As Don Shump, the owner of the Philadelphia Bee Company, prepares to move a bald-faced hornet nest from the side of a large grave marker at Fernwood Cemetery in Lansdowne, he offers some advice. “These girls tend to run and gun. So when they’re mad, they tend to hit you and spin back off for
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Yellow chili peppers grow pointing up from the bushy plant in a raised bed at the Emily South section of the Growing Home Garden in South Philadelphia, looking a bit like a miniature tree decorated with Christmas lights. Leafy green mustard plants sprout from a nearby bed that had apparently been turned over recently for
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The City of Philadelphia and four disabled people — Tony Brooks, Liam Dougherty, Fran Fulton and Louis Olivo — who sued to require the City to provide accessible sidewalks and street crossings as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) have announced a proposed settlement to avert a lawsuit. The City will install ADA-compliant
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If you take SEPTA, you probably have both feelings about its performance and ideas for how to improve it, including how to better route the buses. Here’s your chance to provide some feedback: SEPTA has released a proposed overhaul to its bus route system. While the level of service would remain the same, the system
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On Thursday, Philadelphia City Council introduced legislation authorizing animal husbandry on what, until the fall of 2021, had been part of the Sedgley Woods disc golf course. As Grid reported, on October 11, 2021 (Indigenous Peoples Day) a worker in an excavator began clearing trees at part of the Sedgley Woods disc golf course in
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On the morning of Wednesday, October 5, volunteers monitoring bird mortality in Center City found more than 20 dead chimney swifts to the east of Rittenhouse Square, according to Stephen Maciejewski, one of the volunteers. “I had found dead ones before, but never so perfectly preserved,” he said. “These were obviously fresh kills. They look
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There are six trash-burning power plants in eastern Pennsylvania, “and Philly sends trash to all of them,” the Clean Air Council’s Russell Zerbo wrote in Grid. On October 4, a group of 274 environmental organizations signed a letter to the White House Council on Environmental Quality asking the advisory group to direct the EPA to
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If you’ve ever walked along the east bank of the Schuylkill River in Center City and wondered what trees you were looking at, you’re in luck. The Schuylkill River Park is now officially a Level 1 arboretum. As part of the programming to go along with the park’s new status, the Friends of Schuylkill River
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As I write this, the rain has been at it for six hours, and the National Weather Service has issued a flood watch. Behind my house, the rain barrel, connected to a downspout draining the back section of the roof, is overflowing, with the excess water joining the rest of the block’s runoff in our
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Hello Readers, Bernard Brown submitted this essay to Grid, and I thought it made for a perfect introduction to the new issue. I’ll be back next month! AM I swim laps at the West Philadelphia branch of the YMCA, on Chestnut between 51st and 52nd. My walk there takes me across Walnut Street, often on
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