It's even more difficult to visualize this stretch of Northern Liberties’commercial corridor as ground zero for the Great Linoleum Wars of the 1950s. But that's exactly what it was, this very block of North Second, a half-century ago nearly to the day. Not content to do battle with promotions and and circulars, the shopkeepers of Linoleum Row screamed obscenities across the thoroughfare and pitched bricks at each other's windows. Press accounts compared it to the Hatfields and McCoys, and the Korean War. Proprietor Harvey Bell, who was six at the time, remembers his father on the front page of the paper, pointing to the place where his skull had collided with a competitor's claw hammer.


Harvey and his sister,
Marilyn Bell c. 1950.

Above left: 700-712 North 2nd
Street, 1975.