Anyone remember "The Neck" in South Philadelphia?

When I was a little girl, hucksters would come up the alleys and lanes of our neighborhoods selling produce from horse drawn wagons.  I was fascinated by the horse that pulled the wagons.  

The hucksters came from what my grandmother called "The Neck"
and later I found out it had been Stone House Lane a community of farmers who reclaimed swamp land by making canals and dykes and created small farms.  They had pigs, goats, some dairy cows and chickens and horses. 

Here is what I found on one google search recently:

A trip through the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin archives reveals detail on the otherwise lost neighborhood Stonehouse Lane, in deepest southeast Philly, where residents lived on the fringe of city life in semi-rural conditions into the mid-20th century. Hop in the wayback machine with Jake Blumgart:

It’s hard to imagine that South Philly was ever anything besides a great expanse of concrete and brick, with row homes stretching off to the horizon.

But the city fought its way southward through the marshes and farms that used to occupy that land. By the 20th century, the battle was largely over. The exception lay in deepest South Philly, below Oregon Avenue, where an incongruous community of farmers and squatters hung on until the 1950s.

Stonehouse Lane is one of the dozens of forgotten neighborhoods in this old city that have been bulldozed, burned, or otherwise brutalized. One origin story alleges that this particular corner of Philadelphia was formed by Hessian mercenaries who weren’t quite sure what to do when General Cornwallis surrendered.

Despite Stonehouse Lane’s murky origins, by the 20th century it seemed a clear anachronism in a modernizing, industrial city. The road that formed the spine of the community wound its way down from Oregon Avenue past Pattison Avenue to the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. It was flanked on both sides by canals. Each house featured a bridge that would allow residents to cross from the street to their front doors. There was no running water and the sewer system didn’t stretch down that far south either. The closest trolleys were a mile to the north on Oregon Avenue, and burning piles of trash on its northern border hemmed in the community. This, just six miles from City Hall.

It made me think of all the lost neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, the Jewish haberdashers and tailors, the German brewers and bakers, the Italian Market.

Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com