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Archive: December, 2012
It took months of conflict over Mayor Nutter's ban on serving meals to the homeless in city parks and even a federal lawsuit, but it looks like the city administration is now stepping up with a coordinated approach to providing access to food for the hungry. The mayor signed an executive order to create the Philadelphia Food Access Collaborative, helmed by Broad Street Ministry Pastor Bill Golderer — whom City Paper profiled back in May — and Mary Horstmann, the mayor's deputy director of policy planning and coordination and the city's point person on hunger. The collaborative includes shelter operators, food distribution experts, mental health advocacy specialists and other social service professionals.
The collaborative has a number of concrete goals, like finding new spaces to serve meals and improving coordination among different groups serving the hungry. How and how soon these goals will be achieved, remains an open question. Here's the city's press release:
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.
North-facing view of Revlon Cente, with Walnut Street in foreground.
If the three-minute testimony allowed to each member of the public during the comment period in City Council meetings each week can be regarded as an art form, then Robert Taylor should be regarded as Philadelphia’s most prolific artist. Taylor, president of Transport Workers Union Local 700 for the past 25 years and a libertarian, tests the limits of the form, quoting liberally from thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Mahatma Gandhi as he takes on the legislative proposals of the day.
At Council’s last meeting of the fall session yesterday, he testified regarding a bill authorizing the city’s director of finance to transfer nearly $2 million in appropriations within the Water Fund.
“I don’t oppose the bill itself,” Taylor began, “but I do oppose anything that may funnel any fluoride into our water supply.”
He went on to quote a Harvard University study that suggests that intense overexposure to fluoride may adversely affect neurological development in children, asked that the fluoride content of Philadelphia’s water supply be reduced to zero, and then sought to pass out informational DVDs to each member of City Council. The bill later passed.
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A Pennsylvania National Guard advertisement affixed to SEPTA student transpasses is drawing criticism from parents.
"We are very concerned about whether there's a policy around advertising to young people and about the issue of military recruitment and why parents have not been clearly informed about these policies," says Helen Gym of Parents United for Public Education.
SEPTA does not see a problem, and notes that the ads are sold by an outside agency.
"SEPTA's advertising agency, Titan, solicits a variety of companies and organizations to spend marketing dollars to advertise on SEPTA. We hope the public appreciates our efforts to bring additional revenue to the Authority," says spokesperson Jerri Williams.
Military recruitment aimed at minors has been controversial throughout the last decade's ultimately very unpopular wars on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. In 2008, the U.S. Army opened a very expensive virtual-reality-video-game-complex called the Army Experience Center at Franklin Mills Mall, which I wrote about in my debut freelance contribution to this paper. It closed in 2010. SEPTA advertising, I think, was likely cheaper.
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I greatly admire Philadelphia Daily News editorial writer Sandy Shea, read her pieces every weekday morning, and generally agree with them. But I believe Shea is profoundly wrong in her defense of the William Penn Foundation's funnelling of millions of dollars to pay for the Boston Consulting Group's proposal to radically restructure Philly public schools.
Friday's Daily News editorial criticizes groups that filed an ethics complaint against BCG and William Penn last week that accuses them of violating the new city lobbying code, telling the misfits to not "scare private money away from public schools" by asking too many questions. I disagree. Citizens, journalists very much included, should always ask tough, skeptical questions about how powerful private interests exercise influence over our government.
Here are some quotes from the editorial, followed by questions I think Shea was remiss in not asking:
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.
Its pretty pitiful when a lot was more occupied in 1855 than it is now. This 33,600 square foot piece of shit at 120-140 S. 24th St. is one such lot. For 49 years, this crappy surface lot has graced the Schuylkill River with a sunken empty void that should have been filled a long-ass time ago. Can we get a building here already?!?!
The development life of this lot started way back in the early 1800s when it was at the corner of George (Sansom) and Beach (24th) Streets and wasn't even on solid ground -- it was a series of piers and wharves. The City Glass Works was located here for the majority of the mid-19th century. In the 1860s and 70s, the neighborhood just to the east of this location started to become filled in with the stately mansions of wealthy families. This meant that contractors needed easy access to the high-quality marble needed to build the fancy-shmancy facades of those awesome homes. As a result, the site of the current lot became home to Sam F. Prince's Marble and Soap Stone Wharf, one of many along this part of the river. The northern half of the lot became the Sansom Street Wharf.
After years — really, years! — of lobbying by urban planning and cycling advocates, City Council today passed, with little fanfare, the "Complete Streets" bill. The legislation not only requires the city to (as logic would seem to demand anyway) consider travelers using all modes of transportation when designing streets but also changes the rules of the road for how cyclists and drivers interact. The bill provides for $75 fines for riding or parking your bike in violation of the rules, or for parking your car in a bike lane.
You might say that the creation of uniformity in this matter is somewhat out of character for this City Council, which this June voted to amp up its control over streets design even more, by requiring all new bike lanes that affect parking or remove a lane of traffic to be approved by Council. Nonetheless, proponents see Complete Streets, helmed by Councilman Mark Squilla, as a big step.
Squilla told CP when he was planning to introduce the bill that the reason for the hold-up, he thought, was that people didn't see "the increase of usage that we're having now. You actually see that there is a need for it. Before, I don't think the vision was there that [cycling] was coming to the forefront." He said he didn't see a conflict between Complete Streets and the bike-land-approval bill. "I think they work hand in hand."
A bill from Councilman David Oh to put hefty fines on skateboarders and cyclists who ride over public art or memorials has been amended to reduce the maximum fines from $2,000 to $1,000, but it still includes the possibility of jail time. The bill came up with an amendment in City Council today — Oh said he had met with a number of skateboarding advocates and that they did "like these changes" — but Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell complained that it was still essentially "the same bill."
"This is a bill that would lock people up for skateboarding," she said. "We don't lock children up."
Oh pointed out that it would require intentional defacing of an artwork or memorial to get a fine; just riding is not a crime. Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez pointed out that there's no clear regulation of skateboarding in the city right now, and suggested more clarity was needed all around.
The amendment passed, and Council President Darrell Clarke said to Blackwell, "You can fight the fight next week."
In today's City Paper, I wrote about the teachers, parents and kids who crowded the cafeteria of Olney Charter High School on Friday for an Open Mic Night. Everyone I spoke with said such an event would never have happened a few years ago in this, formerly among the city's most dangerous schools. Since 2011, Olney has been under the management of the nonprofit Aspira.
Aspira's welcome gift from the school district was a big bucket of keys with no labels, and the music department found "garbage," just a few pianos in pieces and missing lids and pedals. Erina Pearlstein, a music teacher, helped raise money to get them fixed up, along with some brass instruments so the school might have even more music classes next year. Teacher Katie Dickerson, who invited CP to the event, has started a blog with her students' work, and it's worth a read.
One thing I did not attempt to describe in this article: Jaylen Gates' impressive dancing. So, here's the video:
In September, federal District Court Judge William Yohn Jr. approved an agreement between the city and church groups that had sued over a ban on serving meals outdoors to the homeless and hungry, providing for the two sides to begin meeting to work together on a solution.
This week, the groups finally sat down for the first time.
The goal, theoretically, was the same on all sides: To eliminate the need for outdoor meals. But ever since the ban was issued by the Nutter administration this spring, citing a need for both sanitary facilities and dignity, critics have suggested there's an ulterior motive: a desire to clear the homeless, and the church groups who’ve long brought them food there, off the newly gussied-up Ben Franklin Parkway.
So, city representatives’ reaction to the latest bold idea presented to them by homeless-feeding groups — an indoor-outdoor homeless café, right on the Parkway near the Free Library and Family Court buildings, with all the class of the stylish new Milk & Honey café just down the road — was not surprising.
“There was kind of a silence,” laughs Pastor Brian Jenkins of Chosen 300 Ministries. He said that he thought the administration might think over the idea, however; he didn't take the silence as a "no," per se.
Cranford Joseph Coulter of The King’s Jubilee says the meeting was “very disappointing.”
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