional urban streetscape than the tower-and-superblock configuration of the former Blumberg complex.

Institutions and Community Life

Schools

Sharswood is served by the School District of Philadelphia. Sharswood Elementary School has historically served the neighborhood's youngest residents, though enrollment shifts associated with the redevelopment and population displacement have affected local school populations. The neighborhood's proximity to Temple University's main campus means that higher education is a visible presence nearby, though the university's direct footprint does not extend into Sharswood proper. Various community organizations have operated afterschool and youth development programs within the neighborhood, often working in partnership with the PHA as part of the transformation plan's supportive services component.

Religious Institutions

Like much of North Philadelphia, Sharswood has historically had a rich landscape of African American churches that have served as anchors of community life, civic engagement, and social support. Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal congregations have long maintained presences in the neighborhood, and several churches have been active participants in community planning conversations around the transformation effort. These institutions represent some of the most durable expressions of neighborhood identity and social cohesion in an area that has experienced enormous physical and demographic change.

Community Organizations

The Sharswood/Blumberg Community Development Corporation and various resident associations have played roles in voicing community priorities throughout the redevelopment process. The PHA's transformation planning process incorporated formal community engagement mechanisms, including resident advisory boards, though critics have argued that meaningful community power over the shape and pace of redevelopment has remained limited.

Transportation

Sharswood is well served by public transit relative to many North Philadelphia neighborhoods. The Broad Street Line, Philadelphia's primary north-south subway, runs along Broad Street at the neighborhood's eastern edge. The Cecil B. Moore Station on the Broad Street Line provides direct rapid transit access to Center City, the Sports Complex in South Philadelphia, and points in between, and the station takes its name from Cecil B. Moore, the civil rights attorney and NAACP leader who was a dominant figure in Philadelphia's African American political life during the 1950s and 1960s. The renaming of the avenue and the station in his honor reflects the neighborhood's deep roots in African American civic history.

SEPTA bus service supplements the subway, with routes on Ridge Avenue and Cecil B. Moore Avenue connecting residents to adjacent neighborhoods including Brewerytown, Francisville, and the Fairmount area to the south. Ridge Avenue's diagonal path makes it a useful corridor for reaching destinations that lie off the strictly north-south and east-west orientation of the grid. For motorists, the neighborhood offers relatively straightforward access to the broader street network of North Philadelphia, though parking conditions have evolved with new construction.

Demographics

Sharswood is a predominantly African American neighborhood. Decades of racial residential segregation shaped its demographic composition, and while the transformation plan has been framed in part around creating a more economically diverse community, the incoming market-rate residents have thus far largely reflected the broader patterns of the surrounding area rather than representing dramatic racial demographic change. Poverty rates in Sharswood have historically been among the highest in the city, and unemployment and low educational attainment have persisted as challenges. The 2020 U.S. Census and American Community Survey data reflected the ongoing nature of demographic and housing transitions in the neighborhood, with population figures complicated by the displacement of Blumberg residents and the gradual arrival of new households in newly constructed units.

Relationship to Adjacent Neighborhoods

Sharswood's identity is inseparable from its relationships with surrounding communities. To the south, Francisville has experienced its own wave of gentrification-driven change, with rising property values and new residents drawn by proximity to Fairmount and Art Museum Area amenities pressing northward toward Sharswood's boundaries. To the west, Brewerytown — the former industrial corridor along the Schuylkill riverfront — has similarly seen substantial reinvestment and demographic change. To the east, Broad Street forms a meaningful dividing line between Sharswood and the neighborhoods beyond, while to the north the neighborhood transitions toward other North Philadelphia communities characterized by a mix of residential stability and ongoing disinvestment. The Temple University Area to the northeast represents another axis of change, as university-driven development has expanded outward from Temple's main campus in recent years.

See Also

• Francisville
• Brewerytown
• North Philadelphia
• Philadelphia Housing Authority
• Cecil B. Moore
• Broad Street Line
• Temple University Area
• Norman Blumberg Apartments
• Ridge Avenue