A scene from the August Night Market in Mount Airy (Photo by R. Kennedy for GPTMC)All has been quiet on the Griddle lately, but we’re starting things up again with a reminder about a Philly favorite—the Night Market! If the Food Trust’s epic street food festival wasn’t already GRID’s culinary nirvana, it definitely is now.
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Scott Kelly, Re:Vision co-founder, steps away from the conference table in the firm’s Manayunk office and explains how they utilized the available light to create a comfortable environment. “There is very little daylight coming in through here,” he says as he stands near the north-facing window. There’s just a faint shadow behind him despite it
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Peeking out between the colonial brick buildings on South 5th Street, a 52-foot, ribcage-like structure is a stranger amidst the relics of Old City. Neon orange, green and blue plastic panels, as well as plant life, stick out from all angles. The structure is a greenhouse and part of “The Greenhouse Projects,” a special exhibit at the American
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Everyone knows what a sparrow is, right? Those ubiquitous little birds that compete with the pigeons for crumbs in front of park benches across Philadelphia? Well, they are and they aren’t. Most of them, Eurasian house sparrows, don’t belong here. They’re completely different birds in a completely different family than our native sparrows, except that
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October’s waning days and crisp evenings provide welcome relief from the summer’s brutal heat, but it’s a bittersweet reward: The summer’s bounty is already nothing more than a bright delicious memory, and your garden is largely in hibernation. If your recall is anything like mine, though, it’s a great time to document your gardening triumphs
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Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World’s Greatest Wildlife Rescueby William StolzenburgBloomsbury (2011), $26
For city dwellers, rats are a nuisance and a health hazard. But for isolated island species, rats are a death sentence, as William Stolzenburg demonstrates in his new book, Rat Island.
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The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Timeby David Sloan Wilson Little Brown (2011), $25.99
In David Sloan Wilson’s fifth book, the evolutionary biologist chronicles his attempt to use Darwin’s theory of evolution to improve the quality of life in his town of Binghamton, N.Y. It’s an ambitious goal, especially
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Philadelphia, as the old trope goes, is a city of neighborhoods. While each has its own concerns and culture, sustainability is a key for all in establishing and maintaining a neighborhood that nurtures and uplifts those who live there. In our Sustainable Communities in Action series, GRID will highlight organizations that are working to make
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FACT
Building-related construction and demolition waste totals approximately 170 million tons per year, roughly two-thirds of all non-industrial solid waste generation in the U.S.
PROBLEM
Total annual construction and demolition waste (“C&D waste” in the biz) equates to 3.2 pounds of building-related materials per person in the U.S., per day. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 52
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For years, the electric vehicle has been mentioned in hushed tones, believed to be the second coming of sorts for our car-dependent society, a clean-running innovation that would allow us to keep up our driving habit without that messy foreign-oil guilt. Yet electric cars have seemed as mythical as Sasquatch—often spoken of, but rarely, if
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