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It’s not the first time Philadelphians have sought to address deep, structural problems by creating opportunities for young people to socialize. In fact, during the 1930s, community activists from the North Philadelphia settlement house, the Wharton Centre, organized poverty alleviation and anti-gang programs to occupy and rehabilitate youths away from the allure of vice and crime. Their effort is worth revisiting today as a potential model for Philadelphia going forward.
The Great Depression hit many neighborhoods in Philadelphia hard. Hundreds of thousands of people faced poverty, joblessness and homelessness. Settlement houses, churches, missions, political clubs and lodge halls offered soup kitchens, bread lines and daily necessities for the working class and poor who desperately needed them.
However, racial segregation at many of these institutions made survival even more difficult for people of color to navigate, no matter where they lived in the city. Public recreation was limited, leaving many residents, including youths, to find entertainment in movie houses, poolrooms, speakeasies and lottery establishments. Others resorted to crimes like robbery, kidnapping and murder to meet financial needs and release frustration and anger about their dismal socioeconomic status.
Juvenile delinquency also increased during the Great Depression. In North Philadelphia, White and Black youth gangs like the Muggers, 40 Thieves and Black Hawks congregated on street corners and committed petty crimes like theft. The city’s carceral system eventually dealt with juvenile delinquency at Philadelphia’s House of Detention, where detained youths awaiting criminal trials in juvenile court were offered room and board, schooling, recreation and discipline.
But some community members began proposing an alternative vision. In April 1930, Quaker and activist Helen H. Corson published an article in the Society of Friends’ journal, Friends’ Intelligencer, requesting donations. Corson, a White woman, wanted to establish a settlement house for $30,000 that specifically would steer Black youths away from gangs and crime to prevent incarceration. Her strongest argument for an institution benefiting the growing African American population was a fiscal one. “It costs society at least $500 a year to maintain a boy for a year in a modern reformatory,” explained Corson, but “to keep a boy in a boy’s club costs nine to ten dollars of society’s money” — and would greatly decrease juvenile delinquency.
According to Black social workers who studied Black families in North Philadelphia, the rise of youth gangs resulted from the “social problems and neighborhood conditions” of high unemployment along with inadequate educational and health-care facilities. Slum housing offered at exorbitant rates forced employed Black parents to work lengthy hours to pay for inadequate living conditions, while their children remained unsupervised outside of school hours.
Corson’s effort succeeded. In 1931, the Susan Parrish Wharton Memorial Settlement House opened. Named after a Quaker philanthropist, the Wharton Centre would not only assist Black families in finding affordable housing and decent employment in segregated Philadelphia, but also provide recreational facilities for youths.
Black educators like John Caswell Smith Jr. and Claudia Grant, who operated the center, drew on sociological research to understand and to try to address the problems facing their constituents. Scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederic Thrasher and William Foote Whyte had published research on urban poverty, crime and juvenile delinquency in Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston, respectively. Social workers gleaned from them that racial discrimination, social ostracism, the desire for social belonging and financial need were major causes for the formation of youth gangs. Thrasher argued that the solution to gang activity was the establishment of inclusive institutions with positive and influential mentors to steer children away from antisocial and criminal activity.
The center offered nurturing programs to demonstrate to Black children that although their neighborhood may have been a “tough” place to live, they didn’t need to join a gang to survive. Throughout the decade, it uplifted Black families by offering classes in health and cooking, along with clubs focused on domestic skills and creative arts like sewing and drama. For recreation, the settlement house offered art classes and shows, citywide youth concerts, a gymnasium for sports and tabletop games and summer camps for Black children. Social workers and college-aged volunteers even initiated community street cleaning projects to convert vacant lots into playgrounds for neighborhood children.
The Wharton Centre specifically acknowledged that havens like theirs were necessary because of racial segregation and economic exploitation in the housing and job markets. The institution also instilled an ethos of hope for a better future into the lives of poor Black youths.
During the 1940s, the Wharton Centre magnified its focus on juvenile delinquency by operating an anti-gang program under the guidance of Black social worker W. Miller Barbour, who was educated at Temple University. From 1943 to 1958, “Operation Street Corner” targeted gang members on street corners to rehabilitate them. “Gang workers” like Barbour observed, documented, interacted with and directed teenagers from gangs like the Warders, North Coasters and Tophatters to the settlement house, where they could receive mentorship and access to recreation. Social workers made conversation with youths over several weeks to build a rapport, according to Robert Rosenbaum, the center’s chairman. As long as police didn’t interfere, the gang workers could build trust with young people. At the center, gang members received access to approximately 15 clubs supervised by three staff members.
By the 1950s, the Wharton Centre served over 300 former gang members — boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18 — with athletics, weekly dances, trips, social clubs and educational programs in which they learned about basic hygiene, money management, job training, teamwork and leadership. Staff also partnered with community residents, police, churches, schools and affiliates from housing projects on outreach programs like all-city art and music shows and neighborhood parades. The center recruited leaders and operators of local institutions to participate in fundraisers and community service projects to benefit gang-prone youths and the neighborhood at large.
From the 1950s onward, job flight, White flight, declining tax revenue and protests and uprisings during the civil rights movement era inspired city officials to protect city coffers by defunding social welfare programs and increasing funding for the police department to manage public safety and curb crime.
Poor and non-White people were cast as undeserving of public resources, while city officials focused on investing in new residential and commercial real estate to attract middle-class White people and private industries in from the suburbs and back to the city as taxpayers and consumers to lift the city out of its never-ending budget deficit. In 1958, the Wharton Centre ended “Operation Street Corner” due to “insufficient funds” to maintain specialized staff. Although the Wharton Centre, which faced bankruptcy and closure in the mid-2000s, made great strides toward curbing juvenile gang activity, its effort to address the racial wealth gap between Black and White people and generational poverty has not been fulfilled.
But the Wharton Centre’s mission of addressing poverty-induced crime and the need for recreational facilities has lived on in other nonprofit, community institutions from the 1960s and beyond, such as the Young Greats Society, the House of Umoja, the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club and Mighty Writers. More can be done.
Today, Philadelphia has many opportunities to expand public recreation as a method of crime prevention and an anti-poverty initiative. For example, the Free Library of Philadelphia — the 16th largest public library system in the country — has not restored a full seven-day service to its 54 branches citywide. Most Philadelphians can’t visit the library on the weekend at all. Opening the pools is a great start. But as the Wharton Centre demonstrated, public recreation can improve quality of life and begin to address deep structural inequities. Investing in Philadelphians is the best way to solve urban issues of poverty and crime.
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