Ludlow: Full Circle

At the beginning of the semester I had my reservations about covering the Ludlow area. During my time at Temple I have had the opportunity to live in a few of the surrounding neighborhoods. Living in them hasn't always been the most pleasant experience either.

I got my first off campus apartment on Camac Street just north of Susquehanna. The permanent residents and neighbors didn't like us. They thought Temple was trying to push them out of their neighborhood. Neighborhoodscout.com named Broad and Dauphin the 16th worst neighborhood in the country while I was living there--only two blocks from where I was living. A housemate of mine had been robbed at gunpoint, and there were home invasions on the block too. I have since moved out but these were the experiences that I brought with me to MURL.

When I first read some of the historical data on Ludlow, I assumed it was just going to be more of the same from North Philadelphia. By the numbers Ludlow seemed to be another community suffering from urban blight. However, I quickly found out that isn't the case in Ludlow.

The neighborhood was at one point one of the roughest areas in the city. Since then development has really started to turn the place around. Housing projects are breathing new life into blocks that once resembled moon craters. CDCs and grassroots community organizations are making leaps and bounds improvements in the quality of life. In the Old Kennsington section of the neighborhood, there is a thriving multicultural community of homeowners that have been in the neighborhood since the early 1990s when Ludlow was at its worst. The neighborhood is really beginning to come full circle and turn back into what it once was--a working class community.