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Arden Jordan | Community Building as Neighborhood Preservation: A Case Study of Cedar Park in Postwar West Philadelphia

city block with 3-story rowhouses with diverse commercial activity in first-floor storefronts
Baltimore Avenue, the commercial corridor of Cedar Park, is home to many Southeast Asian and Ethiopian restaurants and businesses reflecting the two main groups that immigrated to the neighborhood in the late 20th century (Arden Jordan, 2024).
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city block with 3-story rowhouses with diverse commercial activity in first-floor storefronts
Baltimore Avenue, the commercial corridor of Cedar Park, is home to many Southeast Asian and Ethiopian restaurants and businesses reflecting the two main groups that immigrated to the neighborhood in the late 20th century (Arden Jordan, 2024).

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Arden Jordan (MSHP '24) won the Anthony Nicholas Brady Garvan Award for an Outstanding Thesis. 

Abstract: This thesis explores community-led efforts in Cedar Park, a West Philadelphia neighborhood, to ‘stabilize’ the community in the wake of white flight, between 1960 and 1990. As Cedar Park shifted from a primarily white neighborhood to a racially diverse community, two groups—Cedar Park Neighbors, a neighborhood civic association, and the Movement for a New Society, a radical pacifist group—applied varied volunteer efforts to stabilize and revitalize Cedar Park. These included: housing rehabilitation and related education, establishment of a community land trust, a block association to improve community safety, and a food co-op to address food insecurity. While contemporaneous urban renewal efforts in Philadelphia pursued preservation through regulation, Cedar Park Neighbors and Movement for a New Society realized preservation through these alternative means. By focusing on community-building and tending to the social, economic, and physical challenges of the neighborhood, these groups helped maintain both the social and physical fabric of the neighborhood. As the preservation field expands the connection between preservation and neighborhood planning in the twenty-first century, looking back at twentieth-century community-building efforts through the lens of preservation can help clarify what is preservation. By analyzing past practices, new preservation practices are suggested including: apply existing zoning overlays; utilize funds for rehabilitation and implement education programs; advocate for zoning variations beyond traditional family structures; create permanently affordable housing; and maintain abandoned houses and vacant lots. As Cedar Park faces new challenges in the twenty-first century, these tools can help build community and manage change for the future.

Download Arden Jordan's thesis, "Community-Building as Neighborhood Preservation: A Case Study of Cedar Park in Postwar West Philadelphia."
View all Historic Preservation theses on Scholarly Commons.