Kensington Remembers is a digital scholarship project that seeks to find, document, study, and preserve vernacular memorial sites in Kensington and other nearby neighborhoods of North Philadelphia, PA.  

In a city full of official forms of  collective memory—monumentalized in its historic buildings, murals, museums, parks, site markers, and statuary—the Kensington section of Philadelphia sustains a rich culture of grassroots, or vernacular memory.  While official memory is conceived, created, and preserved “from the top down” by  cultural, economic, and institutional elites, vernacular memory is “memory from below” – produced by ordinary people using whatever skills, materials, and ritual knowledge they possess to engage in the public expression of private emotions. 

You can use the links above to explore a map showing locations and descriptions of memorials, view a gallery of photographs of the memorials,  read the KR blog to learn about the study of vernacular memory, or find out more about the project.

Do you have a story or a memorial to share?  We want to hear about it! Use the contact link to start a conversation.