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Saturday, February 15, 2020

Wheatsheaf Village - Wheatsheaf Lane East of Frankford Ave.





A group of housing built by the Robert H Foerderer Kid Glove Leather Factory on the southern bank of Frankford Creek, eastern side of Frankford Ave. off the old main road - Wheatsheaf Lane - from the River to Frankford Ave. - at a wide junction of many rail connections of the Pennsylvania R.R. - Trenton Ave lines, Sea Shore lines and main rails to NYC. - the old Frankford Junction before they decided to build a $5,000 footbridge over all those lines in 1899 instead of dig an underpass like at Lehigh Avenue and Kensington, Emerald and Frankford for the Reading lines. No new railroad embankments here or underpass. Frankford Junction moved south to Butler Street and consolidated with a closed Harrowgate station in terms of the need for only one station in such a small geographic area. 




"The Village" as it is called locally has the tag "Whearsheaf Village" in house rental ads during WWII, no doubt as to give outsiders a clue as where it might be, off Wheatsheaf Lane, where the lane ends and east Pike Street begins and only two blocks from the El trains. Three streets, Arcadia, Coral and Vici are the body of the village of the original 80 or so units.  

There is room for more factory housing on the 1895 Bromley Map. The space on Frankford Ave never got built on and in memory did not look like it was used or legally attached to the backends of the Arcadia Street houses and or Main Street of the complex.



Surviving urban housing, collateral housing of a defunct factory, whose founder also a co-founder of Keystone Telephone and whose early death no doubt changed the function and purpose of this one time farmland, labeled Aramingo on real old maps and overlapping with newer names like Harrowgate etc as that area expanded and filled in all the farmland by the 1920s.



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