MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the 1950s and early 1960s, white community officials, leaders, and parents in Northeast Philadelphia feared their public spaces were becoming havens for delinquent behavior, as white adolescents engaged in “unseemly” social acts that threatened the established social order of their quasi-suburban surroundings. The Northeast’s rapid “suburbanization” during the post-war era, although critical in shaping the area’s socioeconomic foundations, left many question marks about its future social trajectory within the city’s changing physical dimensions. As delinquent cases increased, white community figures and parents feared external influences, such as urban criminality, public housing, the trafficking of pornographic materials and other mainstream cultural phenomena, from working-class and African-American neighborhoods inside the city would alter the social behaviors of their white, suburban children in public spaces throughout the Northeast.

Civic leaders, business figures, and white parents depicted juvenile delinquency as a community crisis that could only be addressed by controlling the socio-cultural and racial cohesion of their neighborhood’s public spaces, especially their recreational facilities.  Preserving Northeast residents’ conceptions of social hierarchy, appropriate civic behavior, and aesthetic control of public space required campaigning for additional “supervised” and “well-monitored” recreational facilities that would counteract and rectify anti-social developments and unregulated aesthetic forces which threatened their children’s perceived virtuous, suburban lifestyles.   In working with Philadelphia city officials to address juvenile delinquency, Northeast civic leaders and residents deemed recreational facilities critical public spaces which could dissuade and redirect “impressionable” white adolescents from subverting the socio-cultural value system through which their whiteness was defined.