The dream commute-Berks Street station to Center City in nine minutes Peter Lane Taylor/PLT Think about that for a second: a four-room, retro-chic neighborhood hotel reclaimed from an old whiskey distilling factory barely a year ago-fifteen-feet from the rumbling El-just beat out the newest launches from Waldorf Astoria and Ritz Carlton on the beach. Mulherin’s Sons was crowned America’s best new hotel. Zagat just anointed Lebanese-themed Suraya Philadelphia’s hottest new restaurant opening. Last summer Jay-Z tapped local bake shop Cake Life to make Beyonce’s birthday cake. Philly Style Bagels’ Classic Lox Sandwich took home the magazine’s prize for the country’s best sandwich the following year. In 2015 Bon Appetit ranked Pizzeria Beddia America’s best pie. The national accolades are even more eye-popping. Now every realtor in the city is trying to bolt another neighborhood onto it. Two decades ago Fishtown was a dirty Philadelphia real estate word. The current sale to list ratio is a scorching 98.8%, going toe to toe with Williamsburg (Brooklyn) and Washington, D.C. Most single-family houses have an accepted offer in less than four weeks. Home values here have nearly tripled since the Great Recession. Tidy and orderly, but scorching the real estate stats Matthew Williams for It’s also magnetizing a new generation of Millennials, Baby Boomers, and young professionals who are summarily rejecting suburbia, car culture, and food deserts in favor of independently-owned retailers, farm-to-table restaurants, and the new self-supporting micro-economy to move back downtown again. Today, the El is held up by local politicians, developers, and the media as the foundation of Philadelphia’s new model for Transit Oriented Development. Underneath the tracks, Front Street and Kensington Avenue became two of Philadelphia’s most crime-infested drug corridors. The cars smelled like piss and cheesesteaks on the weekends. As many of them de-populated with suburbanization in the 70s and 80s, the El fell on harder times. The El links Fishtown with downtown Philadelphia in less than nine minutes. When it was built in the early 20 th century the El was the city’s transportation crown jewel, threading together a booming corridor of working class neighborhoods made up of mostly Irish Catholic and Eastern European immigrants.
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