Today’s article is a special guest post. It comes direct from the historic city of Philadelphia courtesy of Ted Maust at the fabulous Elfreth’s Alley Museum. We hope you enjoy - and please give them a visit!

Elfreth’s Alley is one of the oldest continuously inhabited residential streets in the United States

Tucked into Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood is a narrow street with an old-fashioned name: Elfreth’s Alley. The brick buildings on the South side of the Alley sit only 15 feet away from their counterparts on the North. Historical flags fly from many of the homes--the Bedford Flag, the Grand Union flag, the Flag of Great Britain--and cobblestone paves the center of the street. Walking down the street, you might think you have tumbled through a portal in time. But there, in the window...is that a plush Kermit the Frog? Despite the historical appearance of these buildings, they are still active homes, with real people living in them. A narrow trash truck even makes it down the street once a week.

Since at least 1713, this little street has been home, with possibly ten thousand people living here in the intervening three centuries. The homes that stand today, built between 1724 and 1836, have seen Philadelphia change from a bustling Colonial port to an industrial powerhouse and finally to a post-industrial city.

How did the buildings survive that span? As early as the 1930s, preservationists began advocating for the maintenance and protection of these homes, and since the 1960s, the Elfreth’s Alley Association has operated a museum at #126. The stories of that single house give a sense of the story of the street at large.

The home was built beginning in 1755, and in 1762, two women, Mary Smith and Sarah Melton, moved in. Smith and Melton were mantuamakers, or dressmakers, and called each other “sister-in-law.” It appears that they were partners in business and both contributed funds to the purchase of the home. When Smith died in 1766, she left the house and business to Melton. When Melton died during the Yellow Fever epidemic, she in turn left the house and business to Elizabeth Carr, who had joined her in the business. Carr died around 1814, bringing to an end a half-century of dressmakers in the home.

“Yet on Elfreth’s Alley, and in Philadelphia at large, women-headed households were relatively common.”

The stories of Smith, Melton, and Carr may seem to run counter to many Americans’ idea of the Colonial Era. Here were women, unmarried--or, in Carr’s case, separated from her husband--and owning property and a successful business. Yet on Elfreth’s Alley, and in Philadelphia at large, women-headed households were relatively common. Many widows on this street were able to remain in their homes after the death of their husbands by becoming teachers, mantuamakers, or operating boarding houses. In an urban setting like Philadelphia, marriage rates were lower than in rural areas, in part because young women could commodify their home-making skills--laundry, cooking, sewing, cleaning--to bring in wages for their families and thus delayed marriage later than their countryside counterparts.

While Smith, Melton, and Carr were certainly in a minority of women in that they lived adult lives outside of marriage, they had much in common with other mantuamakers in the city during the late 18th century. Mantuamakers were distinct from seamstresses and tailors in that their primary expertise was elaborate gowns. This work took significant skill, and many mantuamakers listed in the city directories of the era were middle-aged. The vast majority of mantuamakers were widowed, unmarried, or separated, and the most successful of them (judging by their persistence in the city directory) drew on familial support or lived with other single women, as Smith, Melton, and Carr did. Finally, #126 Elfreth’s Alley was located in the most popular area of Philadelphia for mantuamakers, where narrow alleyways offered affordable accommodation while still being a short walk from Philadelphia’s most prosperous denizens--the ideal customers. The partnerships these women formed certainly made their financial situation more secure, but there were also times where other individuals were listed at this address, indicating that they sometimes shared their home with boarders in exchange for rent.

As the memory of the dressmakers faded from #126 in the mid-19th century, the house became the home of German cordwainers, or shoemakers. Louis Kolb and his wife Mary purchased #126 in 1847 and the neighboring #124 in 1859, living in one or the other with their eight children until about 1870. He sold #126 to fellow German shoemaker John Schoendienst in 1873, and the Schoendienst family lived there through the end of the century. Throughout the Kolb and Schoendienst tenures, #126 was also home to apprentice and journeyman shoemakers learning the trade under Louis and John, as well as a variety of other boarders, as the dressmakers had done. Kolb had expanded #126, and by the late 19th century,the Census often listed over ten people living on the property. In fact, Louis Kolb had not just added on to #126, but also built a second house, albeit a very small one--it had just one room on each of its three floors, on the same lot. The addition of this rental property followed trends on Elfreth’s Alley and in the surrounding neighborhood during the second half of the 19th century. Demand for cheap housing remained high and many property owners opted to sacrifice open space on their lots for cheaply built rental units, often called “tenements.”

From at least 1785, some residents of the Alley had toiled as laborers, unloading ships in the harbor, moving heavy items around the bustling city, finding whatever work they could. By the late 19th century, industrialization meant that more of the street’s residents were working in backbreaking jobs while only just breaking even. Residents were now factory workers and day laborers, along with city firefighters and police officers, and they lived in aging homes and tenements, likely in unsanitary conditions.

In 1930, Harry and Florence Hurst, along with their four children, lived in the rear tenement of #126. Archaeological evidence shows that this building was built with “improvisation,” with walls narrower in some points than others, and that a portion of the top floors overhung a first-floor privy. The evidence suggests that in various ways, this house was unsafe, and, perhaps for this reason, the Hursts only paid 8 dollars per month in rent. Harry Hurst was the son of German immigrants, and like his father Fredrick, he worked much of his adult life as a laborer in various factories and machine shops.

By 1940, the Hursts had moved to #137 Elfreth’s Alley, slightly nicer accommodations. Yet they probably continued to struggle; Harry had worked on an intermittent basis in 1939 and was presently employed on a Works Progress Administration project.

In 1937, #126 had been condemned by the city and saved by the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks (PhilaLandmarks), who did minimal repair and rented it out. The repairs may have included pulling down the rear tenement--only one family is listed at the address on the 1940 Census. It is possible that the Hursts were the back building’s final occupants.

The intervention of PhilaLandmarks was part of a larger effort to protect and publicize the street that had begun in 1933 when local restaurateur Mary “Dollie” Ottey wrote to the Philadelphia Bulletin to draw attention to several endangered houses. Ottey would also found the Elfreth’s Alley Association (EAA), an organization which worked alongside PhilaLandmarks on many early activities. These early preservation efforts were especially notable given that there were no notable historical figures associated with the Alley; other preservation efforts in the same era focused on the homes of American politicians and authors. Ottey and her allies tried to connect the street to famous Philadelphians, but by mid-century, research showed that those claims were largely unsubstantiated.

Throughout the middle of the 20th century, the EAA and PhilaLandmarks had some success in drawing attention to the street, as every couple years a newspaper would “discover” the “ancient” alley. Yet the homes were still in disrepair, as years of overcrowding and poverty of the residents took a toll on the old buildings.

By 1957, #126 was again condemned and PhilaLandmarks handed it off to the EAA to repair it and to reconstruct, as much as possible, in its 18th century form, with the end goal of opening a museum. The reconstruction was overseen by Penelope Hartshorne (later Penelope Hartshorne Batcheler), a young architect who had studied under Mies van der Rohe and was a protege of National Park Service preservationist Charles Peterson. Around the time that Hartshorne completed her reconstruction, the street was named a National Historic Landmark.

In the years since Dollie Ottey first started advocating for the preservation of the homes on Elfreth’s Alley, the street has become a visual shorthand for Philadelphia’s history along with sites such as Independence Hall. For the Bicentennial celebration in 1976, the city resurfaced the street, removing 19th-century Belgian block and installing a combination of cobblestone, pavers, and bricks. Metal lamp posts were replaced by wooden, “Franklin” lamp posts to complete the “Colonial” look.

Today, hundreds of thousands of visitors come to the street each year. Most stop and take photos and some enter the museum, which has expanded to include #124 Elfreth’s Alley. One challenge we, the Elfreth’s Alley Museum, have is that to most visitors, this place is chiefly interesting because it is pretty and because it confirms their ideas of what the 18th century looked like. Yet our mission is to not only preserve this place, but to also interpret the lives of the thousands of people who have lived here over the many years. To us, the stories of the dressmakers are valuable in part because they bust some myths, but they are also not the end of the story!

One way we have tried to extend the stories we tell on the Alley, and to give visitors a way to engage with the place before they come or after they leave is by producing a podcast! Check out The Alley Cast, available at all major podcatchers. Season 2 will be coming this summer.

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Elfreth’s Alley: One of the Oldest Residential Streets in America

Learn More about the Elfreth’s Alley Museum

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