Ex-residents celebrate memories of Richard Allen Homes housing project

IT WAS DEMOLISHED in 1996 to make way for updated single-family dwellings, but for some folks, the Richard Allen Homes housing project will always be home.

"There's been a significant rehabilitation of what used to be the projects, but there's still a sense of community that transcends that for the people that lived there then and now," said A. Bruce Crawley, a Center City businessman who once lived there.

That sense of community spawned the Original Richard Allen Committee, which today will hold its 18th annual reunion picnic at Fairmount Park's Lemon Hill, 33rd and Poplar streets.

"The importance is that this is a continuation of a community we started back in the housing development, and there's a close relationship among the people that lived there," said committee spokesman Crawley, president of Millennium 3 Management, a communications and public-relations firm.

"Even today, they continue to rely on each other, support each other."

Crawley speaks wistfully of the community that once existed there.

"Richard Allen was one of the first housing projects in Philadelphia," Crawley said. "It had about 1,200 units, enclosed in a way that you knew people, and played with, socialized with and grew up with people in various part of the project.

"It was like a community unto itself, a gated community in which we really formed great relationships."

When ground broke for the Richard Allen Homes in October 1940, the project was seen as an upgrade to the squalid "bandbox" slums of the North Philly neighborhood bounded by 9th and 12th streets, from Poplar Street to Fairmount Avenue. The total cost of the project was $7.5 million, and the first residents moved in on Oct. 1, 1941.

"In addition to relieving the housing shortage, the homes will also help to alleviate the need for playgrounds and recreation areas in that section," Housing Authority executive director James B. Kelly said at the time. "Only one-fourth of the eight city blocks will be covered by buildings. The remainder will be open spaces."

The new housing was considered so desirable that, in its war effort, the U.S. government tried to wrest the property from the low-income residents and use it for defense housing.

In 1942, acting U.S. Housing Administrator Leon H. Keyserling withdrew his request to use the Richard Allen Homes for the war effort, after U.S. Rep. Michael J. Bradley talked him out of it.

But decades of neglect and disrepair transformed the Richard Allen Homes from a beacon of hope to a public eyesore, a poster-child for failed low-income housing policies.

Despite a series of high-profile conferences - including a rare City Council meeting held there in 1980 - the place continued to deteriorate. The last residents moved out in 1996, paving the way for the newly constructed townhomes.

Crawley admits that the demolition was necessary, but he'd rather focus on the community that once was - and on the colorful people who lived there, such as Mr. Buddy, who always has horseshoes at the ready, and Anita DeBrest, whom Crawley called "the matriarch of Richard Allen."

The committee, Crawley said, is composed of "interested people who weren't blessed with a whole lot of economic opportunity but were looking to help each other."

He expects as many as 600 folks to attend today's picnic, which is free and begins at noon.

At the event, signatures will be gathered for the Green Campaign, which helps victims of hurricanes Rita and Katrina. The committee also will provide a scholarship to a student, honoring deceased members Warren "Boo" Sanders and Charles "Cobb" Balmer.

"It's that kind of family relationship between and among the people that was a factor in creating this group," Crawley said. "I am very proud to have grown up in Richard Allen."