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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We had come to share stories, mourn the loss of the trees, and build a movement. We gathered on a warm Saturday in late April, at the place where Haddington Woods meets Karakung Golf Course, in the shade of a sugar maple that had been spared by the lumber trucks. Tim Dunn unloaded two saplings
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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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Traffic streams over the Adams Avenue Bridge in the video on the Tacony Creek Suite website. To the motorists, the creek and the park around it are simply something to cross, but the camera, as well as the music, focus on Tacony Creek Park, the corridor of flowing water and forest in the middle. “Each
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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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Does healthier soil create food that has more nutrients? At Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, we have several community-science research projects based on farms working to find the answer to that intriguing question, because the wellness of our bodies is very likely linked to the overall health and wellness of the land and water that grow these
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When it comes to how the City manages public land, the deck is stacked. When the City leased the Cobbs Creek Golf Course to the Cobbs Creek Foundation, a West Conshohocken-based nonprofit, for $1 for 30 years, there were no competing bids. There was no discussion about how people in the community might like to
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One of the things that drew me to Germantown was the amount of space to plant things in the ground. I’ve had my share of container gardens in concrete backyards that left me wanting to grow more plants. What I really wanted was enough space to grow my own food. In a time when supply
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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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The modest Belgrade Street retail shop that houses Fishtown Seafood offers high-quality, mostly sashimi-grade seafood that is preserved at peak freshness using a super-freezer. The space also has an entire wall of seafood and culinary equipment, from fish spatulas to grapeseed oil. “I want people to be successful with preparing their seafood at home,” says
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