A group of 30 community gardening organizations and allies have issued a letter asking the Philadelphia Land Bank to change how it preserves properties for community gardening. At issue is the land bank’s practice of attaching a 30-year mortgage to properties that it gives to garden organizations. The “self-amortizing” mortgages are for the market rate
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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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A special meeting by the Philadelphia Art Commission scheduled to review plans for buildings on the Cobbs Creek and Karakung golf courses, which took place on July 27, 2022, led to a conceptual approval by the commission of one set of the buildings proposed for the site, with the commission requesting that the Cobbs Creek
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The Parkside Saints finally found a home. An October 4, 2019 announcement from Philadelphia’s Rebuild initiative announced the completion of a practice field for the youth football club at the Parkside Evans Playground in West Philadelphia. The Saints, founded in 2010 by Coach Cliff Smith, had practiced in whatever open space they could find in
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You’d think that after protecting 50 gardens, the process would get easier. But for the Neighborhood Gardens Trust (NGT), a nonprofit tasked with preserving gardens, securing each parcel of land is a unique challenge. This spring NGT and members of Brewerytown Garden at 27th and Master streets celebrated the protection of some of the garden’s
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Melvin Powell spends most of his days at a vibrant greenspace and community center in North Philadelphia, a backyard garden surrounded by tall walls filled with graffiti art. Community members gather at the outdoor venue for neighborhood events like concerts and art-inspired showcases. “It was a converted gas station that was basically just an empty
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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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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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