Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections

The Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections enforces the building codes and business licensing laws of Philadelphia. In October 1969 its deputy commissioner, Leo Goldstein, closed Underground Cinema 16, the theater of Ray Hoersch, later R.C. Horsch, in the week it planned to preview the Vietnam War documentary In the Year of the Pig.¹²

Cinema 16 and the Tate Administration

On October 29, 1969, the department ordered Cinema 16, at 2021 Sansom Street, closed because it lacked the requisite licenses. Goldstein posted the theater, and "police were instructed to keep it empty." Hoersch, then 26, called the matter a "simple confusion" over the city's requirements.¹ The alternative weekly The Distant Drummer, in an article on the administration of Mayor James H. J. Tate, reported that the department had closed the theater for want of a statement of occupancy and five minor building-code violations, which were corrected within a day, and quoted Goldstein: "I first heard about the theatre (Cinema 16) when I read in the BULLETIN that they were going to play that Vietnam film (In the Year of the Pig)." In the same period the department closed the "Space" annex of the Theatre of the Living Arts and the Manning Street Theater. While Cinema 16 was shut, the film was shown at the Bandbox Theater in Germantown.²

The Market Street Collapse

On June 5, 2013, during the demolition of a building at 22nd and Market Streets, a freestanding wall fell onto a Salvation Army thrift store. CBS News reported that the collapse killed six people and injured 14; Billy Penn reported six deaths, a seventh weeks later, and 13 people seriously injured. The contractor and a heavy equipment operator were arrested.³⁴ After a ten-month investigation, the Mayor's Special Independent Advisory Commission found that "the City's regulatory controls in place at the time were inadequate and there was a lack of effective action on the part of L & I personnel," and proposed "separating L & I into two separate departments," one of them a new Department of Buildings.³ The commission, appointed under Mayor Michael Nutter, described the department as "fragmented by divergent mandates accumulated over decades of mission expansion, chronic underfunding."⁴

The 2024 Division

On February 8, 2024, Mayor Cherelle Parker named Basil Merenda L&I Commissioner for Inspections, Safety and Compliance, responsible for "enforcing the City's codes for the safe and lawful construction and use of buildings," and Bridget Collins-Greenwald L&I Commissioner for Quality of Life, responsible for nuisance businesses, the regulation of short-term rentals, bedbug infestations, and the city's plastic bag ban. Merenda had chaired the Joint Task Force on Regulatory Reform for Licenses and Inspections with Councilmember Mike Driscoll, who said that "the recommendation to split L&I was central to the report of the Joint Task Force."⁵ In December 2023 City Controller Christy Brady had announced a review of unlicensed properties.⁴