On an oven-hot morning, a band of men in blue jumpsuits
is raking up trash tangled into the edges of Ninth Street near Roosevelt
Boulevard in North Philadelphia.
It's early, but the guys with Ready, Willing and Able — a
nonprofit that helps the homeless — have got a lot of work ahead of them.
Through the brush just around the corner, longtime Logan
resident Ernie Bristow scans a vast expanse of grass and weeds.
She shakes her head.
"You gotta beg for somebody to come clean up. It's
just sad," said Bristow.
From a distance, the lot looks like the makings of a
football field. But walk in, and you'll quickly find reminders of what stood
here and on nearly 20 city blocks nearby: houses.
Hundreds of them.
"It's still devastating," said Bristow.
"People don't want to come over here."
Here is what's known as the Logan Triangle, an infamous,
35-acre slice of North Philadelphia history that residents, city officials and,
now, a private developer hope to finally rewrite after three decades.
In the late 1980s, the city started spending millions to
demolish nearly a thousand houses within the triangle, an area bordered by the
Boulevard and Seventh Street and 11th and Louden streets. Millions more were
spent relocating the people who lived in them.
The reason: the houses were sinking. They were built in
the 1920s on top of a creek bed filled in with ash and cinder. Over decades,
that combination behaved like slow-moving quicksand. And, ultimately, punctured
a once thriving neighborhood.
"My children, when they were young, were able to
come in and out [of the house]. Sometimes, they forgot to lock the door and it
was no problem. Nobody can do that now," said Helen Matthews, who moved
across the street from the triangle before the demolitions started.
Fluid plans, perhaps an orchard
That history is part of what led The Goldenberg Group to
ink a deal with the city after months of negotiations.
Jeremy Fogel, the Blue Bell-based company's director of
development, says the project is still very much a work in progress and that
it'll be shaped with the help of neighbors.
Generally speaking, however, the plot may feature a mix
of for-profit and not-for-profit uses along with some community open space.
"Those kind of broader brush, big picture concepts
will need to be adopted into whatever specific designs we eventually end up
with," he said.
The project may also incorporate elements of an alternative
proposal being pushed by a grassroots group known as LOAM, short for Logan
Orchard and Market.
The concept includes plans for parks, greenhouses, solar
cottages and, of course, orchards.
"We would directly meet the basic needs of the
people of this lower-income neighborhood for fresh food all year, genuinely
low-cost housing, health care, jobs, business development and training,"
says Mt. Airy resident Paul Glover, LOAM's founder.
The Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority owns the land
that comprises the Triangle. Executive director Brian Abernathy says it won't
be easy, or cheap to build there.
As it stands today, only about half of the Logan Triangle
is suitable for redevelopment. The center of the site is particularly unstable.
"There's a potential that I fail — that the
authority fails. The government subsidy that's needed will be pretty
significant," said Abernathy.
"I can't promise that we're going to be successful
in a year or two years or three years or five years. But I can commit that
we're in it for the long haul, that the status quo isn't acceptable and that we
have to figure this out, not just for the future of Logan, but the future of
the city."
Explosion exposes instability
It all started in 1986 with a big gas main explosion. The
Valentine's Day blast damaged several homes, but it also revealed just how
badly properties in the Triangle were sinking.
"As you drove along the Boulevard and looked at
Logan, you could literally see houses where the steps of the houses were higher
than the front porches of the houses and that's because the houses were heavier
than the steps," said Deborah McColloch, the city's housing director.
In 1987, the city started condemning properties and
offering buyouts to residents of the Logan Triangle on a volunteer basis. A
nonprofit, the Logan Assistance Corporation was set up for the sole purpose of
overseeing the process.
The work was projected to take three years. In the end,
it took the better part of two decades. The last family moved out in 2003.
"It was a very difficult time," said McColloch.
"Some people wanted to leave and get out of there. Other people didn't
want to leave. They didn't believe the houses were really sinking. They didn't
believe it was as bad as it was."
Over the years, two major development proposals were
presented to city officials, including one from Goldenberg. Bart Blatstein, the
man behind high-profile projects like the Piazza at Schmidt's in Northern
Liberties, submitted the other plan.
Both called for large-scale housing. Both were rejected.
Expensive proposition
Cost was a big factor and, specifically, the cost of
preparing the land for redevelopment. Those are dollars the city would have had
to contribute.
One proposal required $40 million for remediation.
"That was just the start of it. So it clearly wasn't
going to work," said John Kromer, who directed the city's Office of
Housing and Community Development while Ed Rendell was mayor.
That was a big source of frustration for City
Councilwoman Marian Tasco, whose district included the Triangle until 2011.
Year after year, she met with residents with little hope of things changing for
the better.
"Internally, I knew it was just impossible, but I
never said it was impossible. I just kept working with [residents] and working
with the administration to see what we could do on that property," said
Tasco.
"It was not that I didn't want to help or build,
it's just given the facts of life of that land, what we're you going to do and
who do we get to do it?"
Abernathy, with the redevelopment authority, says it's
unclear how much remediation would cost for the current project. But he
estimates the bottom line could be upwards of $100 million.
The new project may feature housing, but it's not
guaranteed. Part of that decision will hinge on whether residents want to see
that and would people be willing to buy a house on land that is most famous for
sinking.
Source: NewsWork
No comments:
Post a Comment