Morrell Park

Morrell Park is primarily a residential district, with only a handful of small industries, all of which are located within one and a half miles of the Northeast Philadelphia Airport. The residences themselves consist mostly of rowhouses, but Morrell Park is distinctive in that most of its row homes have garages in front, facing and with access to the street, something quite different from the traditional Philadelphia rowhouse design. (An exception is one side of one block of Wessex Lane and Churchill Lane, where houses have garages in the back with access to a shared driveway. The duplexes along Frankford Ave. are also set up in this manner.) Later rowhouses followed this form of having garages in the front, but this was first seen in Morrell Park in the very late 1950s. Most homes have kitchens that face the front, living rooms that face the rear of the property, three or four bedrooms, and about 1,200 sq ft (110 m2) of living space. The street pattern of the development is also quite distinctive, as a view of an aerial photo will confirm, consisting of a few through streets that curve through many looping side streets with only one culs-de-sac, Pitt Pl. The streets curve to conform to the natural topography of the area, for years avoiding development right along the stream valley of Byberry Creek, which flows through and about the development before its confluence with Poquessing Creek.