Mill Creek is a neighborhood in the
West Philadelphia section of
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, United States. It sits between 44th and 52nd Streets, north of Market Street and south of Girard Avenue. It was named for
Philadelphia's Mill Creek, which was buried during 19th-century sewer system improvements. In 1961, the sewer
collapsed, taking homes with it.
History and architectural features
During the early 1800s, Mill Creek was used as a water and power supply source by area lumber companies and gristmills. Sometime after the end of the
American Civil War, as Philadelphia's population continued to grow, business and civic leader determined that upgrades were needed to the city's sewer system. One of the projects involved diverting a section of Mill Creek through an underground brick-covered sewer culvert, which was then covered over by landfill. This decision ultimately created "a submerged floodplain" that resulted in sewer collapses during the 20th century.
The neighborhood was formerly home to the Mill Creek Apartments, a
public housing project that was designed by
Louis Kahn during the early 1950s.
Its three 17-story highrise project towers were demolished in 2002 and replaced with
suburb
A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area, which may include commercial and mixed-use, that is primarily a residential area. A suburb can exist either as part of a larger city/urban area or as a separate ...
an-style low-rise houses, a development named Lucien Blackwell Homes after the
congressman
A Member of Congress (MOC) is a person who has been appointed or elected and inducted into an official body called a congress, typically to represent a particular constituency in a legislature. The term member of parliament (MP) is an equivalen ...
.
Mill Creek was the site of the 2000 "
Lex Street Massacre," in which four men killed seven others and wounded three in retaliation for damage to a car, Philadelphia's worst killing spree in modern history.
The
Rudolph Blankenburg School, the
Mayer Sulzberger Junior High School, and
Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital are listed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
References
External links
PHA's Lucien Blackwell HomesRestoring Mill Creek: Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice, City Planning and Design Anne Whiston Spirn
New York Times
{{West Philadelphia
Neighborhoods in Philadelphia
West Philadelphia