Amanda Parezo isn’t your typical bike lane advocate. For one thing, she doesn’t ride a bike. Parezo once loved cycling around Philadelphia. But in 2021, after a game of kickball at Hancock Playground in East Kensington, she was struck in the back by a stray bullet and paralyzed from the waist down. Now, she gets
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By all accounts, 67-year-old Harry Fenton was a model of safe cycling. He used hand signals when he was turning and stopped at every stop sign and red light, even when there wasn’t a car anywhere in sight. To be visible, he wore fluorescent jackets, vests and shirts, and he never left the house without
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Who rides in Philly? There’s the stereotype: the white, male, hip, young, upwardly mobile cyclist. And then there’s the much more diverse reality: the immigrant e-bike delivery riders, the scooterists, the skateboarders, the kids pedaling their way to school. “We Ride in Philly” is a project, in conjunction with the grassroots bike advocacy organization Philly
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In September 2008, George W. Bush was president, the dominant fuel source for U.S. electricity generation was coal, and the Paris Agreement was seven years away. Much has changed in the commonwealth and the country since Grid spoke with The Energy Co-op for our first issue. Founded in 1979 by members of Weavers Way Food
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In June, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro stood on the lawn of the historic Jackson Mansion in Berwick, Columbia County, to make an announcement in the works for nearly two years: Amazon, he said, would spend $20 billion to build two cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in Pennsylvania, one in Bucks County and
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Myriam Siftar cried tears of joy. It was March 2012, and she was at the grand opening of Mariposa Food Co-op’s new home, a Greek-revival style former bank building on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia. (Full disclosure: This author is a member of the co-op.) For Siftar, it was the triumphant culmination of a journey
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At the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) Pop Up Garden at South Street one evening in August, two long picnic tables are covered in plants: philodendrons, lantanas, begonias and more. Around them, dozens of people anxiously hover, some picking up plants from the table to inspect them, others using their phones to look up the species.
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It’s a Wednesday afternoon in late June, and Philadelphia is on its fifth day of the first heat wave of the summer. As temperatures climb to 95 degrees, residents of Mill Creek flock to the best place in the neighborhood to cool down: Fletcher Pool. Public spaces like Fletcher Pool are essential in a city
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The American Lung Association has released its latest annual report on the state of the nation’s air — and the news isn’t good for Philadelphia. In last year’s report, the Philadelphia-Reading-Camden metro area had the 65th worst air quality in the country; now it has the 26th worst. Based on data collected between 2021 and
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George Lakey has seen his fair share of grim political moments. He has, after all, spent nearly seven decades fighting for civil rights, peace and environmental justice. At 87, Lakey recognizes that now is another one of those moments. But his own personal experience as an activist and his research as a scholar of political
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