Frankford Community Blog | Local News, Events, Community Resources
NEastPhilly.com has a good story today on the recovery house issue.
Bottom line, no leadership who will stick out there neck and do the right thing.
Don’t tell us what can’t be done. Heard it before. Don’t tell us what you can’t do. Heard it before. Do the right thing.
We are mad as hell and we are not going to take this anymore.
1522-24 Church St.
I couldn’t attend the Frankford Civic Association meeting Thursday night but it is a pleasure to link you to the NEastPhilly.com report of what transpired. Go there and read it and then come back here.
The issue of 1522-24 Church Street was again on the table and it is apparent that nobody in the city government is going to do anything about this problem until a few hundred people storm City Hall. Should be no surprise that the owner of this property has some past or present Philly government connections. “Business Continuity Analysis at Philadelphia Gas Works” or “City of Philadelphia – Project Manager COOP IT”. We are on our own folks.
A joint effort of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, and the Preservation Design Partnership is utilizing 19th century atlases and other period maps, GIS mapping, and digital technology in a unique experiment. The result may reveal the archaelogical layers of the city’s history from its early years to its current age.
That’s a mouthful. But apparently it comes down to the fact that it’s very time intensive to track down all the old stuff in historic areas. So the researchers are trying to match up old atlases with current mapping techniques and trying to guess which areas of a neighborhood have a high likelihood of having historic stuff. Sounds kinda vague, but lets take the example of the area near Frankford’s border with Bridesburg, you look on an old map and see the Frankford Creek running up along what’s now Aramingo, you know you don’t have to wonder around Frankford Valley looking for old stuff cause they only filled in the creek recently. You look at the houses that used be where I95 is now, you know you’re probably not going to get anything historic around where the city bulldozed 50 years ago. But it also works for where you might find something. Take Leiper Street around Overington Park. If you compare old maps with the current surveys, you can see that some of the lot sizes for the estates are the same, meaning the houses are probably still there. And go figure, they actually came upon this week’s home of the week!
We actually played this very game on the message board a little while ago when we were trying to figure out where the Overington Estate house sat in the park.
You can play along too, a while ago we profiled philageohistory.org, a website that will overlay google maps with old atlases they have of Philadelphia, and Frankford is heavily included. Check out the 1929 Ward 23 map. And if you find anything neat, let us know!
Between the Frankford Creek and Cheltenham Ave, Roosevelt Boulevard and I95, there’s like 38 thousand residents. How hard can it be to get a couple hundred people together to yell at some politicians? That’s one half of one percent of our residents. I can’t believe I haven’t brought this up before, but I’m gonna start blogging on what happens elsewhere in the city when residents band together and challenge everything they see that has a negative impact on their neighborhoods. They’re called NIMBYs. Not In My Back Yard. And they can be very effective. The problem with that is, WE DON’T HAVE ANY. So when the city goes searching for places to dump problems, they come to us because we don’t put up a fight.
Such was the case in East Falls last night where the community met with Deleware Valley High School to discuss the new “kiddie prison” setting up shop in their neighborhood. Here’s some video. Brian Hickey reports in today’s metro that City Counsilman Curtis Jones Jr. is withdrawing his support for the school.
I’ll follow this one, and let you know how it turns out. Maybe we can take a clue from the East Falls community. Because if we can’t find 200 people in a neighborhood this big to show up for town hall meetings or civic association meetings or to even show they care, then we deserve every thing that gets dumped here.
Yesterday, after I posted more hints about a local movie filmed in and around Frankford and Tacony, Shirley and her mother properly guessed it was Pride of the Marines. In the film, Al Schmid is a border in Tacony, dating Ruth Hartley, played by Eleanor Parker who lived at 1025 Filmore Street in Northwood. Remember this is her house here:
As soon as I was this scene, I stopped the movie and started hunting down that location. I was pretty sure it was in East Frankford around Darrah and Wakeling. But it took me a while before I found it; it ended up being 200 yards from my front door in Northwood. Check it out on Google Street View here. And I probably should have just kept watching the movie to save myself some effort, cause her exact address shows up in the movie when Al’s coming back to Philly and she gets a telegram from his friend:
I guess they didn’t have zip codes back then. But anyways, congrats, Shirley and your mom, if we ever start printing up tee shirts, we’ll be sure to give you one.
