found old LPs beneath the points of their spades and pieces of broken 78s between the teeth of their rakes. Stick a shovel anywhere in the neighborhood's soil and you'll hit old concrete, brick, iron pipe, chicken bones, busted colonial china, headstones with typos on them, and heaven knows what else.

Today, after decades of decline that made the neighborhood worth not much more than the 1,000 pounds Penn originally paid the Lenni Lanape for it, and after a series of real estate booms and busts, Northern Liberties finds itself ready to burst, its population set to triple from the last Census to the next, with new buildings as high as 918 feet set to accommodate them. It's home to a breathtakingly diverse group of folks: first and second generation Eastern European immigrants who kept sweeping their sidewalks through the worst years and can tell you the difference between Polish and Ukranian perogies; African-Americans who helped keep it going, buying houses in the neighborhood where they grew up with childhood nicknames like Worm and Hackadoo; artists who streamed in during the 1970s and '80s to rehab buildings and create what Popkin calls "the greatest artists' colony in the state"; young couples who settled down in the '90s and started families, businesses, community gardens and dog parks; and of course those young hipsters—Hummer-loving, Hummer-hating and Hummer-agnostic alike—who fill the new apartments, frequent the new businesses, and will, in the blink of history's eye, become old-timers themselves, complaining about the newcomers.