Photo credit: Steve Hall

MLK Plaza is a mixed-income HOPE VI residential area along 13th Street in the Hawthorne neighborhood of Philadelphia. Originally built in 1960 as four public housing high-rises at 13th and Fitzwater, MLK Plaza was a site of high poverty and street crime. When the towers were imploded in 1999, almost half of the 600 public housing units were uninhabitable.

The Plaza has been replaced with new streets and rowhouses that blend in with the other historic rowhouses in the neighborhood, reconnecting the old public housing site to the revitalizing existing fabric of the community. The transformation of MLK Plaza has brought new life to a community suffering from decades of disinvestment and disrepair.