This is the city’s second intervention on Maplewood. The first, in the 1970s, transformed what had been busy Maplewood Avenue into the hidden jughandle pedestrian mall of today. In the beginning, the experiment proved successful, offering storefronts for artisans — a shoe repair place and a cheese monger — as well as counterculture affiliated retailers like the Leaves of Grass bookstore, a kite shop, and the health food shop, Maplewood Nutrition. In the evening, you could hear live music at a small jazz club.  

“It had a lot of boutiques, cafes, and there was a bar lounge back in the 1970s that was really hip,” remembers Supreme Dow, founder and executive director of the Black Writers Museum. “You could go hear jazz or some really funky R&B and have some drinks. It was a destination place.”

Even by the late 2000s, its glory days long behind it, the pedestrian mall was welcoming enough to seduce Dow into taking over one of the storefronts and turning it into a museum dedicated to the work of black literary figures.

“Maplewood Mall has a history as a street off of a street — it’s an intimate space,” said Dow, who, a few years back, moved his museum into the historic Vernon House in nearby Vernon Park.

But in the 1980s Maplewood’s fortunes began to change, especially as the trajectory of Germantown itself continued to shift. Already struck by the twin blights of white flight and capital flight, the neighborhood continued to bleed population while the stores at Germantown and Chelten lost customers to the suburbs.

Shopkeepers on Maplewood Mall feel they sustained even greater economic damage because the secondary commercial corridor’s transformation into a pedestrian mall removed them from the eyes of drivers and allowed their shops to fall into obscurity.

“People ... didn’t realize what was going to happen here when they put the mall in,” said Albert Ciment, owner of Maplewood Nutrition, a shop his parents opened in 1963. “But it diverted a lot of traffic away from [our shops]. Foot traffic is still about the same, but the car traffic where people would notice you were here, that’s been gone.”

As many of the businesses on Maplewood Mall withered, cars crept back on to the supposedly pedestrian-only area. The signage on the plazas at either end of the street faded.  

Meanwhile, the built-in customer base that could reach it on foot shrank. Between 1970 and 2010, this part of Germantown lost population while its poverty rates shot up. In 1970, only one of the census tracts neighboring Maplewood Mall had a poverty rate of over 20 percent. By 2000, all except one did.

“This ties into urban renewal aspect of central Germantown, a lot of the area got cleared out so you not only had the demolition of that built-in population but also the urban fabric around it that helped tie surrounding residential neighborhoods to Maplewood Mall,” said Matt Wysong, the Philadelphia Planning Commission’s senior planner for Northwest Philadelphia. “So, it ends up isolated as well as being internally facing.”