Maggie Loesch
Discover Germantown Avenue
DGA is a historic walking tour developed by the Tyler School of Art and Architecture's Community Development Class of 2020 for our capstone project. Our work built off of the 2019 class's work with local non-profit APM, which was a community history visioning event called Remembering and Envisioning Germantown Avenue. We expanded on their historical research to create a historic walking tour, complete with a brochure, website, recorded first-hand resident memories, and signs marking each site.
Longterm community residents were interested in a historical project because the low income, predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood is facing increased development pressure due to nearby gentrifying neighborhoods. It was important to the community to share the history of the once-thriving commercial corridor with new residents who may think "nothing was here."
While the COVID-19 pandemic changed our plans of launching the tour with a community celebration and resident-guided tours, APM was still able to use walkability grant funding to produce the signs and hang them at each site. People are able to go on a self-guided tour by scanning the QR codes on the signs with their smartphones and reading/listening to the histories on our site.
As the Graphics and Posters Lead for this project, I led a team of four other students to create the 10 historic posters, tour brochure, event banner, formatted map, presentation, event collateral, survey, and 47-page report, in addition to the logo, color palette, and style guide found on all materials. Softwares used include Adobe, ArcMap, G Suite, Rhino, and Social Explorer.

The site of the former Washington Hotel on Germantown Avenue in Eastern North Philadelphia.

Community Development Workshop 2020 students stand with a map used for engagement on their last day of in-person classes on Thursday, March 12, 2020.

A detail of the study area map shows historic commercial corridor Germantown Avenue.

The site of the former Washington Hotel on Germantown Avenue in Eastern North Philadelphia.