Can My Neighborhood Be Saved?

by Victoria A. Brownworth

 

The November election can’t come soon enough for me. It will end what has been one of the worst, most damaging plagues on my neighborhood of lower Germantown–the reign of Donna Reed Miller in City Council.

We’ve withstood a lot down here in the no man’s land between East Falls and the more upscale parts of Germantown and Mt. Airy–drugs, crime, bad schools, danger and blight wherever you go. But the worst thing for us has been Miller and the do-nothing attitude of her office that has haunted us here since 1996.

How fitting that as her final slap in the face of her constituents, she accepted the DROP payment. 

The November election will bring an official end to her tenure and will–I hope–usher in a new era with the arrival of Cindy Bass come January.

I voted for Bass. A few years back I supported and endorsed the Green Party candidate for Miller’s seat. I had even considered running for the seat myself. All I ever wanted was a councilor who cared about my neighborhood as much as I do.

That was never Miller. One of the last times Miller’s name hit the news was just before the primary in May when Miller’s office was raided by the Philadelphia Police Civil Affairs unit and Council’s own Ethics Board. Miller was accused of using city equipment to print campaign materials for Verna Tyner, the candidate Miller had endorsed for her seat.

I wish I could say this was an anomaly in an otherwise long and distinguished career in Council, but there was no such career.

I hope Cindy Bass will be different.

I’ve been writing about my neighborhood since I moved here in 1989. I have a unique perspective since I grew up in Germantown before moving away after college. So I know what Germantown was and what I firmly believe–with the help of strong city leadership and the support of local business persons and banks–it could be again.

I live near Germantown’s most historic district–a few blocks from the avenue that includes Grumblethorpe, Market Square, St. Luke’s Church, Germantown Friends School and the site where people were treated during the Yellow Fever epidemic. I am a block and a half from the Germantown Cricket Club, one of the oldest in the nation.

However, I am also a block and a half from one of the worst elementary schools in the city, John B. Kelly. I’m a block and a half from Happy Hollow playground where children vie with drug dealers for the space and where shoot outs regularly occur in broad daylight.

I used to be five blocks from the Fresh Grocer supermarket, the best supermarket my neighborhood has had since I was a child living on Rittenhouse Street and the space was occupied by Food Fair. The old Food Fair/former Fresh Grocer site has maintained some kind of supermarket for years. For more than a decade previously, Shop Rite leased that space. 

Fresh Grocer was closed a few months ago and building has been fast and furious on just what my neighborhood doesn’t need: More limited resource markets. Yet another Save-a-lot and yet another dollar store, when two identical stores lie just two blocks away. We need a full service market with produce and fresh meats, fish and poultry.

Now I drive over to LaSalle to the Fresh Grocer there, or up to Chestnut Hill to the Pathmark. Not good for the carbon footprint and also not good for my own neighborhood, because my dollars end up elsewhere.

The thing is, I don’t want to leave my neighborhood to shop. Apart from the inconvenience, there’s the benefit to the neighborhood from having a thriving business district. But Germantown has anything but. Take the four block walk from where the Fresh Grocer was at Pulaski and Chelten to Germantown and Chelten where Rowell’s department store used to be, along with a huge Woolworth’s with a lunch counter and booths, plus a thriving and charming little string of shops down Maplewood Mall and you can chart the decline and fall of a neighborhood.

Chelten Avenue and Germantown Avenue are now nothing but a string of shops with cheap made elsewhere products. The sole exceptions are a Payless shoe store and several chain drugstores–CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens. There is one bank–it used to be a Provident years ago, and there was another sister branch at Market Square and several other banks in between. Now there is the one bank. And if there are no banks, how can there be a thriving business district?

When I was a child there were three major department stores in the two blocks between Wayne and Germantown Avenues on Chelten: Allens, Franklin-Simon and Rowell’s. There were two Woolworth’s. A Sears and a Robert Hall. Numerous small gift and furniture shops. A piano store. The Seven Arts book store. Leaves of Grass bookstore. Several jewelry stores. Several opticians. Several coffeehouses. Imhof’s restaurant. Green Hedges restaurant. The Boswell House restaurant. Two Horn and Hardhart’s. A Hanscom’s.

One of the best repertory film houses on the East Coast – the Band Box, run by local cinematist Art Carduner – was on Armat Street. Also on Chelten was the first-run theatre, the Orpheum. And two blocks from where I live now was the Lyric, another first run theatre. Now the closest movie theatre is on Main Street in Manayunk.

Manayunk is now what lower Germantown could be with the same kind of support Manayunk received 20 years ago. Back when I lived in the old, thriving Germantown, Manayunk was a working class neighborhood with little outlet stores with factory made goods and corner taprooms. It was a grimy and grim little district with nothing but the canal to lure anyone, including locals.

Now it is one of the most dynamic neighborhoods in the city. Tiny row homes sell for $250,000 while the gorgeous sprawling homes in my area are lucky to fetch half that.

How did Manayunk differ from lower Germantown? It didn’t, really. The houses were always grander here and the neighborhood was always racially mixed–at least from my childhood on–with ethnic working class, but the neighborhoods were similar in that they were stable and the residents stayed. Churches, businesses and schools all anchored both neighborhoods. Proximity to Center City made both places accessible: you could live in Germantown or Manayunk and be in town in 20 minutes by train or car.

But where Manayunk has been revitalized, Germantown has turned into a blighted also-ran neighborhood.

I want my old neighborhood back and I believe it can be done. Perhaps not to the breadth of its status in the 1970s, and perhaps not as magnificent as Manayunk, but certainly as solid as areas of Mt. Airy and West Philly.

Here’s what it will take: A City Councilwoman who is as concerned about Germantown as she is about Chestnut Hill. A City Councilwoman determined to meet with local people like myself who want to create meaningful and lasting change for our area. A City Councilwoman who wants to revitalize our business district, our schools and our neighborhood. A City Councilwoman who delivers on the promises she made when she was running against Miller–and Bass ran several times before winning in May. 

Philadelphia has always suffered from the stranglehold some politicians have had over the city, a death grip that has maintained their own personal power but ceded none to their constituents.

Those of us who live in Germantown and love this neighborhood as I do need to demand more. Every election I voted against Miller and I would invariably see people who were there solely to try and vote her out. But votes split among several candidates allowed Miller to squeak through time and again.

Now we have the chance to move forward–create real change, have our voices heard. Bass has promised not to be a knee-jerk, lock-step politician of the pay-to-play school Philadelphians have become all too familiar with. She promises to hear our cries for help and answer them.

I, for one, am hopeful. Because I have to be. Unlike many of my neighbors, I don’t resent the Asian shopkeepers who are the only people willing to take the risks to keep their stores open in a neighborhood known primarily for danger. But there is no incentive for these shopkeepers to do more for us than they do. As it is they often are literally risking their lives to sell groceries or cheap clothes or school supplies. And they are constant victims of racial epithets and violence.

Why can’t we have more? Why can’t we have a real department store? I wouldn’t be so bothered if the Fresh Grocer had closed so that a Target opened. Or if it had closed so that a string of small mid-scale shops had taken over the space. But we have set the bar so low in this neighborhood, that we think it’s okay to have schools without libraries, supermarkets without fresh produce, clothing stores with nothing but cheap T-shirts and no-name jeans.

Why can’t we have more?

Arguments are made all the time that business won’t come to crime-ridden areas. But Germantown is no more crime-ridden than Manayunk was when it was revitalized. Can’t we try to bring it back?

The onus is on us and our soon-to-be Councilwoman Bass. But it is also on business people throughout the city. Giving up on Germantown is racist, classist and above all, stupid: If we had more options to buy, we’d exercise them. We’ve started with Cindy Bass.

The question is, what happens next?