One van — white, with big, yellow triangles splashed across the hood and sides — sat alone in a parking lot rivaling minor league stadia in size. The man in the passenger seat dubbed it the ServiceMaster Clean machine; it came by every day.
“We clean every platform on the Chestnut Hill West,” he said, including the commuter rail stop sitting a stone’s throw away from the railway bridge on Broad and Lehigh. Usually, the man volunteered, he and his cleaning colleague mill about the platforms alone, in the solitude of two.
Not that they journey to the high side.
“That?” The man jabbed his arm at the gigantic, elevated double-platform casting its shadow across the lot. “We don’t touch that. That’s Amtrak.”
Amtrak only owns about 28 percent of the railroads that pass beneath its cars, according to a 2021 disclosure. It uses the rest in joint agreements with local real estate firms, governments and transit authorities. North Philadelphia Station, where that truck was parked, really splits its territory into two stations: On the far side of the parking lot, SEPTA runs commuter trains on the Chestnut Hill West line. But overhead, through a tunnel and up single flights of stairs, SEPTA still runs trains, this time from Philadelphia’s airport to Trenton, New Jersey. But Amtrak operates lines of its own—to Trenton, Manhattan, and the North Jersey town of Secaucus.
The presence of the commuter lines, and a subway station running nearly two blocks underground on nearby Broad Street, makes PHN the center of a metropolitan transit hub. But Amtrak’s side of the North Philadelphia Station, code PHN, remains desolate — enough so that all kinds of refuse accumulates on its territory. One day, an abandoned bike sat just beyond the passenger gates. On another occasion, a shopping cart lay beached in the bare, doorless hut that now serves as the station’s shelter. And sometimes, on chilly mornings, someone stored up camping equipment in the tunnel leading to each platform.
A look at the numbers leaves little question why: According to Amtrak’s statistics, 1,323 people caught Keystone trains from PHN in 2023. 30th Street Station, wedged between Center City and University City, sees more traffic in four hours. PHN, according to Amtrak’s own website, features absolutely no amenities of any kind: No Wi-Fi, no baggage check, no water fountains, no elevators, no ramps – nothing, besides its location, to lure wayfarers away from the west.
Location. About that.
“Look,” Jayson Massey, a Nicetown native who spent a decade in real estate before dabbling in computer science, said. “The biggest buildings around are all abandoned.”
The powerful Pennsylvania Railroad constructed PHN in 1896 to complement the central Broad Street Station across the street from City Hall. North Philadelphia Station shuttled people and steel from the city’s industrial core to destinations in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and New York. PHN continued to bustle, even as the Gilded Age gave way to the Depression and World War II, and as the city’s working class White families made a beeline for segregated turnkey boroughs like Levittown.
North Philly’s wider neighborhood evolved, too. Down the street, the Uptown Theater emerged as a “chitlin’ circuit” sensation in the 1950s; James Brown, Diana Ross and Michael Jackson took turns sashaying across its stage. And in the gym that bore his name just across Broad, heavyweight champion “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier, bobbed, weaved, and blitzed trainees in a cavernous cathedral of hand-to-hand combat still visible from parts of the station’s gargantuan parking lot today.
But America’s cityscapes weathered the White flight that followed America’s triumph in World War II, along with the discrimination encoded in the bowels of the G.I. Bill and the since-banned practice of “redlining” Black neighborhoods and homebuyers. Pennsylvania Railroad began merging itself to death in 1968, and the Uptown played its last big show four years later.
Joe Frazier, true to form, outlived them all, training fighting Philadelphians well into the 21st century. But the draining of North Philadelphia left him a desert, too. In a 2008 transaction initially reported only in The Temple News, Frazier’s Gym shuttered, its shell filled by a shaky succession of discount furniture stores. Frazier himself died in 2011.
By 1991, North Philadelphia’s cash and traffic dwindled enough that Amtrak spun off the station’s majestic shelter — a rest area, ticket sales station, and baggage claim listed on the National Register of Historic Places — to a real estate firm. It’s now split between a Cricket store, several other small retailers, and a discount outlet. While the tunnel beneath the building remains the only way to board Amtrak’s Keystone line or SEPTA’s Trenton commuter line in North Philly, the decommissioned parts of the station no longer serve any transit function.
“I only use that station for two purposes,” Mason Carter, who left Center City for the Germantown neighborhood at the start of the pandemic, explained: First, to go to Chestnut Hill without the time crunch of catching Regional Rail at Wayne Junction. The other? To connect to New York.
“Once I was coming back from New York, and I asked the conductor, ‘Is this going to North Philadelphia?'” Carter recounted. “And he was like, ‘Are you sure you’re getting off there?'” Carter assured the conductor that he was.
“It’s sort of this vicious cycle,” Carter said. “Amtrak puts no investment in North Philadelphia. Therefore, it’s not used.” He added that SEPTA, by contrast, had done “a pretty good job” managing a large and complicated transportation system.
PHN’s dearth of traffic threatens what little attention it still commands. When COVID-19 came ashore in 2020, SEPTA stopped servicing the Chestnut Hill line. The move slashed service to several spots around Germantown, but it also left the far side of the North Philadelphia complex practically abandoned. No record exists of a push to save the line in North Philly, but SEPTA revived service in 2022 when residents of Germantown and Chestnut Hill clamored against the route’s demise.
The pandemic has now placed SEPTA in the crosshairs a second time: Officials say federal COVID-19 aid is set to expire in the summer, and ridership never returned to pre-2020 levels, leaving Philly’s public transit with a $200 million budget hole that Harrisburg only patched after chiding SEPTA to make more cash.
Carter fears that Chestnut Hill West could return to the chopping block – and parts of North Philadelphia station with it. “They closed it before,” Carter said. “They could close it again.”
Amtrak responded to a request for comment with an e-mailed statement, defending its commitment to PHN — but touting interest from Philadelphia’s growing real estate scene, too. In August 2023, former Eagles safety Jamar Adams headlined a group of investors who bought land around PHN for $12 million, intending to build housing, retail and office space on what is currently an asphalt ocean.
“Amtrak is in discussion with SEPTA and adjacent developers to coordinate on possible future service changes and to understand and evaluate potential real estate development plans for the station area,” the statement said, in part. “Amtrak is currently developing a design to achieve ADA compliance at the station and is continuing to coordinate those plans with SEPTA. The developers will be provided a copy of the design.” (SEPTA, spared criticism throughout the reporting process, hasn’t offered comment on the station as of press time.)
What those developers plan to do beyond what’s already been done was not spelled out, and neither was their stake in the fate of the station. But Massey, the programmer and developer, welcomes just about any investment in the station and its surroundings — even investments that would elsewhere be denounced as gentrification.
“One day a long time ago, there wasn’t anybody here,” Massey said. “This was all just woods.”
His neighborhood still housed a Ukrainian church, Massey went on, even though he knew of no Ukrainians living nearby.
“So, the neighborhood changes over,” he said. “The neighborhoods are gonna change. Things are gonna change.”
Massey had been gesticulating on and off as he spoke. When he mentioned change, and transformation, he pinwheeled his right arm in the direction of a three-story building, a few hundred yards south. Across the street and through an underpass, it couldn’t be seen from the tunnel. Then again, Joe Frazier’s Gym was hardly visible to the people right next to it.
Please email any questions or concerns about this story to: [email protected].
I hope the developers can save North Philadelphia station. It’s a part of Philadelphia history for those growing up in North Philadelphia. Broad -Lehigh was the starting point to go downtown. It was exciting to me to go down a tunnel-like enclosure where I felt protected and unseen from the enemy. That was my imagination back then. Amtrak could do better business and invest. Sometimes history and childhood business memories are a cash draw.