Morrell Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Morrell Park
Neighborhood of Philadelphia
Country	United States
State	Pennsylvania
County	Philadelphia County
City	Philadelphia
Area code(s)	Area code 215

Morrell Park is a neighborhood located in the Northeast section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located on the eastern side of the Far Northeast, north of Grant Avenue and east of Northeast Philadelphia Airport.

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.

The land area of Morrell Park was originally the 300-acre (1.2 km²) summer home estate of Edward and Louise Morrell. Colonel Edward deVeaux Morrell (1863-1917), a lawyer, was a US congressman from 1900 to 1907. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, he was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1885. He was a colonel and afterward a brigadier general in the National Guard. He was a member of the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry and owned extensive land in Torresdale. His wife Louise was the daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel and Francis's second wife Emma Bouvier, related [first cousin twice removed] to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Louise's uncle was Anthony J. Drexel, founder of Drexel University, and her two older half-sisters were Elizabeth Drexel and Saint Katharine Drexel. The Morrells built their summer home [1], one of the five homes they maintained, near what is now Morrell and Frankford Avenues, not too far from Francis Drexel's summer home [2], which was itself near what is now the emergency room of Aria Health's Torresdale Campus.

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