Jennifer Baker remembers the old Northern Liberties. A neighborhood now known for bustling bars and hip boutiques was a desolate place, falling casualty to the postwar deindustrialization of the 50s.

“[When I first moved into Northern Liberties] the rest of my building was empty; the rest of the block was empty,” Baker said. There were certainly pockets of residential row houses occupied but not right here. It was all empty and sometimes scary because it was deserted.”

Baker, an artist and graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, moved into Northern Liberties in 1978 and has been calling it her home ever since, taking up a studio space atop a four-story building on the corner of Third and Green Streets. She has worked with a variety of media, including sculpting, drawing and painting. In 1991, Baker was living on American Street when one conflagration down the street ignited a fire within her.

“There was a fire at the American Street Tannery,” Baker remembered. “That was so dramatic, and along with all the buildings being demolished and fires going up everywhere in the neighborhood, it really made an impression on me and made me want to look at my immediate surroundings for my art work.”

So Baker began creating monoprints of Northern Liberties and started to document the changes happening around her.

“I did the monoprints of the neighborhood for a few years then I went on to other things. But for some reason I was really struck again by what was going on in this neighborhood, which was an insane amount of development and a lot of the old buildings disappearing. Places that I would walk by for years were being torn down. A lot of the buildings look incongruous with what I was used to.”

Two years ago, Baker curated an art exhibit featuring work by herself and a group of other Northern Liberties artists at Projects Gallery. That exhibit also featured readings by people who had written about their experiences in the neighborhood. She then found The Community History Gallery at the Philadelphia History Museum when she came up with an idea to set up a history exhibit of her own.

Some argue that art is history—Jennifer Baker’s upcoming exhibit embodies that notion.

Opening on Feb. 20 at The Community History Gallery, The History of Northern Liberties Exhibit chronicles the neighborhood from the 50s on, and will feature art from various neighborhood artists as well as historical artifacts, found objects and personal stories from others who have lived and spent time there. All of these pieces, items and anecdotes will then be compiled into two books, one on Northern Liberties artists and another made up of all of the stories that Baker has collected.

When Baker put out an open call for things and tales to populate the two books, she received all sorts of interesting relics from years long past. Some items include tools from an old blacksmith shop, drawings of cast iron gates intricately sketched onto the back of envelopes, old citations for moonshine from the city, detailed records from old social clubs and societies and much more.

One item that Baker finds particularly interesting is an old vinyl record dug up from what is now Liberty Lands Park on Third Street.

“Where the park is now, there was a tannery— a big leather processing factory that opened in the 1850s,” Baker said. “Eventually it was abandoned and there was a little company on the corner of that tannery that was called Disc Makers where they made vinyl records. In 1996, the city tore down the tannery and it was eventually made into the park. When they dug the pits to plant the trees, they found thousands of records buried. Somebody found a record intact and lent it to me for the exhibit.”

As for the artist book, Baker has received work from over 70 artists as well as a story describing each artist’s experience in Northern Liberties.

Along with the artifacts and art, historic photos, maps, newspaper stories will line the walls of the gallery. There will also be a long table with the two books on it so those who come and see the exhibit can sit down, look into them and even add their own personal accounts onto the pages as the exhibit goes on. The books won’t be printed and bound at the start of the exhibit’s run, but Baker says that she does intend to have them printed and published after the exhibit ends.

The History of Northern Liberties will also feature a handful of short film pieces made from interviews with both longtime residents and younger folks who have recently moved into the neighborhood. These shorts will be playing on a television monitor in the gallery as well.

Overall, this is a multimedia history presentation at its finest.

“I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve curated art exhibits but never a history exhibit,” Baker said. “In some ways this is so much more complicated.”

While it may be complicated, Baker does feel as though telling this history is important.

“You know it’s just a neighborhood like any other in Philadelphia, but being in this one fairly small neighborhood for all these years and seeing how it changed, and it’s changed so dramatically over that time, it’s really a micro chasm for the changes that have been happening in this country and world—how industrial production has changed and affected people lives,” Baker said.

“My idea is that everyone tells their own story.  I figured that no matter what I put on the walls, no matter what images I showed, every single person is going to walk in there and say, ‘that’s not my story that’s not how I see it,’ because how you see history and what goes on around you is so personal. So my idea is to give everyone who’s interested, and wants to, an opportunity to tell their own story and tell what they saw. Then all those little stories together tell the story of the neighborhood.”

The History of Northern Liberties Exhibit will have its opening reception party on Thurs., February 20th at the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent in the Community History Gallery. If you have a personal story to share, contact Jennifer Baker at jlpbaker@gmail.com.