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
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On June 22, the following letter was sent by email to Mayor Jim Kenney, Parks & Recreation, members of City Council, Commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell and their respective staff. It was also hand delivered on June 20 to Ott Lovell. It is a response to various problems identified within the FDR Park Plan, completed in
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Fatherhood, for me, has been a course in community building and reclaiming collective cultural memory. As the son of a social worker and a Vietnam veteran (working with jazz musicians in Brooklyn post-war), I prayed for a daughter named Coltrane so that my parents would see that I understood the lessons that they taught through
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The Painted Bride Art Center has announced Resistance Garden: Cultivating Abundance, a programming series including five community dinners, five artist residencies, and four zine releases. “When you’re making a radical effort like beautifying and reclaiming land, the best way to engage people is art. Our artist residencies are how we bring an element of creativity
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Like many American cities, Philadelphia is built on land that wants to be wet. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Park sits in a particularly soggy corner, right at the junction where the Schuylkill River rushes into the Delaware. The park is perforated by several lakes and water channels, and flooding regularly renders pedestrian walkways impassible. Over
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I’d been hearing about the South Philly Meadows for some time, so I finally paid a visit. I biked from Center City — a very manageable 29-minute ride — and started to wander. The sound of traffic on Pattison Avenue began to fade with every step into the open, unplanned expanse, and the birdsongs grew
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Flooding is the reason for the FDR Park master plan. It also could be its undoing. No one denies that FDR Park has been growing soggier over the years. Paths that once led walkers around the “lakes” now run through marshy ground at the edge of the water. Stormwater flows off of I-95 and the
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Grid has been hearing a lot lately about FDR Park. After our series of articles on the development of the Cobbs Creek golf courses, Philadelphians concerned about the fate of the South Philly Meadows got in touch to defend the park’s former fairways against a plan to develop the beloved greenspace into a complex of
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Want to get involved with advocacy around the Cobbs Creek Golf Course development? Two opportunities are coming up this month: First, the Cobbs Creek Foundation, which is the nonprofit developing the golf courses, is holding a town hall Zoom meeting on May 18 at 7 p.m..: The Cobbs Creek Foundation (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization), would
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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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In 2015 Mount Airy-based real estate developer Ken Weinstein decided it was time to share his success and expertise with aspiring developers. He created Jumpstart Germantown, where participants can learn from experienced developers in training programs and mentorships, as well as access a loan program that can help them purchase and renovate properties. While Weinstein
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