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Archive: February, 2012
Believe it or not, the against-the-odds defeat of the Callowhill Neighborhood Improvement District proposal wasn't the biggest barrier to plan to turn the Reading Viaduct into a second-story park. And neither is what Councilman Jim Kenney called a pervading "aura of fear, prejudice, anger and a real desire to stop any progress. Actually, the most significant barrier may be the intractability of the right-of-way's owner, Reading International, which currently, oddly enough, is in the business of "owning and operating cinemas and live theaters" in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.
Now, PennEnvironment is launching a campaign to pressure Reading International to sell the viaduct, which the group figures would cost $37 million to convert to a park, but $50 million to demolish altogether. "The city is trying to use a carrot to convince them to sell," says PennEnvironment's Adam Garber. "We think there are some opportunities for civic engagement to bring some pressure to bear." The group will be kicking off a letter-writing campaign in the next few weeks and may send a delegation to Reading's California headquarters — including, Garber hopes, some City Council members. After all, they project that a High Line-type project could bring 12,000 permanent jobs to the city.
Last week, Smith’s Restaurant and Lounge, a Rittenhouse eatery, posted a chalkboard beer advertisement that made a pun out of sexual assault. “I like my beer like I like my violence … domestic.” The offensive comment was spotted and photographed by a passerby and uploaded to Philebrity.com. Within hours, a mass response occurred across Facebook. Women Against Abuse picked up the photo and shared it with the tagline “With neighbors like Smith’s, who needs enemies? Let’s stand up to violence, not exploit it.” A series of alarmed responses flooded the comment box, with many readers taking action by calling the establishment or writing letters and emails.
Jill McDevitt of West Chester’s Feminique Boutique also picked up the picture, spurring more of a call to action. Within a few hours of the photo’s Facebook debut, countless emails had been sent and even more had called the restaurant directly, demanding an apology and an explanation. Several suggested the restaurant make amends by sending a donation to Women Against Abuse’s iPledge campaign.
In December, Philadelphia-area pundit and motivational writer-speaker Gene Marks wrote to Forbes.com readers: “I am not a poor black kid.” Yet, in his nationally infamous essay “If I Were a Poor Black Kid,” he had plenty of advice for poor black kids: 1) stop complaining about your crappy schools and study harder 2) use a lot of technology, like having Skype conversations with other go-getter ghetto youth!
Now Marks has been hired by a second publication known for its diverse readership: Philadelphia Magazine [Note: sorry for not making this clear earlier—hired as a blogger for Philly Post]. So I asked editor Tom McGrath, who I thank for his candor, why it is “appropriate to hire the person in this city who has written the most racially-insensitive article of the year?”
“We don't,” responds McGrath, “base our hiring decisions―we don't stick our finger to the wind and say, 'Has this person offended anybody?”
A judge acquitted 10 Occupy Philly protesters today in the first of four similar trials.
The 10 were arrested during a protest outside police headquarters in which Occupiers blocked Race Street for nearly 20 hours to protest police brutality.
Lawyer Larry Krasner, one of the lawyers defending Occupy Philly, argued in court today that the prosecution lacked evidence to show that the peaceful protesters caused "unreasonable" inconvenience to the public.
[-2] Buzz Bissinger writes an impassioned article in the New York Times saying that the Inquirer and Daily News could lose their journalistic integrity if Ed Rendell’s investor group buys them. He concludes by threatening to add all the “sick sex stuff” to the Kindle version of A Prayer for the City.
[-2] Darrell Clarke says he planned to eliminate the City Council tradition of not holding a session during the week of a federal holiday, but there was a miscommunication this time around. Also this is his last cigarette, his diet starts tomorrow and he’ll put The Wire in his queue, just lay off.
[0] Rendell says he’s willing to consider a pledge or outside review to avoid newsroom tampering, and would be fine with the newspapers writing stories critical of him. “Nothing sticks to me anyway,” he says. “Except Velcro, of course. Right now I’ve got a watch band, a messenger bag and some kid’s sneaker all stuck to my back.”
[+3] After being told not to write about the possible sale, journalists at both papers sign a petition against censorship in the newsroom. Among the co-signers are Joe SixPack, The Stinkmeister, the guy who hands out pictures of his balls as gifts, Stu Bykofsky and — Dammit. Can’t read the rest. A giant pop-up ad is in the way. Now it’s wiggling so we can’t click on the little x.
[-4] A 17-year-old girl is tazed in the head during a fight near Overbrook High School. By coincidence: Tazed in the Head plays Connie’s Ric-Rac tonight with Pukemon, Carl Greene’s Grabby Hands and The Bicycle Gropers.
[+1] The Phillies believe their new Phanatic Dangle Hat will be the team’s best selling souvenir this season. “Contrary to the rumors, this item is not a hat that looks like a big fuzzy green Phanatic penis,” sighs spokesman. “This is a small fuzzy green hat you put on your penis, during rainouts and such.”
[-2] A naked man is arrested in a Chester County Walmart. He shrugs. “Guess they’re not dangle fanatics.”
This week’s total: -6 | Last week’s total: -1
Archbishop Charles Chaput has given a reprieve to 18 of the 24 Catholic schools that were up for closure. But among the six schools still set to be shuttered: Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Sacred Heart of Jesus, the last two Catholic schools in Pennsport. Neighbors see it as a critical blow to their South Philadelphia neighborhood — and they claim that the Blue Ribbon Commission, which mapped out the closure plan, never even came through their schools. (The Commission disputes that.)
The schools are organizing a rally at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow, at Third and McKean streets, to send a message to the Archbishop and the archdiocese's Blue Ribbon Commission: South Philadelphia needs their schools. Further, they argue that the proposal Chaput accepted, for "revitalized" schools elsewhere in the area, made questionable assumptions about the two schools' financial outlooks.
Sacred Heart parent Kenneth Dougherty says Chaput didn't really listen to the school community: “We feel we didn’t have our chance to plead our case. We want to make them aware that we want to be heard.”
Photographer Zoe Strauss, left, and journalist Daniel Denvir. Photos by Neal Santos
Exciting news for award-winning photographer Zoe Strauss and City Paper's own Daniel Denvir! The two have won a $10,000 immigration reporting grant from the French-American Foundation. They'll be using it, over the next few months, to assemble a photographic and written report from Philadelphia and Detroit: a portrait of immigrant life in de-industrialized urban America, and an examination of the forces transforming both inner cities and the immigrants that reside there.
"The same powerful forces of globalization that have harmed cities like Philadelphia and Detroit have also brought migrants from around the world to them. These resilient communities are perhaps a silver lining around an otherwise bleak picture," says Denvir.
The story and images will run in the City Paper as well as in The Atlantic Cities later this year.
We knew the budget cuts proposed by Gov. Tom Corbett would be painful — but it's even worse than you thought. Philly's Deputy Mayor for Health and Opportunity Donald Schwarz calls them both "cruel" and "disastrous." As Daniel Denvir laid out in his cover story on Corbett's deep cuts to welfare, public health and other social programs, the budget cuts affect people with intellectual disabilities, mental health problems, the homeless and other exceedingly vulnerable populations. Now that Philly has had time to crunch the numbers on a proposed 20 percent cut to a newly combined block grant that includes spending for four city departments (Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, Human Services, Public Health and Supportive Housing), Schwartz figures we'll lose out on $40,784,291 for fiscal 2012.
More than that, the budget would dismantle safety nets that have been 40 years in the making — and reverse decades-long efforts to move away from institutionalization — all while sending people who would have received mental health services, addiction services, HIV/AIDS hospice care, elderly care and intellectual disability services into homeless shelters or out onto the street.
The numbers projected in Philly are striking: Some 4,000 mentally ill people will lose outpatient services; 400 of them will lose case management services; and 500 to 600 people with chronic mental illness will lose out on housing support, according to Schwarz, meaning "We expect people will be discharged from hospitals and other places into homeless shelters." Thirty to 40 young people with intellectual disabilities who would have received bridge services between youth and adult support systems will not. Sixteen percent of hospice beds for patients with HIV/AIDS will be cut: "There are folks that will die on the streets in Philadelphia because there will not be hospice placements." One out of two daytime mental health emergency teams and six out of eight walk-in centers dealing with emergency mental health services will likely be cut. And 437 addiction treatment beds will be removed, meaning more people will stay in the already strained prison system due to lack of treatment options. As for those homeless shelters — which can be expected to absorb much of this new overflow — they'll be losing critical case management services.
Mike Bennett, a farmer in Henderson Township, tried to convince his neighbors not to lease their land to gas drillers at a meager $35 per acre. But they went ahead anyway, and now he can look out his front window and see two horizontal fracturing wells being drilled — and a stream of 100,000-pound trucks rumbling down his road, which is only bonded for traffic up to 10 tons. After warning truckers, and calling police and town supervisors, Bennett took matters into his own hands last week: "They ran five trucks through and I could see they were lining up more over at the well," he says. "About 11 o'clock, here they come a whole parade, so I simply pulled my pick-up out in front of the truck, and everything came to a stop... . I think we had 11 trucks in the line." The police came out and issued citations to the drivers (Bennett is expecting his own citation in the mail, too); but they warned Bennett that the frackers' $600,000 to $800,000 tickets were likely to be reduced to almost nothing in court. And this morning, Bennett says, the trucks were already back on the road.
That's the type of atmosphere of impunity that anti-fracking activists say is enjoyed at all levels of the industry, nurtured by friendly courts and a Department of Environmental Protection that appears to miss some violations and downplay others.
It helps (if you're a fracker) that the impact fee legislation signed by Gov. Corbett last week takes away municipal powers to control wells via zoning — while giving them the power to decline collecting the new impact fee. Bradford County, already a major fracking hub, is among those considering skipping the fee, presumably in an effort to attract even more drillers.
A weekly series of foulmouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other development and design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at philaphilia.blogspot.com.
On the Delaware Waterfront between Market and Chestnut Streets: Philadelphia's mighty waterfront surface lot.
This shitbird empty lot is even more useless than everyone thinks. This piece of land isn't even supposed to be here, and, as if the fake land knows this, has the unlimited power to stop any project that gets proposed for it. It's a disaster of the Triple-P variety: Piss-Poor Planning.
This lot started as … water. This was the location where ferries from Camden and elsewhere would arrive at Market Street. Once I-95 was stupidly planned to crush, kill and destroy the entire Center City Delaware Riverfront and countless historical sites, a huge extension of landfill crept out into the Delaware, halfway to the long-lost Smith and Windmill islands. They shouldn't call it Penn's Landing, they should call it Penn's Sailing!
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