House #135 is the largest on Elfreth’s Alley, taking up 26 feet of the street frontage. Its size is partly due to the fact that it was built over top of a cartpath, incorporating it into a tunnel.
(You can learn more about the building’s early history by watching this 6-minute video from our 2020 Virtual Fete Day)
It is the home’s history in the 20th century that I want to explore a little bit today. In 1930, the home was rented to three Black families, then the only Black residents on the street: Robert and Gladys Morton and their daughter Goldie, Charles and Elinore Wilson, and Nettie McCrae and her infant son Robert. We talk a lot about these folks in episodes 5, 6, and 7 of The Alley Cast (full transcripts are available at those links too), but I wanted to explore what we know about these folks a little more here in this series of blog posts about African American residents of Elfreth’s Alley over the years.
#135, photographed sometime after 1947 when it had been turned into a restaurant. Photo from the Sunday Evening Bulletin, in the collections of Temple Special Collections Research Center.
The 1930 census considers the Mortons the primary residents of the house, with the Wilsons and McCraes listed as boarders. Whatever the arrangement between these families, the total rent for the home as $50 per month, significantly higher than other rents on the street at that time. Three other homes (121, 129, and 131) were rented at the rate of $30 per month, five others rented for $25 (109, 113, 123, 125, 127), and the other twelve renting households paid less, with the cheapest back tenement (Rear #126) rented for $8 per month. Five homes on the street (110, 112, 130, 134, 137) were owned by the occupants. While the increased square footage in #135 justifies some part of the higher rent, it seems likely that the Mortons, Wilsons, and McCraes were charged a premium on the basis of their race.
Records also show that the owner of #135 lost the property to his mortgage company in 1932 and the building would be vacant by 1940 and condemned by 1941, suggesting that it may have been in bad shape during the time the Mortons, Wilsons, and McCraes lived there.
Why did these three families end up living on this block? The center of Black cultural and political life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the 7th Ward, especially around Mother Bethel AME Church. But by 1930, that was beginning to change as European immigrant groups pushed the Black population westward. By the mid-20th century African Americans in Philadelphia lived in highest concentrations in West and North Philadelphia.
J. M. Brewer’s Map of Philadelphia (1937). Black populations are marked in pink on this map, while Jewish populations are marked in blue and Italian populations are indicated in green. Mother Bethel AME is located at the Northeast corner of the pink area of South Philadelphia.
It’s possible that the residents of #135 recognized that the old established Black neighborhoods were in flux. It is a simpler explanation, however, to surmise that they rented on Elfreth’s Alley because it was available and close to work.
Both Robert Morton and Charles Wilson worked at a shovel factory, likely nearby.
(I wrote a bit about the rabbit trail I went down trying to learn more about their work here)
Nettie McCrae was an operator at a clothing manufacturer, likely also nearby. In Episode 5 of The Alley Cast, we discussed the garment industry in Philadelphia in the early 20th century. It was a time when garment workers were unionizing, and carried out two strikes, in 1909 and 1921. The early union efforts were centered on European immigrant workers, and management took advantage of this by bringing in Black workers and other populations not well-represented in the unions as strikebreakers. By 1926, The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) was doing outreach to Black garment workers and monitoring conditions in the non-union shops where many were employed. An article in Philadelphia’s leading Black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune, reads as follows:
“Mrs. Emma Carter Thompson has been engaged by Local No. 50 to investigate the shops in which colored workers are employed, and to organize the colored workers in order to improve collectively their working conditions. Mrs. Thompson’s investigations have shown that the non-union, and particularly the colored workers are being exploited. Some of the shops are dirty and unsanitary […] Prices for work are ridiculously low. Only the best and fastest workers can make as much as $18.00 per week [...] in some cases the prices average less than one-half compared with Union shops.”
The article ended with a call to action from the author, stating that it was important for Black women to “think about these facts and to make an effort to enroll in the Union. It is through Organized means that they can attain better working conditions.”
I don’t know whether McCrae was involved in a union or not, but this report gives a sense of the discrepancy between union and non-union working conditions.
One final piece of information from the 1930 census data is the birthplaces of the residents of #135. While most of the household had been born in Pennsylvania, Elinore Wilson was born in New York, Robert Morton was born in North Carolina, and Nettie McCrae had been born in Virginia. Morton and McCrae were then part of the Great Migration, the set of forces which brought many African Americans from southern states to the Northeast and Midwest. Like Morton and McCrae, many of these newcomers found work in factories, as well as in service jobs. There is an excellent collection of oral histories and documents to learn more about the folks who came to Philadelphia during this time: Goin’ North. I heartily recommend checking it out.
Unfortunately, I have yet to locate any further documentation of any of the people living in #135 in 1930. I hope to learn more, and will update this post if I do!
-TM