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My name is Jennifer Baker. I’m artist, painter and sculpter.
When I first moved to Northern Liberties the neighborhood was beginning to empty out.
It had been very much a working class neighborhood,
many of whom were immigrants from Ukraine and Russia, Poland,
but you know all the businesses closed, there was no place to work anymore.
And then there were younger people who were
artists who were moving in, who liked the availability of basically cheap space, cheap studio space.
There was definitely community here. But,
it was small, which in a way it was nice because you could know a lot of your neighbors.
So in the late 80s and early 90s, there are all these fires and a lot of the old industrial
buildings were gutted and demolished by fire.
I felt like it was an important time to sort of catch. At some point, all this building started.
You know, more recently it’s gotten to the point when there’s like nothing left of the old neighborhood almost.
One thing that really remains in the neighborhood are the churches.
Although, they are very much less visible because of the scale of
the building around them. And they were the tallest things in the neighborhood
If you live here there’s a grocery store now, and, you know, there’s bars and restaurants.
But, there’s been so little preserved, that I think it's really a tragedy.
Just recently, I’ve gone back to looking at this neighborhood,
and it upset me so much that I decided the only thing I could do was make more paintings.
Rent, taxes, everything has gone up
to the point where the neighborhood is pretty unaffordable for most artists.
It’s a different kind of neighborhood now.
There are young families with children. So that’s a good thing.
But what was special about the neighborhood, I think is very much gone.