One morning in the dead of winter, Robert, 83, and his wife, Donna, 71, (their last name is withheld at the couple’s request) members of Grannies Respond/Abuelas Responden, a nonprofit that aids immigrants and asylum seekers, drove from their East Falls home to Center City’s Greyhound bus station to meet a Central American family just
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The young father made a post on Nextdoor, a virtual neighborhood network, pleading for diapers for his newborn son. Out of work, he had no money to buy them, he wrote, and his partner and baby were due home from the hospital. “Try Cradles to Crayons,” a neighbor wrote back. That advice may have helped
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In 1737, William Penn’s son Thomas and Penn’s secretary, James Logan — Logan Circle’s namesake — did one of the dirtiest deals in the country’s history. The Walking Purchase, specified that the Lenape Indians, whose homeland of Lenapehoking, stretched from the Chesapeake to New York, would sell Thomas Penn as much land as a man
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Words on purses made by Kristianna Brown, 30, of Kensington, owner of SilentlyLoudShop, all but smolder in her booth at the April 24 Sustainable Marketplace at the Cherry Street Pier. “Art Hoe,” sewn on one of the colorful bags, is among the milder messages. “I’m an introvert,” says Brown. “I let my art speak for
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Debates roil South Philadelphia about the synthetic soccer fields proposed for historic FDR Park, at the end of the Broad Street subway line. In 2019, the Fairmount Park Conservancy and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation unveiled a master plan that calls for 12 synthetic multipurpose fields at FDR. “The opinion you hear [about the fields] depends
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When a fire truck shrieked past mere feet away from Jay Basch at two years old, his mother noticed he didn’t react. He kept looking at a store’s window display. Jay’s parents soon had him tested at the Shriners Children’s Hospital. “The doctor told them, ‘Your son is healthy in every way, except he can’t
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The sun shone bright on a landscape cross-hatched with felled trees on a walking tour of the Cobbs Creek Golf Course on April 4. The Cobbs Creek Restoration and Community Foundation, the organization overseeing the revamping of the golf course, had the trees cut down, said Dana Henry, the tour guide and a spokesperson with
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“The only thing you absolutely have to know,” as Albert Einstein once said, “is the location of the library.” When it comes to Philadelphia’s public schools, Einstein’s dictum leaves most students hamstrung, as the district’s number of librarians has declined sharply in recent decades. “In 1991, the School District of Philadelphia had 176 paid librarians,”
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The FBI kept Hakim’s Bookstore, 210 S. 52nd Street, under surveillance for some time, sniffing around for subversion, says Yvonne Blake, 70. Daughter of Dawud Hakim, the store’s late founder, Blake recounts how her father had done the unthinkable in 1959 by opening an independent Black bookstore, five years before segregation would be outlawed in
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Pennsylvania “locks up a higher percentage of its people than almost any democracy on earth,” states the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit in Northampton, Massachusetts, that works to end mass incarceration. In addition, more than 40,000 Philadelphians, disproportionately Black and Brown, come home each year from state and federal prisons, according to a January 31, 2017
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