Home Sweet Home: 7th & Lombard in Philadelphia

South 7th & Lombard Streets.
Photo by Diane Bianchi.

Sitting on the marble steps of my grandmother's house, I watched the neighborhood play baseball across the street at Starr Garden Park in Philadelphia. Home base was to my right and third base was to my left. Cars parked parallel along the curb, feeding the coin meters, narrowing the street to a single lane. Chain-link fencing enclosed the whole park.

From my grandmother's second-floor bedroom, peering through wide-slat Venetian blinds, I had a higher view: the baseball diamond, the basketball court, the playground where I rode the Stagecoach and the swings, and beyond it all, the neon Levis Hot Dogs sign on 6th Street.


An old canopy of trees bordered that open space, out of place amid the three-story brick rowhomes on every side. I sometimes wondered what had been there before Starr Garden. Was it a forest? Or was it full of buildings where people lived and worked?


My grandmother's parents bought the storefront house at 506 South 7th Street in the 1910s and operated a grocery store there. That storefront, between Lombard Street and cobblestoned Bradford Alley, was my first home. Later my parents moved next door, into my grandmother's apartment building at 508. She also owned the parking lot at 510. I considered those three properties to be my grandmother's block.

South 7th Street & Bradford Alley.
Photo by Diane Bianchi.

Years later, while browsing the shelves at the University of Iowa Library, I found W.E.B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899. I majored in Sociology at Temple University in the early 1980s but had never heard of Du Bois or his social study. My grandmother's block sat on the eastern edge of his 7th Ward map. Further research revealed that these properties had at one time been controlled by the Octavia Hill Association, and that 510 had been their office.

This summer, I stumbled upon an article on the 1838 Black Metropolis website about a place called Benezet Hall. It wasn't until 1830, when the Benezet Philanthropic Society purchased the building, that it became a hall for a Black mutual aid society. The Philadelphia Register of Historic Places confirms the building dates to 1797 and names the Society, but says nothing about who actually built it, or who owned it before 1830. That answer came from a deed I found myself on FamilySearch. A house carpenter named John Connor erected it decades before my family ever set foot on that block. I haven't found his name published anywhere else.


I have always known that the back of 508 is shaped like an octagon. My grandmother told me that's the reason the building is on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places and why it can never be altered. What I still don't know is why, and by whom, the octagon was built. I narrowed the window to between 1797 and 1835, and that's the question I'm chasing now.


While writing this, I kept coming back to one song. It was filmed at a Habitat for Humanity build in Philadelphia, and it says something about belonging to a place no matter how far you've gone.

"Who Says You Can't Go Home" — Bon Jovi and Jennifer Nettles