Streetcars made the neighborhood you are in, Spruce Hill, one of the finest intact Victorian streetcar suburbs in America. West Philadelphia's Spruce Hill and Woodland Terrace neighborhoods were developed in the 1880s and 90s as the streetcar lines extended west from Center City, allowing middle-class families to live in large houses with yards while commuting downtown for work. The resulting fabric of three-story Victorian row houses, twin houses, and the occasional detached villa has been remarkably well preserved, creating a neighborhood where the street grid, the architecture, and even many of the original trees are intact from the late nineteenth century.
Clark Park, a small triangular park at 43rd and Chester, is the neighborhood's social center, hosting a farmers market, public theater performances, and daily gatherings of dog-walkers and chess players. The neighborhood has been home to successive waves of residents: the German and Irish families of the late nineteenth century, the Jewish community of the mid-twentieth, the African American families who moved in as redlining and blockbusting changed the neighborhood in the 1960s and 70s, and more recently the mixed community of long-term residents, university staff, and younger arrivals who have stabilized property values without entirely displacing the existing community.