The parking lots of 4th & Vine

Jan 27, 20213 min read

Surface parking lots generally occur when old (often forgotten) buildings are torn down and aren't replaced. This is a history of what used to be at the tri-corner lots at 4th & Vine Sts (1st image - 1910 map).

The northwest corner of Fourth and Vine is really the southern end of the long-lost York Avenue that once crossed diagonally through the (also) long-lost southern section of Northern Liberties. At this corner, there were two commercial buildings, 300 and 302 York Ave., that were demolished in the 1940's, giving birth to part of the surface lot that exists here now. Also located on the site of this lot was two three-story industrial buildings (501 - 505 Vine) used by the Renner Company, producing awnings, sails and tents for the first third of the 20th century. In 1938, the building became home to the Craftsman Printing Co. In 1963, Camitta Brothers Wholesale Footwear, purchased the entire corner along with the old W. G. Ellis & Co. hosiery factory to the west. The old Renner/Craftsman Building still stood along with a few other smaller structures on the lot into the 1970s (2nd photo), when it was torn down.

The southeast lot at Fourth and Vine was also home to a factory building, but a rather unusual one. This one was right at the corner -- a five-story, row home-wide building with a mansard roof. This place started out as the Penn Button Hole Machine Co. in the late 19th century, then got taken over by a national sewing machine concern called the Reece Button Hole Machine Co. (3rd photo) When the 20th century arrived, the factory went into different uses every few years. Ladies boots, then decorative glass, then flags and banners, and finally measuring instruments by the 1950's. The rest of the site of the current empty lot consisted of the usual type of smaller buildings one would expect to see in this neighborhood ... except for one little thing. There was an interstitial street, a small dead-end alley with six tiny trinity rowhomes packed into a footprint only as large as one of the buildings on the rest of the block. It was called American Place (4th image - 1847 map), and later came to be known as its location between buildings, 245 N. 4th St. There are curb cuts, probably from an old entrance to the lot, that line up perfectly with the site of American Place.(5th photo) This lot grew in a piecemeal fashion. First to go were American Place and the buildings to the south, all the way to New Street. They were gone by the 1940s. The rest of the buildings on the lot would last a while longer.(6th photo) 249 N. 4th St. outlasted all others and was the last to go down ... it was still standing into the 1970s, while the rest of the site was surface parking.

On the southwest corner, eighty years before being an empty lot, 262-264 N. 4th St. sported the D.P. Brown beeswax and parrafine factory. After six decades of beeswaxing, the same building later became the Nathan Frick machine tools factory. At the corner of Fourth and Vine (274 N 4th), there was a confectionary manufacturer that lasted for most of the 19th century. For the first third of the 20th century, the building held the Philadelphia branch of the National Confectioner's Association. In 1939, St. Augustine's Catholic Church took ownership of the entire site, tore down the buildings and converted it to parking cars by the next year. At some point they sold the northern half of the lot and it became part of 406 Vine's property.