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[-5] According to a new survey, Philadelphia is the ninth most segregated metropolitan area in the country. “We can do better,” says Philly Mag, in a tone that’s hard to read.
[-1] The Rev. Kevin Johnson, of North Philly’s Bright Hope Baptist Church, is disinvited from speaking at Morehouse College after writing a newspaper column critical of President Obama. “All I said was Jonathan Papelbon had some good ideas on how to take our country back.”
[-1] AshleyMadison.com releases a list of its Philly customers’ top 10 meetup spots, with No. 1 being Barclay Prime. And all the rest being handicap restrooms at the Linc.
[-3] Documentarians witness a shooting while filming their This Is Kensington series. “How exciting,” says a guy from the This Is Chestnut Hill crew. “All we did was sit around eating Mister Softee and making out.”
[-4] A woman faces child-endangerment charges after leaving her 6-year-old unattended in a car with a loaded gun in Kensington. “And just how do you propose the kid was supposed to defend himself?” asks Jonathan Papelbon.
[0] Philly is the seventh happiest city for young professionals, according to a survey by CareerBliss.com. Aw, that’s so nice! Thanks, stupid survey-churning, click-baiting website nobody’s ever heard of!
[0] A policy change allows Philly police to carry higher-powered firearms. “See, we were shooting lots of bad guys,” explains Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey. “But only making teeny-tiny holes in them.”
[+2] Penn’s Ryan Hospital is honored with a Veterinary Trauma Center designation. “Thanks, Obamacare!” says Jonathan Papelbon, and nobody even wants to guess what that’s supposed to mean.
[+1] Mariel Castro, the daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro, is cleared to travel to Philly to attend Equality Forum. Sorry, Dom Giordano, we know you’re upset, but nobody’s paying attention. You’re the boy who cried “gay socialist foreigner.”
This week’s total: -11 | Last week’s total: -7
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.
Bounded by the 8th, Vine, Franklin Streets and the Metroclub Condo. From the Franklin Street/Franklin Square side.
This right here sure turned out crappy. This shitbag surface lot is just one of many in the area surrounding Franklin Square. With endless auto traffic lining its perimeter, this 40-year-old lot will probably never go away. Nonetheless, there is a small glimmer of hope that it might sometime soon.
The first known use of this lot was as a cemetery. The Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia commanded most of the block bounded by 8th, Race, Vine and Franklin Square for most of the first half of the 19th century. The church itself faced 8th on the southern part of the block and the cemetery filled the rest. Eventually, the church sold off some small pieces along the perimeter of the block, causing buildings (mostly very large houses) to be built along all the street-fronting parcels. Miller's Winter Garden Theater appeared on the Vine Street-facing part of the block in 1854.
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Two men from the Azerbaijan Embassy in Washington D.C. visited right-wing Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler) last week. And yes, this is a set up for a bad joke. But it has nothing to do with bars.
"The catalyst for the meeting was a resolution proposed by a Philadelphia Democrat legislator," Metcalfe wrote to his email list. "The two gentlemen asked to meet with me because the resolution had been referred to the State Government Committee. They explained that the resolution was offensive to an ally of the United States of America. It was an interesting and educational meeting and one not expected normally at the Pennsylvania State Capitol."
Metcalfe, the State Government Committee's chair, pledged to block the legislation and went on to discuss pension reform. He did not, however, say what the legislation was. I asked around, and it turns out that the Azeri Embassy was angry about a "non-controversial" resolution introduced by Rep. Michelle Brownlee (D-Phila) "supporting Nagorno-Karabakh's right to self-determination and efforts to develop its democracy."
Since DA Seth Williams announced that his office's prison-diversion programs for misdemeanors could be in jeopardy due to lack of funding, it seems a good time to review one of the more mysterious items in Philadelphia's capital budget as proposed by Mayor Nutter: A request for $2.3 million to purchase land for city jail expansion. That spending is prescribed, the budget notes, by the new master plan for the Philadelphia Prison System. Which got us interested: What's in that master plan? How many beds will be added? And where? When CP asked the Prison System for a copy of said master plan, however, the response was that the plan isn't complete yet. The city doesn't know how much the prison system will be looking to expand, All it knows is, it needs more beds and its oldest jail, the House of Correction, is overdue for replacement.
It may seem like common sense to — in the process of replacing an old prison — add more beds and hopefully eliminate the practice of triple-celling, (or putting an extra inmate on a cot on the floor), which has drawn criticism and civil-rights lawsuits, including one class action suit that was reopened in December and could go to trial in federal court next year. But the notion of expansion does not sit well with some of the same people who are lodging those civil rights complaints, and who worry it will only further bloat Philly's highest-in-the-nation incarceration rate.
Philadelphia Prisons Commissioner Louis Giorla says the expansion will be designed to accommodate projections for future demand — projections that, again, are not finalized. But projecting is tricky in the prison business. After all, Giorla is not the one who sets the policies that lead to more or fewer people being sent to prison. Those policies have recently included the creation of a bench warrant court, recently cited as driving a reduction in the number of fugitives on the street, and tougher action on those caught in possession of illegal guns, part of a crime-reduction strategy announced last year by Mayor Nutter. The city jails, which were built to house 6,500 people, now routinely contain more than 9,000 on any given day.
This morning, City Council passed legislation that could improve quality of life for Philly's LGBTQ population by offering a $4,000 tax credit to encourage employers to choose health-insurance plans that don't have exclusions for transgender individuals' care, and by requiring that such exclusions be eliminated from the city's own non-union health-care offerings. The bill also makes changes to gender-specific language on city forms, and increases rights for life partners.
The vote wasn't unanimous; it went 14-3 in favor. Councilman At Large David Oh said that he'd "like to support this bill" but he had some issues. He had asked the bill's primary sponsor, At-Large Councilman Jim Kenney, to hold the bill to work out those issues, but Kenney had declined. Oh's concerns included a the worry that eliminating gender-specific identification on school forms would create challenges in collecting data on single mothers and fathers in the city. He also said that, while he supported assisting current transgender city employees with gender-reassignment surgeries, he wasn't sure that "we should provide new surgeries."
Councilman Brian O'Neill seconded that: "The changes in the medical insurance for transgender surgery, I'm not there yet." And Councilman Bill Green said he worries about the bill were solely financial. The tax credits, he said, "is largely a waste of money." Given other budget constraints, "I see no reason to take $2 million and growing, and spend it on something that provides a marginal and incremental benefit."
State Rep. Brian Sims, who addressed Council, didn't see it that way. "Today," he told them, "we get to add your voices to the chorus of civil rights leaders. ... Today, you are agents of equality. … This is a remarkable day in our city's rich history."
A blighted building in Old City that we told you about last month is finally showing some signs of new ownership, following rumors of its acquisition by a (formerly) super secret real estate investor.
In recent weeks the south face of the 105 N. 2nd St. has been plastered with a sign advertising New Hope-based Northeastern Commerical Funding as the principal lender involved in the sale and presumably redevelopment of the Trenton China Pottery complex.
According to new deed records from the city, the building, which is valued at an even $2 million by the Office of Property Assessment, was sold by previous owner Jack Azran on March 7, 2013 for $1 (in other words, presumably, a silver briefcase full of cash). However, real-estate-transfer tax documents for the sale indicate that Azran's cash consideration was $3.5 million.
So who are the mysteriously well-funded buyers? The deed records list the imaginatively named "105 N. 2nd Street Investors, L.P." as the buyer, with an address at the ever-dubiously-occupied Waterfront Square condominiums. That address corresponds with what the OPA lists as a commercial unit on the ground floor of the complex's Reef Tower.
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The ACLU today filed a lawsuit challenging a Norristown, Pa., municipal ordinance that "punishes innocent tenants and their landlords for requesting police assistance" — including victims of domestic violence. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Lakisha Briggs, who "was threatened with eviction under this policy after she called the police for protection from her abusive ex-boyfriend."
The ordinance, according to the ACLU, "penalizes landlords and encourages them to evict their tenants when the police are called to a property three times in four months for 'disorderly behavior,' including responding to incidents of domestic violence."
Norristown, the seat of Montgomery County, is no stranger to civil rights controversies, drawing protests from advocates who accuse local police of detaining undocumented immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). More on the immigration controversy from WHYY's Emma Jacobs here. The ACLU press release is below.
So, the Village Voice put Philly-born porn star Stoya on their cover this week. That should be a good story and good click-bait. We should know, since we did a cover story on her in 2008. Of course there's room for multiple stories in alt-weeklies on the same subject, especially four years later. I'm just courting some of that sweet sweet click-bait.
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In case you thought things had become more progressive in Harrisburg, here's a reality check. Pennsylvania's state legislature, last year the star of national headlines for its proposal to mandate pre-abortion ultrasounds (since women who didn't want to see them could just "close your eyes," according to the governor), is back with more anti-abortion legislation. HB 818, a revived proposal to ban insurance companies offering abortion coverage from the Pennsylvania health-insurance exchange to be established via the Affordable Care Act, passed out of the state House today.
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.
Is this fucker even dead? This staid-looking asstower has been promised for the last eight years and still hasn't seen a stick of construction.
This location, on the 100 block of Spring Garden, isn't all that historically exciting. Spring Garden Street didn't even exist here until 1923. Spring Garden used to start at 6th Street and was later expanded to 5th. In classic Philly fashion, it took five decades of preparation for the extension all the way to Delaware Avenue. After it was finally done, the piece of Spring Garden that was brought into this area cut across the pre-existing grid in such a way as to render several blocks disfigured. The site of this project was where Spring Garden collided with Green Street, which was the original major thoroughfare for this neighborhood. The result was an extremely wide-ass section of Spring Garden Street. Even today, Google Maps labels the block as both Green Street AND Spring Garden Street.
