For years, bicycle-advocacy organizations across the country and the world have supported a policy called Vision Zero as a push for safer streets for everyone. Emphasizing the five E’s of planning—engineering, education, encouragement, evaluation and enforcement—the Sweden-born safety policy has proven effective where implemented. Utilizing police departments for the enforcement part of Vision Zero has
More
Our recycling system is broken. It was broken before Covid-19 and China’s recycling ban, and the cracks are now beginning to give way to what I hope will be a complete rethinking of what it means to “recycle” as we know it. If you’ve read my columns on gridphilly.com, this intro may sound familiar because
More
Thank you, Matthew George and Bria Howard of I ♥ Thy Hood, for interrupting the news cycle that produces fear, anger, despair and disbelief. You know what I’m talking about. Is it really possible that a pandemic hit and we are unable to organize ourselves nationally to combat it? It seems likely that hundreds of
More
Photography By Rachael Warriner Graveyard Shift By Constance Garcia-Barrio If tombs are the clothes of the dead, as one poet said, permanent residents of cradle graves at The Woodlands Cemetery wear vivid garments indeed. Marble headstones, footstones and low sides form these graves while pansies, bleeding hearts, and other flowers bloom atop them and brim
More
This week is National Farmers Market Week and Grid is doing a round-up of eight of our favorite Philly Farmers Markets to mark the occasion. Even as many of us are realizing the value of local food during the pandemic, the Farmers Market Coalition reports that 57% of farmers market operators surveyed had seen an
More
A lot of americans have a vague idea of where their water comes from, says Kayla Callender, a former participant in the Independence Seaport Museum’s River Ambassador program. “We take water for granted,” she says. “We assume it’s never going to run out.” The River Ambassadors program is bridging the disconnect between citizens and their
More
On August 19, 2019, Matthew George decided he had enough of the litter lining Germantown’s streets. He created a GoFundMe campaign for a trash-can program he called “I ♥ Thy Hood.” He reached out to his neighbors in the hopes that he could raise enough money to buy 10 44-gallon trash cans for the neighborhood.
More
Although the Free Library of Philadelphia is currently closed amidst COVID-19, one unconventional library is open to the public this summer: the Quarantine Public Library. In May of this year, Katie Garth, an artist based in Philadelphia, and Tracy Honn, a printing history educator based in Madison Wisconsin, began to brainstorm their idea for a
More
When costume designer Heidi Barr looks out the window of her Wissahickon home, she doesn’t see rowhouses, paved streets, parked cars and tidy front yards. Instead, she envisions the Northwest Philly neighborhood as it would have looked 200 years ago, when lush fields dotted with farmhouses sloped toward the banks of the Schuylkill River. Back
More