‘Get their stories in ink’: A new archaeological project is helping to preserve the history of West Philly’s Black Bottom

Buttons, pennies, and glass shards might not look like much. But they’re a reminder that West Philly’s Black Bottom neighborhood still matters decades after it was demolished.

Earlier this week, the team behind the Heritage West community archaeology project broke ground on their excavation of the neighborhood. The collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Museum, and local community groups aims to unearth pieces of the once thriving Black community that was ultimately cleared by Penn and Drexel to create the present-day University City.

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“There [is] a real opportunity for archaeology to add something to this history and to try and integrate what we as archaeologists do with what historians do and what local community community members remember and know about these neighborhoods,” said Megan C. Kassabaum, one of the project directors and an associate professor of anthropology at Penn and the Weingarten Associate Curator for North America at the Penn Museum.

Sarah Linn, another project director and an associate director of academic engagement with the Penn Museum, said that archaeology can add materiality to these stories. “It can provide a little deeper history than what people remember,” she said.

The excavation site is in the parking lot of the Community Education Center in Powelton Village at 3500 Lancaster Ave. This block was once home to community centers, theaters, and residences as Black Bottom thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before Penn, Drexel, and Presbyterian Hospital banded together to buy properties and redevelop the area.

An estimated 5,000 residents were displaced as the universities’ West Philadelphia Corp. used tactics like eminent domain to claim the land. Penn archaeologists believe that where this parking lot now sits, there once stood several brick rowhouses and twin wooden homes constructed as early as the 1840s.

The first stage of the dig is exploratory. Previously, the archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to identify where the bulldozed rubble and basement walls of those structures lie beneath the surface. This week, they began excavating in roughly 3-by-3-foot boxes to find the areas with the most promise.

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As Penn’s classes begin at the end of the month, the more thorough, comprehensive excavation will begin. The archaeologists will work with a class of Penn undergraduates and interested community members through November to excavate and expand the chosen site to roughly the size of a car, digging just a couple of feet below ground level.

“We’re not looking for cultural heirlooms, the types of things that wouldn’t be left behind. Because in reality, those are the types of things that often make it into the historical record. Those are the things that people have oral histories about,” Kassabaum said.

She explained that mostly, they expect to be sifting through trash. Often, when homes were cleared in the 20th century, developers filled in the holes in the ground with the remains of the house to save money. But those behind Heritage West hope that whatever is left behind can still say a lot about life in the historic neighborhood.

“We’re more interested in things like, what did people eat? What types of activities did they do in their backyards? What sort of plates were they eating off of? What sort of beverages were they drinking?” Kassabaum said.

“We’re taking a very small window in and trying to get a lot of information out.”

“People are very proud of the history in this neighborhood,” said James Wright, the director of strategic partnerships and major gifts with HopePHL, a social services agency and one of Heritage West’s community partners.

He’s heard extensively from people about the nostalgia for this slice of Black Bottom on Lancaster Avenue. “It really was this cultural center in West Philadelphia,” he said.

Wright explained how from the planning stages, the project has worked closely with community members and the people who still carry the legacy of Black Bottom with them.

“People were really interested in [this project] because of the fact that it dealt so specifically with something that Penn needs to reckon with.”

Heritage West held workshops at the Community Education Center to help people trace their family histories and learn how to preserve their own family artifacts. They worked with other community partners like the Black Bottom Tribe and Penn professor Walter Palmer, who grew up in Black Bottom, to understand the neighborhood better. They also spoke with community members at local events about what they would like to see from the project.

“It’s actually wonderful to see [this] happen and connect the dots in all the stories,” Wright said.

Anyone is welcome and encouraged to help with the excavation on Fridays this fall, or with future elements of the project. You can fill out an interest form on Heritage West’s website.

One especially successful community collaboration was the creation of an interactive West Philadelphia timeline. The Heritage West team created a large written timeline for the neighborhood, but left space for community members to write in their memories of events and what the area was like.

“We’d love to hear from community members about what they’d want to see happen with the material.”

On the first day it was up, one man told the Heritage West team about how elaborately people used to decorate Lancaster Avenue for Christmas.

“When it’s just oral history, even though we know it’s real, and our children may know it’s real because of how we speak to them and tell them about it ... a lot of times as we move and get older and move out, those stories get lost, and the neighborhood could be written over,” Wright said.

Though he grew up in Southwest Philadelphia, his aunt lived in Black Bottom and told him about her neighborhood and her pride for it.

“[This is] really helping to make sure that people get to get their stories in ink,” he said.

The Heritage West team isn’t sure what the project’s end product will be. Kassabaum’s dream is an exhibit that is located in both the Penn Museum and the West Philly community. That way, it might draw typical Penn Museum-goers out into the community and community members into the museum.

But things are still very flexible, and Heritage West is looking for guidance.

“We’d love to hear from community members about what they’d want to see happen with the material,” said Linn.

For now, for everyone involved, it just feels good that a project with Penn’s backing is making a small step to take accountability for its role in clearing Black Bottom.

“People were really interested in [this project] because of the fact that it dealt so specifically with something that Penn needs to reckon with,” Kassabaum said.

“We can’t make the University of Pennsylvania be something that it’s not ... so what can we do? And for us it was well, we can marshal the resources available to archaeologists at Penn to do something good with all of that brain power and resource that’s sitting here in the city.”