On Saturday, Philadelphia Cambodians observed Ancestors Day, the reunion of ancestral spirits with the living. It’s the holiest day of the year in Cambodian Buddhism, and, for the first time in South Philly, it was celebrated at a Buddhist temple that looks like a Buddhist temple. Under a canopy outside the newly renovated Preah Buddha [...]
From CP:
In early 2007, the East Park Revitalization Alliance (EPRA), a community nonprofit in Strawberry Mansion, decided to tackle the nutrition vacuum in the neighborhood, one of Philly’s poorest. A produce stand comes to an adjacent neighborhood, but only once a week, and only during the growing season. To really get any food besides the [...]
The Francisville section of lower North Philly has remained largely untouched by the sort of development that tends to usher in gentrification. But at a neighborhood meeting on Friday, 95 percent of attendees voted to allow chic developer Onion Flats to build a super-sustainable five-story residential building at the long-overgrown corner of 19th and Wylie [...]
Last Wednesday morning, Dennis Crowley received a text message from his employees at the Gold Standard Café saying that their building had received a radical new paint job. The café, at 48th and Baltimore streets, was in its fourth week of operation. By the time Crowley arrived, employees had begun removing the splotches of silver. [...]
Brett Mandel looks well-rested. He’s not: For the past four days, the candidate for controller has been in the midst of 100 hours of nearly nonstop campaigning with three-hour “catnaps” at night. But to see him sitting at Zeke’s Café on Fifth and Spruce streets, sipping iced tea with his campaign team, you wouldn’t know [...]
Finnigan’s Wake may be Northern Liberties’ last bastion of working-class pubbery. The walls are spattered with union stickers and pro-police and military ephemera, and it was a fitting place for DA candidate Dan McCaffery to hold what turned out to be a concession party. McCaffery was the endorsee of unions and, judging by the crowd, [...]
Last week, a young waitress ambled about the sidewalk outside Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steak House, holding a tray of white sample drinks and offering them to passers-by. She was surrounded on all sides by shouting picketers — subcontractors who worked to renovate Del Frisco’s historic building, and say they are still owed $6 million. [...]
When Evi Numen sent me the portrait she had taken of me for her upcoming series, I was struck by how sickly and sullen I looked. For Numen, that’s a good thing: The unnamed exhibit, part of a number of senior thesis projects for Penn MFA students being shown at the Crane Arts Building, is [...]
In 2005, as the homicide rate in Philadelphia rose frighteningly, the Street administration had an idea. It would take the highly reputed Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, a program that closely monitors youths age 15 to 24 at high risk of “killing or being killed,” and adapt it to a younger group. The new program would [...]
If the judge had known that Rasheed Scrugs would kill a police officer five months after his arrest, maybe he would have jailed Scrugs after his third bench warrant, or decided that his lengthy rap sheet should prohibit bail altogether.
But all the judge saw (beyond Scrugs’ prior record) was a minor case of stolen property, [...]