Grid Magazine April 2021 [#143]

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Let’s keep MLK Drive for the people

Music therapy soothes bodies and souls

The healing powers of a green burial

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p. 26

p. 8

APRIL 2021 / ISSUE 143 / GRIDPHILLY.COM

T O W A R D A S U S TA I N A B L E P H I L A D E L P H I A

Ice cream entrepreneur Kianu Walker inspires and delights with his dairyfree desserts

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Kristi Habedanck Philadelphia, PA TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF Hi my name is Kristi Habedanck and I am the founder-maker of m. et al, a jewelry business that utilizes cuttlebone casting methods. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a BA in Economics, I swapped numbers for artwork, completing two semesters at California College of Arts and an array of classes at the Main Line Art Center.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON? I’m always inspired by different forms of beauty and craft, and I get the most joy from the originality of hand-crafted jewelry. The interesting thing about this cuttlebone casting method is that it makes every single piece original. Each cuttlebone is destroyed once the hot silver is poured over. This means all of her rings are entirely unique, much like a person’s fingerprints, and fit everyone differently.

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS? It’s fair to say I am an old-school seller and have completely avoided social media and online sales—I don’t even have a website yet! However, I do realize that developing a social media presence is the next step for my business and I am definitely willing to jump on the bandwagon if it means I can make beautiful jewelry for some new customers! At NextFab I mostly use the torch because I work with metal and I don’t have access to these tools anywhere else. I can design and finish in the comfort of my own home, but I really could not do what I do without NextFab. With a jewelry studio, a woodshop, a photo lab, and so much more, I am always telling people that NextFab is the best-kept secret in town!

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EDI TO R ’S NOTES

by

alex mulcahy

Feed the Worms

managing editor Alexandra W. Jones associate editor & distribution Timothy Mulcahy tim@gridphilly.com copy editor David Jack Daniels art director Michael Wohlberg writers Magdalena Becker Bernard Brown Constance Garcia-Barrio Siobhan Gleason Randy LoBasso Alex Mulcahy Lois Volta photographers Drew Dennis Milton Lindsay Rachael Warriner illustrators James Olstein Sean Rynkewicz Lois Volta published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

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(I have a few not-so-fond memories, too.

Like the time when, despite my wise sister’s warning, I decided to pet a bee. Another time, Seamus the sheepdog chased after me like a lamb straying from the flock, and I fell hard on concrete.)

Over the decades that have passed, I’ve gone back to the cemetery as members of my family have been buried there. Much has changed. The house is gone. The apple tree is gone. My Gram and Pop are gone.

What is most striking to me is that the open areas are far less open than they used to be. There are a lot more tombstones than in 1980. It’s starting to look crowded.

On my most recent visit, this time for my father’s burial, it really hit me. Nevermind the formaldehyde seeping into our groundwater, the carbon emissions of concrete and cremation, or as Andrew Smith, environmental philosophy professor at Drexel, pointed out to me, the cost of depriving our soil of the nutrients our decaying bodies would provide. Surveying the more densely packed cemetery, it’s a land usage issue.

There simply isn’t enough space for a tombstone for everyone, ad infinitum.

I have said that, upon my demise, I’d like to be put into a Bennett Compost bucket.

(They do Christmas trees, after all.) Just a joke to deflect an uncomfortable truth we all have to face, and that truth is, we are all going to die.

Many people reading this magazine go to great lengths to live sustainably. Let this issue serve as a reminder to die sustainably, too.

ALEX MULCAHY Editor-in-Chief alex@gridphilly.com

COV E R IL LUSTRATIO N BY JAM ES OLSTEI N

I L LU S T R AT E D P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

publisher Alex Mulcahy

love food.

I feel like I need to say that because last month we did a vegan issue and I wrote a diatribe about Facebook’s failure to recognize that they are publishers, and how they shirk their responsibilities to society. Since publication, I’ve tried Vannah Banana’s vegan ice cream and it is delicious.

This month we profile two local businesses, Philly Foodworks and Primal Supply Meats, that are models of what the local food supply chain should be. They both rose to the occasion when the community needed more food. I have been a customer of both, and the products they deliver are uniformly outstanding.

But instead of waxing poetic about the quality of their food, or even about the important work they do building local supply chains, I want to talk about something else: death, or more specifically, cemeteries.

My grandfather, Pop Mulhern, was the superintendent of St. Mary’s Cemetery in Wilkes-Barre, where I was born and raised.

My Mom and her siblings lived in a house on the cemetery grounds for a number of years, and my grandparents lived there until I was ten.

When I was very young, I lived at the cemetery in a trailer, a temporary shelter that the federal government supplied to people who had lost everything due to Hurricane Agnes and the flooding of the Susquehanna River.

I have very fond memories of time spent at the cemetery. It was a great, expansive place to run around, to play hide-andseek. There was an apple tree outside the big house, and I remember bringing in apples for my Gram to make apple pie. I have dozens of cousins on my Mom’s side, and when, on those special occasions when all the far-flung relatives visited, playing at the cemetery was epic. On a dark night, cousin Matt, a gifted storyteller, scared everyone with his tale of Sickle Man, sending screaming cousins in all directions.

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by

lois volta

DEAR LOIS,

How do I overcome guilt about my lifestyle?

V

iolence causes so much turmoil on our planet. People in powerful places enable corporate plundering, war, greed and exploitation—and we are all caught up in the mess.

We buy things online and shop at chain stores. It’s impossible to adhere to a moral code with every purchase.

Still, I feel guilty when I think about how supporting these unsustainable systems butts up against my moral fiber. I hope that, as a species, we can move into a brighter future. But the harsh self judgments about not living according to my values sometimes makes me feel so tired and stuck that I hit a wall. “If I only did this or that, then I would be a better person …”

My home takes the brunt of these feelings.

When it comes to daily chores, I find that it is very easy to feel overwhelmed and unmotivated. I feel guilty and stuck by apathy.

In this place, it is easy to look at my clutter and dirt with resentment.

While I get frustrated that it takes so much energy just to keep my head above water, I know, deep down, that life feels better, lighter and more creative when the house is healthy and functioning well. It’s just my passion to create a beautiful life that is in a battle with the violent consumerist system that I feel locked into.

It’s not a surprise that I feel stuck. How I 4

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want to live conflicts with our entire societal structure. The conventional way of living in 2021 is not emotionally, mentally, spiritually or ecologically sustainable. I know that I am not alone in this feeling. It is bigger than just one home or household.

Personally, I don’t have the time and resources to be the person I desire to be. So I focus on the here and now. I am not interested in living in resentment, shame or guilt when I approach my lifestyle. I have accepted that I’m part of the mess society’s created and that I make my own messes every day.

From there, I can take a more realistic approach to how I can be part of cleaning up whatever is in front of me.

There is always something to clean up.

Life creates a mess: accept it, then roll up your sleeves. The sooner we accept this truth, the quicker we can start digging ourselves out of the mess. Whether it be a neglected and cluttered room, crud buildup due to poor cleaning habits, denial or flatout indifference.

I care more about my life when I’m not in denial or blaming someone else for why things feel out of my control or messy. I also know that I can’t care about everything all at the same time—it’s too much pressure and I’ll throw my hands up.

It takes an extraordinary amount of energy to get ourselves unstuck and stay motivated. It’s exhausting and a lot of the time we need real help to get out of a rut. We have all hit the wall after this long year and we do need help. Why not bring personal generosity, compassion and responsibility

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

TH E VO LTA WAY

IL LUSTRATIO N BY LO I S VOLTA

The conventional way of living in 2021 is not emotionally, mentally, spiritually or ecologically sustainable.” to how we live to squash the bigger oppressive feeling of guilt and frustration? Pick up the sponge and just start cleaning.

I know I talk a lot about cleaning up and taking care of our lives and homes. Doing a deep cleaning of our homes calls to the deeper parts of ourselves. Spring is upon us—and so is the wall we’ve hit. It’s time to dismantle the wall and use the bricks to lay a new path using routine, discipline and mental fortitude.

Bring generosity and compassion along with the rags, cleaner and time you set aside to take care of your home. I believe this is how we roll up our sleeves to ward off guilt and shame. We do know what it feels like to do a job well done and directly benefit from our hard work.

When we look at where we are right now, in this moment in history, we can see very clearly that we need a boost to get over the hump. Use cleaning as the boost. When we grab hold of a helping hand, we learn how to extend our own. You’ll just have to trust me here. Don’t stop until you know what I mean. Push through whatever wall you find yourself against. It works. lois volta is a home consultant, musician and founder of Volta Naturals. loisvolta.com.

Send questions to thevoltaway@gmail.com.

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Radical Shift

To save the planet, we have to kill sustainability and embrace regenerative design

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orget sustainability. Over the past 50 years we have lost more than half of Earth’s wildlife, and perhaps even more of her insects. More than half of all fossil fuel emissions have occurred since 1987. Sustainability, as a concept, as an idea to rally around, has failed.

If we are to survive, we need a radical shift in thinking. Regenerative design advocates are working to bring about that shift.

“We tend to celebrate compromise,” says Max Zahniser, the Regenerative Studios Lead at the College of Architecture & the Built Environment at Thomas Jefferson University.

“Compromise is just everybody getting less of what they want. And we are currently compromising our way into oblivion.”

While disregarding significant gains that have been made in sustainability may seem harsh, advocates for regenerative design believe that sustainability is nothing more than making unacceptable things less bad.

An example of that is Net Zero, or carbon neutrality, an energy goal that mandates a building use no more energy than it creates.

“Net Zero is burning coal at night, so the fact that you get a shiny green halo for that drives me nuts,” says Zahniser. “I don’t want to design for Net Zero. I want to do

positive everything.”

Regenerative design students at Jefferson can expect to have their expectations and beliefs challenged. Zahniser says that before trying to solve problems, a period of deprogramming needs to occur. This approach to design has to recognize living system dynamics—another way of saying taking a holistic perspective. To achieve this, Zahniser says that students need what Zen Buddhists call a “beginner’s mind.” What does this mean to the prospective student?

“It’s a bit shocking,” Zahniser admits.

“Because [the studio] is two consecutive terms, I’ve got more runway. We spend the first third of the Fall term just working on our thinking, just working to try to begin to embody the regenerative paradigm. One of the things they can expect is to not get to do design for quite a while. So I’m kind of holding the rubber band on the slingshot back for an extra few months.”

Much of the students’ energy is spent collaborating with people in the Sharswood

A rendering from the student-designed North Philly Peace Park

neighborhood (or what some residents now call “Peacetown”) in North Philadelphia. It’s a neighborhood in danger of gentrification, but Zahniser encourages his students to go beyond the trappings of binary thinking.

“There’s a camp in Peacetown that thinks that what PHA [Philadelphia Housing Authority] and other developers are up to is the worst thing ever. There’s another camp that says, ‘Well, the decay is the worst thing ever, and any development is better.’ So we’re just coming in and saying, ‘What’s the third option? What’s the fourth? What’s the fifth?’

The community leaders, the real wisdom holders of the place, get that already.”

Zahniser’s students have been working with community members to reimagine the William D. Kelley School, designing what the school would look like with a large foyer, a full cafeteria that doesn’t double as a gym and a garden instead of a concrete lot.

Students are also working on a proposal to develop an empty lot at N. 27th Street and Girard Avenue, turning it into a “a block scale co-op” that would be owned by existing residents.

Scale, according to Zahniser, is another critical component to regenerative design.

“In our society, we tend to manage things— like food and water—either too small or too big, and totally miss the Goldilocks zone.”

Zahniser has found that focusing on a neighborhood has been the Goldilocks zone for his students, and for him, too.

“The idea of committing to a place over and over instead of switching every term was something I was very ready to do. We started falling in love with Sharswood. Each consecutive year, I feel like the relational equity jumps up another order of magnitude.”

Students can be sure that while they are examining problems and possibilities in one neighborhood, their imaginations will be untethered.

“Rather than debating what’s possible, we put all of our energy into what must happen.”

THE MISSION OF Jefferson’s College of Architecture and the Built Environment is to educate the next generation of design and construction professionals to create an equitable and sustainable future.

Learn more at Jefferson.edu/Grid.

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Every acre of land preserved... cleans the air we breathe filters the water we drink soaks up floodwaters helps cool our planet gives wildlife a home brings humans joy.

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bike talk

Lane Change Keeping Martin Luther King Jr. Drive closed probably won’t by randy lobasso affect traffic

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arlier this year, as policy director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, I began meeting with City Council staff, businesses, registered community organizations and nonprofits to discuss the future of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

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The drive has become one of the most trafficked trails in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania since it was closed to motor vehicles in March 2020. According to electronic counts conducted by the engineering firm WSP, the drive sees more than 5,000 users per day on weekdays and more

than 9,600 people per day on weekends.

While we don’t have pre-COVID weekend counts to compare, we do have weekday counts. The WSP data, when compared to the city’s data, shows a 1,300% increase in users on weekdays, which is the fastest increase in usage of any trail in the area we are aware of.

Keeping this in mind as vaccinations inch us back to normalcy, it’s time to reimagine the drive’s future.

My colleagues at the coalition and Yasha Zarrinkelk, of Transit Forward Philadelphia, have discussed two proposals for the future of the drive: leaving it as it is, an open street for the public, or making it a shared roadway, split in half, with pedestrian traffic on one side and a two-way busway on the other, making travel easier between Center City and Northwest Philadelphia and West Philly neighborhoods Mantua, Wynnefield and Parkside.

The initial feedback we got was virtually all positive, which was a surprise to me.

What I expected were questions about how closing the drive affects traffic patterns and how traffic on I-76 and Kelly Drive, which run parallel to MLK Drive, would be affected long term by the closure.

These questions can’t be answered definitively until studies are conducted, looking at expressway usage, how long SEPTA takes to return to full capacity and what commuting looks like post-pandemic. But what we can say is that adding MLK’s two lanes back for Center City commuters won’t lighten the amount of traffic they see.

Despite what you’ve heard, traffic is actually created by additional motor vehicle lanes.

So if you’re inching along I-76 while MLK Drive is closed to vehicles, you’ll be inching along I-76 with it open to vehicles, too.

For decades, there has been a line of thinking that, if we just add one more lane, congestion will decrease. But the opposite has always been true. Increasing roadway capacity encourages more people to drive, thus failing to improve congestion. This is a concept called “induced demand.”

As noted in a recent Inquirer story about snarling traffic on Philadelphia highways and efforts to ease congestion, Thomas K. Edinger, who runs congestion management process programs at the Delaware Valley IL LUSTRATIO N BY S EAN RY NKEWI CZ

Regional Planning Commission, noted: “To manage congestion, we have to rely on other ways of reducing traffic versus building more capacity,” adding that it is well known that expanding roads induces more traffic, making them “as crowded as before.”

Sure, in the case of MLK Drive, lanes were taken away—but it’s been that way for more than a year now. While the number of vehicles going in and out of Center City is about 80% of pre-pandemic levels, commuters have adjusted to the new restrictions—and they will adjust again when restrictions drop and more commuters head back to work.

There are cases in which highways have been destroyed for the good of a city’s health, and traffic simply finds another way. There are examples of this all over the world, spanning decades, including freeway teardown projects in Milwaukee and San Francisco.

The U.S. government has finally caught on to this. A recent Senate bill would provide $10 billion to cities for tearing

For decades, there has been a line of thinking that, if we just add one more lane, congestion will decrease.

But the opposite has always been true.” down urban highways, which are unsightly, noisy, dirty and have historically destroyed low-income neighborhoods.

Creating less expressway space for motor vehicles is a net good if you care about road safety and climate change. The best case scenario for a person sitting in traffic, alone in their car, is for that person to say, “Wow, this sucks. I’m not doing this again,” then choose a different route or mode of transportation next time they travel into the city. And two bus-only lanes on MLK Drive could be the driving force that gets those commuters out of their cars and onto the bus. (Public transportation will need all

the support it can get: SEPTA saw a 92% drop in ridership on buses, subways and trolleys and a 98% drop on Regional Rail between March and June 2020.)

Additionally, we must keep in mind that with white collar jobs shifting to remote work, it’s still unknown how many jobs will be coming back to Center City. Many cities are already preparing for the work-from-home trend to continue, and Philadelphia should do the same. In doing so, we can reimagine our spaces for living and our roads for travel beyond the commute, with buses and trains transporting people to and from communities, cultural centers and public spaces.

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urban naturalist

Kill the Lights Environmental groups and building associations work to save birds by bernard brown from deadly collisions

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tephen maciejewski hit the streets of Center City before dawn one morning last October to look for dead and injured birds, just like he did every morning during spring migration.

Maciejewski, a volunteer for Audubon Pennsylvania, walked a set route around the glass-and-concrete canyons, documenting where he found birds that had collided with windows. He released the ones stunned by the impact in a sheltered courtyard where they could take some time to recover and fly off.

The dead ones went into Ziploc bags, destined for the research collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. On a normal day he would find a handful of birds. On a busy day, 20 or so.

But this morning was different.

Dead birds were everywhere. Maciejewski struggled to keep up.

Near 18th and Arch streets, a custodian sweeping up in front of an office tower came over.

“His dustpan was full,” recalls Maciejewski. “He dumped 76 birds in front of me. I got the live ones out … then I had a big pile of birds. I felt the need to spread them out, and I took that photo that went around the world.”

All tallied, Maciejewski found more than 400 dead birds that day.

Every year about 600 million birds die when they collide with buildings, according to researchers. There are a lot of ways that humans kill birds, but window collisions are only exceeded by outdoor cats (which kill on the order of 2.5 billion per year). The victims range from the tiniest hummingbirds up to bald eagles with wingspans of nearly seven feet.

Birds did not evolve with glass, and often they smack into windows that reflect 10 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 20 21

the sky or trees that they would like to land on. The problem is particularly severe with buildings next to green spaces, whether that’s an office building next to a pocket park, a university hall on a landscaped campus or a suburban house with a garden.

To make things worse, birds migrating at night can get confused by artificial light, and on nights with low cloud ceilings they can end up circling skyscrapers until they drop from exhaustion or land. They find themselves not in a natural stopover like a forest but in the middle of a city.

This was just such a night. Just the right, or rather wrong, weather conditions hit during the peak of fall migration, when billions of birds fly south from breeding territory in Canada and New England. Instead of making it to Cuba or Venezuela, they died in Philadelphia.

Maciejewski’s photo quickly went viral.

News outlets from Philadelphia to Australia jumped on the story. On October 21, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an op-ed by Robert M. Peck, a senior fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and Keith Russell, program manager of urban conservation at Audubon Pennsylvania, arguing that we didn’t need to let this happen again.

In response, the Academy of Natural Sciences, together with Audubon organizations and the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, has launched Bird Safe Philly (full disclosure: I volunteer at this organization).

The effort seeks to gather more information about bird window collisions while organizing to prevent them.

This is a problem we can solve.

Turning off lights in tall buildings is part of the solution. The organization’s Lights Out campaign, in partnership with the city’s Office of Sustainability along with the Building Owners and Managers Association of Philadelphia and the Building

Industry Association of Philadelphia, will encourage building managers to turn down lights during spring and fall migrations.

“We are heartened by all the efforts in our community to join together in this critical initiative to save so many birds from unnecessary harm and even death,” stated Scott Cooper, president and CEO of the Academy of Natural Sciences, in a press release.

“A simple thing like turning out lights can help thousands of birds safely navigate our challenging urban environment.”

Volunteers can also help by collecting more information about where birds collide with windows and contributing observations to the Bird Safe Philly project on iNaturalist. The information they collect can point to buildings, and even specific windows, that need to be altered to reduce collisions.

Buildings with large glass façades might come to mind as obvious bird killers, but the vast majority of window-killed birds die on houses and smaller buildings. Each window might only kill a couple birds per year, but multiplied across millions of houses, the total is much higher.

Birds might not recognize smooth glass, but we can take steps to make windows visible to birds. For example, stick-on window films that include visible patterns or strings hanging in front of a window work well, as does using tempera paint, which can be applied before migration seasons and washed off later. Organizations like the American Bird Conservancy offer online resources for anyone looking to make their windows easier on our birds.

On May 21, 1915, hundreds of migrating birds died after colliding with City Hall, newly lit up with powerful arc lamps. Artificial lights at night and windows have been killing birds for more than a century, but we can end the problem today.

P HOTO G RAP H BY D RE W DENNI S

Audubon volunteer Stephen Maciejewski holds a killdeer that died in a Center City window collision.

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water

Water Park Climate change will make FDR Park even wetter.

The city has big plans to adapt by bernard brown

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n a trip to the Meadows at FDR Park at the end of last summer, we got our feet wet.

The Meadows is a repurposing of the recently closed golf course at the South Philadelphia park. What were once fairways are now green spaces for play, short-term art installations and homes for wildlife. We were early to meet some friends at the park, and we killed time by following a trail marked by hand-painted signs. The first few hundred yards were fine, but as we made the turn at the end of the trail loop, we found ourselves faced with a large puddle that extended well out into the grass and brush to either side. We tiptoed through it as best we could, but in the end the water won and breached our sneakers.

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is wet and getting wetter.

I can’t remember a visit I’ve made to FDR Park in the past few years that didn’t involve flooding. Often there are puddles across the roadways. Paths around the lakes tend to go through the marshy edges rather than around them, and a shortcut through a field often turns into a squelching slog.

“Those lakes keep getting bigger,” says George Armistead, co-founder of BirdPhilly and South Philly resident. He has been birding FDR Park since 2010. “I never don’t bring muck boots anymore. I used to go in sneakers.”

The wetter conditions were a major factor in the decision by Philadelphia Parks & Recreation (PPR) to close the golf course in 2019.

It was opened as the Meadows in 2020 to accommodate increased park visitors during

the COVID-19 pandemic. The Meadows has proven to be popular for nature lovers, as well as for families looking for more green space to let their kids run around.

“It is great that it is a meadow, we don’t have a lot of that habitat around here,” says Armistead. “Having that is pretty key for certain songbirds.”

The flooding has also been a guiding principle in the creation of the 10-year FDR Park Master Plan, unveiled in May 2019.

The park was created in 1926 on what was previously wetlands with a branching tidal creek running through. We might think of “sea level” as fixed, but in reality the surface of tidal waterways, like the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, fluctuates by about six feet between low and high tides.

Shaped somewhat like a basin with a rim formed by the surrounding streets, the park currently sits below mean high tide, according to Allison Schapker, senior director of capital projects at the Fairmount Park Conservancy. What’s more, a tide gate—designed to close at high tide to keep P HOTO G RAP HY BY RACHAE L WARRI NER

Philadelphia Parks & Recreation Commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell at the Meadows at FDR Park. While a popular new recreation space, the Meadows experiences frequent flooding.

out water and then open at low tide to release it—downstream in the Navy Basin has been partially broken for several years, letting in water at high tide. The park also receives stormwater runoff from I-95 and groundwater seeps up from beneath. The result is constant flooding.

“It’s not just the rainwater on the surface.

We’re always going to have an issue with groundwater on the site,” says Schapker.

It’s only going to get worse, with the city anticipating five additional inches of annual precipitation and sea levels four feet higher by 2100. The solution, given the soggier future of global warming, means an end to the Meadows, but possibly the birth of an entirely new and more resilient park.

PPR has chosen to overhaul the landscape and drainage of FDR Park. As mapped out by the master plan, this will involve increasing the volume of surface water (the lakes and streams), expanding

wetlands and raising the level of the remaining high ground.

“This is the first time we’ve looked at climate change projections into the future and had it inform a park’s design,” says PPR Commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell. “And that’s what we need to be doing.”

Ott Lovell highlighted a long list of planned improvements in the park, including adding athletic fields and playspace, as well as new trails that explore expanded natural habitats.

“We want [the park] to be activated and used by more people. It is underutilized, and that is certainly in part because of the status of the park, because so much of it is underwater and because it lacks amenities,” she says.

The park’s redevelopment will kick off with the construction of a new gateway at the corner of Broad Street and Pattison Avenue. The guardhouse and stables will be

transformed into a welcome center, and a play area will expand playspace beyond the current, often flooded, playground.

In 2022 construction will begin at the other end of the park, along I-95, to transform what is currently an inaccessible patch of woods into wetlands. The Philadelphia International Airport, which needs to create new wetlands to mitigate a wetland loss at the airport site, will be digging out the woods, which sprouted up on wetlands that had been filled in during the park’s early years, and depositing the excavated ground on the adjacent golf course, where it will be used to build up high ground.

“The wetland itself we think will be remarkable because it will be a mosaic of wetland types rare in Southeastern Pennsylvania,” says Ray Scheinfeld, planning and environmental services manager for the city’s Division of Aviation, which operates the airport. “It will be a showcase from an ecological side. We think we can expand habitat for flora and fauna. In the long run we’ll provide opportunities for wildlife viewing.”

Scheinfeld expects most of the construction for the wetlands mitigation project will be done by 2023, though it will take a few more years for the trees and other plantings to mature. So far the city does not have funding lined up beyond these two stages of the plan, leaving some uncertainty about the timeline for the trails and boardwalks around the new wetlands, as well as the playing fields to be built up with the excavated ground.

Schapker and Ott Lovell say that current park uses won’t be eliminated by construction before they can be replaced, but visitors who have grown fond of the Meadows will see it buried in 2022, rather than drowned by rising water. For now, its fans have to trust that it will be replaced by something better.

Ott Lovell is optimistic that the renovated park will meet the needs of current Meadows users, as well as people not yet using the park.

“We’re thrilled about the popularity. We intentionally reopened that golf course to draw in more people,” Ott Lovell says. “For some people this is their secret hidden place, but we want to make it our non-hidden place.”

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healers in the city

While illness has been front and center in the media’s spotlight this past year, this column aims to shift readers’ attention to healing—and those who direct their energy toward others’ well-being. Consider the restaurant owner who employs returning citizens, or how a city-run program promotes wholeness through storytelling, or an individual who helps people come to grips with a loved one’s murder. This column will spotlight people who help to heal the city.

Sound Healing Music therapists bring minds and bodies back to life

M

by

constance garcia-barrio

usic therapy can ease distress at life’s beginning, help us say needful words at life’s end and restore us in rough spots along the journey, according to Scott Horowitz.

Horowitz, 38, a board-certified music therapist and assistant clinical professor of music therapy and counseling at Drexel University, offers an example: “Re-creating the soundscape of the womb—the whooshing sound of amniotic fluid using an ocean drum, along with a gato box, a drum that can simulate a mother’s heartbeat—can help to stabilize premature babies.”

Music therapists can also guide patients toward peace at life’s end.

“Hospice patients doing life reviews may find comfort in listening to songs they enjoyed with their partner,” Horowitz says. In one case, a dying woman, with the support of a music therapist, wrote a song to thank the person who had become her caregiver.

Through music therapy, families may obtain audio keepsakes from a loved one.

It could consist of recorded songs sung by the dying family member or a combination of songs and narrative. In addition, a stethoscope adapted with a microphone can record a heartbeat that’s then integrated into a piece of music, Horowitz says.

“It’s a powerful way to hold onto a person.”

How music therapy looks varies from patient to patient, notes John Glaubitz, 40, a therapist at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital.

“Treatments by music therapists may include creating, singing, moving and listening to music, sometimes combining those approaches, to achieve physical, emotional, 14 GRID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 20 21

speech and cognitive goals.”

When stroke patient Richard Deen, 63, arrived at Magee with his left side paralyzed, Glaubitz suggested playing the xylophone and drums. “He had a percussion background, and I could raise the instruments so that he played while standing for ten minutes—one of our therapeutic goals,” Glaubitz says. “Drumming … kept him engaged and improved coordination between his left and right hands. Sometimes it’s a matter of shifting patients’ focus to something that engages them.”

The change of focus through music has

proven especially important during the pandemic, when patients can’t have visitors, notes Siera Hall, 22. Hall, an animal science major, was helping to distribute hay to horses at the Penn State Horse Farm in State College last November when a 546-pound bale of hay fell on her. “It literally folded me in half and broke my back in two places,” she says. “A bone splinter severed my spinal cord. I’m paralyzed from the waist down.”

Glaubitz knew that Hall had endured other medical challenges—a brain tumor at 14, heart surgery at 15 and Crohn’s disease at 16—and that her father plays the guitar.

Glaubitz recommended that she learn to play the ukulele.

“Playing lifted my spirits and helped me get through the pain,” says Hall, who plans to work with horses as a career. “If you’re not in a good place emotionally, you’re not going to benefit as much from other therapies.”

Hall capped her inpatient stay by writing an upbeat song titled “It’s Always Something, But It’s Never Too Much.”

Music therapy has venerable Philly roots.

Two early references appeared in 1804 and 1806 in dissertations by students of physician and psychiatrist Benjamin Rush (17451813), who championed using music as

An outdoor community drum circle in Mount Airy.

medicine. (Rush also signed the Declaration of Independence.)

The field grew after the World Wars, when medical staff found that hospitalized soldiers healed faster with music. Colleges began offering music therapy studies in the 1940s. In 2011 the field made headlines when music helped former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords recover after an assassination attempt left a bullet wound in her brain.

While music therapy can aid individuals with everything from pain to autism, it’s also helping to address big social challenges, says Peggy Tileston, 65, coordinator of clinical training at the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University.

“Atlanta, San Diego and other cities have homeless choirs,” she says. “Participation builds self-confidence and trust.” Formed in 2014, The Dallas Street Choir has performed at Carnegie Hall.

MUSIC THERAPY

Peggy Tileston, of the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University, plays a trashcan durm.

T H RO U G H T H E AG ES

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he American Music Therapy Association, in Silver Spring, Maryland, distinguishes between music therapy, which must be “done by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program”—and other kinds of sound healing. That said, different cultures have long used sound therapy.

Some sources say that metal singing bowls, said to reduce pain and depression, among other benefits, have existed for 3,000 years. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia developed the didgeridoo, said to reduce anxiety and pain, some 1,500 years ago, according to historians.

Some healers today include sound in their repertoire. “I’m not a licensed medical practitioner,” says Philadelphian Natalie Bliss, a retired reiki master and holistic healer. “I’m a sound worker who combines reiki with a sonic environment so that the client’s deep relaxation may allow their own natural healing processes to awaken and engage.” A session might include instruments like muted gongs or instrumental recordings designed to induce deep relaxation.

“Other sound workers may use different approaches.”

Karen Anne Melendez, who trained largely in Philadelphia, uses music to help heal the hearts and minds of inmates in a special needs unit at a women’s maximum-security prison in New Jersey.

Melendez uses singing, gentle movement to music, playing instruments and discussing song lyrics with inmates. “The women involved note tremendous enjoyment of the process, changes in their demeanor, [increased] social engagement with each other and self-confidence … ,” Melendez says.

“Most years, we’ve presented a concert, but we cancelled this year due to COVID-19. For many of the women, it’s been the first time they’ve ever experienced success.”

Pamela Draper, 36, program manager of the Kensington Storefront, a community center and an initiative of Mural Arts Philadelphia, also saw gains from her Wednesday morning Community Music Hangout.

“Anyone could walk in and participate,” Draper says. It led to “improved self-esteem … [and] social cohesion. We’ve had virtual open mics and art salons since the pandemic, but it’s harder to have the same level of trust in that platform.”

Yet the need seems great now, notes Natalia Alvarez-Figueroa, 31, a certified music therapist. “I work largely with Black people, Brown people and immigrants,” says Alvarez-Figueroa, who is of Black and Hispanic heritage. “Music therapy helps them feel more supported while they face illness, death and job loss.”

Drexel’s Horowitz also emphasizes reaching underserved communities. Many insurance companies consider music therapy a complementary service and don’t cover it, he explains. He would like to see music therapy become a primary service.

“Music therapy could be delivered by community health facilities like Drexel’s 11th Street Family Health Services. It could be ‘drumming for wellness’ as an after-school program in a safe environment.

Music therapy in parks and recreation centers are possibilities.”

People can become vocal advocates for it, he says, “in schools, community centers and with local and regional politicians.”

Rapper Macklemore summed it up well: “Music is therapy … It pulls heart strings. It acts as medicine.”

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yhpargotohP ronnoC aruaL

School Day and All Day Montessori Toddler, Pre-K and Kindergarten 2121 Arch Street, Center City, Philadelphia www.gtms.org info@gtms.org 16 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 2021

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SISTER, SISTER Family-run baking company captures customers’ hearts and taste buds story by magdalena becker

I

n 2020 sisters Rhonda Saltzman and Mercedes Brooks turned their lockdown restlessness into a blossoming business with their online store, Second Daughter Baking Co. After years of experience in restaurants, bakeries and the hospitality industry, Culinary Institute of America graduate Saltzman had an excellent résumé. But at the beginning of the pandemic she lost her job and found herself spending her days at home with her sister and mother.

“We need[ed] to do something with our 18 GRID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 2021

time,” Saltzman says. “I was going crazy just being home and not doing anything. So, it was like, ‘Well, why don’t we get serious about this?’ ” With Saltzman’s experience and Brooks’ knowledge of hospitality and accounting— along with a generous amount of quarantine boredom—the sisters created their company.

The name, Brooks explains, was originally inspired by their eldest sister.

“We kind of played around with our names for a little bit, and we didn’t want to do something that was just Instagram-y,”

Brooks says. “We thought, ‘How can we incorporate our [sisterhood]?’ ” In the end, Saltzman, the second-born, came up with the name Second Daughter.

“No one was really on board [with the name]. They couldn’t see the vision, but I was like, ‘No, this is great,’ ” Saltzman says.

“It sounds unique enough where people will ask what’s the story behind [it]. Also, it’s kind of straight to the point.”

After launching from home on November 1, Second Daughter Baking Co. now has over 2,500 followers on Instagram and has amassed a loyal following of customers as well. When they started off, Saltzman and Brooks sold their products on Etsy, but they have since transitioned to selling exclusively on their own website.

Ling Phan, the founder and owner of Picnic Palette Co., a luxury picnic and event consulting company, says she first ordered from Second Daughter in December for a friend’s party.

“I saw this event as an opportunity to not only support them but to taste their amazing cake,” Phan says. “For cakes, I always recommend our clients [use] other small local businesses, and obviously Second Daughter Baking Co. is one of them.”

Phan ordered a drag-and-winter-

P H OTO G R A P H Y C O U R T E S Y O F S E C O N D DAU G H T E R

Rhonda Saltzman (left) and Mercedes Brooks are the sisters that make up Second Daughter Baking Co.

They’re delivering something that is just so needed during this time.”

— h eather holiday, customer

wonderland-themed rainbow cake, and Second Daughter quickly delivered a sixinch, three-layer funfetti vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream, strawberry jam and intricate sugar accents such as macaroons and snowflakes.

“They created this beautiful, colorful ombré rainbow cake,” Phan says. “It was so good.”

While detail, customer service and branding are important, Saltzman and Brooks are also dedicated to keeping their ingredients planet-friendly.

For example, Saltzman says, they use only cage-free, organic brown eggs for their products.

“We aren’t working with any local farmers, but that’s something that we want to do,” Saltzman adds, noting they also aim to use more organic ingredients as they grow.

After working out of their home, Saltzman and Brooks quickly realized they needed a larger space for their business. Hoping to support other local bakeries, restaurants and catering companies, the sisters decided to search for a space they could sublet and utilize.

“We called a lot of people, [and] got a lot of no’s,” Saltzman laughs.

But they finally found their new baking home.

In 2014, Scout, a design and development firm that concentrates on renovating unused spaces, proposed to take over the Bok Vocational High School building on South 9th Street. Scout created affordable workspaces for small businesses, and now hosts

150 companies within the 340,000-squarefoot building. Second Daughter is now one of them.

“When we talked to Hannah Baker over at Bok, they were really willing and very helpful to get us started and set up in there,” Saltzman says.

While they currently bake out of Bok, the sisters hope to one day get a storefront of their own.

“I’m the only baker at the moment, and Mercedes is learning how to bake, so we’re very small,” Saltzman says. “But we’re hoping to do more. We’re working towards that.”

Second Daughter uses Instagram as their main source of customer communication.

“There was a point where we didn’t have any orders, and it’s a very humbling experience to go from not having any orders and just being there, just waiting patiently for them, and then they just start coming in and coming in and people really want to support us,” Saltzman says.

Customer Heather Holiday, who first picked up a Thanksgiving pumpkin pie from Saltzman and Brooks in November, spotted a gold-leafed Second Daughter creation on Instagram and was quick to order her own.

“I met them in a parking lot in Center City where they were handing beautifully wrapped pies from the trunk of their car,” Holiday says. “It’s the full package, like really good down-to-earth, kind people and then this amazing product.”

Saltzman and Brooks say every day varies for them, based on the orders.

“Right now, we are operating on a pre-order basis, so if one day we might have six cakes

to frost and pick-up, either later that day or early the next morning, then that’s what we’ll be working on,” Saltzman says.

Even when the sisters have had to take time off for themselves, due to a family tragedy, the support from customers never wavered.

“The amount of people that reached out, offering condolences or offering to bring our family stuff, it felt very good,” Saltzman says. “It felt like a community that was very strong and people who wanted to be there.”

Cristina, a creator behind @phillyisforfoodies on Instagram, has been a loyal supporter of Second Daughter since she bought two pies from them in November.

“It was honestly some of the best pie I’ve ever had—if not the best pie I’ve had,” says Cristina, who then ordered a bundt cake for her Christmas Day brunch. “Anyone that now asks me for a pie recommendation, we’ll definitely send them to Second Daughter Baking Co.” Beyond their standard menu, which includes their fudge brownies and Strawberry Superpower cake, Saltzman and Brooks are now collaborating with another small business, Mithras Candle. Along with Second Daughter creations, customers can purchase local hand-dipped beeswax candles to finish off their party festivities.

“If you’re gonna get a cake, you’re gonna need candles,” Saltzman laughs. “You’re supporting two small businesses at once, and it’s a really good product.”

Saltzman and Brooks look forward to growing in the future, and their customers share the same sentiment.

“They’re delivering something that is just so needed during this time … It’s joy in a box that you can share,” Holiday says.

“Or not share.”

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Forest therapy guide Anisa George takes in nature.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

Therapists help clients reflect and process using the great outdoors

A

nisa George sees a strong connection between theater and forest therapy: they both involve improvisation.

“You enter the rehearsal space, invite the ensemble to try different things, to engage with the environment,” George says.

George was drawn to the practice because of its focus on the body and the natural world. Her career as an artistic director, actor and producer has always focused on exploring body movement, so the practice felt natural. A certified guide through the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs (ANFT), she has been leading walks in parks and forests, 20 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 20 21

including Bartram’s Garden and Wissahickon Valley Park, since 2019.

Forest therapy was first introduced to the U.S. when M. Amos Clifford founded ANFT around 2012. The practice he developed draws from the Japanese tradition of shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing”, which involves immersing oneself in nature.

“Forest therapy is about creating a safe, no-pressure space,” says Jess Isaacs-Blundin, another ANFT-certified guide. The experience involves a guided walk and invitations for participants to engage with their senses—like feeling the texture of tree bark or the chill of a breeze as it blows by.

story by siobhan gleason

After an invitation, participants are encouraged to speak about what they felt exploring the natural environment. “People come back and talk about what the experience meant to them,” George says.

Forest therapy can be broken down into three parts: the sharing circle, the guided walk and the tea ceremony.

Isaacs-Blundin describes the sharing circle and the tea ceremony as “the space in between normal life and transcendent experience.”

The distinct sections of the circle, walk and tea ceremony make forest therapy easily recognizable and familiar to participants.

The three parts create “a standard sequence P HOTO G RAP HY BY D RE W DENNI S

by which we know what forest therapy is,” Isaacs-Blundin says.

During the tea ceremony, participants share tea and food with the guide. Often the tea is made using foraged plants; Isaacs-Blundin likes to use white pine or spruce in her tea. The tea ceremony, like the rest of forest therapy, can look different based on the guide leading the practice.

George and Isaacs-Blundin previously worked together at Wild Philadelphia, which Isaacs-Blundin founded in 2019 and closed in March 2021.

Isaacs-Blundin and George continue to lead guided walks. Anyone interested in participating in one of George’s Wissahickon walks can sign up for a walk on Airbnb.

“Ever yone should tr y it once,” George says.

Lauren Kahn, a licensed marriage and family therapist and ecotherapist, utilizes the Wissahickon during her sessions as well. During a session, clients walk through the woods with Kahn and also find private spaces to practice mindfulness.

Ecotherapy sessions can feel very public when compared to the “container of the therapy office,” Kahn says. She discusses confidentiality concerns with her clients before a walk so that they are prepared for the possibility that someone walking by may realize a therapy session is taking place.

During the walk, Kahn gives her clients choices, such as which direction to choose when they reach a fork in the road. Kahn talks about the metaphor of a fork in the road in life and ways clients may feel stuck. Choosing a path to walk can help clients reflect on what choices they are struggling with.

“Where do you want to go? What do you want to leave behind?” Kahn will ask her clients.

In addition to dealing with difficult choices, Kahn helps clients bring attention to the woods and to their own bodies.

“I talk about the pace they’re moving and it often reflects the pace in which they’re moving in life … What does it feel like to slow down? We incorporate mindfulness so people notice the pace at which their thoughts are moving along,” she says.

Nate Schlingmann, counselor and psychotherapist, also uses the Wissahickon for his nature therapy sessions. In most sessions, he sits in a tent with a client and goes through the session almost identically to how he would in the office.

The natural world may interrupt what a client is saying. The sound of falling trees or bird calls serve as a reminder of the passage of time. If a client is talking about a traumatic event, the natural noises outside can help them remember that the event happened in the past.

“If someone gets to a place where they’re ready to share, there’s not just this resounding sense of what they’re saying in a four-cornered room. Nature is listening

too,” Schlingmann says.

Schlingmann finds that some of his clients are dedicated to nature therapy and consider it a valuable way to connect during COVID-19. He sees clients mostly over Zoom now, so nature therapy has been a special way to experience therapy in person.

Kahn hopes to see more nature incorporated into therapy, as well as more interaction with the outdoors.

“It is the way of the future,” Kahn says.

Forest therapy is about creating a safe, no-pressure space.”

— j e ss isaacs-blundin, forest therapy guide

Tea is a central part of nature and forest therapy.

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Pandemic panic was a boon for local food.

These distributors are meeting the new demand story by siobhan gleason

I

n march 2020 customer sign-ups at Philly Foodworks grew 50 times in just one week. Last year, overall, customer orders and customer sign-ups tripled when compared to 2019.

“People were placing $600 fish orders,” Dylan Baird, Philly Foodworks co-founder and CEO, says.

Baird credits some of this growth in his online business, which home delivers locally-sourced organic produce, meat and fish, to panic buying early in the pandemic.

“There were 4,000 more people who were 22 GRID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 20 21

interested in this type of service,” Baird says.

Baird wasn’t the only local food entrepreneur that saw a dramatic spike in interest.

According to nonprofit news organization Civil Eats, farmers selling through CSAs (community supported agriculture) reported “a massive increase” in memberships across the country.

Primal Supply Meats, which has built a supply chain connecting local farmers and slaughterhouses to customers around Philadelphia, is another local company that saw sales skyrocket. Primal Supply’s member-

P HIL LY FO O DWO RKS P HOTO G RAP HY BY M ILTO N LI NDSAY

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FRESH TAKE

ship program, The Butcher’s Club, doubled in 2020.

Heather Marold Thomason, founder of Primal Supply, believes that disruptions in the food supply chain revealed just how exploitative and unsustainable industrial meatpacking is.

Pre-pandemic, meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses were a hyper-efficient piece of the food supply chain. However, though they were efficient, they were not able to adapt to change quickly.

Between March and May of 2020, 23 states reported COVID-19 outbreaks across 239 meatpacking and poultry processing plants.

Employee illness and plant shutdowns in turn disrupted these supply chains.

Many poultry, hog and cattle farmers had a surplus of animals, but could not get their livestock slaughtered and processed. Some farmers had to euthanize animals because if they continued to grow they would be too large for processing plants when they reopened. Euth-

I think a lot of people asked the right questions about what their food dollars are supporting …”

— h eather marold thomas on , founder of Primal Supply Meats

From left: Heather Marold Thomason, founder of Primal Supply Meats; Dylan Baird, Philly Foodworks co-founder and CEO.

anizations and shutdowns led to lost profits.

The beef cattle industry specifically lost about $9.2 billion in revenue sales in 2020.

Meanwhile, many customers stockpiled groceries in the early months of the pandemic due to fear of food shortages. Some retailers responded to increased customer demand by price gouging essential groceries.

“I think a lot of people asked the right questions about what their food dollars are supporting—an unhealthy industrial system that doesn’t support the workers or the animals within it, or a transparent local system that supports … these things,” Thomason says.

By comparison, local food systems adapted more easily to changes in the market.

Loren Pola, Philly Foodworks produce buyer and planning manager, saw this firsthand in the spring of 2020. As many farmers markets shut down and restaurants shifted to takeout-only, farmers turned to Philly Foodworks.

“Farmers were pivoting and we had the capacity to take [their crops],” Pola says.

When Philadelphia-based mushroom farm Mycopolitan Mushroom Company’s restaurant clients began to close, their sales dropped by about 90% overnight. They relied on Philly Foodworks to connect with a reliable customer base.

“We felt a certain responsibility because we identify our role as supporting our local producers and developing the supply chain,” Baird says.

Baird believes Philly Foodworks’ commitment to setting produce prices with farmers and buying what farmers produce helped build their reputation.

“We don’t necessarily pay the top dollar but we say what we’re going to do. A lot of farmers don’t care if so-and-so’s paying an extra 25 cents a bunch,” Baird says.

Instead, many farmers seek out buyers who will purchase the amount of crops they produce. Philly Foodworks works with farmers to determine how much of each crop they will buy that year and how much they will pay for it.

Pola set out to diversify the products Philly Foodworks could carry in 2018, creating a spreadsheet to track what each farmer would be growing that year. Pola helped farmers choose different varieties of the same plant or choose different planting times to reduce overlapping crops. This ensures that Philly Foodworks doesn’t have to turn farmers away due to excess supply of any one crop, reducing waste. It also gives customers a wider range of food to choose from.

Pola encourages farmers to use the farming methods that come naturally to them, or to experiment with other methods or crop varieties if they choose to.

“Since we’re not putting these farmers on contract, they’re not going to be punished if something goes wrong. I give them flexibility,” Pola says.

The Large Appeal of Small Business Local food has always been desirable, especially for customers who value fresh, nutrient-dense produce and a connection to local farms. In 2015, direct-to-consumer farm sales accounted for $3 billion in sales.

“People want higher-quality ingredients and more variety,” Baird says. “The natural place to turn is local food.”

In recent years, many businesses that deliver customizable boxes of groceries, such as Philly Foodworks and Primal Supply, have focused heavily on a specific subset of foodie customers who enjoy home cooking.

Before COVID-19, people could dine out freely. Once restaurants began to close, many customers turned to food delivery apps for takeout. But according to Jonathan Deutsch, professor of food and hospitality management at Drexel University, there was also a dramatic increase in home cooking.

“If you’re working from home and your kids are doing remote learning, you might have a full [house] for three meals a day. At the end of a pre-COVID-19 week, there may have been five to ten meals served at home.

Now, [families are] doubling, tripling, quadrupling that,” Deutsch says.

Deutsch believes businesses like Philly Foodworks and Primal Supply have been successful because they trust that customers are interested in experimenting with new foods.

“The food industry tends to underestimate the willingness of consumers to try new things,” he says.

Thomason agrees.

“Members discover lesser known cuts, like coppa steak or tri-tip, and they also get cuts that they might not have chosen themselves,” Thomason says.

According to Butcher’s Club member Matt Morgis, “picking up your box each week feels like an episode of ‘MasterChef.’ ” “It’s fun to open it up and start to figure AP RIL 20 21 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 23

Philly Foodworks employees pack delivery boxes for distribution.

The pandemic has made us think about building a local food system that could potentially feed our city.”

— d ylan baird, co-founder of Philly Foodworks

out what meals you can put together from what’s inside,” Morgis adds.

Morgis is also more aware of the connection he has with local food production.

Because of this awareness, he strives not to waste the food he purchases.

“You’re the last link in a network that cares about their craft, sustainability, the environment and the lives of the animals.

The least you can do is treat everything with the same level of respect and use everything,” Morgis says.

Experimentation also happens often with Philly Foodworks customers. Be-

24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 20 21

cause the group sells mostly local vegetables and fruits, some things are not available year round, so they’re pushed to explore seasonal produce.

Baird points out that it helps people appreciate the local food system.

“If we carry zucchini year round, then it’s not special anymore and people lose touch with the idea of seasonality,” Baird says.

The transparency of business practices and local food systems are also important to customers who want to feel good about the companies they support.

“When Philly Foodworks sells some-

thing, it’s almost like a blanket approval to me. Their values jibe with mine,” says customer Louis Cook.

Though increases in customer sign-ups and membership rates may have been spurred on by pandemic panic, Philly Foodworks and Primal are confident that interest in and awareness of local food will last. Drexel’s Deutsch agrees.

“The satisfaction and appreciation that consumers have developed for having restaurant-quality products at home isn’t going away. I think the market will continue to the extent that it makes sense for farmers,” Deutsch says.

The Industrial Devolution To Baird, the industrial food system’s inability to adapt to challenges presented by COVID-19 foreshadows its eventual ruin.

“I think that the industrial food system is going to collapse at some point. It’s getting so top-heavy and so much of the means of production are owned by so few people,” he says.

Baird envisions a food system in Philadelphia that is adaptable, that focuses on local food and that gives producers the power to make their own decisions. And he’s helping to make this new food system a reality.

“The pandemic has made us think about building a local food system that could potentially feed our city,” Baird says.

Thomason highlights the change’s worth.

“There is value,” she says, “in knowing who and where your food comes from.”

Every Every day, day, the the average average American American produces produces 4.5 4.5 lbs. lbs. of of trash. trash.

OUR OUR YEAR-LONG YEAR-LONG

PLASTIC PLASTIC REDUCTION REDUCTION CAMPAIGN CAMPAIGN begins begins on on EARTH EARTH DAY DAY and and includes: includes:

Offering our house-made soups Offering our house-made soups in returnable glass containers in returnable glass containers

Wrapping our Wrapping our sandwiches in paper sandwiches in paper

Changing our local Changing our local pie packaging to pie packaging to paperboard boxes paperboard boxes

Eliminating polystyrene Eliminating polystyrene meat and seafood trays meat and seafood trays

Replacing plastic packaging Replacing plastic packaging with returnable containers in with returnable containers in more departments more departments

ON ON A A MISSION MISSION to to help help you you buy buy food food minus minus the the trash trash

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BEYOND THE GRAVE

Green burials are good for the environment. They might be even better for the soul story by alex mulcahy — photography by drew dennis

D

an lavin returned from his friend Chuck’s wake feeling troubled. Lavin and his now-deceased husband had met Chuck and his wife in a support group for people with cancer.

“Chuck was a really sharp-witted, spitfire kind of guy,” Lavin says. In the throes of his illness, Chuck bought a Corvette with a license plate that read “NT DED YT.” Lavin wondered, why was the memorial for someone with so much personality so antiseptic and generic?

He recalled seeing a burial on “Six Feet Under,” an HBO drama about a family-run funeral home, which evoked a very different feeling.

The burial depicted in the scene is simple and intimate. The family lowers the corpse, wrapped in linen, slowly into the ground, and then one by one, family members take shovels and throw dirt on top. “[The episode] really resonated inside of me,” Lavin says. “I was like, ‘This is the way it’s supposed to be.’”

So he Googled “Nate’s death Six Feet Under” and found out it was a green burial.

An unlikely undertaker Lavin next discovered the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit whose mission is “to inspire and advocate for environmentally sustainable, natural death care through education and certification.” He then began looking for cemeteries offering green burials. He assumed it was just going to be a West Coast kind of thing, but was surprised to learn that there were many cemeteries like this in the South, and even one nearby: Steelmantown Cemetery in Woodbine, New Jersey.

From left: A green burial site at Steelmantown Cemetery brims with flowers; Ed Bixby, owner of Steelmantown.

26 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 2021

The owner of Steelmantown and the board president of the Green Burial Council is Ed Bixby, someone who never imagined he would be in the business. “I didn’t choose to be a cemeterian, it chose me,” he says.

Bixby now owns and operates a half dozen cemeteries around the country, but before 2007, he was in real estate and development.

His connection to the Cape May County cemetery, however, stretches back centuries.

When his family arrived in the New World in 1680, they were, according to Bixby, given the deed to 195,000 acres of land.

What is now Steelmantown Cemetery was a private cemetery for his family. In 1840, his family gave the municipality ownership so it could become a public cemetery. All of his ancestors and family are buried there.

In 1957 the municipality sold it to a funeral director who provided a service called “sim-

ple burial,” a green burial by another name.

The cemetery had a contract with the Woodbine Developmental Center, a nonprofit that supports men with developmental disabilities. Anyone in their care who died would be buried at the cemetery, a simple—and inexpensive—option for the facility.

Eventually that contract ended, and the cemetery fell into neglect. This distressed Bixby’s mother, whose son, Bixby’s brother, was buried there in 1956. So Bixby went to the caretaker, a family friend, who was 87 years old at the time. Bixby asked him to clean it up but the caretaker responded that he didn’t have the money or the means.

He then offered an alternative: “How about if I give you the cemetery?”

He sold the cemetery to Bixby for a dollar.

“This is before I even knew anything about natural burial,” Bixby recalls. His

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first actions were to have 20 dump trucks of debris removed and to install a mile of hiking trails.

Six months after taking possession of the cemetery, an article in The Press of Atlantic City caught Bixby’s attention. It described what a natural burial is and laid out the criteria for a cemetery to qualify.

Lo and behold, the Steelmantown Cemetery met all of the criteria. Bixby began to consider the possibilities.

What makes a green burial green?

As one might expect, the requirements set up by the Green Burial Council focus on the environment. There is no embalming fluid, which typically contains a mixture of three chemicals toxic to humans: formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde and methanol. There are no vaults of any kind, eliminating the use of cement. Bodies are wrapped in biodegradable shrouds or burial containers. Only stone that is found on the site can be used as a grave marker and granite tombstones are forbidden. Native plants are grown throughout the cemetery.

But perhaps the most crucial component to a green burial is that they must “[p]rovide clients and families with the opportunity to participate in the burial and ritual process.”

This, Bixby says, makes all the difference.

Using some vintage wood and antique wagon wheels, Bixby built a wagon so that families can help push their departed loved ones to their gravesite. They can also carry the body to the grave, lower them down and backfill the grave.

Bixby says, “During this entire process [the bereaved are] surrounded by life and the living, the wind blowing through the trees, the birds whistling in the forest. And you can see the grief disappear. … [T]ypically they’re very grief-stricken in the beginning. At the end, when they’re finally done, they look at you and they give you a genuine smile. They say, ‘thank you.’ It’s a surreal experience in the sense that there’s not a tear in the group when the process is over.”

I ask Bixby why he thinks that participation is so critical to the healing process.

“That final act of kindness heals the heart. It’s so cathartic for that family. They don’t have that missing feeling anymore— that the minute their loved one stopped breathing they lost all touch with that person,” he says. “To lay them to rest in that way is life changing.”

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In Bixby’s opinion, the modern funeral industry makes people feel a greater sense of despair and loss, and a green burial helps restore a sense of agency.

“If you have a child you care for—you bathe them, you feed them, you clothe them. You do everything you can for them, because you have to,” he explains. “In death, you should still be able to care for your loved one and in a way that feels like they belong to you. You have all full rights to your loved ones.”

When people first come to Steelmantown Cemetery they often believe they can’t handle what’s ahead of them. But Bixby offers strong words of encouragement. “I say, ‘It is in your DNA, believe it or not. It is in you to care for your dead.’ … They come in scared and apprehensive and they leave empowered.”

The hybrid model While Bixby happened upon a cemetery perfectly suited for green burials, undeveloped tracts of land for new burial grounds can be hard to come by. There are, however, plenty of existing cemeteries that might be able to carve out some land devoted to green burials. This is the hybrid model.

Bala Cynwyd’s storied West Laurel Hill Cemetery fits that bill.

Founded in 1869 by Quaker John Jay Smith, the 187-acre campus is a certified Level II arboretum, and home to more than 3,900 trees, according to Sales, Marketing and Family Services Director Deborah Cassidy. It is the final resting place for a number of famous Philadelphian families, including Rittenhouse, Strawbridge and Widener, as well as nationally-known names like Breyer,

In death, you should still be able to care for your loved one and in a way that feels like they belong to you.”

— e d bixby, owner of Steelmantown Cemetery

Luden, Stetson and Whitman.

Despite its long history, it has not been resting on its laurels, if you will.

“We try to be at the forefront of innovation,” says Cassidy.

West Laurel Hill has a crematorium and a funeral home on site, and began offering services for pet burials using a technique called aquamation in 2018. A much more environmentally friendly alternative to cremation, aquamation involves submerging a body in a solution that is 95% water and 5% alkaline. This speeds along the process of decomposition. After a few hours, only bones remain. These are then ground into dust that the client can keep in an urn or spread as they wish; the nutrients in the water can be used as fertilizer for plants.

Aquamation of human remains is currently legal in 15 states, but not yet in Pennsylvania.

“We are one call to one place for everything when it comes to our death services,” says Cassidy. “We want to make sure that when someone asks, ‘Do you offer this?’ we’re able to do so. And if we can’t at that time, we make sure that we put that in place as one of our strategic plans for the following year.”

That’s how their green burial offerings

emerged. After a few people asked about them, the cemetery launched Nature’s Sanctuary, a natural burial section that overlooks the Cynwyd Heritage Trail, in 2008.

Nature’s Sanctuary has been certified by both the Green Burial Council and the Sustainable SITES Initiative, but it took a significant commitment to get the sanctuary to where it is now.

“I think it was about 2015 or ’16, we decided to take the same property and do a restoration. There were individuals buried in the area and we had sectioned them off, so that we could then take out all of the soil, put it back in, so that we could plant indigenous plants instead of these invasives that were taking over,” Cassidy explains. “Once we did that restoration, people were just very, very interested.”

Also on the sanctuary’s grounds is an apiary. A full-time horticulturist and an arborist are on staff, helping to seed a meadow that will eventually become a woodland.

Demand for the space is strong.

Cassidy says that in 2008, West Laurel Hill had three green burials. Since then, that number has climbed to 96. But the real measure is that the living are making reservations.

“We have over 351 pre-needed proper-

From left: Bixby tows the homemade wagon used to carry the departed to resting sites; a forked path at Nature’s Sanctuary in West Laurel Hill Cemetery; Steelmantown offers a biodegradable coffin.

ties,” says Cassidy. “So you can see the difference between 2008 and 2020.”

The actual day It was on Holy Thursday, just a few days before Easter, that Lavin’s husband died.

Despite the fact that he had been ill for a long time and that his prognosis was bad, it was still a shock.

“He was planning for my parents to come down on Sunday. In the hospital, he’s telling them, ‘I gotta get out of here.’ And that was the plan,” Lavin says. “I wasn’t thinking about a funeral or anything.”

But then, he had to.

Lavin began to retrace his steps: the “Six Feet Under” episode, the Green Burial Council and then the Steelmantown Cemetery. He began to plan the event after a visit.

Originally Lavin envisioned a small service with a handful of people, but when he began receiving emails from his husband’s friends he decided to invite them all. He estimates between 100 and 150 people attended.

Lavin welcomed the guests by explaining where they were and what type of burial they were having. “[N]o matter where we go in our lives, we will always remember this day,” he told them.

The attendants packed into the tiny chapel at Steelmantown. They took turns talking about the deceased, and when one woman spontaneously began singing, everyone joined in.

In this setting, Lavin says, the fear of death seemed to disappear. One friend later told him, “I learned more about life and death at that funeral than I’ve ever experienced.”

Unlike the “Six Feet Under” episode, Lavin chose a biodegradable casket rather than a shroud, because he thought that might be easier for his husband’s parents.

He was grateful that he chose the route he did.

“If you’re embalmed and put into this concrete vault, you’re disrupting the natural cycle of things,” he says. “And I think as humans, we do that so many times. We just disrupt the natural cycle.”

Looking back, Lavin feels that everyone in attendance could see that death itself is natural—not something to fear.

“I think everybody felt safe in the experience of death,” he says.

Processing a loss at a green burial is not scary or cold, he says. “It’s truly a celebration of life.”

AP RIL 20 21 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

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