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Hot on the tail of one of the city's biggest slumlords being sentenced to serious (or perhaps not serious enough) jail time, a reader has come forward with the scoop on another infamously delinquent property owner.
Ted Snyder, who was profiled as part of last month's cover on blight in Old City, rented one of his commercial properties to a reader, who referred to himself as "a beneficiary of Ted's strange concept of being a real estate mogul." Their lease agreement, which the reader realized later had never actually been signed by Snyder, lasted for "over 20 years."
The reader's recollections shed some light onto a figure who was, above all else, extremely private in his affairs. They also reveal a man, as hinted at by other accounts in our story, who was crippled by paranoia and eccentricities.
When our reader first encountered Snyder, an erstwhile arcade manager in the 1980s, "he was wearing a change belt with brass coin dispensers."
View galleryIn protest of major school budget cuts, thousands of students walked out of class at noon on Friday. As teachers and parents testified before City Council on a proposal to increase the Use & Occupancy tax to help close the school district's $300 million deficit, students took the streets (hashtag: #walkout215), marching from the Philadelphia School District headquarters on North Broad Street down to City Hall and back again. Some students joined in a booming chant — "SOS, save our schools" — while others toted handmade signs, snapped photographs and pecked on their phones. Many brandished "Join the Movement" stickers provided by Youth United for Change, a student-led organization.
"We want our sports. We want our music. We want the stuff that keeps us in school," said Zara, an 11th-grade student at Julia R. Masterman School (she declined to provide her last name). As someone who lost a considerable amount of weight while playing on her school's soccer team, she is particularly concerned about the effect sports team cuts would have on youth obesity rates.
For another high-schooler, Emmanuel Rodriguez (10th grade, George Washington Carver High School), college admission is a more pressing concern. Without counselors to help students through the application process or extracurriculars that could lead to scholarships, he wonders, "How are we going to get into college?"
As the chants subsided and students grew weary (one girl muttered, "I don't want to be here anymore"), adult members of Youth United for Change directed the procession back up Broad.
Still energized after two hours of protesting, Julie Sherchuk, an eighth-grader about to enter high school at J. R. Masterman, was troubled by the prospect of the music program dissolving. An active member of her school's choir, she worries that there won't be a high school musical in which to participate. "It's not fair for our first year," she said. As her group of friends described it, if all extracurricular activities were discontinued at J. R. Masterman, students would struggle to organize events of their own. Because of security guard cuts, students already cannot stay after school. They must either hold their clubs during lunchtime or meet early in the morning, a challenge for Scherchuk who lives 45 minutes away from school.
For those who wonder if the protest was just an excuse for students to skip out of class early on a sunny Friday, Bella Sa-Lasbetsch made it clear that this could not be said of everyone. "We need to be here to have our voice heard."
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The national media has packed up its encampment at the Criminal Justice Center. Philadelphia will, once again, somehow make do without its fickle attention.
Out of-town reporters, of course, made this rare visit to America's fifth largest but most ignored big city after conservatives accused the mainstream media of failing to cover Dr. Kermit Gosnell's rogue abortion clinic on Lancaster Avenue.
The liberal media, conservatives alleged, were concealing Gosnell's horrors from the public because they reflected poorly on abortion. This was perhaps surprising to local reporters who had covered every step of the case from the grand jury indictment on. It was likely also a surprise to abortion rights supporters, like Drexel professor Rose Corrigan who told me in 2011 that "because of the Medicaid ban on abortion funding and state restrictions, poor women in the state and in Philadelphia really face horrific choices about what to do if they have an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy."
Abortion rights activists were from beginning eager to talk about the reproductive healthcare services denied to low-income women. The national press, however, was only interested in covering the trial once the right had successfully turned the entire episode into an extended version of those blow-up pictures of disfigured fetuses they carry around at protests.
This morning, City Council will hold a hearing on a bill to set the Use & Occupancy Tax, paid by commercial property occupants, at 1.74 percent — with a $2,000 exemption for all businesses. It's kind of wonky and requires some basic math skills to understand, but the upshot is this: Sponsor Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez says it may be Philly's only surefire way to bring more money to the school system without help from Harrisburg. That's appealing if you don't believe the General Assembly will approve liquor- and cigarette-tax increases, or if you worry that Mayor Nutter is bluffing about the millions of dollars in delinquent tax collections that he suddenly expects to be able to bring in for the school district.
The plan would also offset the shift in the tax burden from businesses onto residences that has been perceived as a central problem with AVI, and one for which, due to the state's tax uniformity requirements, there are not many pretty solutions.
Sanchez told CP last week that she was crunching numbers for colleagues to make a case for this bill, but the administration "continues to feel that this goes against their commitment to make AVI revenue neutral. Our argument is that this is a different tax, and all we're asking is for the businesses that are getting $100 million cut to leave some of it on the table."
In Philly, Robert Coyle has become infamous for his Landvest rent-to-own scam that left hundreds of low-income Philadelphians sliding into foreclosure as he defaulted on their mortgages. Today, he was sentenced to six years in prison.
That doesn't sound like all that much, when you consider that the office of Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez, among others, is still cleaning up this mess — while Coyle's son, Robert Jr., was as of last year still profiting from it. Here's a statement from the office, by staff attorney Jennifer Kates:
Councilwoman María Quiñones Sánchez represents the residents of Philadelphia’s Seventh Councilmanic District. Her district includes the Kensington neighborhood, where Robert Coyle’s “Landvest” rent-to-own scam was centered and where hundreds of his foreclosed properties are located. Mr. Coyle’s activities have had a devastating impact on both individual families and the neighborhood as a whole, and have imposed significant costs in the form of governmental services and public safety. These spiraling costs and effects continue today, and will stretch far into the future.
Mayor Nutter, whose reaction to the Newtown, Conn., school shooting included the swift promotion of the "Sandy Hook Principles" — which demand a number of commitments from the gun industry and suggest possible divestment from irresponsible gun manufacturers — yesterday afternoon found himself face-to-face with that self-same gun industry, or at least some of its representatives. He didn't waste the opportunity.
Well, if you thought Post Brothers' Craigslist ads urging bachelors to snap up a "wet dream" of an apartment at Goldtex before "all the college girls go home" for the summer were classy, you haven't seen anything yet. They're opening tonight with a "Polish My Pearl" party. Because the place is on Pearl Street. And also, because it sounds raunchy, which is apparently what the Post Brothers target demographic wants.
Lingerie-clad girls kneeling in a bed of oysters in a new, stainless steel kitchen seems, however, a fitting capstone to the high-profile building of the project, which made headlines due to clashes between the Pestronk brothers, the actual brothers behind Post, and Philly's powerful building trades unions.
Decarcerate PA rallied today near City Hall to announce a march to Harrisburg demanding that Gov. Tom Corbett and the legislature cut prison funding and invest in education and social services.
“A lot of legislators talk the talk about all the things they’re going to do," said Decarcerate PA’s Joshua Glenn, describing the 113-mile trek. "But when they’re in office, they never do it. We’re walking the walk to show legislators how serious we are about ending mass incarceration."
Advocates are particularly incensed about the Corbett Administration's construction of two new prisons in Montgomery County, set to replace SCI-Graterford in the Philly suburbs. Decarcerate PA, which received a 2012 City Paper Big Vision Award, is demanding that Corbett halt the $400 million-plus project.
Speakers at the rally included City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson and representatives from the ACLU of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Student Union, Human Rights Coalition, DreamActivist PA, Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools, and the office of state Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown.
The speakers, some of whom donned yellow construction hats to symbolically “break ground” on the campaign, charged that the upcoming closure of 23 Philadelphia public schools was evidence that Corbett prioritizes corrections funding over the public good.
“The annual cost to incarcerate an individual is about $32,000, while the annual cost to educate a child is about $11,000," said Councilman Johnson. "You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that there is far greater value in investing in education over incarceration.”
The march kicks off with a rally on Saturday, May 25th at noon in LOVE Park and will pick up supporters along the way, ending with a June 3rd rally at the Capitol building.
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Northeast Corner of Spruce Street and 38th Parallel Place.
This pile of dirt and grass is NOT part of the Korean War Memorial Park to the north and east. This is a straight-up empty lot that's managed to stay hidden due to all the open space around it, disguised as part of the surrounding park and plaza. Empty for over 50 years, this shitty patch of fuck has witnessed the entire history of our great city.
When William Penn first arrived to primordial Philadelphia in 1682, legend has it that he entered at "the Dock," a small bay at the mouth of Dock Creek (now Dock Street). The site of this empty lot, according to some accounts, would have been located somewhere along the southern edge of the Dock, just to the east of the mouth of Little Dock Creek, a small tributary of the Dock that ran southwest. That means William Penn, if the old accounts/conjectural musings are true, passed this location on a boat when he first arrived.
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In recent months suburban and typically white victims of mass shootings in Colorado, Connecticut and Arizona have galvanized the United States to think critically about gun violence, mental health, and gun control. As they should have.
But Sunday's broad-daylight shooting of a largely-black New Orleans second line parade, which left 19 people injured, including three critically, merited just a six-paragraph AP story tucked into the bottom corner of A11 in The New York Times. The Mother's Day bloodshed evidences a jarring disjuncture in how violence is treated in the media: Americans killed by Muslims or in white suburbia merit non-stop coverage while the victims of everyday bloodletting on the streets of New Orleans, Philadelphia and Chicago are typically rendered a footnote.
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