It was flooding in the Ablett Village public housing development in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood. It had rained overnight from Saturday, April 24, into Sunday, April 25, and that brought water that pooled in driveways and on the sidewalks running between the area’s long, two-story brick apartment buildings. This is not at all unusual, according
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About 120 years ago a nature enthusiast named Charles McIlvaine explored the Angora Woods of West Philadelphia hunting for mushrooms. While most of the Angora Woods have long since been built up, a fringe of the area remains along Cobbs Creek. It was there that I met up with a modern-day fungi enthusiast, Luke Smithson.
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This is the first time I’ve ever cracked open a beer as I started an article. It’s a Delco Lager from 2SP Brewing Company: a bit malty and quite drinkable, good for a warm spring day. At 4% alcohol by volume (ABV), the buzz shouldn’t interfere with writing (you be the judge). The alcohol isn’t
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On May 9, 1715, Andreas Sandel, a minister at the Gloria Dei Church, aka Old Swedes’ (929 South Water Street), made a note in his journal that “some singular flies came out of the ground.” “The English call them locusts,” he wrote. “When they left the ground, holes could be seen everywhere in the roads
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On a trip to the Meadows at FDR Park at the end of last summer, we got our feet wet. The Meadows is a repurposing of the recently closed golf course at the South Philadelphia park. What were once fairways are now green spaces for play, short-term art installations and homes for wildlife. We were
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Stephen Maciejewski hit the streets of Center City before dawn one morning last October to look for dead and injured birds, just like he did every morning during fall migration. Maciejewski, a volunteer for Audubon Pennsylvania, walked a set route around the glass-and-concrete canyons, documenting where he found birds that had collided with windows. He
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Even in the before-times, I was always looking for an excuse to get outside. My bike commute from Walnut Hill to Washington Square was often the most satisfying part of my day. I slipped out at lunch to birdwatch in Independence National Historical Park. And the weekends found me herping, or doing my best to
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Of course the toothy mascot on Chris Muller’s bright orange cap is a beaver. “Oregon State,” he explains. I should have known. We are meeting up on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive at the Fairmount Dam, where we could talk while admiring the view—not of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fairmount Water Works or
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In November 2019 the City of Philadelphia approved SEPTA’s request to operate a natural gas–burning power plant in the Nicetown neighborhood of North Philadelphia. This approval marked a defeat for the neighbors opposing the plant, who are now preparing for the next phase in the struggle: taking oversight of the new plant’s emissions into their
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After nearly 40 years of organizing nature walks, park cleanups, tree plantings and trail maintenance, the volunteer group Friends of Pennypack Park disbanded in March 2020. Its dissolution came about after being named alongside the city as a defendant in a personal injury suit, in 2019, filed by the family of a girl injured inside
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