Penn Collaborative History — The University City Science Center and the Black Bottom

Penn’s own collaborative-history archive documenting the role of the West Philadelphia Corporation (a consortium led by the University of Pennsylvania as majority shareholder, with Drexel Institute, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, Presbyterian Hospital, and the Osteopathic Medical School) in the urban-renewal clearance of the Black Bottom neighborhood. Records that Unit 3 displaced 2,653 residents (approximately 78% African American), the Science Center was incorporated in 1963, the Redevelopment Authority condemned Unit 3 properties in 1966, and bulldozers leveled the blocks in 1967–1968. Documents that University City High School, “while it was to be built by the School District of Philadelphia, was planned by the WPC as a high school of science & technology to be affiliated with the Science Center,” that it was built on land “that was once the heart of the Black Bottom,” and that it operated “from 1972 to 2013.” Records that “The RDA acted in the interests of the West Philadelphia Corporation (WPC) and the School District of Philadelphia,” and that in 1983 the WPC “was restructured as the West Philadelphia Partnership.”

Quoted or relied on in RECOGNIZED (verbatim from the page as captured 2026-10-15): “Unit 3, which displaced a total of 2,653 people; approximately 78 percent were African American” (footnote 9, a Karen Gaines memorandum of 30 October 1968, follows the next sentence, on 1,472 displaced by the science center strategy); “the RDA failed to track the relocation of the dispossessed families and individuals”; “Oral history sources point to the Kingsessing neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia as the primary locality of resettlement”; the 2015 Becoming Penn “two possible interpretations”; Epstein “adheres to the former interpretation, persuasively affirming” a communal identity “extending back to the 1940s, if not earlier”; the youths imprisoned for killing In-Ho Oh “were not from the African American-majority blocks around Market Street, known locally as the Black Bottom”. This page dates the killing “an April evening in 1958”; the companion WPC page says 1959, so RECOGNIZED gives no year.