On an afternoon in late October, students from Sayre High School were trickling into the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Center’s community room to take off their waders and to review what they had found in the creek. It was a scene you might expect at any environmental center, but a relatively fresh one now that the Cobbs Creek center is open again after a two-year, $1.5 million renovation.
The building, originally a horse stable used by the Fairmount Park Guard (a park police force absorbed into the Philadelphia Police Department in 1972), opened as an environmental center in 2001 thanks to a campaign helmed by retired teacher and school administrator Carole Williams-Green. The resulting nonprofit organization, the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center (I served on the organization’s board of trustees from 2009 to 2011), ran the center until 2017 when Philadelphia Parks & Recreation took over operations. At that point, Cobbs Creek native Alicia R. Burbage, who had been involved with the center and the efforts to create it since the 1990s, started as director of operations, community outreach and civic engagement.
The pandemic forced a pause to indoor programming in 2020, though Burbage says they continued the work of connecting neighbors to the outdoors. “We did programming without walls,” she says. Once the center opened again in 2021 (I worked as a seasonal environmental educator from the summer into the fall of 2021), it was plagued by problems with its heating system and decaying roof, forcing it to close in the fall of 2023.
Under Rebuild, a soda-tax-funded program to rehab libraries and park spaces, the City replaced the roof, upgraded the HVAC system and renovated public spaces in the building, among other repairs and improvements, according to Lloyd Salasin-Deane, communications director for Rebuild.
“During the years that we were closed, programming was still going on,” run by partners such as the University of Pennsylvania as well as by City environmental educators based at other centers, Burbage says.
You don’t need to make it a big trip … You can walk here from your house, from your neighborhood.”
— Andrew White, PPR
Although Parks & Recreation did not officially announce the center’s opening, they hosted a performing arts camp in June, according to Burbage. Parks & Recreation brought on environmental educators Andrew White and Nick Tonetti in June as well, and they got to work cleaning up the center’s orchard and launching programming such as weekly plant walks in the park.
The University of Pennsylvania provides educational materials and equipment and uses the center as a hub to connect with its West Philadelphia community. Danielle Darfour, a Penn junior, found herself in the center after teaching 9th grade students from Sayre High School about waterways as part of their environmental science class. “We focused on examining the diverse species in Cobbs Creek,” she says.
The building is open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, but White recommends visitors walk through the woods anytime dusk to dawn, take the bridge over Cobbs Creek and explore the meadow on the other side. “When the wildflowers are in bloom, it’s just magical,” he says.
Both White and Tonetti emphasized how accessible the park and the center are. “It’s right here in West Philly,” Tonetti says. “It’s one of the few big green spaces you can get to by trolley, by bus or by the El. It should be more popular than it is.”
And for neighbors in Cobbs Creek, the center is right down the hill. “You don’t need to make it a big trip,” White says. “You can walk here from your house, from your neighborhood.”
