Eldercare at the Margins: Keeping up to Code at the Stephen Smith Home

Between 1949 and 1966, the Stephen Smith Home, one of the oldest African American "homes for the aged" in the United States, went from partially condemned to new construction. Through his leadership at this historic Philadelphia institution, administrator Hobart C. Jackson learned firsthand the "double jeopardy" of Black aging, culminating in the 1970s with his national advocacy efforts on behalf of minority elders. The intersectionality of age and race was intimately tied to the built environment of homes for the aged, the precursor of today's nursing home. This paper considers how structural racism and ageism were materially manifested in the struggle of African American eldercare institutions to respond to protean building and safety regulations for senior care. I introduce a necessary architectural analysis into histories of aging in the United States by examining how building maintenance, upkeep, and volunteerism offer a way of understanding social history. This research reveals Philadelphia's Stephen Smith Home to be both representative and singular: like other African American facilities, the home struggled with building obsolescence and funding shortfalls, but unlike many of its counterparts, it nonetheless survived and developed into a hybrid campus of historic and newly built structures within a growing Black neighborhood. Ultimately this article does foundational work in exploring the shifting building and social cultures of the charitable old age home in the mid-twentieth century by examining a mode of community-based care that, when rendered within the built environment, contrasts greatly with contemporary perceptions of institutionalization.