Grid Magazine June 2022 [#157]

PLUS

A product line made with Black hair in mind p. 8

THE WATER AND INFRASTRUCTURE ISSUE

Does a smart city mean fewer potholes? p. 12 Amtrak goes in reverse and chooses fossil fuels p. 16

JUNE 2022 / ISSUE 1 57 / G R ID PH IL LY.CO M

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1

EDI TO R ’S NOTES

by

alex mulcahy

publisher Alex Mulcahy director of operations Nic Esposito managing editor Alexandra W. Jones associate editor & distribution Timothy Mulcahy tim@gridphilly.com copy editor Sophia D. Merow art director Michael Wohlberg writers Marilyn Anthony Bernard Brown Nichole Currie Chris Dougherty Nic Esposito Constance Garcia-Barrio Anisa George Claire Marie Porter Lois Volta photographers Chris Baker Evens Rachael Warriner illustrator 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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’d been hearing about the South Philly Meadows for some time, so I finally paid a visit. I biked from Center City — a very manageable 29-minute ride — and started to wander. The sound of traffic on Pattison Avenue began to fade with every step into the open, unplanned expanse, and the birdsongs grew clearer. To say that walking along the Meadows’ paths flanked by all kinds of vegetation was at once calming and exhilarating sounds contradictory, but that’s what it felt like. There is something liberating about this open, undefined space.

Working in Chinatown as I do, that urge for freedom is a usually unmet need. The best I can do is walk a half-dozen blocks to the grass of Independence Mall, a far cry from the wilderness.

When it was time to go, for a brief moment, I lost my bearings. How did I get in here? Aside from the panic I felt about my unlocked bike (and maybe some embarrassment at getting lost so easily) I couldn’t help but think how rare the opportunities are to be in a landscape that can turn you around. Proposed slogan: “Get lost in the South Philly Meadows.” Or, if you prefer, replace “Get lost” with “Lose yourself.”

Unfortunately, these weren’t the only feelings I experienced on my trek. I was also feeling dread, eco-grief, eco-anxiety — the ones you experience when you read a Washington Post story about the destruction of the Amazon or “The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert. It feels like this piece of land is a microcosm of our cultural problem, humanity’s existential problem writ small. Are we really going to suffocate our Meadows, to bury it alive, with tons of dirt and plastic?

Our City government is in the midst of making a series of profound mistakes. The results of these shortsighted decisions will mean more flooding, worse heat from climate change, more greenhouse gas emissions, less open space and more environmental injustice.

Recently 100 acres of trees — home to several protected species — were leveled

for the Cobbs Creek golf course expansion.

The City now intends to carpet the beloved South Philly Meadows with AstroTurf playing fields, after the landscape has been buried with truckloads of dirt.

We need to rewind a little bit first. The FDR Master Plan is part of another, unrelated instance of bad judgment: the proposed expansion of the Philadelphia International Airport. Wetlands, which we should be protecting at all costs, will be destroyed to accommodate the airport’s ability to handle more cargo. It is well documented that airplanes are the most carbon-intensive way to transport goods, and, if our City were serious about climate change — I argue that it is not — it would not be investing in enterprises that are diametrically opposed to stated greenhouse gas net-zero plans.

Destroying the wetlands will likely lead to more flooding in Eastwick, a neighborhood that has borne the brunt of racist public policy for years.

The federal government requires that the airport mitigate the destruction of wetlands.

Despite numerous other potential sites, the City decided FDR Park would be the location of the make-good.

The FDR Park Master Plan might have made sense (to some) a couple of years ago, but after the former golf course started to rewild due to pandemic-induced construction delays, it is clear that this project should be scuttled. There are infinitely better uses for the land.

Right now we need our City’s leadership to process this new information, to have the wisdom and humility to change direction.

We have a golden opportunity to protect something beautiful, and make FDR Park a park for the people.

a l e x m u l ca h y , Editor-in-Chief

COV E R P HOTO G RAP H BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

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TH E VO LTA WAY

by

lois volta

DEAR LOIS,

How do you find your domestic flow?

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4

GRID P H I L LY.CO M

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I have what I call a “home day” — a day where I set aside time to take care of the house’s needs. messier than others; everyone has their own type of cleaning flow. The point is to keep it flowing.

I usually help them on the last leg of their rooms. This way they have received some support, but it’s also nice to spend some time with them in a personal way. Together we take it a little further than they might have gone on their own. This is an opportunity to teach cleaning techniques, life hacks or find some missing things under the bed.

Ultimately, I am trying to help them find their own unique flow, but also guide them on how to take care of their spaces until they don’t need me anymore.

On our home days it’s not about doing things we hate or dread; we don’t think of domestic work in that way. In general, we have a good attitude when we approach this

set-apart domestic time; it’s just part of life.

When I have my own home days, the ones where I have the house to myself, I let myself clean and tidy aimlessly. I don’t have an agenda or a list of tasks; I just take care of what I have to take care of.

The mindset shift between a “cleaning” or “chore” day and a “home day” takes the productivity edge off. If I am aware that my value doesn’t lie in how much I get done, but on my ability to value time and energy, it makes our homes priceless, clean or not. I believe that I am doing my best to be caring, aware of the mess I make and to set aside the time to honor the spaces that hold us daily. lois volta is a home life consultant, artist and founder of The Volta Way. Send questions to info@thevoltaway.com.

IL LUSTRATIO N BY LO IS VOLTA

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

ebranding is the first step.

Instead of having a “cleaning day,” which sounds a bit like a list of chores, I have what I call a “home day” — a day where I set aside time to take care of the house’s needs.

There is no prescription for what order to do things in, or how to keep the home under control as a whole — everyone lives so differently. Some days I break the house up into sections; other days I stick to one room or project.

For instance, sometimes my daughters and I will focus our home day efforts on the upstairs. We each spend time caring for our own rooms and the shared second-floor bathroom. If I hold and make the space for all of us to take care of the bedrooms, it doesn’t feel like such an added “personal chore.” It’s my job as the parent to teach my kids how to set aside time for these types of tasks.

Honestly, it’s nice to be together, under the same roof, doing similar tasks but having the space for some alone time. I encourage the kids to go as slowly as they want, taking the time to go through their closets and drawers and pull everything out. Why not? Now is as good of a time as any. It gives them a chance to organize their things, get rid of clutter or trash or donate what they don’t want anymore. Some of them are

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healing city

Makers of Change POC and gender-diverse artists bring sustainable creations and progressive messages to feminist market by

W

constance garcia-barrio

ords on purses made by Kristianna Brown, 30, of Kensington, owner of SilentlyLoudShop, all but smolder in her booth at the April 24 Sustainable Marketplace at the Cherry Street Pier.

“Art Hoe,” sewn on one of the colorful bags, is among the milder messages.

“I’m an introvert,” says Brown. “I let my art speak for me.”

Brown also makes handbags from thriftstore denim. “I love giving old jeans a second life. The scraps trickle down until they become handmade earrings,” she says.

Brown’s presence and approach accord with the light the flea market, co-presented by the Feminist Flea Market (organized by House Cat) and the Black-woman-owned fashion brand Grant Blvd, shines on sustainability and diversity. The event includes vendors often sidelined due to race, culture or size, or for being trans, non-binary or gender nonconforming. The mix of vendors offers Philadelphians a more inclusive view of the face of eco-awareness.

“We’re giving diverse artists a platform where they can stand at the forefront of sustainability,” says Jessica Casale, 25, marketing manager at The Rounds [featured in Grid #146, July 2021], which hosted the event. The Rounds delivers items to customers on the milkman model, reusing packaging and offering lower prices than many stores.

The market’s riot of creativity includes Ashley Lian, who is a textile designer of Asian descent at Anthropologie.

“The organizers have created a safe space for everyone,” says Lian, whose creations include tote bags dyed with onion skins, and avocado skins and pits. “Using natural dyes as part of my practice recycles food scraps and is less dangerous for the environment,” she adds. Lian also pieces together cloth scraps to make new garments or uses 6 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

them as stuffing for other projects.

Visual artist Jazmyn Morse, 25, who energizes vintage clothes by painting on them, echoes Lian’s words. “The flea market has created a nurturing community where artists of color present our wares,” says Morse, who is Black.

Morse’s bold art honors a relative.

“I’ve always loved drawing,” she says.

“My brother, who passed away three years ago at age 35, taught me. During the pandemic I started painting on clothes, and it snowballed. I love bright colors, so I’ve jazzed up clothes with paintings so people will want to wear them,” says Morse, who’s had commissions, displayed her work at the National Liberty Museum and won a fellowship from Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Family ties also led Tanika Casimir, 32, to create Elizabeth Peyton Creations skin care products in 2017.

“My mom’s treatment for cancer left her skin extremely dry,” says Casimir, whose

family hails from Guyana, “and I looked for a way to soothe it. After her passing, I became more determined to develop my products.”

Casimir relies on ingredients from nearby sources.

“I use fruits and veggies from local farms,” she says. “My products heal you inside and outside because the body absorbs anything you put on your skin. I would say that I’m an all-natural, holistic creator,” says Casimir, who makes an anxiety-depression relief oil in a roller bottle, a green tea yogurt mask to soften the appearance of facial aging and many other products.

Despite the success of the musical artist Lizzo, size prejudice works against large women. Jenna Howell, 27, and Cameron Forrest, 26, owners of ShopJennron, challenge that outlook with sassy clothes for full-figured folks. “We make everything plus-size from vintage fabric,” Howell says. “I go to estate sales and sometimes find bolts of cloth.”

ShopJennron budded along with the couple’s relationship.

“After many thrift-shop dates, Ron and I grew tired of not finding clothes in our size,” Howell says.

ShopJennron was born in 2019 to make vintage clothes for all bodies.

“I began making plus-size, gender-neutral clothes,” she says, of the eye-popping prints she favors for tops and full-body coverings. “Each ShopJennron garment is made from quality vintage or sustainably-sourced

P HOTO G RAP HY BY RACHAE L WARRI NER

Clockwise from opposite page: Feminist Flea marketgoers stroll Cherry Street Pier. Jazmyn Morse of JazMakes Studios sells stickers and prints.

Kristianna Brown of SilentlyLoudShop sells upcycled handbags.

fabrics in our South Philadelphia row home.”

“Clients can also custom order, so there’s no waste,” says Forrest, who does much of the sewing.

Besides preferring rich hues, the shop follows a philosophy. ShopJennRon is “a fat space, a queer space, an anti-racist space, a genderless space, and a fun, accepting place,” their logo says.

JoAnne Sutkin, 59, a potter who works

in The Clay Studio, often adds an element of surprise to the tea tumblers, rice bowls, whiskey sippers, utensil holders and other functional pieces she creates in sage green, earth tones and luscious aquas with clay from the Catawba River Valley of North Carolina.

“Some of my pieces are gas-fired,” Sutkin says. “At times, I throw in a fistful of salt at the end for an added [unpredictable] element.

Then again, I fire the oven with wood, which burns down to ash that flies around the kiln and settles on the piece,” also leaving a unique signature. “It’s scrumptious,” she says, of this feature of her brand, Barnhouse Pots.

For Sutkin, sustainability counts.

“I recycle clay from failed pots,” she says.

“I reuse it, turn it into something else, and I fire the oven with wood from trees that have already been felled. I also keep the wrappers from packaging that comes my way and use it to mail orders to customers.”

Morgan Karcher, 25, and Kate Verstreate, 29, owners of UpcycleAndArtwork, serve up zany genius. “We use objects that are broken or discarded in our artistry,” says Karcher, pointing out a bowling pin wired into a lamp. Nearby stands a mannequin that’s been turned into a floor lamp. “We aim to use as much of the find’s original pieces and parts, repurposing them and upcycling them,” says Karcher, who also creates handcrafted artwork in different materials.

“Sustainability is important to both of us,” says Verstreate, who does much of the electrical wiring.

Cosmic Haha, 32, seems to take joy not just in her own eco-art, but in being among the flea market’s other vendors. “The Marketplace is super inclusive,” Haha says. “I’m not binary, and I’m comfortable here. [The organizers] prioritize people. They create community, offer us a platform,” says Haha, who makes “Soft Friends,” whimsically shaped, hand-dyed and sewn pillows from reclaimed cotton fabric as well as handdyed underwear.

“Everything I do is sliding scale,” adds Haha, also a self-taught ceramicist who produces stained stoneware plates and dishes, “because I want people to have my art.” ◆ The next Feminist Flea Market and Craft Fair is slated for Saturday, September 25 from 12 to 7 p.m. at Love City Brewing at 1023 Hamilton Street. The $5 entry fee will benefit the Coalition for Black Trans Economic Liberation. Please visit www.feministflea.market for information.

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retail

Lakisha Bullock, owner of SCB Naturals, makes her creations in her basement studio.

One-Woman Show West Philly native creates soap and skin care line from her basement lab by claire marie porter

G

rowing up in the ’90s, Lakisha Bullock was bullied for her appearance at her West Philly middle school.

“I had big thick hair. My mom didn’t know what to do with it,” she says.

At the time there weren’t a lot of Black hair products that weren’t relaxers and straighteners, she says. So, in high school, she set out to find them for herself. She came across the brand Carol’s Daughter, launched by a Black Brooklynite named Lisa Price who started a business making hair care products in her kitchen.

“I was like … ‘I could do that,’” says Bullock. She began dreaming of starting her own product line. “I fell in love with the idea of fixing myself,” she says.

8 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

Over the years she learned to make her own skin and hair products, and manage her hair. She would do her sisters’ and neighborhood girls’ hair to make money to buy new clothes and shoes. In 2011, she went to cosmetology school. Skin care products were her side hustle while she became a mother and worked a variety of management jobs.

In 2015, Bullock was in a difficult relationship and struggling with her mental health — and her skin was suffering as well. She had serious eczema. She started making her own treatment, and it worked.

She decided that the time had come to share her skills, and officially launched SCB (“She Creates Beauty”) Naturals.

Her business was on and off over the next few years, but by 2020 she had saved

up enough from her job as an assistant director for a nonprofit to buy her own house. Now that she had her own space, she decided it was time to focus on her business. She turned her basement into a skin care “lab,” left her nonprofit job and began developing her wellness brand full time.

Her experience in retail and management made entrepreneurship natural.

“I’m a manager at heart,” she says.

As a one-woman business, she has to be.

She says she is highly organized and uses Periodic Automatic Replenishment, or PAR — a method of inventory tracking often used in restaurants — to keep on top of things, like her handcrafted soaps, which take several weeks to complete. The higher the water content, the longer they take to cure.

“Soapmaking is fun. But it is dangerous,” she says. “I’m handling lye, so I need to suit up.”

Bullock also makes lotions, balms, serums, toners and masks. Her business is vegan and cruelty free, and she grows some ingredients for the products in her own garden — a certified plant nursery.

Her products are currently sold by seven retailers, including Philly Foodworks and the Kensington Community Food Co-op.

She also does pop-ups at farmers markets, like the weekly East Falls Farmers Market, where she met her friend and fellow entrepreneur, Hector Hernandez, a candlemaker. They often go to each other with business-related questions, and Hernandez loves using her products — particularly her lemon poppy lotion, he says.

“She wants to dabble in everything,” he says. “She doesn’t let anything get in her way. That’s what I love about her.”

Shannon Reynolds, owner of an ecommerce website called iCraft-Mart that helps new local entrepreneurs market their handmade products, was Bullock’s very first retailer, and still sells her wares to this day.

Reynolds says Bullock’s brand is “superior in every way,” down to the meticulous packaging.

“Phrases like ‘vegan,’ ‘sustainable’ and ‘organic’ aren’t just buzzwords to Lakisha,” he says. “She embodies that lifestyle, and wants to make sure they’re available and accessible to all.”

“I’ve never seen anybody work as hard as she does to make her business a success,” he adds. “Lakisha is one of a kind.” ◆ P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

We all live downstream.

So how do we keep that water clean? From fish to factories, swimmers to sewage, insects to instruments, learn how we've protected our water in the past—and the challenges we face tomorrow. sciencehistory.org/downstream Museum of the

The 2030 Series Sustainable Infrastructure and FDR Park Edition

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Mark Wheeler City of Philadelphia Chief Information Officer

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BUILDING FOUNDATIONS

City program jumpstarts careers for Philadelphians interested in infrastructure

I

story by nic esposito • photography by chris baker evens

n 2019 then 23-year-old Cashmir Woodward was dissatisfied with the home healthcare sector job she started just out of high school and was certain it would not be her long-term career. So when a friend asked her to join PowerCorpsPHL,

10 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

she decided to make a move.

“I was kind of wanting a different scene,” she explains, “so I decided to give it a shot.”

A workforce development program that provides career-connected education and paid work experiences for 18- to 30-yearolds, PowerCorpsPHL helps individuals

forge careers in municipal government operations or infrastructure-based industries. The program is led by the nonprofit EducationWorks in partnership with the national AmeriCorps program and the City of Philadelphia.

Participants in PowerCorpsPHL join as corps members at what the organization calls the “foundations” level. For six months, they work in teams on a variety of projects with City departments such as green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) maintenance with the Philadelphia Water Department and land management with Philadelphia Parks & Recreation.

“For my interview with PowerCorps, they wanted to see if I’d like the work,” Woodward recalls. “At 14 I worked for a landscaping company, so I didn’t mind digging and I don’t mind getting dirty.”

With that mindset, Woodward had no issue joining the GSI crew to maintain the many pieces of green infrastructure around Philadelphia, such as rain gardens, bioswales and tree trenches. Anticipating much worse flooding as a result of climate change and confronting Philadelphia’s aging and inadequate combined sewer system in much of the city, Philadelphia launched Green City, Clean Waters in 2011 as a 25-year plan to reduce both the amount of stormwater runoff into surrounding waterways and combined sewer overflows as a result of stormwater surges from intense storms.

After six months on the GSI maintenance crew, Woodward moved into PowerCorpsPHL’s second phase, which places corps members who have successfully completed the foundations program into fellowships or post-secondary education support and

“industry academies.” Members can also be placed as assistant crew leaders for future six-month foundations teams.

An example of an industry academy is PowerCorpsPHL’s Bright Solar Futures Fellowship. In partnership with the Philadelphia Energy Authority, the solar installation firm Solar States and the Energy Coordinating Agency, this academy provides corps members with a 17-week training course and a 10-week internship to prepare corps members to enter careers in the solar and electrical industries.

But for Woodward, her experience working with the Water Department was what she needed to focus her career path.

“When I really saw what GSI was about, I was so intrigued that it opened up something new for me,” she says. “It made me want to be a part of something bigger than just me.”

[Green stormwater infrastructure] made me want to be a part of something bigger than just me.”

— cashmir woodward, PowerCorpsPHL alum

PowerCorpsPHL support staff was able to help place Woodward in an internship with the Philadelphia-based civil engineering firm Rodriguez Consulting. Founder Lou Rodriguez was a former Water Department employee and served as the City’s first GSI program manager. After founding his consulting firm, Rodiguez made sure to pay it forward and provide mentorship and internship opportunities for young people participating in the PowerCorpsPHL program.

Today, Woodward has landed a full-time civil service position in the Water Department’s land survey division. Her experience maintaining GSI infrastructure as a corps member as well as her exposure to blueprints and surveying were the perfect combination of experience and expertise that made her a competitive candidate when she applied for the job.

“When I worked at Rodriguez, I started to see what they do with surveys and I was in love with all the different gadgets, the machine robots,” she says. “But getting this field survey job was a perfect fit because I’m really not a person to sit behind a desk all day.”

When asked what advice she would have for a young person considering a career in sustainability and infrastructure, Woodward had no shortage of tips and vision.

“As a corps member, take advantage of all PowerCorpsPHL offers you, especially the infrastructure program,” she suggests, adding that the program is a great connector to good jobs.

“But whatever job you have in infrastructure, just know your trade is much bigger than you,” she continues. “Infrastructure is something everyone needs in life for travel on roads and bridges, clean drinking water from clean rivers and lakes — so I want everyone to give it a chance, but especially the female members. We need more of us in the field.” ◆

Opposite page: Cashmir Woodward is a PowerCorpsPHL alum and now works for the Water Department.

An excavator prepares land that PWD surveyed in May for a forthcoming Topgolf in Northeast Philadelphia.

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Mark Wheeler, Philadelphia’s chief information officer, stands at 13th and Sansom streets, where sensors installed in a light (pictured below) count people and vehicles using the road.

BY THE

NUMBERS

City initiative uses data and artificial intelligence to improve Philly’s infrastructure story by nic esposito • photography by chris baker evens

H

oping to encourage the thoughtful development and deployment of new technologies across the city, the Kenney Administration formed the SmartCityPHL initiative within Philadelphia’s Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT) in 2019. The SmartCityPHL steering committee formed that year as well, tasked with creating a roadmap for using technology to support the City’s economic, social and environmental goals.

But three years in, how is our “smart city” doing on its quest to ensure sustainable and equitable development and maintenance of Philadelphia’s infrastructure, from roads 12 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

and waterways, to buildings and utilities?

Grid’s Nic Esposito sat down with the City’s chief information officer, Mark Wheeler, to find out.

This interview has been edited for clarity, length and style.

What is OIT’s vision for a smart Philadelphia?

The long-term vision is that a smart city could be the organizing principle within city government. One that coordinates and integrates the objectives and the operations around workforce development, urban planning, resiliency and mobility in a way that creates a more economically sound, socially diverse and sustainable city.

A city that is a very satisfying place to live in for all of the residents.

We want these programs to be locally sourced, or locally inspired, meaning that we’re solving problems that Philadelphians are having rather than adopting some kind of program that is focused only on the technology and not existing social or economic issues.

We want to put people at the heart of the technology programs we’re working with.

How does this vision influence or affect Philadelphia’s infrastructure development and maintenance? The smart city definition is that you’re using data that’s collected over a long period of time to help you make

decisions or to guide and direct operations to make them more effective.

An example is what we’ve done recently with a Charlotte, North Carolina, company called GoodRoads that we did a pilot with in 2020 through 2021 that may soon become a permanent program. GoodRoads put sensors on existing City vehicles, so it didn’t cost a lot to put them there. These sensors measured the roughness in the road as a vehicle drives, so we knew exactly when the vehicle hit a pothole. GoodRoads also put in optical sensors that can record general road conditions. They were trained with machine learning to identify cracks in the asphalt, uneven roads or decaying asphalt.

That information fed into how the Streets Department determined which roads needed to be repaired, and how bad they were.

That sensor data was then paired up with what we call our “stress index”* that further helps prioritize roads in communities that have typically been underserved by the City.

The normal way that road condition assessments are done is by engineers in vehicles driving around doing a visual assessment, recording information and then having to analyze it. The sensors cut that work time in half. With the machine learning we get the analysis much faster and we are able to then know how well our repairs are working. Based on the data we collect, we can very quickly see how well the repairs are lasting and know if we need to try out new materials or methods that might last longer. And that’s where I see the value.

How can the data gleaned from this SmartCity approach increase sustainability goals, particularly on our infrastructure? We’ve done a couple of pilots that haven’t necessarily used sensors, but they used more analytical techniques and technology. One example is the construction waste problem in Philadelphia. How do you divert that waste? You need to identify it in the waste stream and then connect all of the individual entities that do reclamation around the city, so they have a more predictable view of what’s in the waste stream.

The Amsterdam-based firm Metabolic was selected as the first SmartCityPHL pilot in 2020 to address this problem. Metabolic

We want to put people at the heart of the technology programs we’re working with.”

— mark wheeler, City of Philadelphia chief information officer has its own “urban mining” tool which is designed to mine the existing municipal and commercial waste streams for resources for recovery as feedstock into manufacturing or reuse programs, instead of extracting virgin resources to create products.

Urban mining is valuable to creating a circular approach to building and construction. It evaluates existing opportunities to reuse materials sent to landfills or embedded in existing buildings — like window frames, ceiling tiles or doors. Metabolic worked with OIT on a pilot to test an approach for mapping upcoming building needs and matching availability of recoverable resources in the construction and demolition waste stream and how to align to local, logistical supply chains. The pilot produced some data-driven insights into the demand and supply as a means to encourage the construction and demolition sector to redirect reusable materials and minimize demand for new construction materials.

I saw something like this in Rotterdam in the Netherlands where they took dredged material from their port and then used it as fill for other development projects. These waste exchange ideas have been around for a long time.

I worked on them decades ago, and I can tell you that it was really hard to make those connections because the information was old by the time maybe somebody needed it. So unless the timeline synced up you couldn’t necessarily get the extracted waste material to use as a feedstock in a new construction project. By using data, you know if there’s going to be a demand or what type of material is in the supply and you’re just linking that up.

What do you say to the average Philadelphian who hears about sensors and video cameras being used by the government all over the

* The Philadelphia stress index is a mapping tool that shows which neighborhoods experience different kinds of stressors such as poverty, health, education, employment and quality of life.

city and has privacy or surveillance concerns?

We take steps before we’ve done any pilot to pull very smart people together from law and academia and the private sector who understand the implications around how AI and sensor technology can work beneficially to give us feedback and recommendations on how to work with our partners to make sure that we’re not capturing data that contains or could extract personal information in ways that could be hackable.

For instance, we have sensors on 13th Street between Chestnut and Walnut.

They’re not cameras in the traditional sense being that they don’t take pictures of people’s faces. The information is processed very quickly and what the City gets back is never images, it’s just counts of people or cars and vehicles in the roadway. And that’s what we want it to do. We want real-time information, 24/7, about the capacity of the sidewalk and the streets. Because it’s structured in a way that doesn’t retain information or capture faces, it’s not a hackable image that can then be reused to track people.

But you have to be purposeful about that.

There was a pilot at Eakins Oval in 2018 where we were counting people at the oval by sensing cell phones moving around the park. That technology at the time could retain what we call MAC [media access control] addresses on the cell phones and if they were stored, then you could have seen which MAC addresses were coming and going, and how frequently.

That’s a learning lesson for a city because you do not want to store that information and you don’t even want to be using MAC addresses to count people. When it comes to SmartCity, we learn sometimes by doing and that’s why we strive to think through the technology and the data that’s being stored and how it’s going to be used as much as we can before we implement projects. And thankfully, we’ve had really great partners in the nonprofit and private sectors to work through all of these concepts with us and make changes as we discover issues. ◆ J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 13

AIR BUD

Project encourages community members to work together to monitor air quality and use data to seek environmental justice story by marilyn anthony • photography by chris baker evens

A

ir is something we share. But clean air, it turns out, is not equally available to all.

Using technology with an almost cartoonish name, the PurpleAir monitor, Christina Rosan thinks making disparities in air quality “in your face” will lead to more equitable, citizeninformed public policies. Advocating for clean air everywhere, she believes, could promote climate resiliency, restorative social justice and more livable neighborhoods across Philadelphia.

Rosan, an associate professor at Temple 14 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

University in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies, hopes to use community data and stories to inform green infrastructure investment to confront past, present and future neighborhood challenges.

“We’re trying to address the fact that many communities in Philadelphia have overlapping vulnerabilities that are going to get worse with climate change,” Rosan says. “We want to help communities be able to make demands from the City, framed in climate language, to get more integrated policies that help them deal with current and coming problems.”

Rosan and Russell Zerbo, a Clean Air Council advocate, are helping lead a team of academics and advocates that recently won a $150,000 planning grant from the National Science Foundation’s Smart and Connected Communities program to tackle urgent environmental injustice problems.

Their project, PREACT (Planning for Resilience and Equity through Accessible Community Technology), fosters community engagement as a basis for equitable urban sustainability.

Enter PurpleAir monitors. Each about the size of a softball and with a $250 price tag, the monitors measure a regulated pollutant, particulate matter up to 2.5 micrometers. Zerbo explains that particulate matter is the only thing you can complain about, such as when smoke or dust comes onto your property. But you can’t make air quality complaints through 311.

Rosan and Zerbo want PurpleAir monitors on libraries and schools, where the technology can be paired with educa-

From page left: Clean Air Council advocate Russell Zerbo and Temple University associate professor Christina Rosan inspect a smartphone displaying Philly-area air pollution data. A PurpleAir monitor collects air pollution data.

We want to help communities be able to make demands from the City ... to get more integrated policies.”

— christina rosan, associate professor at Temple University tion. They believe that understanding air quality should become part of a school’s science curriculum, providing communities with hard data to inform conversations with City officials.

As the air monitoring network expands, residents viewing the monitoring map could see the disparities. Why is the air cleaner one zip code away? What is causing our problem locally? Is it an illegal dump or something else? Neighborhoods could then request more sophisticated assessments by the City and be part of any interventions.

“We’re trying to connect immediate needs for good schools, affordable housing, safe parks, and dealing with gun violence, while working with communities to help them see that climate investments could solve some of those problems,” Rosan explains.

Too often environmental improvements in neighborhoods are precursors to gentrification and “sustainability” code for upscaling housing and amenities that displace

longtime residents.

Rosan wants to flip the conversation about “greening” and climate change resiliency to be about restorative justice — engaging residents to direct efforts to improve their neighborhoods in ways that make it possible for them to stay. Understanding what causes poor air quality can provide the intersection for the City’s infrastructure investments and neighborhood permanence.

For too long there has been a disconnect.

The City advocates for a tree canopy while many neighborhoods suffer under terrible living conditions. It’s not that residents don’t care about climate change, but they face more dire needs. It’s hard to get excited about trees when your block is awash in illegal dumping.

Distressed neighborhoods have been playing defense, fighting off development or further environmental degradation. Rosan and Zerbo think air quality data can help communities change their game to offense.

“We provide residents with the tools to understand existing problems and start to think strategically with the City in terms of a Neighborhood Bill of Rights: every neighborhood needs to have clean air, affordable housing, good schools, trees, parks, safety from gun violence, access to healthy food. This is what makes sustainable communities,” Rosan says.

Connecting greening and climate investments with community needs is central to their efforts.

Rather than dismissing trees as unimportant, residents might consider that an investment in trees could bring jobs, and that greening their streets, or a park that kids could safely play in, could dramatically improve the environmental health for all residents. Longer term investments in green infrastructure could bring relief now to stressed communities.

Rosan and Zerbo’s work aligns with other city initiatives. The Environmental Justice Advisory Commission is charged with creating a whole-government approach to addressing environmental injustice. The Community Health Act, legislation proposed by City Councilmembers Helen Gym, Kendra Brooks and Jamie Gauthier, aims to generate a citywide environmental justice map. The bill would enable the Department of Public Health to ensure that industrial projects don’t inflict further harm on communities that have already suffered an undue burden of pollution.

For Rosan, opportunity is in the air. “We have the technology,” Rosan says. “That’s what’s exciting about climate change. As terrifying as it is, there are a lot of really cool integrated approaches that will come out of it, making us rethink solutions.” ◆ To see where regional sensors are located and learn more about the monitors, visit map.purpleair.com J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 5

ON THE

WRONG TRACK

Concerned about accelerating climate change, activists at the Clean Air Council are pushing Amtrak to reverse its switch from steam power to gas boilers story by nichole currie • photography by rachael warriner

S

i n c e p h i l a d e l p h i a’s 3 0 t h Street Amtrak Station announced in late March that it would switch from steam power to gas boilers, activists have been pushing back on the station’s claims that the move aligns with a sustainable future for the city.

“That is simply a false narrative,” Clean Air Council Executive Director Joseph Minott says. “Everyone who cares about climate change knows we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.”

Amtrak’s switch to boilers, provided by Philadelphia Gas Works, marks a step backward to those at the Clean Air Council, Philadelphia’s oldest environmental nonprofit.

PGW’s gas boilers burn fossil fuels, which release methane emissions. These emissions will impose significant externalities because methane gas is an 86% more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The emissions may be reduced if PGW’s 2021 pledge to reduce its carbon footprint is successful, but activists are wary and say fossil fuels should no longer be considered as a long-term option.

16 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

In response to Amtrak’s announcement, which offered few details about the decision-making process, the Council urged the federal government to intervene and stop the switch to natural gas. In a letter written in March to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the Clean Air Council asked to halt Amtrak’s switch to gas boilers, which would take place during a renovation of 30th Street, explaining that the change would undermine President Joe Biden’s mission to accelerate a transition to clean energy.

“Clean Air Council urges Amtrak to pause this ill-advised conversion and publicly disclose the reasoning underlying this decision,” said Minott in the March 17 letter. “When it comes to combating the existential crisis of climate change, we have no time to stumble into decisions that could lock in greater carbon and methane pollution for decades.”

Clean Air Council legal fellow Joseph A. Ingrao at Amtrak’s 30th Street Station.

The switch, activists contend, will undermine both federal and local goals. Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability announced a Clean Energy Vision Action Plan, a 2018 goal by Mayor Jim Kenney to reduce carbon emissions by 80% from 2006 levels by 2050 while emphasizing equity and health for all Philadelphians.

It’s unclear why Amtrak announced a switch at odds with clean energy goals, but Amtrak isn’t the only company that has signed on to PGW recently. The gas company acquired many customers this year on what looks like an aggressive buying spree.

“From what we understand, PGW is making some very aggressive offers to customers to entice them to move away from the district energy system,” says Jaclyn Bliss, chief customer officer at Vicinity, the district energy system located in Center City that was initially in contract with Amtrak.

Amtrak declined Grid’s request to comment on the switch from steam power to natural gas.

A future with Amtrak’s methane While it may cost less in the short term, Minott says if Amtrak switches from steam power to natural gas, there will be monumental effects on the environment and, eventually, the company’s wallet. “[Amtrak] will be investing in new infrastructure for burning a fuel we cannot afford to burn if we want to avoid the worst

of climate change,” Minott says.

A large component of natural gas is methane, the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes 1 million premature deaths every year.

If Amtrak does indeed sign a contract with PGW, it will be significantly increasing its carbon output. According to a new Vicinity Energy report, Amtrak’s switch to gas boilers will increase its carbon footprint by 1,840 tons per year for the next 30 years — three times more than Vicinity’s carbon intensity.

“When you switch to something like a natural gas boiler, they stick around for a while,” Vicinity’s Bliss explains. “You’ve made a commitment for decades to that particular piece of equipment, which is 20 to 30 years. So that is 40,000-plus tons of carbon just from that one building in Philadelphia.”

In addition to environmental factors, the methane gas industry could in the future burden Amtrak’s finances. The cost of gas heat, like all energy reliant on fossil fuels, may be subject to price shocks and global market fluctuations. Gas prices have spiked in the last two months due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Switching from the steam loop to PGW service will lock Amtrak into polluting methane and uncertain price spikes,” Minott says.

Leaky pipes and competing visions In 2014 Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration tried unsuccessfully to offload PGW to a private company in anticipation of business suffering in a future economy transitioning from fossil fuels.

Eight years later, PGW released an action plan to lessen methane emissions by 80%

Everyone who cares about climate change knows we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.”

— joseph Minott, executive director of the Clean Air Council by 2050. Titled “PGW’s Methane Reduction Program,” the plan aims to meet these targets by replacing old, corroding pipes buried across the city to stop methane gas from leaking into the air — upgrading up to 30 miles of its natural gas mains with new, modern pipes each year. For each further mile installed, emissions along the new main are reduced to near zero, PGW’s report says. At this pace, PGW anticipates that all of its unprotected steel service lines and cast iron mains will be replaced by 2038 and 2058, respectively. Its plan also includes monitoring leaks to reduce the number of leaks in its distribution center.

PGW’s infrastructure is currently responsible for 72% of the methane emissions from its internal operations.

While methane leaks are a major factor to its emissions, PGW will still be supplying a fossil fuel: natural gas.

Vicinity Energy, which already delivers energy with an overall smaller carbon footprint, is also implementing a program to bring its carbon emissions to zero.

Vicinity has transformed district energy over several decades, moving from coal to natural gas and now to Combined Heat and Power (CHP), a system that efficiently generates electricity and thermal energy using various technologies. At Vicinity, CHP utilizes a cogeneration unit that generates thermal energy that simultaneously harnesses

for steam and electricity.

According to Bliss, Vicinity has a threefold plan to eliminate its carbon footprint. If executed, Vicinity will first introduce electric boilers at its central facility. The electric boiler is designed to take electrons from the grid and then use these electrons to generate steam to distribute to Vicinity customers. The second phase will use a heat pump to harness energy from the Schuylkill River. Bliss says the process will return clean water to the river with no increase in the temperature. In the third step, Vicinity will purchase green power from the grid and use it to create thermal energy.

Bliss says Vicinity is in the process of acquiring an electric boiler to begin the first phase of its three-fold plan.

One of the primary advantages Vicinity has, according to Clean Air Council legal fellow Joseph A. Ingrao, is that nothing needs to be built for energy to be delivered.

“Vicinity’s power plant will generate the heat for the steam loop whether 30th Street Station uses it or not, while switching to gas heat means investing in new on-site boilers and miles of new pipes that will leak dangerous methane into the station and throughout the city,” he says. “These pipes and boilers will quickly become stranded assets as the City, State, and country pursue their climate goals and transition away from this dangerous fossil fuel.” ◆

J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 17

FDR

A PARK FOR THE PEOPLE

The entrance to the South Philly Meadows at FDR Park.

SOMETHING

WILD The FDR Park Master Plan needs reconsidering

Grid has been hearing a lot lately about fdr park.

After our series of articles on the development of the Cobbs Creek golf courses, Philadelphians concerned about the fate of the South Philly Meadows got in touch to defend the park’s former fairways against a plan to develop the beloved greenspace into a complex of wetlands, sports facilities and other park amenities.

Grid has written about Philadelphia Parks & Recreation and the Fairmount Park Conservancy’s plans for FDR Park before, and our April 2021 (Grid #143) article highlighted the FDR Park Master 18 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

Plan’s ambitious goals for a park that would benefit a wide variety of users, even if the much-loved open space of the Meadows would be sacrificed.

In this issue we take another look.

Anisa George offers an essay that is both an impassioned love letter to the dynamic Meadows and a broad critique of the plan to replace them with synthetic turf playing fields.

The core of the master plan is an attempt to escape the water by elevating much of the park above the tides and improving drainage.

P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

This takes a lot of earth, which will be provided by the Philadelphia events, and only 2% from Parks & Recreation programming.

International Airport (owned by the City) as it digs out a wooded Grid reached out to the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national section of the park to create wetlands. Those new wetlands will parks advocacy organization, to put this in context. Will Klein, a replace (“mitigate”) a section of marsh the airport will be destroying parks researcher with TPL, said that 10 to 15% of the $10 billion as part of a cargo facilities expansion. One of the pieces in this issue that the 100 biggest cities in the country spend on parks comes from examines the airport’s expansion and how it threatens to increase earned revenue. flooding upstream in the Eastwick neighborhood.

Earned revenue has proven less stable than other funding sourcIn the late 1700s German families farmed the high ground of the es in recent years, dropping from 13% nationally in 2019 to 8% in marsh. There they grew the still-beloved Seckel pear: small, can2021. “The pandemic hit parks that rely on earned revenue the dy-sweet, and a sensation when it first spread beyond what is now hardest,” Klein says. the park. Christopher Dougherty’s essay uses the history of the pear Funding a public park overwhelmingly with private sources raises to discuss the cultural legacy of the land that could be lost. access questions as well. How often will neighborhood youth have to Like much of South and Southwest Philadelphia, FDR Park was watch from the other side of the fence as suburban leagues rent their built out of the freshwater tidal marsh of the Delaware River estufields? When a community group wants to use the FDR Park Welcome ary. It was lifted up from the water, and the water has been taking Center for a neighborhood meeting the same night that a corporate it back. Most of the park sits below high tide on the Delaware River. partner wants to book it for a cocktail hour, who wins?

An old tide gate, intended to keep high tide out and to let the park “Staff for the park will be primarily funded by the revenue generdrain at low tide, is failing. Storm runoff pours in from I-95 and ated from park concessions and events held at FDR Park,” accordsurrounding streets. Groundwater rises up, ing to the master plan. This doesn’t include undermining road surfaces and turning earth staff provided by “outside operators,” for to mud. their own programming in the park, includEven if the FDR plan proceeds as designed, ing at the fields. The privately-funded park Like much of South the water might still win out. The hundreds of staff will largely sit outside of the City bumillions of dollars of infrastructure to be built reaucracy and, presumably, its unions. and Southwest at the park sit in a FEMA floodplain, at risk The plan tries to put a positive spin on this.

Philadelphia, of getting washed out by coastal flooding that “This represents a shift in how Parks & RecFDR Park was built out will grow more frequent and heavier as climate reation operates by dedicating staff to a large change lifts the tides and brings more intense park, thereby freeing district staff to serve in of the freshwater tidal storms. New York City learned important lesother needed areas of the city.” marsh of the Delaware sons when Superstorm Sandy caused nearly All of this private funding, staffing, and $800 million of damage to its park system. An administration saves the City money, but River estuary. It was article in this issue asks whether the planners the governance plan paints a picture of a park lifted up from the of FDR Park have ignored those lessons. largely outside of taxpayer control. water, and the water has Much criticism of the park has focused on As Philadelphia’s leaders have chosen to the 12 synthetic turf soccer fields that could be spend fewer and fewer tax dollars on opbeen taking it back. used as practice facilities for the 2026 World erating and maintaining parks, and as the Cup if FIFA chooses Philadelphia as a site for city’s parks have declined, private groups games. The high cost of the fields ($96 million have stepped in to fill the gaps. This includes total) has drawn the attention of those who small, unincorporated friends groups and suspect the project isn’t actually for everyday park users, and Conrecreation advisory councils as well as professionally-staffed orgastance Garcia-Barrio talks to members of South Philly immigrant nizations like the Friends of the Wissahickon. The Fairmount Park communities who currently play soccer at FDR to see what they Conservancy functions as an intermediary between these parks think of the plans. groups and the City, in addition to handling plenty of uncontroThe high price of synthetic fields can be measured in heat and versial projects such as developing trails on the Belmont Plateau, pollution as well, and Grid takes a look at these costs, which will coordinating park cleanups and restoring habitat. be borne not by the corporate and foundation donors to the project The Conservancy has taken the lead in planning and implementbut by the youth playing on the fields, the neighbors and the suring the renovation, which could have inequitable outcomes even if rounding ecosystems. conceived with the best of intentions. Although this might be the It’s clear that the physical plans are ambitious, and a peek at the only way a large project can be completed in an era of underfundproposed finances of FDR Park reveals that the budgets are, too. ing from public sources, the risk is that the more the park relies The City has committed $50 million to the park’s development, on private funding sources, the more it could stray from meeting which sounds like a lot, except that it’s less than a fifth of the total the needs of ordinary Philadelphians. “Parks for Profit,” a book by project costs of over $255 million.

Temple University sociologist Kevin Loughran, examines three park The master plan also includes proposed operating budgets in which developments in other cities in which private organizations took 69% of the funding comes from partnerships and concessions, 22% the lead. In a Q&A piece Loughran discusses how equity and the from rentals and permits (including those 12 fields, to be rented out public interest take a back seat when outside money takes the wheel.

20 weekends a year to visiting soccer tournaments), 7% from special What should happen in FDR Park? You be the judge. ➤ J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 9

FDR

A PARK FOR THE PEOPLE

Let It Be Will we save the meadow that saved us?

L

ike many American cities, Philadelphia is built on land that wants to be wet.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Park sits in a particularly soggy corner, right at the junction where the Schuylkill River rushes into the Delaware. The park is perforated by several lakes and water channels, and flooding regularly renders pedestrian walkways impassible. Over the decades a monstrous tonnage of earth has been trucked in to raise the level of the park. It has been hauled in from the excavation of subway lines, the construction of railway lines and the demolition of water sanitation plants—all in an effort to raise the level of the marsh. FDR is essentially estuarial bogland posing as parkland, a space where the urban and the swamp collide and form startling juxtapositions. The Tastykake headquarters, for example, can be smelled in the southwest corner of the park, where the scents of butterscotch krimpets and pine sap mix and you can see the bright, blue steel of the Girard Point Bridge jutting out of the tree line into the sky.

Cheryl Brubaker is the current tenant and custodian of Bellaire Manor, a historic house that stands within FDR’s former golf course. Brubaker moved into the manor in 1986 and over many years watched through her window as the puddling got worse. “They put like 30 feet of fill in here 20 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 20 22

by anisa

george

when they built the course [in 1940] … but of course that has not been replaced … so it’s just slowly sinking and settling … and then in 2018 one of the guys from the course told me that they had closed the course 80 days out of the season because of flooding.”

Eighty days is one third of the season.

The 146-acre golf course officially closed in October 2019, six months after the unveiling of a new design to transform the entirety of the park, a design referred to as the Master Plan. The document was released in May 2019 and was full of eye-catching graphics and utopian renderings of what the future of FDR Park could look like. Soaring kites, beatific children and lovers strolling at the golden hour, all compiled to form a mouthwatering compendium of civic imagination.

Phase one of the plan was supposed to kick off in the spring of 2020, but there was, of course, a pandemic-sized hitch and all the funds necessary to implement the plan were diverted. Not a shovel was raised, not a stake was driven, and the seeds beneath the golf course, which had been patiently waiting for 80 years for the mower to cease its rounds, began to germinate.

Along the fairways and through the putting greens, speedwell, celandine and chickweed erupted. Over two seasons, goldenrod and boneset have followed, growing in dense stands taller than the humans who once golfed there. Countless roaring dandelions and delicate swamp rose-mallow

The South Philly Meadows, formerly a public golf course in FDR Park, grew out of pandemic-stalled park renovations in 2020.

punctuate the green, as magenta-stemmed pokeweed tangles with blackberry canes.

Foot-high oak saplings and bald cypress babies now circle their mother trees, and with all the seed heads exploding, new insects and birds are increasing each year. Monarch butterflies alight like glowing embers upon the milkweed, praying mantises stalk the rushes, crickets sing to the very bitter end of autumn, and goldfinches bob their lucent trails across the thorny crowns of nursing thistle heads. Someone sighted a snapping turtle, then an otter. Brubaker tells me she got to watch two bald eagles engaged in an elaborate courtship display right outside P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

Bellaire Manor. “He was stomping around slapping puddles with his wing.” She bends her knees and plods heavily from one foot to the other, showing me the eagle’s most impressive mating moves. “My birder-friend was freaking out, saying ‘I’ve never seen anything like this!’”

In 2020, the birds, bugs and flowers were all thriving at the Meadows, but what about the humans? Let us not forget the humans, who were not yet vaccinated and desperately seeking ways to safely congregate or simply to escape the doom of Zoom. The humans had started wandering into this newly-resurrected meadow. There was an

The rolling hills and the grasses and the sort of groomed wildness of it was so breathtaking.”

— christina zani, South Philly resident

uncanny synergy of desires, as if the Meadows had risen up to embrace them, to offer them resilience in the face of an escalating death toll — bloom in a moment of terror and quarantine. South Philly resident Christina Zani says that the first time she entered the Meadows she felt like she was in Tuscany. “The rolling hills and the grasses and the sort of groomed wildness of it was so breathtaking. We brought both kids and the dog and everyone was just sort of tumbling and rambling and like arms stretched out and just feeling curious and free and running in the sun. It was a sanity saver.”

But of course the Meadows was never part J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HILLY.COM 21

FDR

A PARK FOR THE PEOPLE

of the Master Plan. Within the boundaries of the Meadows, the Master Plan calls for 12 multipurpose athletic fields, 10 tennis courts, five parking lots, four baseball diamonds, four basketball courts, a playground, a concession stand and one driving range (but not a partridge in a pear tree). Let me stand back a moment to say that there are many admirable dimensions to the Master Plan. This is not a story of goodies versus baddies. This is a story of a well-vetted plan, a plan that went through rigorous community outreach meetings, a plan that was called into question not by feuding parties or political scandal, but by the sheer beauty and resilience of a wild meadow.

A plan to dominate the landscape Some of the admirable aspects of the Master Plan are the restoration of over 30 acres of wetlands, the development of a welcome center (with bathrooms!), and an ambitious attempt to rejigger the park’s entire topography so that it won’t completely disappear under rising tides in the next century. Much of the park is at or below sea level, and the park’s tidal gate “effectively allows the park to exist, closing the influx of water at high tide and draining the park at low tide.” The 22 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

malfunctioning gate will be fixed. The Master Plan also aims to mitigate flooding by building several large lagoons and using excavated fill to once again raise the level of the marsh. The construction crews employed by the plan will essentially sculpt a new park, much the way a sandcastle is built—scooping out lagoons instead of moats to be heaped into hills instead of towers. Unfortunately, we know what eventually happens to sandcastles. “FDR Park has always been a product of human invention and imagination,” states the Master Plan, “and it will continue to be in this resilient vision for the historic park.”

I find calling the park “a product of human invention and imagination” an interesting admission, one that I would never have unearthed if I had not fallen in love with the Meadows. The park has certainly and unarguably been sculpted by humans, but the words “product of human invention” bend towards a domination narrative I find a little startling. In the wonderfully wry words of Elizabeth Kolbert: “If control is the problem, then, by logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.”

But something gloriously shambolic and

uncontrollable is happening at the Meadows.

Cheryl Brubaker tells me she watches people pause at the threshold, wondering not only what path to take, but how the golf course they knew disappeared beneath six feet of flowers. The resiliency of the seed bank startles people—all that latent wild power resurrecting itself after 80 years of dormancy. No one even tilled the soil.

The Meadows is “a place I can breathe again,” says Dominique Messihi, who coruns a homeschooling pod there. “I didn’t know I needed that until I was [there].” And why is this encounter with wildness so utterly refreshing to us? Perhaps because we live in an age where we, for the most part, shape the earth processes that once shaped us. Before us, only a legion of volcanos or an asteroid colliding with the Earth could be the cause of a great extinction event. Now we are the asteroids. Rivers have been dammed, mountaintops leveled, marshes made into golf courses. In the Meadows, many of us feel, at last, this relinquishing of control, this psychic break, this abnegation of a colonizing will. Perhaps we feel the absence of — for lack of a better phrase — a master plan.

But the architects and defenders of the Master Plan will shake their heads and point P HOTO G RAP HY BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

Opposite page: A red-winged blackbird at the South Philly Meadows.

The 18thcentury mansion Bellaire Manor originally sat at the water’s edge in FDR Park.

This is not a place a meadow would exist in nature if we hadn’t artificially created it. It’s at the bottom of the bathtub ... ” — maura mccarthy, executive director of the Fairmount Park Conservancy

out that the Meadow is nice, for now, but it is temporary, full of invasives, and not even a real meadow but an artificial one. When asked (by me) in a public forum whether or not the Meadows would be preserved, Maura McCarthy, executive director of Fairmount Park Conservancy, stated: “This is not a place a meadow would exist in nature if we hadn’t artificially created it. It’s at the bottom of the bathtub, that’s actually below sea level …

Where we can, yes, we will artificially recreate some of the landscape of meadow.”

If the forum had been a live discussion, not a webinar, I could have interrupted to clarify that it is not the habitat category of meadow that moves me. It is wildness, which to me means land engaged in self-directed creation, and it is a realization — on witnessing such numinous creativity — that the land is not an object, but a subject, not an it, but a thou.

Messihi also feels frustrated at the offering of a “recreated” meadow. “Can’t we just keep this?!” she asks. Why build another? That tomorrow the Meadows might resemble more of a muddy savannah, or a marsh, does not matter to her. Help pick

up the trash, maintain a few elevated pathways, and she’ll be satisfied. If the park staff wants to engage with battling the invasives, she and her children report they’re excited to volunteer.

But the goal, says Allison Schapker, chief project officer at Fairmount Park Conservancy, “the goal is not to … return to nature. We have all passed the point of that being possible.” I don’t believe it’s actually possible to depart from nature (just as it’s not possible to stop breathing if you want to stay alive).

What I believe Schapker means to say is that if we stop raising the level of the marsh, we will have to sacrifice some of our plans.

Available playing fields or wild space?

The Master Plan is designed to take FDR from two soccer fields to 12, from zero basketball courts to eight, from one playground to two. If the plan were simply to double or even triple the amount of fields existing presently, much of the Meadows could remain. Where does the incentive for this amount of increase come from? Revenue, perhaps? The fields will be permitted, and

permits bring money to the City’s coffers.

It’s also well documented that Philadelphia is a candidate for the 2026 World Cup and has pitched South Philly Meadows as one of the potential spaces for their tournament.

If Philly won the bid (a significant if), FIFA could contribute up to $200 million to support elements of the Master Plan. A notable number given that the budget for the entire Master Plan is about $256 million, of which only $90 million has been currently raised.

Which is to say, even if FIFA were only in town for a month it could bankroll most of the plan. But, unlike all the other spaces wrapped into the FIFA pitch, FDR is cherished public land.

If FDR is at the bottom of the bathtub, wouldn’t it be better to keep it a meadow/ emerging-marsh than turn it into a multipurpose recreational zone thousands of people depend upon for dry turf? According to the Master Plan, “climate projections estimate Philadelphia could see an increase in average annual precipitation of up to five inches, and sea level of up to four feet by 2100.” These are, of course, shifting predictions that grow wetter and deeper as our emissions rise. If the climate warms by two degrees Celsius, a map on climatecentral.org shows tides surging as far as Oregon Avenue, a mile north of FDR Park. The acreage where the Meadows now sits has failed as an athletic zone in the past under less pressure. In the face of catastrophic climate change, why try again? Let the space be muddy and let it be wild. A green sponge is always the best buffer against rising tides. Why not use the $100 million allotted for field construction to build quality athletic zones in neighborhoods on higher ground, possibly transforming abandoned lots into vital community centers that currently have no space for recreation? As one working parent commented in a virtual FDR open house, “I don’t need fields at the farthest southern point in Philly. There is a soccer field that is currently permanently locked two blocks away from my house. Sports fields and playgrounds belong in neighborhoods unlocked and maintained.”

The soccer field she’s talking about turns out to be the one across the street from me— Columbus Square. It’s a balmy Sunday, for February, and the field is locked and empty right now. I can see two teenagers trying to scale the fence. As I watch them struggle to break in, I wonder if this feeling of field scarcity is in many ways an administrative J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 23

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A PARK FOR THE PEOPLE aren’t in great shape and they could use a few more, but when I asked him what the right number of fields was, he said, “Twelve may be a little bit much, just to be honest with you.” But even if 12 were the right number, 12 fields should and could be found (or built) within the city proper without fragmenting the vital space emerging at South Philly Meadows. And before we spend $100 million on the construction of fields at FDR, could we spend a few hundred thousand to develop a citizen-friendly website where all public fields were listed and mapped, where they could be reserved, and, if necessary, permitted? As I look out my window at the gaping nets across the street waiting for a goalie to guard them, the notion of field scarcity seems like a communication and distribution problem, not a land use and construction one.

We have several recreational sports fields in South Philly, and there are spaces where we could build more, but what we don’t have at all is wild space. You have to drive 20 minutes to find pockets in Fairmount or go all the way to the Wissahickon in order to have a decent ramble, and, for many, that is a 30-minute car ride away. For those without cars, it’s over an hour of multiple bus and train rides.

Convenience trumps resilience – and health concerns

A kangaroo sculpture from an Australian flora and fauna exhibit in the 2021 Philadelphia Flower Show, held at FDR Park.

The Master Plan should be amended to state that it will bury almost 30 acres of currently existing meadows beneath a layer of plastic. failure. Perhaps it is not easy to assess the presence, occupation or vacancy of sports fields in Philly because the City wants you to come through them with paperwork — and, more importantly, money — in hand. If I get on the Parks & Recreation finder-site and search “soccer,” the resulting eight hits — which for some reason include a Gamblers 24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 2022

Anonymous meeting — all point to activities, not locations. How exactly do you find a vacant field in this city?

I checked in with Alvaro Drake-Cortés about this question. He’s the liaison between FDR Park and the soccer leagues that often use its fields for Sunday games. Drake-Cortés told me that the two existing fields at FDR

In June 2021 a petition against the Meadows’ inclusion in the FIFA bid started circulating. I signed it along with about 2,000 other people. Eventually an email arrived in my inbox saying that there was a protest scheduled for September 22, 2021, the day of FIFA’s site visit. It was the first day of fall, and there was a crisp breeze cutting through the lingering summer haze. I saw a cyclist ahead of me with a cardboard sign strapped to his rack and knew we were headed to the same spot for the same reason. His sign read, “I love soccer, but save the Meadows,” in big bubbly letters with a blooming milkweed plant in the corner.

A carefully drawn monarch butterfly was sipping up its nectar. At the entrance to the Meadows we met up with other protestors carrying other banners that read “Meadows not money” and “Preserve our wild space.”

But even if FIFA doesn’t pave the way for the destruction of the Meadows, the Master Plan will still attempt to cover the majority of it in a layer of synthetic turf. Synthetic turf is convenient because it doesn’t need to be mowed, fertilized or watered, and it won’t P HOTO G RAP HY BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

turn into a mud pit after it’s been trampled for hours by opposing teams, but it doesn’t support the larger ecosystem. It also doesn’t photosynthesize or sequester carbon in an age when carbon emissions are racing towards a tipping point. In fact, synthetic turf is a product derived from fossil fuels, and so creates a significant amount of emissions before it has even been rolled out. Twelve athletic fields worth of synthetic turf is a lot of plastic—the equivalent of every registered citizen in Philadelphia dumping 130 plastic bags on the Meadows. A pointed comparison, considering that the City recently enacted a ban on plastic bags. Also, the fake turf will inevitably break down and introduce micro-plastics into the soil and surrounding watershed. It will be ingested by wildlife and pollute those wetlands the plan purports to revitalize and bolster. It retains heat, in some cases becoming too hot to walk on. And perhaps most detrimental, many turfs use tire crumb infill, which is made from recycled tires that can off-gas toxic fumes, such as styrene and butadiene, which damage the nervous system and cause cancer.

The Master Plan claims that synthetic field surfaces will “maximize playtime and reduce maintenance needs,” but any surface that doesn’t degrade and regenerate itself needs to be cleaned, which can mean brushing, hosing down and sometimes vacuuming.

In as little as 10 years, the fake lawn could need to be replaced. And how much will it cost to roll away and roll out another 12 athletic courts and four baseball fields’ worth of plastic grass? Where is the “resilient vision” there? The Master Plan says it will increase the meadow habitat at FDR by 10.8 acres from zero acres. This is plainly incorrect.

The Master Plan should be amended to state that it will bury almost 30 acres of currently existing meadows beneath a layer of plastic.

Pflicke, an avid birder who has been stalking the area with his binoculars since before the golf course closed in 2019. “The good thing about Philly birding,” Pflicke says, “is there is always a hole in the fence somewhere.” He is one of the many community members who consulted on the design of the Master Plan, but he now wishes that the Meadows could remain. Even in January, suited up in our mittens and hats, we find the place bustling with white-throated sparrows and meowing woodpeckers. Goldfinches pilfer seeds in the boughs of a sweetgum tree as a bald eagle passes overhead.

Among the birds Pflicke has spotted exclusively since the rebirth of the Meadows are: clay-colored sparrows, vesper sparrows, dickcissels, blue grosbeaks, and eastern meadowlarks. “All that growth that came back led to something,” he tells me. More food sources, more habitat, more birds. People will talk about invasives here, he says, but even if phragmites or mugwort are not ideal habitat, “they still provide some habitat.” If you’ve ever noticed the red-winged blackbirds chortling in the phrag, you can attest to this. Today, Pflicke is hoping we can see an orange-crowned warbler, a small songbird that may stop shortly in Philly during the winter on its way to Central America.

If you ask Pflicke what drives him to wake up at dawn to survey the Meadows before work, he’ll tell you about the miracle of migration—wild geese and blackpoll warblers starting up in Canada and flying nonstop all the way to South America. “It’s mind-boggling that those little things can sustain that,” he says. Birds have always been a symbol of resilience and also a puzzle piece with planetary dimensions. We may witness them for

only a brief moment, but through these brief intimacies we are stitched into the pattern of the seasons and become attuned to the tilting gyre of the giant planet to which we both belong. Suddenly Pflicke spots the orange-crowned warbler. It’s right there in the shrubbery straight ahead, a greenish-yellow, feathered plumpness with a gray hood. A second one arrives. Two in the same view!

“And that is only due to the Meadows,” says Pflicke with a kind of joyful pride in his voice. “And that is awesome.”

We are just beginning to discover what the Meadows is and to imagine how it can intersect with our lives. This past year the Philadelphia School brought all of their fourth and fifth graders to the Meadows once a week to carry out “mini-expeditions” and do hands-on science education. After a late January blizzard, the Sierra Club led a snowshoeing hike and passed an impromptu ice hockey game along the frozen creek bed. I myself have led walks for people who have lost loved ones and are navigating mental illness. The Meadows is not just a space where birds and bugs are nourished; it nourishes us all. If the Master Plan escapes amendment, if the inertia is just too great, and the frozen-in-time community of 2019, who never met the Meadows, is the only community whose input matters, then perhaps that is all that we will ever be able to say. For a miraculous moment we were awestruck, and in our brief encounter, we felt our place on Earth.

But I, for one, am not ready to give up or to say goodbye. Are you? ◆ A version of this story first ran in The Philadelphia Citizen.

A habitat that nourishes all visiting creatures A meadow is an interconnected web of being. The monarch beats its wings to the rhythm of the entire carnival of creatures that has summoned it into being. Our ecosystems are already so fragile: if the Meadows is divided, like so many cut-up squares of carpet, it will be subject to all the consequential unraveling.

Curious about some of the species that have appeared in FDR since the Meadows’ return, I set out on a long walk with Holger

Visitors enjoy the trails around South Philly Meadows.

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Not at Our Expense The proposed airport expansion threatens to make flooding worse in Eastwick by bernard brown

T

ed pickett counts himself lucky. He and his wife were home when the flooding started. As Hurricane Isaias dumped rain over the Delaware Valley and Darby Creek crested its banks on August 4, 2020, he and his wife got to work. “We were able to mitigate a real nasty thing,” Pickett says.

For five hours they pushed water through the first floor of their house, on Buist Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia’s Eastwick neighborhood, to the driveway where it could drain.

The water damaged their air conditioning system and ruined sheetrock on the first floor, but insurance paid for repairs, and by the end of December their house was back to normal.

Not all their neighbors have been as lucky. Funding from the City has helped replace hot water tanks and heating systems for some uninsured residents, according to Carolyn Moseley, executive director of the Eastwick United Community Development Corporation. Additional funding is expected to pay for home repairs such as replacing damaged drywall, but the community’s flooding experience has made it wary of development that could exacerbate flooding in the Darby Creek watershed. “We’re afraid of major flooding events and damage they can cause: the loss of life, trauma. People have been flooded repeatedly,” Moseley says.

This is why Moseley and other leaders in Eastwick are keeping a close eye on Philadelphia International Airport’s expansion plans.

The Army Corps of Engineers is currently evaluating the City’s request for permits 26 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 20 22

necessary to complete the airport’s expansion. Moseley has requested that the Corps hold hearings to discuss the potential impact of an airport cargo services expansion on flooding in her neighborhood. “We’re not against the airport expansion, but we don’t want it done at our expense,” she says. The Corps has not yet responded to her request.

The airport seeks to “expand its air cargo facility footprint by 136 acres and almost triple its cargo building square footage from 600,000 to 1.4 million,” according to

the airport’s website (the airport declined to comment for this story while their permits are pending). Much of the new facility expansion will take place on recently purchased wetlands to the west of the airport, and local environmental experts as well as Eastwick leaders are concerned that the loss of the greenspace will make flooding worse in Darby Creek and beyond.

The airport, like Eastwick, sits almost entirely within FEMA’s 1% and .2% floodplains, describing the likelihood of a flood in any given year, based on historical flooding.

When a creek or a river rises over its banks, its floodplain is where the extra water goes.

Any construction or alteration that elevates land above the floodplain or that replaces vegetation with impermeable surfaces like asphalt or concrete can essentially shrink the floodplain. The next time it floods, the waters will have less space to spread out and soak in, forcing them higher.

“Any time you put in new development, it always has an impact, as much as developers or land owners state how they’re meeting all the state requirements,” says Jaclyn Rhoads, the president of the Darby Creek Valley Association and president of the Friends of Heinz Refuge, which sits along Darby Creek upstream from the airport.

P HOTO G RAP HY BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

“Does that mean we never develop? No, but in light of the history of the area, taking wetland away is a bit more egregious.”

The expansion could increase flood risk in the Delaware estuary beyond Darby Creek. “The airport is part of a larger narrative about more fill getting put in the floodplain,” says Joshua Lippert, an environmental advocate in Philadelphia who until recently served as the City’s flood plain manager. In the broader Delaware River floodplain, projects like the capping of I-95 at Penn’s Landing, construction at the Navy Yard, and the airport’s cargo facilities expansion add up to more-intense future flooding in what remains.

The cargo expansion will also have a negative climate impact beyond its watersheds. Greenhouse gasses produced by aircraft make up about 93% of the airport’s

overall emissions. Airplanes are generally the most greenhouse-gas-intensive way to move cargo, producing more than three times the emissions of trucks per unit of cargo over a given distance, more than five times the emissions of trains, and more than 10 times the emissions produced by marine shipping. “Carbon pollution is already changing weather patterns in Philadelphia, but we can make sure that these shifts are as limited as possible by reducing our contributions to climate change,” according to the City’s 2016 Greenworks vision document.

Increasing air cargo traffic to the airport runs contrary to the City’s goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The airport’s planned cargo facility sits five miles west of FDR Park, but it is nonetheless at the center of the park’s renovation.

The core problem that Philadelphia Parks &

potential locations within the Darby Creek watershed. Alternatives noted by Rhoads include 120 acres of undeveloped land next to the refuge. “It’s not officially preserved in any way. Why couldn’t that have been an option?” Rhoads says. “I’m sure it’s a cool project, don’t get me wrong, but it has nothing to do with an area that you are impacting. And guess what, why not do the work at FDR and do the mitigation in the watershed, considering all the added benefits?”

In April 2021 the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) published a final environmental assessment finding that the cargo expansion project would have no significant impact. A letter submitted by Eastwick Friends & Neighbors Coalition, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and the Darby Creek Valley Association as a comment on a draft of the FAA’s finding complained that the assess-

We’re afraid of major flooding events and damage they can cause: the loss of life, trauma.”

— carolyn moseley, executive director of the Eastwick United Community Development Corporation

Left: A view of the Philadelphia International Airport from I-95 shows marshland in the foreground.

Above: Eastwick resident Ted Pickett has been impacted by flooding from Darby Creek.

Recreation seeks to resolve at FDR Park is its low elevation, low enough for groundwater to erode the road surfaces and turn grass into a soggy mess. Most of the park is below high tide on the nearby Delaware River. A tide gate in the Navy Yard is supposed to keep the Delaware’s water from flowing into the tidal Hollander Creek, which drains the park, but let it out as the tide recedes. “[T]he tide gate only partially works,” however, according to the FDR Park Master Plan.

Federal law requires the City, which owns the airport, to “mitigate” the loss of wetlands by creating new wetlands somewhere else, and the City plans to comply by creating 45 acres of wetlands at FDR Park by digging soil out of a currently off-limits, wooded section of the park. All that soil needs to be dumped somewhere, and using it to raise the elevation of much of the park could resolve the groundwater flooding problems. The airport will also repair the tide gate.

Although mitigating the lost wetlands at FDR Park might satisfy federal requirements, local advocates say that the city ignored

ment did not consider impacts on Eastwick.

“There is no mention of the overall and cumulative impacts of the air cargo expansion project on the neighboring community of Eastwick,” the letter says. “Eastwick is an Environmental Justice community overburdened by legacy pollution and with a predominant population of people of color. Impacts include but are likely not limited to increased traffic and noise from the construction and operations, air quality, potential aggravation of flooding conditions, increased disturbance to use and enjoyment of the Heinz Refuge and the health effects that those multiple impacts can lead to.”

“For some reason the airport decided to go in its own direction,” says Earl Wilson, president of the Eastwick Friends & Neighbors Coalition. “The information we were able to put in was pushed to the side or ignored.”

“The results of this make you think, ‘What’s the point?’” says Wilson, promising to fight on. “We are the kind of people who are organized, and we will not quit on these issues.” ◆ J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

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Turf Wars Immigrant communities express concern about the proposed turf fields, and wonder if they will eventually lose access to the space by constance garcia-barrio

D

ebate s roil south Philadelphia about the synthetic soccer fields proposed for historic FDR Park, at the end of the Broad Street subway line. In 2019, the Fairmount Park Conservancy and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation unveiled a master plan that calls for 12 synthetic multipurpose fields at FDR. “The opinion you hear [about the fields] depends on who you ask,” says Alvaro Drake-Cortés, 47, FDR’s liaison to the Latinx community and program manager at The Welcoming Center, a local nonprofit that helps immigrant entrepreneurs.

Drake-Cortés, a South Philly resident and U.S. Army veteran originally from Colombia, played soccer in college and later in the Palumbo League.

“The soccer players prefer grass fields,” 28 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 2022

says Drake-Cortés. “All they want is an even grass surface. On the other hand, any soccer coach will tell you that one of the biggest challenges is finding a place to play.

There aren’t enough, except in the Northeast, which seems to have more green spaces. Low-maintenance synthetic turf fields could help solve the problem. This opportunity will be appreciated by many people.”

La Liga Pattison players line up for a free kick on the pitch at FDR Park during a Sunday game.

Carlos, aka El Chupón (“The Pacifier”), 49, a soccer referee in La Liga Pattison for 14 years, confirmed the scarcity of playing fields. “There is a lack of them,” he says.

“Synthetic fields could help solve the problem, but they’re hot [to play on].”

South Philadelphian Thoai Nguyen, 56, CEO of Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition (SEAMAAC), which has advocated for refugees and immigrants since 1984, has played and coached soccer in South Philly, where he lives.

“Professional teams play on grass,” he says. “It’s easier on your legs, back, and ankles when you’re running for 90 minutes

The soccer players prefer grass fields.

All they want is an even grass surface.”

— alvaro drake -cortés, program manager at The Welcoming Center and FDR Park’s Latinx community liaison P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

I S TO C K P H OTO

because it has give, but maintaining those fields and keeping the grass at the right height and in good condition is expensive.”

Beneath the pros and cons of synthetic turf versus grass lie intangible issues: Would the proposed fields be available to communities that play at FDR now? If turf fields attract professional players, those from outside of Philadelphia, or both, how would their presence affect the social web that the grass fields have long nurtured? What would happen to the many vendors and their families who gain a financial foothold by selling food, clothes and toys?

Current conditions, for example, seem to strengthen families.

“La Liga Pattison is a family league,” explains Eladio Soto, 35, originally from Mexico and owner of El Mezcal Cantina, a restaurant at 1260 Point Breeze Avenue. For 10 years, Soto has served as commissioner of La Liga Pattison, founded 22 years ago.

The league has 40 teams with 30 people on each team. “People come to see their husbands, fathers and boyfriends play. It’s a social time. Vendors come, people eat, children play,” says Soto, a father of two.

“My son used to play regularly before the pandemic,” says Nguyen, of his 10-year-old son. “His interest in the game has waned.

Still, when he and I go out together, it’s our preferred activity.”

Children have a presence in other ways too.

Daniel Rauda, 10, has come to games with his mother, a food vendor, since he was four years old, he says. “I like to spend time playing here with my friends,” Rauda says, pointing to Ronal Contreras, 9, standing beside his blue scooter, and to other boys kicking a soccer ball through the mud.

Families favor the grass surface, according to Drake-Cortés, who makes sure that things run smoothly at Sunday matches. “If you ask family members, they much prefer the grass,” he says. “It feels better.”

Some young people, like Hannah Sor, 19, cite other reasons for their preference. “I usually come as a visitor, but today I’m helping out [at this food stand],” she says. “I like contact with the public. As for grass or turf, there’s no benefit to turf.” Sor’s studies at the Women in Natural Sciences (WINS) program at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University included such issues. “Real grass is better for the environment.”

“I’m also in the environmental science high school,” says Sor’s friend Amaral

SURFACE TENSION

Advocates express concern about artificial turf’s carcinogenic chemicals, contributions to heat island effect and plastic waste by

bernard brown

Much of the opposition to the FDR Park Master Plan centers on the replacement of the open greenspace of the Meadows with the artificial green of 12 synthetic turf athletic fields. Master Plan boosters cite the “playability” of synthetic turf fields, which can host more hours of play per week than natural grass fields. Recent research into the environmental impact of synthetic turf, however, raises questions over whether the fields are worth the cost.

Synthetic turf rose to fame in the 1960s when the Houston Astros installed ChemGrass in the Astrodome. What became known as Astroturf spread to other professional sports stadiums (including Veterans Stadium) through the 1970s before teams started switching back to grass, often motivated by injuries to players. Astroturf fields consisted of a carpet of plastic grass blades over a shock absorbent pad.

In 1992, a renaissance in baseball stadium architecture began, and multi-purpose stadiums with turf were systematically replaced by stadiums with grass. More recent versions of synthetic turf are made from a carpet filled in with loose, springy material, often manufactured from recycled tires, and these “infill” style synthetic turf fields have been growing in popularity, with baseball teams such as the Arizona Diamondbacks coming back to synthetic turf recently. According to the Synthetic Turf Council, there are more than 8,000 fields in the United States.

In 2019 the Ecology Center, in collaboration with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), reported finding toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), sometimes called “forever chemicals,” in synthetic turf samples as well as in wetlands next to discarded turf. These findings have added to the list of environmental concerns around synthetic turf playing fields and raise questions about Philadelphia Parks & Recreation’s increasing use of the surfaces, including at FDR Park.

PFAS, a family of more than 6,000 chemicals, have been linked to a variety of human health problems, including reduced fertility, developmental problems in children and some cancers. The chemicals are often used to make substances less sticky, as in clothing, food packaging, or the surfaces of frying pans (Teflon is the brand name of a compound in the PFAS family).

According to industry literature reviewed by the Ecology Center and PEER, they are used to keep the blades of plastic grass in synthetic turf fields from sticking to manufacturing equipment.

PFAS take a long time to break down. This persistence can be useful in the nonstick surface on a cooking pan or as a stain barrier on fabrics or carpets. It also means that the chemicals can remain in the environment, and in human bodies, for decades. Their presence in firefighting foams has complicated the development of military sites such as Bucks County’s Willow Grove, where PFAS have built up in the soil and contaminated local drinking water.

“We need to assume those chemicals are present in any turf field you can find,” says Sarah Evans, assistant professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The ways PFAS get from the environment into bodies are unclear in general, but children playing on contaminated fields could ingest the substances that get on their hands while playing, for example when they adjust a mouthguard. Friction burns sometimes called “turf burn” are common injuries on synthetic fields. “Chemicals on the turf can get directly absorbed through those wounds,” Evans says.

The EPA is in the process of studying PFAS and developing regulations. Pennsylvania is developing regulations for some PFAS in drinking water, but there are currently no regulatory limits to their use in synthetic turf fields, leaving it to recreational space managers such as Parks & Recreation to C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 1 ➤

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Lopez, 16. “Keep the green grass to help [prevent] climate change.”

At present, selling food and handicrafts to soccer fans fosters solid relationships and financial health for some families. “Entire families come to work as a unit to contribute to their business, including parents and young and adolescent children, so you’ll see ‘all hands on deck’ in the morning to set up equipment,” says Drake-Cortés. “As a parent and former educator, I especially enjoy seeing our entrepreneurs’ children being involved in the family business. They bring articles to customers. They help straighten out inventory. And when they feel like it, they also play in the midst of all that commercial activity.”

First-year vendor Yesid Marcos Vargas, who sells arepas, has flourished. “Being part of the market has allowed us to find new business opportunities,” he says.

As things stand, soccer is the world’s most popular sport. According to the World

The grass fields maintain our values. You play, you shout, you get dirty. That’s natural. That’s as it should be.”

— E ladio S oto, commissioner of La Liga Pattison

Population Review, it has about 3.5 billion fans worldwide and 250 million players across 200 countries. And it helps knit together diverse immigrant community.

“There are families from El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia and Brazil,” says Soto.

“There are Africans and Asians, too.”

Nguyen gained a wider community through soccer.

“I played on an international team until I had a bad ankle fracture in 2015,” he says.

“You have Colombians, Africans, Italians, Koreans and Brazilians playing in these leagues, becoming friends,” says Nguyen, who came to Philadelphia from Vietnam with his family in 1975. “It creates this

amazing sense of community.”

No matter one’s native tongue, soccer on FDR’s grass fields represent a lingua franca, a way to deepen one’s connection to other immigrant groups and smooth the adjustment to the United States. “Soccer provides a gateway to help immigrants enter this American life,” says Drake-Cortés.

For Nguyen, the game promotes acquaintance and equity on another level as well.

“I’ve played on teams committed to the inclusion of women players,” he says, noting that the teams sometimes used fields at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’ve also cocoached all-female teams. They play hard.”

The question of tradition, and, perhaps,

Milagros del Carmen prepares arepas at a market for spectators of Sunday soccer matches.

30 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2022

P HOTO G RAP HY BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

bonds with a distant homeland, come into play. “The grass fields maintain our values,” Soto says. “You play, you shout, you get dirty. That’s natural. That’s as it should be. Otherwise, we are losing our values.”

Beyond a supportive environment, the question of access to the proposed turf fields, especially for people of color, looms large for Nguyen. “In my experience, well-maintained playing fields, be they for baseball, soccer or other sports, are under lock and key,” he says. “The general public can’t use them. Under those circumstances, Black, Brown and Asian players are often shut out.”

The City needs money to pay for the fields and later, to maintain them, Nguyen adds.

“There are different grades of synthetic fields,” he says. “If you use top-of-the-line technology, it’s going to cost you money. It makes sense to charge a nominal fee to help pay for them, but the rental or maintenance fee shouldn’t shut people out. If the City controls the fields, there’s a better chance of democratic access. With City control, there’s a better chance that people like me can participate, a better chance to rectify inequities.”

Should the City decide to give control of the proposed fields to other organizations, it must be able to require use by different groups, Nguyen stresses. “If civic groups and private entities control a field, they should have to follow certain criteria. You cannot discriminate against people because you don’t like them. Contracts with the City must have a proviso to ensure accessibility, equity and democratic use of the fields. How the City decides to move forward will determine who has access to the fields. Politics and race always play a big part in sports.”

It troubles Nguyen that plans for synthetic soccer fields at FDR often overshadow more pressing concerns. “There is so much need for community-accessible urban agriculture and community-shared spaces, such as permaculture gardens, community kitchens, greenhouses, orchards, and vending and market spaces for the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the city,” he says. “It’s an absolute disservice to this community if you are ignoring people’s need for open public green space, food security and food sovereignty.”

Meanwhile, Soto worries that synthetic turf will result in La Liga Pattison being squeezed out. “We’re a growing league,” he says. “We want to start a team for children.

We want the city to let us stay there, not take us out of there. That’s my main worry.” ◆

SURFACE TENSION (CONT’D) protect the public.

Grid reached out to Parks & Recreation to ask whether they would be testing synthetic turf fields for PFAS and what the plan was if the tests came back positive. A departmental spokesperson responded but did not directly answer the question: “Just like with the new playground surface, and other recreational facilities in the plan, the ground covering is being designed with children’s safety at the forefront. Philadelphia Parks & Recreation follows all local, state and national regulations regarding field safety and maintenance.”

PFAS exposure adds to the list of public health concerns associated with synthetic turf, which include higher injury rates, high temperatures and exposure to toxic chemicals from ground-up tires and other synthetic materials used as fill at the base of the plastic grass blades.

A review of 306 chemicals found in recycled tire fill found that 197 were potentially carcinogenic and, of those, “52 chemicals were also classified as known, presumed or suspected carcinogens” by the EPA or the European Chemicals Agency.

Fill as well as torn-off blades gradually wash away in the rain and get carried away on players’ clothing and shoes, making it a steady source of plastic pollution in the surrounding landscape.

A recent study of high school athletes found that injuries were 58% more common on synthetic turf than on natural grass. Higher injury rates have led the NFL Players Association to call on owners to switch all fields to natural surfaces.

Synthetic turf fields can also contribute to heat-related illnesses for athletes. In hot weather the plastic blades and black rubber fill absorb the sun’s energy and radiate it much like an asphalt roof or parking lot.

David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment, whose child plays flag football, recalled attending a game on a synthetic field in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “I was wilting, and I was just standing on the sideline, not even playing.”

Temperatures on artificial turf can be at least 30 degrees hotter than natural grass, in one Utah study hitting 200 degrees on a 98-degree day.

Penn State researchers comparing alternative synthetic turf carpet and fill found that in sunny conditions with air temperatures in the 70s, all the synthetic turf samples topped 155 degrees.

“The other thing that is important to think about particularly in Philly is that these fields act as heat islands,” Evans says. “Parks and green spaces provide cooling in the summer, so if you put in a synthetic turf field, you’re losing that and you’re making a hotter neighborhood, and with climate change that’s really something you do not want to be doing.”

Synthetic turf fields last about 10 years, after which they become a disposal challenge, expensive to dump in a landfill. Currently there is only one facility in the world that recycles synthetic turf, and it is in Denmark. A Parks & Recreation

spokesperson did not directly respond to Grid’s question about how the fields would be disposed of after the end of their lifespan.

Both the Fairmount Park Conservancy and Parks & Recreation responded to Grid’s questions about why the fields are planned to be synthetic by emphasizing the surface’s “playability.” Natural surface fields need time to recover after heavy use, and often can’t be used at all in wet weather, limiting their availability to about 20 hours per week. Synthetic turf allows more use per field, although the cost per hour played is about the same thanks to the lower lifetime cost (taking into account installation and maintenance costs) of natural turf.

The 12 synthetic turf fields at FDR Park will cost about $76 million to build, according to the Master Plan. “For that money you could put soccer fields all over the city,” Masur says. “How do we get the most bang for our buck as taxpayers?”

It is unclear how much of the $76 million is budgeted for landscaping and preparing the fill deposited on top of the Meadows, but in general synthetic turf fields cost several times as much to install as natural grass. A comparison of fields in the Willamette Valley in Oregon found that the average installation cost of natural grass fields in the study was $324,900, while that of the synthetic turf fields was $1,212,200.

The 12 synthetic turf fields figure into Philadelphia’s bid to host games during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, fueling suspicions that the choice of materials has more to do with the demands of special events than the needs of Philadelphians.

The Fairmount Park Commission addresses this concern on its Master Plan website, saying that any amenities developed for the World Cup will serve park users after the event. The FAQs as well as budget materials in the Master Plan, though, point to a more significant way that the synthetic turf fields will serve the interests of people from outside the city.

“The FDR Plan proposes that in order to sustain the park’s operational budget, the fields would be used by tournaments 20 weekends a year—with the full 12 fields only used on the first day of each tournament. Thereby, even during those 20 weekends a year, the public is still able to use some of the fields on Saturdays and Sundays during tournaments,” according to an FAQ on the Master Plan website. Of course 20 weekends a year takes up just over half of the weekends outside of the winter, and it is unclear how many fields would be used after the first day of a tournament.

“The funds from the fields will go back into the maintenance and upkeep of FDR Park,” according to an FAQ on the Master Plan website. The projected operating budgets in the Master Plan aim to cover all of FDR Park’s operating expenses with earned revenue, and a little under a quarter of that revenue is projected to be from rentals and permits, which includes field rentals. ◆

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A PARK FOR THE PEOPLE

Beyond Compare A legendary fruit was born on the land the City wishes to bury by christopher r. dougherty

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n one of the world’s most polluted urban watersheds, in the shadow of shuttered refineries, stands FDR Park, a miraculous sliver of natural topography.

The City intends to use it as something of a retaining wall supporting vast elevated terraces topped with artificial turf fields.

When development projects are proposed on City-owned land, the City is supposed to conduct a cultural resource assay.

Plans to develop FDR Park, then, prompt the question: Is anything there worth saving for cultural reasons? The answer, it turns out, is a resounding yes: On the South Philly golf course that has become the 32 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 22

beloved South Philly Meadows, just west of the fairway and green of the 15th hole, the world-famous Seckel pear was born.

“…the finest pear of this or any other country” is born The turf fields will obliterate what was known in the 18th century as Mason’s Hill, a slight rise overlooking where Shedbrook Creek once met Hollander Creek. It was land that—dry amidst the marsh—would have likely attracted Lenape and Swedish habitation. Using your mind’s eye to disappear the interstate and the Navy Yard, you can imagine this hill affording fine views of Hollander Creek flowing to the back channel.

By the 1760s, two German families lived on the banks of Hollander Creek, taking advantage of the excellent farming on the small marginal uplands bathed by the tides. On the southwest flank of Mason’s Hill lived Lorenz Seckel. On the eastern side of Hollander lived Jacob Weiss. In the mid-18th century, Weiss was growing—and guarding—a stash of new pear trees, which he carefully distributed to friends and family. It is surmised that Weiss shared these pears with his countryman, but Seckel was less discriminating in his distribution, and the delicious new variety was soon being marketed under his name.

The fruit had garnered such acclaim by 1817 that the noted New Jersey pomologist William Coxe was already asserting in “A View of the Cultivation of Fruit Trees” that the Seckel pear “is in the general estimation of amateurs of fine fruit, both natives and foreigners, the finest pear of this or any other country.”

In 1819 Alexander Hamilton’s attending physician and botanist David Hosack sent specimens of the Seckel to the Horticultural Society of London, noting its Philadelphia origin. English pomologists declared it “one of the best fall-ripening pears,” and the fruit fast became an emblem of national pride.

The fruit’s image was further burnished by a high-profile endorsement: the noted landscape architectural tastemaker Andrew Jackson Downing praised the pear’s fine flavor and touted its suitability for domestic gardens. In an extended footnote in “The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America” Downing relates that on “a fine strip of land near the Delaware” Jacob Weiss first grew a pear of “high flavour … as yet unsurpassed, in this respect by any European sort,” proving “the natural congeniality of the climate of the northern states to this fruit.” Downing further notes that Stephen Girard, an industrious agronomist who managed a plethora of properties in Passyunk Township, likely recognized the parcel’s historic value, and purchased it. “The original tree still exists (or did a few years ago), vigorous and fruitful,” reports Downing, further noting to its longevity that “specimens of its pears, were quite lately, exhibited at the annual shows of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.”

Girard snapped up Lawrence Seckel’s 108 acres and 70 parcels, comprising an area known as “Schuylkill Point meadows,” at a sheriff ’s sale in 1832. As Downing mentions, the Pennsylvania Hor-

I L LU S T R AT I O N F R O M “ T H E F R U I T S O F A M E R I C A ,” P U B L I S H E D 1 8 5 1 BY C . M . H OV E Y

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ticultural Society found Girard’s orchard management superb with “universal health among the trees” noted during a tour. Girard’s property, “situated on the Neck between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers” also contained “the original Seckel pear tree, from which has been propagated the most luscious pear in existence.”

The old Seckel farmstead, occupied by a tenant of the Girard estate, became the site of many a pomological pilgrimage in the 19th century. In 1849, the year the American Congress of Fruit Growers unanimously affirmed that the Seckel was “worthy of general cultivation,” the horticulturalist Dr. W. D. Brinckle reported in “The Cultivator” that “the original tree still stands on the banks of the Delaware, three and a half miles below Philadelphia.” Dr. Brinckle described the tree as about 30 feet tall, about two feet in circumference, and “hollow and decayed on one side.”

Dispatches on the tree’s health continued to flow to horticultural journals. The correspondent Jafet, admitting that information regarding the tree’s existence from an old “Necker” “began to haunt” him, wrote of his visit to the ancient tree in the September 1880 edition of the “Gardener’s Monthly.” Coming upon the telltale markers he was told to expect — “the old stone house, the sloping meadow and the ditch” — he encountered a Mr. Bastian, tenant farmer current custodian of the declining pear tree.

“The fraction of all that remains of the old stormbeaten, ancestral Seckel Pear is 26 feet in height,” Jafet reported. Publisher of Gardener’s Monthly Charles H. Marot also sold photographs of the tree, urging readers in advertisements to “secure something more than a mere tradition.”

The archaeologist’s quest to document the famous tree When Dr. Henry Mercer, the noted archaeologist, artist and preservationist, set off in search of the Seckel in 1909, he was embarking on another sortie in his lifelong rearguard action against the leveling effect of industrial modernity. Like Jafet, Dr. Mercer was moved to explore Philadelphia’s low country, and with historian Anthony Hance he visited the Seckel pear’s stump several times in 1909. Bounding amidst sodden “land being reclaimed from river silt by man’s genius and mastery of engineering,” they still found ancient references to guide them. Hance told Mercer about the venerable Cannonball House then standing on the other side of the Schuylkill, so named because it bore the ballistic remains of the

British violence wrought during the siege of Fort Mifflin in 1777. It was demolished by the City in the 1990s.

A year before Hance and Mercer’s adventure, pomologist H. P. Gould of the U.S. Department of Agriculture had visited the site. Learning that the tree had been dealt a final, deadly blow by a storm in 1905, Gould photographed the old Seckel homestead and the location of the stump in 1908. He erected a whitewashed marker at the site of the submerged stump; this allowed Mercer and Hance to remove a relic of the tree to the Bucks County Historical Society.

Mercer and Hance returned in April 1909 — with the permission of the Girard Estate — to take 12 grafts from the nearest living relative of the old progenitor, some of which made their way back to Mercer’s Fonthill estate.

[The Seckel is] the finest pear of this or any other country.”

— william coxe , 19th century New Jersey pomologist

A map from 1808 of historic roads leading down from Mason’s Hill to the “Sickle” [sic] Estate. Right: the same land today with a South Philly Meadows path.

P HOTO BY C H R IS BA K ER EV E N S

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With the anthropogenic mud rising, Mercer was observing above-ground cultural artifacts slowly become archaeology in real time. So they wisely triangulated “the old tree between 24th and 25th streets on 42nd avenue in the 36th Ward” on a 1909 map.

With our access to digital cartographic resources, 21st-century Seckel seekers can now determine that the likely location of the Seckel homestead was the green of the old 15th hole, with the first Seckel pear growing near the fairway of the 14th hole.

Most of these spaces will be excavated and filled to the height of Mason’s Hill, forming a broad plateau of artificial turf fields terminating abruptly at an inaccessible 45-acre wetland.

Contrary to the belief of park master planners, the small knob of neck land called Mason’s Hill remained unchanged for most of the 20th century. Philadelphia-based Curtis Publishing Company’s “Farm Journal” urged visitors to the sesquicentennial

to “walk or drive” to the corner of League Island Park to tread the ground that bore the first Seckel pear. Portions of Mason’s farm were incorporated into the League Island Golf Course itself, preserving this space for nearly three centuries. But the way the official League Island Historic District is delineated, nothing west of 20th Street has ever been surveyed for historic or archaeological resources. This despite the fact that the U.S. Navy recognized the Seckel pear’s origins nearby in their 1988 Environmental Impact Statement for a proposed trash-tosteam plant at Girard Point.

Like islands in the marsh, the story of Philadelphia’s own indisputably homegrown fruit gets concealed but always reemerges. The FDR Park plan’s failure to identify and draw strength from this foundational story of urban agriculture is a loss.

One no less grievous than the destruction of an 18th-century pastoral landscape tucked away for 300 years. The Seckel pear is South Philly born and raised, no matter whether the landscape of its birth is marred by mit-

igation wetlands and artificial turf.

Nearly every seeker of the Seckel has opined as to why this plot of earth gave rise to the fruit, and it all comes down to the delicate interplay of land and water — of seeds caught in tidal surges and deposited on the sides of our fertile hillock. Encoded in that seed’s journey, too, is the true way forward for the design of this park: islands of permaculture in the meadows. ◆ For ten years, Christopher R. Dougherty worked for the Fairmount Park Commission as a Historic Preservation Specialist, with Philadelphia Parks & Recreation as a Park Manager and the Fairmount Park Conservancy as project manager working in cultural resource and capital project management throughout the 12,000 acres of Philadelphia’s parks. Before leaving the Fairmount Park Conservancy in 2017 he managed the project scoping and design consultant selection for the FDR Park Master Plan. He has an MS in City & Regional Planning from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

A cherry tree to the left of the former Seckel homestead, is a testament to how fruiting trees can naturally sprout in an undisturbed meadow.

34 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2022

P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

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Risky Business Philadelphia is rolling the dice building turf fields on a floodplain, warns former City floodplain manager by

bernard brown

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looding is the reason for the FDR Park master plan. It also could be its undoing.

No one denies that FDR Park has been growing soggier over the years. Paths that once led walkers around the “lakes” now run through marshy ground at the edge of the water. Stormwater flows off of I-95 and the surface streets bounding the park. Water seeping up through the ground erodes road surfaces. Chronic flooding of the golf course led Philadelphia Parks & Recreation to close it in 2019.

The question, according to Joshua Lippert, an environmental advocate in Philadelphia who until recently served as the city’s flood plain manager, is whether it is

worth putting any new development in the path of what is sure to be worsening flooding as global warming raises sea levels and brings more intense storms to Philadelphia.

Although it is conventional to refer to a fixed “sea level” when discussing elevation or the impact of rising water levels, the sea rises and falls twice a day with the tides, and those tides push water up Philadelphia’s rivers. FDR Park is shaped roughly like a square basin with much of its surface below high tide on the nearby Delaware River. A tide gate at the Navy Yard keeps water from flowing into the tidal Hollander Creek, which drains the park, but lets it out as the tide recedes. “[T]he tide gate only partially works,” however, according to the FDR Park master plan (p. 35). With global warming lifting tides

A wetland seen from a pedestrian bridge that connects the trails of the South Philly Meadows.

36 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 20 22

P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

C O U R T E S Y O F H AG L E Y M U S E U M ’ S C O L L E C T I O N O F DA L L I N A E R O S U R V E Y C O. P H OTO G R A P H S

higher on the Delaware and producing heavier, flooding storms, the park is bound to get even soggier.

The renovations outlined in the master plan address the kind of flooding the park sees routinely. The Philadelphia International Airport will excavate new wetlands at FDR Park (to mitigate the loss of wetlands near the airport thanks to a cargo services expansion). Earth excavated as part of the wetlands project will be used to elevate other sections of the park high enough to avoid groundwater flooding. The airport will also repair the tide gate.

Nonetheless the park will still be vulnerable to water flooding in from the Delaware. Most of the park sits inside a FEMA special flood hazard zone, which has a 1% chance of flooding in a given year (formerly known as a “100 year” floodplain). More of the park sits inside the 0.2% flood hazard zone (formerly the “500 year” floodplain).

These are areas at risk of flooding during a major coastal storm like a hurricane or tropical storm, when heavy winds push water inland.

Virtually everything built in FDR Park is vulnerable to this kind of storm damage and will only become more vulnerable with time, says Lippert.

Global warming and its resulting sea level rise will increase the odds of a hazardous flooding in a given year, though how much depends on whether the world successfully limits emissions. Average sea level is projected to increase by about a foot in 30 years, and as much as seven feet by the end of this century according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Flooding will become more frequent. NOAA predicts that “major (often destructive)” flooding will happen five times as often as it does today in 2050, and “moderate (typically damaging)” flooding 10 times as often.

The Master Plan proposes several structures in the park, including elevated boardwalks, a pavilion, a new maintenance building and concession stands. Historic buildings like the bathhouses at the southeast corner of the park and the guardhouse at the northeast corner will be repurposed for public use. The city is taking measures to make at least some of these buildings less vulnerable to flooding. For example the guardhouse, which is being turned into a welcome center, will have mechanical and electrical systems relocated from the

A 1929 aerial shot of the land that became FDR Park. Mason’s Hill is visible to the center left; the triangular-shaped area could be the remains of an orchard.

The more we increase risk, the more it increases all kinds of costs.”

— joshua lippert, environmental advocate and former City flood plain manager

basement to the third floor and flood-proof materials in low areas of the building, according to Cari Feiler Bender, a public relations consultant for the Fairmount Park Conservancy, the nonprofit hired by the city to implement the master plan.

For a preview of what a major coastal storm can do to urban parks, Philadelphians can look north. At the end of October 2012, Hurricane Sandy ripped through New York City, flooding nearly 5,700 acres of park and causing nearly $800 million in damage.

As New Yorkers learned, the damage extended beyond buildings. Synthetic turf fields, for example, were wrecked by the storm’s flooding. According to the NYC Parks Design and Planning for Flood Resiliency guidelines (pp. 121-123), there are two kinds of synthetic turf fields—carpet and infill—and both are vulnerable to severe damage from floodwaters. Infill fields have a layer of loose rubber material filling amid the plastic grass blades, and this layer can wash away. Floodwaters mixed with sewage or chemical pollution can contaminate the infill materials, and flooding can loosen the seams holding sections of the field together.

Flooding can also loosen the seams of carpet style fields, which use a layer of padding

beneath the carpet of plastic grass blades.

“Synthetic turf is generally not recommended for installation in the floodplain,” according to the NYC Parks guidelines.

Natural turf, by contrast, “is a resilient surface for the floodplain.” Real grass requires more routine maintenance than synthetic turf fields and can be damaged by storms.

“Natural turf is, however, inexpensive to restore and is better to use in floodplain parks than many costlier materials.”

The FDR Park master plan calls for 12 synthetic turf fields. According to Feiler Bender, it is too early in the planning process to say at what elevation above sea level they will be built and what kind of synthetic turf they will be. The master plan estimates that the turf fields will cost $76 million to build.

Overall the FDR Park construction costs are projected at $197 million. It is impossible to say exactly how much it will cost to repair and restore them and other expensive park elements after a major coastal storm like Sandy, but by choosing to place them in the path of coastal flooding, the city puts Philadelphia taxpayers on the hook to pay for the cleanup. Lippert says, “The more we increase risk, the more it increases all kinds of costs.” ◆ J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 37

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Gentrification Through Conservancy A Temple resarcher explains how private money for public spaces normalizes inequality by bernard brown

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t’s hard to find someone with anything bad to say about the High Line, the abandoned elevated train track that reopened in 2009 as a park after years of organizing by advocates in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.

In 2019, before the pandemic, the High Line drew 8 million visitors a year. It has been a critical smash hit, too. “The civic and aesthetic marvel of the High Line never gets old, which is strange. Everything else does,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker when a new section of the park opened to the public.

But in his new book, “Parks for Profit,” Temple sociologist Kevin Loughran has taken aim at not only the High Line but also two other recent post-industrial parks, the 606/ Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago and Buffalo Bayou in Houston, arguing that the neoliberal agendas behind the parks’ development as well as the role of private groups in parks development lead to inequitable outcomes.

Philadelphia has seen its own privately driven parks projects recently, including the renovation of the Cobbs Creek golf courses as well as the planned renovation of FDR Park.

This May, Grid reporter Bernard Brown talked with Loughran about the book and how Philadelphians can apply its lessons.

Everyone loves the High Line! What could be wrong with it? I think that’s one of the core issues with a lot of these new parks, that the spaces themselves can be quite lovely and engaging. But it’s the politics behind them that is troubling and I think that that isn’t always apparent. If you’re just a regular person, and you are visiting a park, you’re not necessarily being introduced to the po38 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2022

litical background. You’re not necessarily aware of who might manage the space and all that goes into that.

So who benefits from parks like these? The people who benefit are certainly anyone who has some kind of meaningful investment in what we would call the symbolic economy of the city. So people who are invested in generating tourism, people who are invested in driving cultural industries, people who are invested in the prestige of a city. In sociology we talk about the idea of an urban growth machine being this kind of an assemblage of the public and private elites who may have differing points of view on political issues, may look at urban planning issues differently. They may have very different kinds of economic interests, but they all kind of converge around this idea of “growth is good.” In one way or another, they want to drive the idea of Philadelphia forward. They want to drive the idea of Chicago forward. They want a place that is a commodity on the global stage.

These are spaces that are tied to postindustrial decline, and we know that the consequences of that are devastating for people who had their whole livelihoods tied up in those economies and now they’re gone. But the spaces have remained. The railroads, the factories. I think that’s partly why they’ve served as such attractive redevelopment opportunities for the urban elites, because it’s like you don’t have to displace people in a direct way.

They’re not building the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Exactly. We’re not tearing down a neighborhood for something like that. So

it sort of becomes an opportunity to just say, “Hey, we can weave these new forms of capital into this existing environment.”

I think they trade on a lot of the symbolism of parks, the ideas around nature and beauty and civic engagement. The idea that parks are for everyone. I think that those are false. Those are ideas that have been co-opted increasingly by private groups.

This struck me as the most challenging claim you make, that private parks groups aren’t working in the public interest. Whether it’s the Central Park Conservancy or the Fairmount Park Conservancy, Friends of the High Line, all of these groups exist because of those same forces of economic retrenchment that created the de-industrialized urban environment in the first place.

We’ve also had 50 years of reductions in all kinds of public works budgets in U.S. cities. Private park groups serve their donors.

They don’t serve the public. They serve the other privileged urbanites who get to benefit from these kinds of spaces.

I don’t think that there’s really a good reason for these groups to exist other than normalizing neoliberalism. Why can’t we just give more money to the parks department and have them make the park as nice as we want it to be?

It seems very natural for a bunch of neighbors to say, “Hey, we want to get together and raise money to improve our park,” especially when the City doesn’t seem to have money to do it. What is the right response?

I don’t necessarily think that everyone who has that impulse has bad intentions, that everyone who volunteers with the Friends of the Wissahickon, for example, is a bad person. I think it’s very understandable that a lot of people would gravitate towards those groups because they’re part of this

Kevin Loughran, author of “Parks for Profit,” next to the Kitchens Lane bridge at Wissahickon Valley Park.

fabric and, if you live in Mount Airy, the Friends of the Wissahickon is everywhere.

It’s not like they’re walking around with MAGA red hats, but I think that it’s about advocacy. It’s about forcing the City to do something different and having a political mobilization that is a genuine social movement, that’s not something that is going to just shore up the already existing privileges.

Because, guess what? In Mount Airy we are very privileged. And yes, it’s nice to be involved very locally and be engaged in your own neighborhood, in your own community, but we’re part of a huge city that has a very uneven level of park development and park access. I think those energies would be much better spent mobilizing a general push for more money for parks.

The idea that collectively we don’t have those resources just seems false to me, when there’s clearly so much private monP HOTO BY C H R IS BA K ER EV E N S

Those private groups do nothing to address the equity issues. What we’re talking about is racism.”

— kevin l oughran, Temple sociologist and author of “Parks for Profit” ey that people are willing to put in these private park groups.

Those private groups do nothing to address the equity issues. What we’re talking about is racism. We’re talking about historical underdevelopment. Communities of color have had very little parks investment historically. They don’t have the same access to the sort of friends groups, and all of those private resources.

When we hear someone coming up with an idea for a park, whether a renovation of existing space or a brand new park, what

questions should we be asking? Where’s the money coming from? Who’s controlling it? Who’s managing the space? Is this a bunch of private money that’s coming in, and then is it a private group that’s going to then control the space? How does this project address accumulated racial inequalities in terms of park access? How is this park going to invite diverse users and uses?

Once you start allowing these private groups to take ownership of the spaces, where does that ownership stop? Where does the public draw the line and say, “No, this is ours”? ◆ J UN E 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 39

My hope is that the work I do, as a domestic educator, validates women from where they stand— in their own homes. It’s normal to feel silenced and suppress domestic frustration for the sake of the family or relationships. No one wants to rock the boat if they are afraid they might fall in the water. And, if you don’t don’t feel supported, the ship might go under. Big picture: learn how to swim.

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One of my favorite parts of the job is teaching an open-minded man how to clean. I help them understand the value of domestic work by honoring the work that came before. Not only by appreciating their newly learned skills, but giving thanks and reverence to the work done by the hands of the women throughout their whole lives. Be part of women’s liberation by learning how to ease the systemic pressures that fall on the majority of women. I can help.

Step back and look at the domestic problem. Many times, we want shortcuts to remedy the symptoms of clutter because the real issues are too hard to face, namely, how the mess and clutter happened in the first place. When we acknowledge that we can be messy and apathetic toward major issues, we can then take the first steps on a path of clarity, healthy decision-making, and control over our homes. Rather than shuffling items and issues from one place to another, we begin the real, lasting work.

Most times when I am working with a client, they just need someone there to talk through how to approach their clutter, come up with a strategy and give them a little push in the right direction.

So many people feel overwhelmed at home and can’t seem to find a good flow. I can help. - Lois Volta

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Environmental health is a human issue Nina Smoker (MES ’18) has been interested in the intersection of human health and the environment since she observed the impact of a coal plant on the air quality in Bosnia, where she was born. In Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies (MES) program, she augmented her undergraduate environmental science degree with courses in epidemiology and opportunities to develop her communication skills. “I didn’t feel pigeonholed at Penn,” she says. “I was able to really lean into that intersection of humanities and environment and health and science.”

Nina Smoker MES ‘18

Virtual Café Join the MES program team from 12-1 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month for an online chat about your interests and goals.

Log in with us.

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Now a senior project manager for a consulting firm, Nina draws on her writing abilities to make a clear and persuasive case for environmental due diligence.

“Going on site visits opened my eyes,” she says. “It’s really exciting to talk to the people who are making things for our country, and see how hard they work every day and how much they do want to care about environment,” she says. “At the end of the day, people want to be better and do better, especially when it comes to health and safety.”

To learn more about Nina’s work and research in different aspects of human health and the environment, visit:

www.upenn.edu/grid