WestWords: Fourth Street Surges Forward

Queen Village Reinvents Its Heart

My brother's mother-in-law grew up in South Philly, and she told me that, back in the day, all the mothers and their daughters loved to go to Fourth street and shop for fabric, and then sew themselves stylish new frocks. It was a happy memory for her.

In the 1990s, local merchants started using the term Fabric Row for the stretch of Fourth between Bainbridge and Catharine, and pretty quickly the City made it an official second name. There are still a good number of fabric and related shops on Fabric Row, but the strip has definitely diversified, creating a commercial center that can provide for many of the daily shopping needs of the surrounding neighborhood, which is called Queen Village.

(There is a Queen street in the center of Queen Village, which is apparently named after a queen of Sweden whose actual name was Christina. Christiana, Delaware, home of the Christiana Mall, is also named after her, as is the local Christina river. The Swedes were among the very first Europeans who attempted to put down roots in this area, before being overrun by the Dutch, who were in turn overrun by the English.)

And now the Queen Village Neighbors Association has decided to take back the street itself and give it to the people. If you look at old photographs of similar streets you can see what Fabric Row would have looked like before cars - jammed with people walking in every direction and abruptly shifting course when something in a store window caught the eye.

There's another piece of this picture that you might not expect: The curbs were lined with pushcarts, from which vendors sold a wide variety of items. The curb was a very lively liminal space on Fourth street. Then the cars needed the curb for parking, and the curb became a dead liminal space. Or, as The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia puts it, "With the increase of automobiles and demand for parking spaces, in 1955 a city ordinance brought an end to an era by banning pushcarts from Philadelphia streets."

So it's back to the future on Fourth. With variations, of course. I'm not expecting pushcarts to return - but the merchants who took control of the street in front of their shops did put me in mind of the pushcarts that used to occupy exactly the same space.

And the current approach to open streets on Fourth is one day on two weekends in October. And it's just an experiment for now.

I do think kids will be the key to success here. Kids don't need elaborate props - QVNA gave them chalk and bubble-blowing kits, blocks and bean bag. I think chalk was the favorite, and not just with the kids.

The shops that were open and put their goods out front definitely drew in passers-by. It's so much easier to linger for a moment at a table set up in a space that nobody owns than it is to walk into a store, however welcoming it may be. Walking through that door takes you from the public space into a private space. I understand that retailers want to put you in a controlled environment, but with selling points both inside and outside, they can have the benefit of both environments.

There was a very good band - three instrumentalists and a vocalist. The music permeated the space without dominating it, and I think contributed significantly to the ambient happy energy.

I visited on Saturday, October 11, and wound up spending several hours there, just wandering around and absorbing the atmosphere (and eating a very good bagel at The Bagel Place). A QVNA person asked me to fill out a questionnaire. One of the questions was how long it had been since I last visited, and I was stumped. I finally decided it was before Covid.

Too long. My bad. Queen Village is a really nice neighborhood, and I like what's happening on its main street quite a lot.

I just love all the children.