Scoop’s Views

Below is a video that was shot as an advertising flick during the depression of the 1930s. Why am I posting it on my site? Because it’s a historic film, about 17 minutes long, and talks about landmarks, businesses, and the people of the Mayfair section of Philadelphia during that rough time in this nation’s history.

During my high school days, attending Philadelphia’s Lincoln High School at Rowland and Ryan Avenues., I spent a great deal of time in Mayfair, though I lived a little further north in Northeast Philadelphia.

If you look at the new home construction going on around the 9:24 mark in the video, that’s some of the construction that led to many of the cookie-cutter style homes in Mayfair at the time. From the mid-1940s through the early 1960s, a lot of new home construction converted much of Northeast Philadelphia from open fields to the Northeast Philadelphia of today. In 2004, Northeast Philadelphia provided around 70 percent of all city revenue from taxes.

As a child, I spent many days in Mayfair, at some of the shops featured in the video, even in the 1960s, with my grandmother. She’d take me out for the day, jumping on a PTC (Philadelphia Transportation Corporation) Route 3 bus — this was before the current transportation monopoly, SEPTA (South Eastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) took over the area’s transit contracts — and then on a Route 66 trackless trolley. We’d get off the trackless trolley at Frankford and Cottman Avenues., and start out journeys. It was always a great time for me when I got to spend time like that with my grandmother.