Penn Collaborative History, The West Philadelphia Corporation

Secondary scholarly account. The West Philadelphia Corporation was formed by “higher education and medical institutions that included the University of Pennsylvania as the senior partner” after the murder of a Penn graduate student (this page says “the 1959 murder”; Puckett’s companion page on the Science Center and the Black Bottom dates the crime “an April evening in 1958”, and the WPC’s formation 1959; the 1958 date is corroborated elsewhere, so WR does not cite this page for the year); it “established the boundaries of ‘University City’ (the brand name the planners gave to this ‘artificial neighborhood’ located in the Philadelphia City Planning Commission’s University Area Redevelopment Area, an urban renewal zone first defined in 1950).” The Science Center, incorporated 1963 and built from 1967 in Redevelopment Unit 3, “arose in an existing neighborhood known locally as the Black Bottom, whose majority-Black residents were insensitively displaced by the RDA.”