The Changing Landscape

In reading through this history, consider that for the last eighty years Upper Dublin has averaged about one new residential development proposal per year, seeing its population grown from about 5,000 to nearly 30,000. When many of its large non-residential tracts were converted to single-family housing the use of that property has been fixed as the homes may age but they do not disappear, unlike farms, institutional uses and industries that can be redeveloped into new uses (sometimes at considerable cost to a municipality and its taxpayers) as time goes by.

Upper Dublin’s development was also fostered by the 19th century rail system with Philadelphia’s Reading and Penn Central lines designed for the landed gentry to visit their extensive estate properties and to serve farms and industry located outside of Philadelphia (and beyond). In the earliest years, it was simply a post office next to a railroad line. W. Harry Body, Boyd’s Business Directory and Gazetteer of the principal towns of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and Branches, at p. 98 (1883) (available on Internet Archive): In describing Ambler: “A station on the North Penna. Division of the P. & R.R.R. (the post office being called Upper Dublin, a village of about 300 inhabitants is 15 miles from Philadelphia and 13 from Norristown.” After various railroad bankruptcies in the 20th century, the railroad mostly became a publicly operated transit commuter rail system with four stations serving Upper Dublin passengers-but none of them actually in Upper Dublin itself. Later, the post-World War II highway expansion of the Pennsylvania Turnpike to connect the Valley Forge area with New Jersey and New York City, then the center of American life) and construction of the Fort Washington Expressway made Philadelphia’s northern suburbs interconnected with expanding suburban centers throughout the region.

Although Upper Dublin’s population has grown from a few thousand folks located amidst dozens of farms and several orchards and a few stores to its present size with few farms and no orchards, its days of substantial population growth are in the past. Whether the lessons to be learned from this study of a fast-growing suburb to a suburb now with a relatively stable and aging population with be left for future authors.

Further, predictions of future development are often askew. For example, in what was known as the Industrial Park, then viewed as visionary, at least locally, as “the first of its kind in the United States,” was already somewhat behind the times when it was implemented while the nation’s pre-World War II industrial base was already eroding.