American Nightmare

Student Union 34 is LIVE! but Soft

2009-07-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

Okay, so Student Union 34, the Philadelphia Inquirer's website finally went live on July 1st, but it's a soft launch. The Website is up, at www.college.philly.com and I've begun to transfer my posts there, but they aren't going to really publicize it until Fall Semester when the site has enough content on it.

So this blogspot here is done with because it was always meant to be temporary until the Inky site went live, but I'm continuing on college.philly.com

So go check it out! It's going to really get going in the Fall Semester, so make sure to check back in then.

Interview: Alain Joinville

2009-06-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

A while ago I participated in the Philly Spring Clean up, and while working at the Amos Recreation Center on 16th and Berks I told an intern with the Department of Recreation about my blog. He told me I needed to talk to Alain Joinville, the Public Affairs Coordinator for the Department of recreation, and thus I had my first interview for this blog. I originally submitted it to be posted on the Student Union 34 site, but since that is temporarily down, here it is:

Alain Joinville

Public Affairs Coordinator

Department of Recreation

Greg Trainor: First off, what was the Department of Recreations part in the Philly Clean Up?

Alain Joinville: Well we had 15 facilities participate in the mayor’s clean up. All over the city, from South Philly to Northeast Philly. We had three facilities in North Philly. Eighth and Diamond, it wasn’t a clean up. It was a bin distribution with the Mayor, a couple Eagles players, the streets department was involved. They used that site sort of as, a distribution site for recycling bins. Of course, Amos, the one you were at we did some painting, some clean up, and we are also at Athletic Recreation Center. Which is one of our biggest facilities. Two baseball fields, basketball gym, boxing gym, beautiful pool, and just a huge, grand building.

So this is an opportunity to work in conjunction with the mayor to give some of our facilities some TLC. We have over 163 facilities, and 75 neighborhood parks. An example of a neighborhood park would be Clark Park. Not as big as the Fairmount Park sites, but some of them are pretty substantial, so its a lot of territory for our maintenance guys to cover, so any time we can get volunteers to help us out with some of these projects it helps a lot. We can cover more ground, and it doesn’t cost us that much. Because if we had to put all of our men there, with overtime, we wouldn’t be able to be as efficient.

GT: Do you feel that they are being used? They’re appreciated? Are the kids getting out to them?

AJ: Yeah definitely. I think unfortunately, there’s an issue of crime in North Philadelphia, so the parents don’t really feel safe sending their kids out, unless its next door. So, we get kids, but not as many as we could. If crime wasn’t an issue, just in that area, I mean I’ve had folks... I live just in that Francisville area, and the parents just have the kids play on the block instead of going just a few blocks over because they feel safer, more secure.

GT: What types of problems or issues do these rec centers face?

AJ: Graffiti, we have a strong graffiti issue. On the same day as the clean up--graffiti and vandalism--I was walking by one of the sites that was part of the clean up, and there was like this group of like twenty guys doing BMX tricks on the just painted playground, so that just tore it up. I mean we had sixty or seventy volunteers there. It was paint that we had to pay for, the city had to pay for, it was labor, and you could tell it was just painted so it was just...being a jerk.

Crime is an issue at some of our facilities just because, crime is an issue in Philadelphia, so we’re not immune to that, and we’re in every neighborhood in the city. It usually happens after hours, when there isn’t staff there. Because we have big fields and open space that is not locked down, and actually, even if it was locked down, if you want to be mischievous you’re going to be mischievous.

GT: Is funding an issue?

AJ: Just because... funding in the entire city is an issue, and the budget crisis. So its difficult to do some of the programs that we would like when moneys not coming into the city.

GT: Was the Philly Spring Clean Up successful?

AJ: Yes, very successful. The city provided us with rakes, brooms, paint, gloves, anything we needed to help spruce up the facilities. Of course, one day makes a difference, but it needs to be a sustained effort. That’s why its important that we have folks from that community be a part of it, so luckily I sort of live near that facility that I saw, so I told those guys to get out of there, but we need just regular city folk looking out for these facilities.

GT: How would one get involved with the Department of Recreation, either for work or for volunteering? Do you have volunteer events?

AJ: Yes we have, for the most part every facility has an advisory council, and they are a volunteer group of folks who live in the neighborhood. They do outreach for the rec center. They help raise funds. They come up with programming in coordination with the recreation department. But if you have a skill or talent, we have partnered with Villa, who has been a great partner, at Martin Luther King recreation center, at 22nd and Cecil B. Moore. They donated some money to that center for a teen center. Which is strictly teen programming, more focused on education, not so much sports. Which we have a lot of for teens, but more educational programs. SAT Prep, homework help, business competition.

For the homework help, the tutors are college students who are doing it for free, some from Temple University. So it could be tutoring, it could be coaches, and we actually need more volunteer coaches. For Marian Anderson Recreation Center in South Philly. World class baseball program. We got kids you know, its busting with kids because its popular, which is a good problem you run into, but we don’t have enough coaches to give them quality oversight and teach them to play the game well.

GT: In particular to Amos Rec Center where I worked on Saturday, is Temple University’s expansion, and the gentrification it causes, an issue to its future?

AJ: To Amos? No I haven’t heard of that. We would like to work more closely with Amos, there is Penn Rose Playground, I forget the address, but Temple University has been a great part of that over there. Helped with a couple clean ups of that facility. They’re helping us long term to be a partner at that facility, Penn Rose Playground. I believe the program is Temple Youth Voices, what they’ve done is, after the election, or during the Obama election, a lot of our facilities are polling places, and one of the largest amount of folks came out to vote ever at that facility. I guess the polls were open until nine or ten o’clock, and I guess Temple Youth Voices wanted to capitalize on that energy in that neighborhood, so they’re teaching the neighborhood kids how to do video documentaries of the neighborhood. Find out why they were so happy to see Obama become elected. What is the change in the neighborhood. What do they think folks can do to improve the neighborhood. They started a teen health facility there to teach kids not only how to eat healthy, but how to exercise. How to have a healthy sexual relationship. So that has been a great partnership, and we’d like to duplicate that at Amos.

GT: That’s good to hear. One last question. Temple Youth Voices sounds like a great program. I’ll definitely look into that. Is there anything else you would like to see from student at Temple University in regards to the rec centers? As in volunteer, fundraising, working...

AJ: I just think definitely helping with the tutoring. Helping with being coaches, maybe some student athletes. I don’t think, actually that you need to even be a formal student athlete, just that you played baseball in the past, and know some of the skills, know the game. Actually, if you’re teaching a five year old, you don’t necessarily have to know the game, just become more active and it doesn’t have to be a 20 hour commitment. It can be one hour a week, you know, you can choose it. How you volunteer at the facility, but I think this is great also, maybe about three weeks ago, the Temple Journalism school, I think it’s Mural or something?

GT: Oh yeah, MURL.

AJ: Yeah, MURL, they interviewed me, and a couple folks from the department. We need more folks to know what we do. I don’t think enough folks know what we do. I was a little irked, about a month ago, was talking to some friends about a community group I’m a part of, and it was like, hey we can do it a rec center! Everybody’s nose went up.

I mean our facilities are clean, there are some of them that have issues, but by and large they’re clean, they’re safe, they’re big places that not enough people know about. I’m working on that, but I work for the department, so of course I’m going to say that but if other journalists give us a shot... we can talk, we can do on site, bring video. Let folks see and feel what’s going on at our facilities.

GT: Right yeah, I mean I didn’t know the rec center was there. I think though, that there are a lot of people that want to help make a difference, they just don’t know how to help or where.

AJ: To that end, we just started speaking to Monica... Hankins? I forget her name, but she’s at Temple Univesity. I think she’s in the community outreach office. We’re just in the beginning process hopefully it gets bigger, and a much longer term partnership.

How Did We Get Here? Part One

2009-06-09T18:28:00.000-07:00

The first problem that came to mind I had the idea to write this blog was a big one, where do I start?

With a problem as huge as poverty how I could write a blog? A blog is a news feed of commentary on current events relating to an issue. I could do this for poverty, but how could I write about what is happening now without going back to the beginning to explain why things are this way in poverty stricken North Philadelphia.

I decided early on for this reason that I would need to write a series of articles that break down why North Philadelphia is the way it is before I could move on to writing about what's going on now. This is part one of the new series I'm going to write, How Did We Get Here?

Anyone can see from the ruined factories that North Philadelphia was once a booming industrial town. Before the factories North Philadelphia had been a wealthy network suburban townships for Philadelphia's business elite. Then the Consolidation Act of 1854 made North Philadelphia a part of the city proper, and the industrial age followed. During the 1920's Gilded Age a generation of successful German Jews turned North Philadelphia in a boom town. Scores of row homes were raised just to house the factory workers.

Then the Great Depression came, driving away the businessmen with their factories and jobs. As Philadelphian's suffered through the Great Depression racist loan companies, used a technique called redlining to create black ghettos.

Redlining is the practice of denying necessary services to certain areas. It began with the National Housing Act of 1934, an effort to drive investors back to cities that resulted in the creation of "residential security neighborhoods," determining which neighborhoods were worthy of investment. The services denied included: loans, insurance, access to jobs, supermarkets, and access to health care. The neighborhoods that were denied these services and investments? The black neighborhoods mostly, but they also targeted Latinos, Asians, and Jews.

It makes you want to ask, what exactly did they think would happen?

Despite these racist loan policies that still wasn't the beginning of the North Philadelphia we know and love today. Through the 40's and 50's white flight took place, but at a slow pace. North Philadelphia became a center for black culture and jazz. This is the Philadelphia jazz legend John Coltrane came out of.

The Nail In the Coffin: The North Philadelphia that exists today began on August 28th, 1964. Philadelphia was ripe for a race riot like the ones that had taken place in Jersey City, Brooklyn, and Harlem. Knowing this, the police department had set up each police car that patrolled black neighborhoods with one white cop and one black cop. That night in 1964, an old black woman named Odessa Bradford's car stalled at Broad and Columbia, now known as Cecil B. Moore. In other words, this happened right in front of Temple University.

When Mrs. Bradford refused to get out of her stalled car, the cops who had been called to the scene had to physically remove her in front of a gathering crowd. She began to kick and punch them. One man, James Nettles tried to come to her aid by jumping the officers from behind, and the cops called "Assist Officer" into their radios.

Assist Officer means cops are in trouble, come now. No doubt every cop in the city turned on their lights and headed for North Philadelphia. At the same time, rumor spread throughout the black community of North Philadelphia that two white cops had beaten a pregnant black woman to death. In middle of an era of race riots that was all it took.

For the next two days black mobs looted and burned white owned business throughout North Philadelphia, but mostly on Columbia Avenue. The police stood back and watched under orders from the police commissioner, something the future Mayor Frank Rizzo called gutless. The riot was encouraged by black political militants like Raymond Hall, the man who created the rumor that Mrs. Bradford had been pregnant and beaten to death by two white cops. Meanwhile, the President of NAACP and the street's future namesake, Cecil Moore, was standing on a soap box shouting that looting would hurt their cause.

When it was over the slow trickle of white flight that had occurred thus far turned into a white exodus. The main commercial district of North Philadelphia was destroyed, and it wouldn't return until the recent redevelopments by Temple University. The jazz culture began to deteriorate as well. The riot even led to the closing of Connie Mack stadium, and the Phillies leaving North Philadelphia.

Essentially: Rich, white businessmen created a poor black neighborhood, and angry, black militants created a senseless riot. Everyone suffered.

It is worth noting however, that several great men were there as well working to keep things from getting worse, such as Cecil Moore and Frank Rizzo.

But isn't that always the case?

This was the beginning, sort of, and there's more to come. Trying to understand something like poverty in North Philadelphia is a massive undertaking, so I'm going to take it step by step.

I hope you keep reading, because figuring out what happened to the first capital of this country might be a key step in figuring out what happened to this country.

Park Bitch

2009-05-27T20:05:00.001-07:00

I saw this in the Love You Hate You section of CityPaper the other day and had to share:

"Park Bitch

To the bitch who thinks he's running the park. Guess what asshole,you fuckin not dickhead. You waste 35 fuckin hours doing what. Don't you have a real god dam job? You look worse than a homeless person. Think your making a fucking difference cleaning up a worthless park? Your not. The neighborhood looks like shit with the crime and your worrying about a stupid park that still looks like shit. Your a fuckin idiot. Do some creative for the neighborhood than worry about cutting the grass. You do that once a month anyway,dumbass. By the way dickhead, I'll be litter 3 times a week. So you could have something to do,prick. Not unless your beating your fat wife."

I hope I managed to capture the illiteracy as accurately as CityPaper did. This is one of the many things anyone trying to make a difference in Philadelphia will come up against, apathy, but this isn't your usual simple lazy apathy. This is an apathetic person who was made to feel guilty by a neighbor, who then became angry and aggressively hurt their neighborhood to spite the person who made them think about things they didn't want to think about. Like the fact that they weren't helping the situation.

It's that whole, "Oh, you some kind of hero or something?" issue.

It's hard to understand people like this, but they are an extreme sect of a massive apathetic group. It's scary to read something like this if you're someone as idealistic as me that plans to attempt to make a difference. The idea that the people who live in poverty don't want my help, and might even hate me. It makes you question why you are trying.

Above all faced with such aggressive apathy I look at the supposed "park bitch." Somewhere out there in a crime ridden neighborhood some guy is cleaning a park that is being purposely trashed, again and again, because he believes that he can make things better. These people are out there, and they are doing all sorts of great work.

I wasn't trying to write a lot tonight, I just wanted to share that clip because it shows what anyone trying to make a difference in Philadelphia has to deal with, so I'll stop there for now. I think it's clear enough who the bitch is.

Another Temporary Location

2009-05-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

I'm in Jersey. I'm here because life happens fast, and while I do not live in poverty, I am broke. Actually, I'm more than broke. The point is I was offered a job I couldn't refuse. Powerwashing and landscaping on a Mexican work crew, an under the table cash job.

The important thing to know however, is that I'm not going to drop this blog because I am now working 50-60 hours a week in Jersey.

My plan had been to spend this summer writing in Philly. No job. Just staying broke and writing. I was going to treat this blog like a full time job, and write investigative stories. Unfortunately I can no longer do that, but I'm going to continue posting.

One of the main things I had to write about for this blog to work is how come North Philly is in such poverty. To figure that out I've been reading research studies on several programs, as well as books about Philadelphia like A Prayer For the City. I hope to break it down so it's more easily accessible than the dreary research papers I'm reading.

I can do that from Jersey, so that's what I'm going to do.

So keep reading, because a huge part of figuring out what we can do about poverty is figuring out how people ended up in poverty, and that will be my focus for the rest of the summer.

Temporary Location

2009-05-18T14:08:00.001-07:00

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me talk about my internship with the Philadelphia Inquirer, because I have a big mouth and that's what I do.

If I don't know you, and haven't told you about it, let me explain what is going on right now. The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the entire newspaper industry, is suffering. No one knows how to make money off of Journalism right now and if you can't make money off the news, you can't pay to report the news. That is a scary idea, but the news industry isn't dying. It is evolving.

One of the Philadelphia Inquirer's ideas to change with the times is a student run website to be called Student Union 34. The 34 stands for the 34 colleges in the Philadelphia area. The idea is each college has a news page on the site, and a news team of about 6 to 8 student journalists from that college running it. Each student journalist has a lot of freedom to write on a subject they pitched and had approved by the editors of the Inquirer. The blog I pitched was one about poverty in North Philadelphia. An obvious issue without enough coverage.

I'm not exactly sure what is going on right now. I assume that they are working to get Student Union 34 ready, but their work at the Philadelphia Inquirer is their main priority, so it's taking some time.

I am taking this blog very seriously and didn't want to wait. My plan had been to get the ball rolling this summer, so now I'm going to start this blog, which was supposed to be on SU34, and when SU34 is ready I'll simply transfer my posts to it.

This is in other words a temporary location until the SU34 site is ready. I'm going to post weekly. I'm hoping that people will begin to read the blog here, and then when Su 34 is ready they will follow it onto that site.

So yeah, keep reading.

American Nightmare

2009-05-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

I have this recurring fantasy about being able to time travel back to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, almost 233 years ago in this city. That might sound lame to some, but I would love to tell them that they were forming what would eventually become the greatest country in the world. After congratulating them, I would like to time travel back to the future with them, and walk them through North Philadelphia. I wonder what changes they would make to the constitution after seeing the cost of not including equal rights for Africans, and leaving a vague right to bear arms, on the city that was in their time the capital of the United States of America.

The more research I've done since I realized that I needed to write about poverty in North Philadelphia, the more it reminds me of the statistics I had to learn in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and why not? After all, what is North Philadelphia if not a disaster hundreds of years in the making?

This is what Philadelphia is dealing with right now: 25% of this city is living in poverty. There are about 22,000 abandoned buildings, and 30,000 empty lots. 22% of adults in Philadelphia cannot read at a basic level. That's what we have to work with. Oh! And a $1 billion dollar budget gap.

These are the glimpses I have gleaned from the my research foray into the North Philadelphia's situation. I decided to write this blog about a month ago, since then I've been sitting in my room reading those dreary graduate student case studies that no one was ever intended to read, as well as Buzz Bissinger's freaking amazing book, A Prayer for the City, and everything else my google searches turned up.

I had to do the research because besides the obvious things, I don't really know about poverty, or North Philadelphia. That's because I am a middle class suburban white kid from North Jersey, and I want to acknowledge that as I begin this blog. I believe in transparency in reporting, and I want readers to know that I am stepping into this arena with a confession:

I did not grow up in poverty, and thus I am ignorant about poverty...but I want to know about poverty.

To that end I plan to go out into North Philadelphia and meet with anyone willing to educate me. I want to know who is living in poverty, why they are living in poverty, and what are the problems of poverty. I believe that that is the first step towards this blog ultimately becoming about what is being done, what is working, and what we can do to help.

I want to meet with, and learn to understand, everyone. The politicians behind the neighborhood transformation initiative, and the community organizers who protested it. The cops and the criminals. The educators and the children. The prostitutes and the church organizers.

On this blog I plan to post news, interviews and profiles related to issues of poverty weekly. I'm also planning on keeping a simple, weekly video journal of sorts on my thoughts as I delve into the world of North Philadelphia. The profiles I write will mostly concern nonprofit organizations, philanthropists, and community leaders. I hope as well to interview as many public figures as are willing to talk to me. I don't think anything less would do this problem justice.

I was struggling to think of a way to start this blog when I heard about the second annual Philly Spring Clean up. What better way to begin such a monumental undertaking than by cleaning up the streets of North Philadelphia one cigarette butt at a time?

I was the only one volunteering at the Amos Recreation Center at 16th and Berks. Throughout the day I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of Philadelphians as we picked trash out of the overgrown empty lots that litter North Philly. These people clearly care about their city. They were just waiting for someone to give them the opportunity to do something about it. Over 10,000 volunteers turned out for Mayor Nutter's city-wide day of service, and they removed over 346 tons of trash from the streets of Philadelphia in one day.

Thanks to that day of service I had the opportunity to sit down with Alain Joinville, the Public Affairs Coordinator for the Department of Recreation, my first interview for this site. He told me about the challenges these recreation sites face in North Philadelphia, some of the programs they are working on, and pointed me in the direction of some other young idealists trying to make a dent in North Philly's poverty.

Among these volunteers were many from Temple University, and I think the only reason there weren't many more was the lack of advertising for the Philly Spring Clean Up. My last seven months at Temple has been a big part of my motivation for this blog. The fact that a university can thrive while surrounded by such an impoverished community is shameful. The school is an oasis of academia in the ghetto, disconnected from the community that surrounds us, and that is not okay. Temple University should be the base from which volunteers pour into the community, after all, we both live here. I hope that this blog will eventually become a way for Temple students to find out about all the nonprofit organizations in North Philadelphia, and become involved.

It's no small task ahead of us, so keep reading, because I'm going to keep writing.

P.S. If anyone ever does want to become involved, or if you know of a nonprofit organization that deserves coverage, please email me. I'm going to need all the information, contacts, and help that I can get.