In retrospect, it’s possible to reconstruct a recipe that enabled Catie Gainor to create her South Philly cookbook store, Binding Agents. Start with a family connection to the food business and a mother who loved cooking for friends and family. Add a high school summer spent working at a bookstore, early exposure to classic TV
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The front door of Chris Hytha’s 1857 Fishtown-area rowhome opens to face a spotlit shelf cabinet — a “house museum” of artifacts: the house’s old lead water main, a hunk of its original stone foundation and a block of termite-hollowed wood. The artifacts catalogue the house’s history — and the hurdles of Hytha’s now two-year
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Imagine if developers quietly acquired and developed a few acres of Fairmount Park every year, carving them off into luxury housing. Philadelphians would rightly be outraged. And yet: One building at a time, spaces that were designed for public assembly — churches, cultural centers, former schools — are being converted into private apartments or condominiums.
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Will Ryan faces a half-dead (yet half-alive) ash tree deep in the woods of Tyler Arboretum and ties a plastic pill bottle around its trunk. Inside is a folded white paper dotted with tiny black specks that look like poppy seeds. He ties the bottle to the tree and takes off the cap. Those tiny
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There is no one single type of PA Cyber student, and they all have their own personal reasons for choosing to go beyond the standard schooling option. Some start with PA Cyber in kindergarten, and for others, high school is the right time to make the switch. For all grades, the school empowers students to
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Throughout July 18 and 19, visitors arrived at South Philadelphia’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park with a unique task — to perform for a tree. The production, “Arborlogues,” is a touring piece developed by Other Forms Of (OFO) Theater, a company led by set designer Dan Daly that emphasizes theatrical experimentation through unorthodox sets. Billed as
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Anou Vongbandith, 51, the chef at Germantown’s Das Good Café, was driving to work on the sweltering morning of July 26, 2025, when masked men from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) boxed in his car, then abducted him. They soon sent Vongbandith to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, a facility equipped with
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Sometimes Linde Lauff sees a pile of construction waste in Pennypack Park and thinks, that shouldn’t be there. Not just in a general way in which, ideally, no litter should ever pollute a natural space, much less the enraging detritus left behind by short dumping. For her, the frustration is much more specific. A little
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At Re:Vision Architecture’s Manayunk headquarters, energy-saving features are everywhere. Exterior walls are carefully sealed and insulated to keep the building warmer in the winter. Windows and skylights admit plenty of sun, reducing the need for artificial lighting. Those same skylights and windows can be opened on warm days to flush hot air up and out
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Philadelphia is changing all around us. Fresh off a tourism season celebrating our city’s colonial history, our building boom is racing to meet a housing crisis and is, in turn, reshaping the very fabric of our neighborhoods. As that transformation pushes forward, developers, designers and community groups are wrestling with what it means to build
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