In 2024, to celebrate her 75th birthday, Aminata Calhoun took a trip to Spain for some much-needed rest and relaxation. After a few weeks of soaking in the picturesque Spanish scenery, she returned home to a landscape starkly different from the one she had left. Surrounding the lot at Belmont and Wyalusing avenues that she had tirelessly cleaned and beautified into what she dubbed the “Ed Bradley Oasis” was a chain-link contractor fence barring Calhoun and the rest of the community from the land they had once tended with such care.
“It was a shock to me, visually, and it saddened me emotionally,” Calhoun remembers. “I came back to heavy equipment, machinery, that had already torn down the planters and had destroyed the pollinator garden.”
The fences that went up at the southeast corner of Belmont and Wyalusing marked an end to eight years of Calhoun’s organizing and beautification work. As covered in the September 2020 issue of Grid (#136), after Calhoun’s parents passed away in 2016, she moved into their house on Belmont Avenue. What she didn’t expect was that she’d soon be taking care of the vacant lot just a few doors down.
Calhoun says she couldn’t just stand by and watch the lot accumulate heaps of illegally dumped trash and debris. At first Calhoun started doing cleanups herself. When that became unmanageable, she tried reporting the illegal dumping through the Philly311 system. And when that proved ineffective, she coordinated with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) and Mural Arts Philadelphia to beautify the lot.
Mural Arts started the process by installing a mural of West Philadelphia-born broadcasting legend Ed Bradley. After the mural went up, the lot was among those selected by PHS to receive a pollinator garden as part of a collaboration with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). The 2020 Grid article quoted representatives from PHS and NWF touting the project as a verdant example of using horticulture to beautify a community. Only four years after moving in, Calhoun had created what she affectionately referred to as the “Ed Bradley Oasis.”
When, just a year after the garden was created, the pandemic hit, the site became an even greater refuge for the community, offering somewhere for children to escape quarantine and virtual school and experience the natural world, a place for neighbors to safely convene and enjoy events such as poetry readings. Calhoun reports placing drastically fewer 911 calls after the lot was beautified than she had previously. This was where the Grid story of September 2020 ended.
For Calhoun the story continued. Early on in her efforts to clean up the lot, Calhoun had contacted the property’s owners, a couple from South Philly who had owned the lot for almost 30 years. After hearing about the pollinator garden and Calhoun’s ideas for bringing positive change to the community, they were upfront with her about not having plans for the lot. They told her to go ahead with her project, especially if it was going to do the neighborhood good.
Calhoun says that, over the years she tended the land, she tried to make contact a few more times with the owners and even invited them to the ribbon cutting once the pollinator garden was installed, but they declined the invitation. With all the work she was putting in, Calhoun didn’t have time to think about the ownership of the space or to engage with the associated bureaucracy. And the lack of strong Registered Community Organization (RCO) representation in Calhoun’s neighborhood didn’t help matters. These community organizations function as development and zoning liaisons between the City government and residents. One RCO leader suffered a terrible fire at his residence, Calhoun explains, and the other recently passed away. Calhoun had no idea that the lot was even under the threat of development.
I came back to heavy equipment, machinery, that had already torn down the planters and had destroyed the pollinator garden.”
— Aminata Calhoun, Ed Bradley Oasis caretaker
Even now, as a multiunit building is being constructed on the land that once hosted her pollinator garden and the Ed Bradley mural is completely covered, Calhoun says she is not mad at the former owners or the developers they sold to. Although she still has not had contact with the owners and doesn’t know why they sold the parcel, Calhoun says she can imagine a number of reasons, including needing the money for retirement or some other family necessity. She also says she isn’t angry at the developers who bought the lot and built on it, because, as she puts it, “Developers do what developers do.”
Mural Arts is not letting the developers evade responsibility, however. They have been in touch with Isaac Katz, the director of operations of site developer Grandview Developers. According to a spokesperson, Mural Arts is asking Grandview to fully or partially fund the mural’s re-creation on another wall near the garden. As of this writing, Grandview, which did not respond to questions before this article went to print, had not communicated whether they would honor this request.
According to Mural Arts’ executive director, Jane Golden, the public art nonprofit isn’t appealing only to Grandview. She would also like to see a City policy requiring developers to coordinate with the City when there is a community asset such as a mural or garden on a lot they want to develop and notify the creator of that work of the development threat. Golden points out that a developer wouldn’t just demolish a building without telling anyone even if they didn’t know who owned it. So, in her view, the same should go for works of art like murals. But when it comes to community, Golden has an even more compelling reason for this advocacy.
“When a mural goes away, there’s also all the people who worked on that project, the community voice, the team of artists,” Golden laments. “It’s this robust village that brought the work of public art to life. So when it goes away, it’s like just taking away a part of Philadelphia.”
Calhoun shared Golden’s sense of loss when she saw her work get buried, especially since the lot in question is in one of the many neighborhoods that have historically shouldered the burden of Philadelphia’s vacant lot crisis.
“These lots are predominantly in communities that are challenged with resources and psychologically stressed from the blight,” Calhoun explains. And as the City’s 2019 Litter Index Report found, the majority of heavily dumped-on neighborhoods and vacant lots are in the lowest income parts of the city. (Full disclosure: I worked on this report while serving as the director of the City’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet.)
Calhoun is frustrated that the City government lacks the policies and programs to help residents and community organizations — left to deal with the negative effects of vacant lots — put these spaces to productive use via a clear and transparent process. Calhoun has, however, seen the power of vacant lot beautification, and even after the frustrating and traumatic demise of the Ed Bradley Oasis, she is actually looking to start another project.
“I’m a little dismayed, but I’m not beat down to the point that I would not do it again,” she says. “I’m just looking in a more strategic way.”
