The Providence Dye Works
WHYY's Mhari Saito reports on a mill that once helped fill Emerald Street with workers and now stands blackened from fire. ----------------------------- Walk out the faded grey door of Gail Brown's apartment and look left. A rusted refrigerator sits in an overgrown lot next door. Across the street from the yard stands one and a half three-story brick buildings...all that's left of Providence Dye Works. "They're knocking it down," Gail Brown says. "I'm hoping they get the second building down. I'm hoping thats going too." When Brown moved to Kensington in the early 1970s, the old dye works was closed but people still filled the building. A cabinet maker, an upholsterer and someone making statues worked in the pair of buildings. Brown, now a deli worker in her early 40s, liked to sit out in the summers and chat with neighbors. "We had a lot of trees and it was nice and shady and breezy," Brown says. "And then the trees all kinda got knocked down or they all died. But it was nice. We didn't have all these vacant homes. They had everybody living in them, you know, but it has really changed. Now it's all vacant and nobody seems to want to move back in or they don't stay in the neighborhood." The Emerald Street warehouses have been vacant and boarded up for the past few years. Last November, someone broke in and started a four-alarm fire. Around Thanksgiving, five more followed. No one was injured and none of the arsonists have yet been caught. "Since I bought it it has been downhill with the vandalism and the break-ins and what have you," Oliver Paynter, one of the buildings owners, says. Oliver Paynter has owned one of the abandoned factories since 1998. He owns dozens of properties around the city and calls himself a cabinet maker and failing land investor. "It has been a struggle to keep [the building] secured and keep out vandals and drug addicts." Now Paynter just wants to get rid of his dye works property and is looking for the owners of its sister building. So is the city fire marshal's office. Investigators have traced deeds to a Wilmington-based company, but can't reach the owners. This is something which the fire marshal says is hardly surprising. The city allocates 10 million dollars every year to demolish properties belonging to people they never find. ********* In the 1880s, Emerald Street was bustling with looms weaving cottons and fabrics. Providence Dye Works was surrounded by a dozen textile factories. Companies on neighboring blocks made everything from yarn to boxes...all you needed to get the country's best textiles to market. Temple University anthropologist Muriel Kirkpatrick has studied the mills near Providence Dye Works. "It would have been smelly with the dye factories and things," Kirkpatrick says,"with the plumes of smoke rising above the industrial parts of the city." With few labor or environmental laws the workers' life was far from perfect. But by 1900, nearly 100 thousand people, immigrants from England, Ireland and Germany, lived on the row-house lined streets of Kensington. Kirkpatrick says at the turn of the century the dye works' two hundred and forty employees quickly dyed yarns and fabrics in hundreds of colors. "These buildings strike me as the cathedrals of the industrial city with their surrounding tenants, because of the scale, the size of them and how they were the center of people's lives." Kirkpatrick says. But the mills couldn't survive the economic highs of the 1920s and the stock market crash of the 1930s. After World War II, a homogenization of style and a movement towards mechanization killed off much of what was left of Philadelphia's high-quality textile lines. Providence Dye Works shut its doors in the early 1950s. The end of the mills meant lost Kensington jobs and for many suburbia was beckoning. In 1950, 149 thousand people lived around here...in forty years that number dropped by more than a third. Buildings like Providence Dye Works sat abandoned, much like the neighborhoods they once supported. ********** "Do you have all your teeth?" Gail Brown jokes. "Yes I have all my teeth!" Rebecca Shaw answers. Gail Brown likes that neighborhood kids hang out in her house with her son. On this day, Brown sits on a bed that doubles as a couch and jokes with 15-year-old twins Rebecca and Stacey Shaw about what Kensington is known for now. "That's, like, the reaction we get from everyone when we say we're from Kensington," Stacey Shaw says. "They're like, 'Ohhhhh....youre from Kensington!'" Like much of industrial Philadelphia, Kensington never rebounded from the population loss. Neighbors say the arson and drug dealing has lessened thanks to police efforts, but it's hard to see past the trashed lots and blackened buildings. Paul Malvey grew up near here and now works with the New Kensington Community Development Corporation. He drives around the area looking for opportunities to turn his neighborhood around. "Some of the houses...people are clinging, trying to keep their houses up," Malvey says. "Some of them they've given up. There's mounds of trash around...there's boarded houses, abandoned houses...but then there's little pieces of hope." ****** "In here, my ma has her roses," Lisa Ramos says as she unlocks the gate to an alleyway filled with plants, fountains and ceramic statues. The garden is a block and a half from Gail Brown's house and the remains of Providence Dye Works. With the help of the New Kensington CDC, the Ramos family turned an alley from a hiding place for drunks and addicts into an award-winning garden filled with flowers and vegetables. Like some of her neighbors, Lisa Ramos is fiercely loyal to Kensington and takes negative comments about her neighborhood personally. "It makes me angry for people to think that everybody in Kensinton are criminals," Ramos says. "I mean, I just want people to look and say, 'She lives in Kensington and look how nice their neighborhood is.'" Back up the street, Gail Brown says she'd move if she could afford it. In her next breath Brown says, despite the area's problems, she and her son like it here with friends nearby. But her neighborhood's decline is threatening to literally fall down around her head. The 100-year-old home next to hers is condemned. "I live in fear that this house next to me might be torn down and my house is going to fall down with it," Brown says. "That's the biggest fear I have. Where am I going to go! What's going to happen if this falls down? Where am I going to go?" Brown's looking to Philadelphia Mayor John Street and his campaign promises to put 250 million dollars into fixing up these forgotten parts of the city. The Street administration is getting ready to demolish thousands of buildings in coming months. Right now, there are no concrete plans for what will take the place of Providence Dye Works once it comes down. City officials and local activists acknowledge the toughest part of the so-called anti-blight plan will be redevelopment of former industrial areas no longer viable. Brown says she dreams of the day when Emerald Street looks like it's supposed to be, like a neighborhood again. "If they could just build the neighborhood, build it all up it'd be great," Brown says. "I'm looking forward to it myself."  whyy.org |