Northern Liberties ranks among the oldest and most continuously evolving neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Northern Liberties — the name comes from the fact that it was outside the original city limits, beyond the northern liberty of the city — was settled in the eighteenth century by German immigrants and developed as a manufacturing district in the nineteenth, home to sugar refineries, glassworks, and later electric companies. Edgar Allan Poe lived in a house on Spring Garden Street at the southern edge of the neighborhood from 1843 to 1844, the period when he wrote The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold Bug, and The Black Cat; the house is preserved as a national memorial.
By the mid-twentieth century the neighborhood had declined as manufacturing left. Artists moved into the empty factories in the 1970s and 80s, establishing the pattern repeated in neighborhoods across America: cheap space attracts creatives, creatives attract bars and restaurants, bars and restaurants attract gentrification, gentrification raises rents and displaces the creatives. Northern Liberties today is an affluent residential and nightlife neighborhood with bars, restaurants, and boutiques in the former factory buildings.
The Schmidt's Brewery complex, which produced beer here from 1860 to 1987, has been converted to apartments and retail.