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Archive: December, 2012
Around late September, property owners along Bodine and Cadwallader streets in Kensington started getting notices in the mail: The Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority wanted to take their property, and it would be setting the price. Maybe it was because it was so unbelievable — the idea that the city could just seize their property, including garages rented to businesses, side yards adjacent to their homes, a garage with an apartment above that's rented, and others — that the property owners didn't take the correspondence too seriously at first. But over the past week — just in time for Christmas — they got news that it was done. "On December 18, 2012, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority acquired title to the referenced property," the letters read, distributed by mail and attached in manila envelopes to signposts all along the square block.
Now, Meletios Anthanasiadis, owner of El Greco Pizza & Luncheonette and landlord of about 20 properties in the area, is livid that some seven properties in his name are all being taken from him. The properties in question are garages that he says are currently rented to tenants, who use the garages and adjacent parking lots for businesses including an auto body shop and a small antique car restoration business. "They're displacing a small business," he says. "They're costing people their jobs."
"They're stealing [the properties]. They're taking my property, my tax dollars, and giving it to someone else."
Anthanasiadis had purchased the properties over the past 12 years or so with the plan to rent them out until he could develop on them himself. He says it was his only retirement plan, after running pizza shops ever since he dropped out of school before 10th grade. He feels that he invested in the neighborhood when few others wanted to — and now someone else will reap the profits. For one example, he points to 1529 N. Cadwallader St., for which he says the city has offered him $43,000. "I paid $55,000 in 2004, and then I had to make improvements, I had to pay interest. But that's the only offer I received from the city, and they made the offer after they took possession over my property. They become gods [in the way they hand down decisions]."
Image from greatwhatsit.com
If there's one thing you can say about the Mummers in recent years, it's that they seem to have perfected a balance of doing what would be, almost anywhere else, politically incorrect, and getting away with it in style. It's something about being good natured, and a little drunk, and loaded up with sequins that makes it seem, somehow, sort of OK to dress as a generically "Oriental" emperor, or tribally nonspecific "Indian."
Mayor Nutter may think the NRA's suggestion of bringing more guns into schools is a "dumbass" notion, but that might not stop the idea from gaining traction in Harrisburg. Newly elected state Rep. Gregory Lucas (R- Crawford and Erie counties) has circulated a memorandum detailing his plans to clear the way for teachers and other trained school staffers to carry guns in school.
In the document, he explains, "As a new legislator from Northwestern Pennsylvania, I believe I bring a unique perspective to questions about these shootings. My home town, Edinboro, saw something similar back in 1998. A student brought a gun to a school dance. Three people were shot. One of them, a friend of mine, died of his wounds. What prevented more deaths on this horrible occasion? An armed private citizen who, using his own gun, stopped the shooter."
He added: "I will be introducing legislation to allow school personnel to carry a gun to school if they have been licensed to carry a concealed firearm AND have a current and valid certification in the use and handling of firearms."
Lucas told a local reporter "I think the NRA is right on track," though he explained, "I'm a gun person."
The "Drop the Ball NYE Event" at 2424 Studios' Skybox in Fishtown was supposed to include five hours of open bar, "2,000+ of the tri-state's elite nightlife crowd," a champagne toast, live ball dropping — and, neighbors feared, a drunken mess of non-locals cramming into a space that they argue could barely accommodate 1,000 party-goers. Fishtowners were none too pleased with the plan by a promoter called One Up Events. In fact, after a slew of emails to City Paper, which was among the sponsors of the event, to district Councilman Mark Squilla and to the 26th Police District, they got the event canceled, according to 2424 Studios co-owner Leonidas Addimando.
Addimando didn't want to comment to CP about the event, his decision to cancel it, the capacity of the space or whether the property owner should have had a Special Assembly and Occupancy License to host such events. However, in an email to Squilla, the 26th and Christopher Sawyer, a neighbor who complained about the event, Addimando wrote: "After having the details of this NYE event brought to my attention late last week and early this week, my partners and I have canceled the event's booking and thus there will be no such party in our building. … When this event was booked the true intentions of the events sponsor's were not disclosed to us. Had they been, we as owners would have never allowed them to book the 'Skybox.'"
We reached out to a couple promoters on what happened and whether this event will be moved at the llast minute. Apologies to the tri-state elite nightlife crowd for any disappointment.
UPDATE: Good news, tri-state elite nightlife crowd! The event has been moved to "Philly's newest super club, Statuz" at 600 Spring Garden St. Event promoter Rob Wright describes this as his decision. "This event has not been canceled but it has been relocated to a new venue with better parking and access to cabs and public transportation. This was a hard decision but became easy to make given all of the requests we were getting from ticket buyers for better transportation options."
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 of the entire 3000 and 3100 blocks of John F. Kennedy Boulevard
It just keeps on going!!
This lot sure is a bastard. A Long Bastard. West Philly's east-west blocks are already longer than Center City's, and this lot is as long as two West Philly blocks. That's long!! For 59 years, this parking lot has dirtied up an already dirty spot that was empty before it was even a parking lot. What a piece of dung.
In the early 19th century, the site of this block would have been described as a small part of the massive estate of the Powel family, a wealthy Welsh family that had their hands in everything, especially real estate. The parcel of land that this lot stands on was so large that it was becoming a town upon itself called Powelton. The neighborhood to the northwest still bears this name.
When I lived in Texas, I spent nearly every evening having beers with my neighbor. Unsurprisingly, he was named Bubba. One day, while he and I were discussing how a local tweaker had come to begin driving a very expensive luxury vehicle he mentioned that he had recently bought a gun he described as a Russian sniper rifle.
I asked why he thought he needed a gun like that. He described his purchase as an investment.
Barack Obama had recently been elected president. Rather than let your stereotypes fill in the rest of this anecdote, I’ll just say that Bubba planned on selling the rifle after a gun ban went into effect. That ban never came.
All of this leads me to say this: Though I acknowledge that they might be accurate, there is good reason to be skeptical of all the stories in which reporters go interview gun shop owners, only to be told that “Business has never been better.”
In Washington, talk of how rich is rich enough to endure an elevated tax rate has been a central sticking point in negotiations. Reportedly, the president is now looking for higher tax rates to start for those earning more than $400,000; House Speaker John Boehner's "Plan B" would increase taxes only for those earning more than $1 million.
However, for most Pennsylvanians it will make little difference. The end to tax breaks for people earning more than $200,000 or couples with incomes above $250,000 would impact just one in 100 people in Philly, according to an analylss by the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. (Affluent counties immediately surrounding Philly would be among the most affected in the state.) “Lawmakers in rural, urban and suburban areas alike should be speaking out loudly in favor of ending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to limit cuts to services that benefit the seniors, children and families they represent,” the center's executive director Sharon Ward said in a statement. A study of the impact of the tax cuts by the Congressional Research Service also found the impacts of the cuts would be "negligible" when it comes to economic growth.
Sen. Larry Farnese, a Philly Democrat who last session worked on legislation designed to crack down on straw purchasers of guns, is preparing to introduce a bill that would ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines in the state.
Whether Gov. Tom Corbett would sign any such legislation is less certain. Corbett has told reporters that he thinks the answer is not necessarily gun control but could lie in part with a better focus on mental health services. (This comes from the same governor who has advocated major cuts to mental health funding, leading this year to a 7.7 percent cut in the mental health base line item in Pennsylvania's budget.)
Just last year, City Council passed legislation requiring anyone who wants a plot of city-owned parkland to offer up another piece of land to replace it, noting that "it is vital to the public interest to preserve and protect the City's public park and recreation spaces and ensure that future developments in the City do not result in any net loss of public park and recreation land." Pretty soon, we'll get the first chance to see if, when the right proposal comes along, that admirable principle gets flushed down the Schuylkill.
The proposal in question is from Temple University, which wants to build a 23,000-square-foot boathouse off of Kelly Drive near the East Park Canoe House. The school's crew teams have been operating out of tents and trailers (which is apparently pretty miserable) since the East Park Canoe House was condemned in 2008; a Temple rep told the Inquirer that rehabbing the canoe house itself (which would be allowed under the 2011 law) wasn't an option, because it's not big enough. The hitch: Temple can't meet the law's requirements to provide nearby, comparable property to substitute for the riverside plot. Instead, they're offering $1.5 million to help with the estimated $5 million fix of the East Park Canoe House, and what may be around $1.5 million more to help fix up land in the area that Temple believes is "all but unusable."
You may not have a problem with one of Philly's major universities getting a boathouse, just like its counterparts have a couple miles downriver. But theoretically, the city should: The established price of that plot of land is not the $3 million Temple put on the table, but another plot of land.
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City Commissioner Stephanie Singer took down meeting transcripts from her personal website after Deputy Commissioner and legal adviser Fred Voight told her it would violate a city contract with Class Act Reporting Agency, LLC. The public must pay Class Act $4 per page to access the transcripts.
"If the public doesn't want to pay for it, then they should go to the Commissioners' meeting," says Ralph DiFronzo, who identified himself as Class Act's office manager. (The company, which boasts a laundry list of union and city contracts and whose website displays photos of former Mayor John Street and ex-City Councilman Frank Rizzo Jr., says that it is "woman-owned"--by Rose Tamburri and Clarissa DiFronzo.)
Ralph DiFronzo says the proceeds belong to the hardworking person who typed out the meeting and called Singer's posting of the transcripts "unethical." He says she did it "because she was so pissed that [her fellow Commissioners] voted her off" as Chairwoman after this November's election.
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