An independent analysis of The Inquirer archives by Temple University’s Abby Whitaker found that the paper mainly focused on urban renewal projects as a benefit for the city that would help stem the postwar challenges that faced urban America.
When the opposition did get coverage, in articles like 1957′s “Property Owners Hit Penn Expansion Plan” or 1965′s “Housing Bullying Charged,” the coverage rarely delved deeply into the allegations made by opponents, and when critics were quoted, they were most often white professionals rather than Black residents or business owners.
Much attention was lavished on the jobs that would be created – 10,000 from the University City Science Center alone, one 1964 Inquirer article noted – or the Penn and Drexel faculty and staff attracted back to city living.
“Luckily for Philadelphia … Penn decided not to run this time, but to stand firm and fight the blight of its surroundings,” a 1962 Inquirer article reads. The reporter, who goes on to note that the city’s larger urban renewal efforts had displaced 5,000 families and 2,500 “other individuals,” does not quote any opponents of the project or any of the people displaced. By 1970, Black Bottom, which stretched from 32d Street west to 40th and from Lancaster and Powelton Avenues south to Sansom Street, had been all but erased by a series of condemnations and buyouts.
The university cleared Palmer’s neighborhood using a law passed in 1959 that allowed for the clearance of blighted land in order to expand campuses. Penn itself had been a key player in drafting the law and utilized these urban renewal tools more aggressively than any other university, according to historians John L. Puckett and Mark Frazier Lloyd.
Whitaker’s analysis found the term blight was often uncritically adopted by reporters. Within stories, the term was usually employed to describe buildings being cleared for new projects, but it was often also used to describe predominantly Black neighborhoods. “Each year larger proportions of the black population are crowded into the ghettos, and the ghettos spill their blight over continually larger proportions of the cities,” wrote the author of one 1967 Inquirer Magazine story.
Only a single Inquirer article complicated the description of blight in West Philadelphia, noting that a Penn professor named Paul Davidoff argued that the Redevelopment Authority was simply using the term as an excuse to clear the area and secure federal funds.