Living in Brewerytown, Philadelphia

Fairmount Park's northern edge borders Brewerytown, and the neighborhood has built a small but growing food-and-beer scene around that proximity, with breweries, casual restaurants, coffee shops, and a scattering of studios and small galleries filling in blocks that were largely vacant a few rent cycles ago. Newer apartment buildings now sit alongside the neighborhood's older rowhome stock along the main corridors running toward the park, and the park's trails and river access are just a short walk from most front doors.

The scene is still filling in: a night out here means a shorter list of options than Fairmount or Northern Liberties offer just a short distance away, and reaching either one usually takes a car or a bus rather than a train, since no rail line extends this far north into the neighborhood itself, a gap most residents plan around rather than fight.

A foothold near Fairmount Park's trails at a lower price point, one new storefront and one renovated rowhome at a time — the savings show up on the rent check first, the block itself still slowly catching up to it.