Today Bell Floor Covering is the only floor store left in Northern Liberties, and Deuce which has turned out to be a popular neighborhood eatery—is its amicable next-door neighbor. Go into any similarly new restaurant or condo in Northern Liberties, and there's a good chance you're walking on floors from Harvey's stock, installed by Harvey's guys. Whatever else Northern Liberties has been, it's been nothing if not strange. It has never been stately, quaint, quiet or precious. Crazy, raw, messy and mismatched is more like it. It's a tiny hamlet, stretching from Callowhill Street up to Girard Avenue and from the shores of the Delaware out to Sixth Street, but it ranked among America's eight largest cities well into the 19th century (before being annexed by Philly in 1854).
And it's almost certainly got more stories and characters per square foot than any other neighborhood in America's First City—from Mr. Kitchens the neighborhood pyromaniac, to the log cabin on Lawrence Street, to the guy who murdered his wife to fund his obsession with a local stripper, to Harry Shur the King of Nails and his ten buildings full of hardware, to the half-milliondollar lien that hung over the neighborhood park, to Mr. Big Balls (the less said there the better), to the human torso in the abandoned rowhouse, to Henry the Bird Man, to the four years it took to renovate neighborhood watering hole The Standard Tap, to the firebombing of the community zoning chairman's car, to the house with the giant turret tower and the Guggenheim staircase, to the Great Floods of '04 and the Great Water Main Break of '05.
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1. Deuce: Liberties Walk, 1040 N. 2nd Street
2. Standard Tap: 901 N. 2nd Street
3. Log Cabin
house: 800 block of Lawrence Street |
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