Capstone: Yu

Capstone: Weizi Yu

Strawberry Mansion Vocational Training Center

Strawberry Mansion turned from a middle-class Jewish neighborhood to a black neighborhood since the late 1950s. The Jewish population called their moving out from the community as “Exodus”, while many of the black residents’ history afterwards remains untold. The main thread of the black people’s Civil Rights Movement in Strawberry Mansion was the fight for employment equity, which peaked at the 1963 Strawberry Mansion Junior High School construction yard protest and the 1964 Columbia Avenue Riot. Realizing that protesting wasn’t sufficient to help the large number of unemployed black people, NAACP leader Leon Sullivan established the Opportunities Industrial Center (OIC) in 1964, intending to train the black residents vocationally in various fields of profession.

Bird view of the Strawberry Mansion Vocational Training Center (Weizi Yu, 2025).
Today, OIC still functions in North Philadelphia, providing mainly culinary and media courses. As more construction opportunities occur in Strawberry Mansion, vocational training in construction fields, including plumbing, electricity, HVAC, and carpentry, will be vital to help the employment of the younger generation and revitalize the declining commercial corridor on Ridge Avenue. The project aims to utilize the historic Tanner House and the vacant True Value hardware store, which was a site of memory for locals in the 1980s, to build up the Strawberry Mansion Vocational Training Center.

The center’s design intends to minimize intervention on the buildings to save funds. Tanner House’s interior would be refurbished to provide a classroom, an office, and a mentor’s temporary living space. A shed would be built at the rear of the hardware store building to extend it to a large workshop space. The street front of the workshop space is controlled by a set of barn doors with exhibitions of the site’s civil rights history. The hardware store’s 35 foot by 30 foot storefront will be revitalized as an exhibition space for the center students’ learning achievements.
Layout of the exhibition space in storefront (Weizi Yu, 2025).

Site plan (Weizi Yu, 2025).

Capstone: Weizi Yu

Students

Faculty