Fourteen years ago, I began stewarding portions of land in the Upper Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia. At the outset, it was a mere 2,400 square feet in the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (SCEE) organic community garden plots. I worked shoulder to shoulder with SCEE staff and fellow gardeners to clear invaders from fence lines
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On Thursday, June 30, 2022, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education’s plans to sell a 24-acre parcel of land called the Boy Scout Tract met with sharp questions and numerous objections from neighbors at a public virtual meeting of two local civic associations, the Upper Roxborough Civic Association and the Residents of Shawmont Valley Association.
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About 80 acres in the Somerton neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia have been conspicuously left out of Philadelphia City Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson’s legislation to improve the city’s tree canopy protections, which passed City Council on June 16, 2022. The Somerton Civic Association is lobbying to change that. Northeast Avenue comes to a tree-shaded end in
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Philadelphia parks advocates are celebrating an increase in Philadelphia Parks & Recreation funding, $4.99 million above what Mayor Jim Kenney had requested for fiscal year 2023. Philadelphia’s park system has been chronically underfunded for decades, and as City Council worked on a budget deal for 2023, advocate groups such as the Philadelphia Parks Alliance have
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On march 19, 2019, Mom, the red-tailed hawk matriarch of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, disappeared. A post by Carolyn Sutton on the Franklin Hawkaholics Facebook page described how, over the previous weekend, Mom had been looking unwell, sitting listlessly on a branch and showing no interest in a dead rat delivered by her mate, T4
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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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The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education reported on its blog that two local civic associations, the Upper Roxborough Civic Association and the Residents of the Shawmont Valley, met last week to discuss news of a possible sale of the Boy Scout Tract, a section of the Schuylkill Center’s property. The Boy Scout Tract is a
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Much of the opposition to the FDR Park Master Plan centers on the replacement of the open greenspace of the Meadows with the artificial green of 12 synthetic turf athletic fields. Master Plan boosters cite the “playability” of synthetic turf fields, which can host more hours of play per week than natural grass fields. Recent
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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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In one of the world’s most polluted urban watersheds, in the shadow of shuttered refineries, stands FDR Park, a miraculous sliver of natural topography. The City intends to use it as something of a retaining wall supporting vast elevated terraces topped with artificial turf fields. When development projects are proposed on City-owned land, the City
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