On a chilly night in February, a group of young people gathered on the steps of City Hall, armed with hand-painted artwork, prepared speeches, chants and community speakers; the Philly Thrive interns had organized a press conference to support housing justice in Grays Ferry. They were calling on City Council to support affordable housing legislation
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Philadelphia City Council’s Committee on Rules voted on June 15 to advance Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson’s bill to close some loopholes in Philadelphia’s tree regulations. As Grid has reported, highlights of the bill include a community notification process for tree clearing, expanding tree replacement rules to public land, and fees in lieu of replacing cut
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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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I’m one of the last to arrive, which means the full spectacle of the protest hits me at once as I come around the bend. A crowd of 150 people holding banners and signs surrounds a massive inflatable of CEO Tim Buckley on the lawn in front of the Malvern headquarters of Vanguard. The likeness
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Black Birders Week 2022 was celebrated from May 31 to June 5. This year Grid caught up with three local Black birders to hear their stories. Katrina Clark I started birding during the pandemic. Mostly a friend and I were walking. We were like, “We have to get out of the house.” We started walking
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Air is something we share. But clean air, it turns out, is not equally available to all. Using technology with an almost cartoonish name, the PurpleAir monitor, Christina Rosan thinks making disparities in air quality “in your face” will lead to more equitable, citizen-informed public policies. Advocating for clean air everywhere, she believes, could promote
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It’s hard to find someone with anything bad to say about the High Line, the abandoned elevated train track that reopened in 2009 as a park after years of organizing by advocates in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. In 2019, before the pandemic, the High Line drew 8 million visitors a year. It has been a critical
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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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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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Ted pickett counts himself lucky. He and his wife were home when the flooding started. As Hurricane Isaias dumped rain over the Delaware Valley and Darby Creek crested its banks on August 4, 2020, he and his wife got to work. “We were able to mitigate a real nasty thing,” Pickett says. For five hours
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On October 11, 2021, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a worker in an excavator arrived at the Sedgley Woods disc golf course and began clearing a road along the boundary with the Strawberry Green driving range next door. “On the first day of the destruction I happened to be on my lunch break in my car at
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