Photograph for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. The jewelry shop at Sansom Street displayed signs in the windows of the third story of the building to show support for the Jewelers Row preservation effort. Several of the business owners who rent or own space on Jewelers Row advocated for the preservation of the block after Toll Brothers proposed the construction of a condominium high-rise.
The Philadelphia History Museum at Atwater Kent hosted a public meeting in September about the history and future of Jewelers Row, prompted by a Toll Brothers project that would replace several Sansom Street buildings with a high-rise condo building.
Besides members of the of the public, others in the audience were shop owners and renters of Jewelers Row, including individuals who voiced their concern and opposition to the Toll Brothers project.
The construction company released a rendering of its condominium project in January Join the discussion at a Greater Philadelphia Roundtable or add your nomination online. Jewelers Row in Center City Philadelphia emerged in the s and over time became home to more than two hundred jewelry retailers, wholesalers, and craftsmen.
Many of these businesses were owned by the same families for generations. By the twenty-first century, Jewelers Row had become regarded as the oldest diamond district in the United States, second in size only to the jewelry district in New York City.
Situated in the heart of the original city plan for Philadelphia, on Sansom Street between Seventh and Eighth Streets and on Eighth Street between Chestnut and Walnut Streets, Jewelers Row reflected the architectural and developmental history of the city. These blocks were originally laid out by William Penn and his surveyor general, Thomas Holme The property remained in the Norris family for much of the eighteenth century, until its sale in to merchant and financier Robert Morris He tore down the mansion and bisected the property with an eponymous east-west street.
He contracted with Benjamin Latrobe to construct speculative housing on the north side of Walnut Street, while the Scottish architect Thomas Carstairs ?
Between and , Carstairs proceeded to build a block-long series of twenty-two identical Georgian-style row houses known as Carstairs Row , modeled after earlier patterns of row houses constructed in the squares of London, Bath, and Dublin.
To attract tenants to this relatively undeveloped area of the city, Sansom paved the street at his own expense. Over the course of the nineteenth century, increasing industrial and commercial development, spanning an area from Walnut Street in the south to Arch Street in the north, spurred interest in creating new residential districts.
The row houses they left behind in older and increasingly working-class and ethnic neighborhoods became available for commercial uses. This view of south side of the block of Sansom Street shows several of the jewelry shops in The building in the background is the Curtis Publishing Company building, built in Before it became a jewelry district in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the block of Sansom Street was the center of a thriving engraving trade, which benefited from its proximity to an established printing industry , including many publishing firms on Sansom Street or nearby on Chestnut Street.
The engraving business, with its high level of technical expertise and precision, formed a natural relationship with jewelry and watchmaking crafters and suppliers, who used a similar set of skills and tools. Over time, independent engravers continued to prosper due to the booming publishing industry, but they did not increase in number.
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