North Philadelphia : In The News

Bilenky Cycle Works, the legendary Olney custom bike builders headed up by Steve Bilenky (and his beard), is the subject of a wonderful short film by Bicycling magazine, directed by Andrew David Watson.

Long before the resurgence of "handmade everything" Stephen Bilenky started a career as a custom bicycle builder. 30 years later, Stephen is still creating works of art in his gritty north philadelphia workshop.

Original source: Bicycling magazine
Click here to watch the mini-documentary.

Many young latino readers are noticing a dearth of diverse protagonists in available books. The New York Times visits a Philadelphia-area school to examine this issue.

At Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia, a school where three-quarters of the students are Latino, Kimberly Blake, a third-grade bilingual teacher, said she struggles to find books about Latino children that are “about normal, everyday people.” The few that are available tend to focus on stereotypes of migrant workers or on special holidays. “Our students look the way they look every single day of the year,” Ms. Blake said, “not just on Cinco de Mayo or Puerto Rican Day.”

Original source: The New York Times

An iconic mural of artist Dox Thrash, located in western North Philadelphia, was recently destroyed. The Atlantic Cities investigates.

The Thrash mural, located on the side of an abandoned house at 2442 Cecil B. Moore Avenue, depicted the artist working in his studio in a style mirroring his own beloved carborundum process. Eric Okdeh and Calvin Jones painted it in 2001 to coincide with a Thrash exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Later, it became part of MAP's public tour of 47 murals that “uniquely capture the rich African American experience in Philadelphia,” featuring a podcast narrated by none other than ?uestlove. So why did it mysteriously disappear?

Original Source: The Atlantic Cities
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Philadelphia sisters Claire and Nikka Landau and friend Jason Tucker have established PhilaSoup as a monthly dinner bringing together dynamic educators to fund the most ambitious and innovative projects, reports NPR.

On a recent Sunday night, the trio of friends welcomed about 45 teachers and other members of the local education community to a cozy gathering at the University Barge Club, a 19th-century boathouse on the banks of the Schuylkill River. As folks walked in, they were asked to fill out name tags -- with their names and the names of their favorite children's books.

"Teachers all over Philadelphia are doing terrific projects," Claire said. "It's really exciting to gather and break bread with teachers from across the city doing exciting things."

Original source: NPR
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A couple months ago we wrote about honoring Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Yorktown, a community on the verge of rebound, and now the American Planning Association has awarded a 2012 National Planning Award for Yorktown's recently completed community-driven master plan Yorktown 2015: A Blueprint for Sustainability and Survival.

"Yorktown 2015 capitalized on the energy and creativity of Yorktown’s residents by engaging them and using their input to create an action plan," said Marie L. York, FAICP, APA Board Director and 2012 Awards Jury Co-Chair. "Despite the small size of the community, participation was overwhelming, with more than 260 Yorktown residents participating in surveys, meetings, and groups to help shape this plan."

In addition to robust traditional community outreach and engagement components, Yorktown 2015 participation was enabled through a more innovative method. Interface Studio, conceptualized, designed, and fabricated a storytelling booth--the Yorktown Chatter Box--that invited community members to step inside and speak into a soup can telephone [actually a functional audio recording device] to tell stories about their memories of Yorktown, share their hopes for the future of the neighborhood, and describe the characteristics of the neighborhood they feel would be most important to preserve.

Original source: American Planning Association, PA-Southeast Blog
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The Fairmount Park Art Association makes USA Today's list for America's must-see sculpture gardens.

This group started in 1872 to integrate sculpture into the city, and is the main reason Philadelphia is now said to have more public art than any other city. Visitors can download MP3s or use a cellphone for tours of the city's extensive sculpture collection, which is overseen by the association. You'll find a concentration of art in Fairmont Park, a 9,200-acre urban oasis.

Original source: USA Today
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The Hollywood Official sits down at Sabrina's Cafe with Germantown native Rel Dowdell, a writer/director whose latest film "Changing the Game" looks at a young man emerging from 1980s North Philly and will premiere at the Hollywood Black Film Festival on Oct. 29.

DOWDELL:  'Changing the Game’' is a film about a young man who came out of Philadelphia in the 80's. The worst part of the 80's. 8th & Butler in North Philadelphia was one of the most notorious streets in the United States at the time.  All types of heinous activity was going on there. It was an area where you never heard about anyone getting out and doing well in their life. I wanted to make a film about a young man in that tumultuous environment who saw all the demons around him and somehow managed to get out. He was a genius and intelligent enough to make himself successful on Wall Street. He was also guided by his grandmother. It was the spiritual aspect of his life that helped him to somehow avoid the pitfalls and other things that would've been his demise.

Original source: The Hollywood Official
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A steel house built in the 1930s will be transported panel by panel from Connecticut to be restored by Milner + Carr, according to the Associated Press.

Shedding paint flakes the size of dinner plates, the rusty steel house huddled in a corner of Connecticut College's campus appeared for years to be more of an eyesore than a historic treasure.

As one of few 1930s steel houses of its type still standing nationwide, though, the prefabricated cottage holds a pedigree on par with many better-known architectural jewels — and now it's getting its chance to shine again.

A crew of restoration specialists spent much of the past week dismantling the boxy two-bedroom, 800-square-foot structure and meticulously marking each piece to be sent to a Philadelphia conservation firm.

Source: Associated Press
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A Philadelphia facility's 40-foot high UNTHA Recycling System can process up to 150,000 used refrigerators a year, reports Gizmodo.

Back in the day, your old refrigerator wasn't thrown away after a new one was purchased. It was refurbished and resold, again and again, until the doors fell off (then it was sold again). Now? Now they get shredded.

As of late, most refrigerators are no longer repaired after their first service run and are simply destroyed—releasing massive amounts of CFCs from the insulating foam—and the other 55 pounds or so of their remains dumped into a landfill. Now, GE and Home Depot are teaming with the EPA and the Appliance Recycling Centers of America (ARCA) to lead the charge to recycle these appliances in the greenest way available—by feeding them to this fridge-shredding behemoth.

Source: Gizmodo
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The grassroots soul music movement of Philadelphia that created The Roots and Musiq Soulchild hasn't disappeared, and its latest practitioners are worth seeking out, according to Urban Cusp.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Philadelphia had one of the most diverse and respected cultural scenes on the East Coast. One could walk down South Street and hear poets on the corner, see Rasta street vendors selling patchouli and flags, and not make it too far down the block without receiving at least two hand-bills advertising upcoming events. You could walk on UPenn and Temple's campuses and see a range from tattooed Rockers with spiked hair to B-Boy wannabes in full Adidas gear. The culture was so bountiful that it made you stop and ask, "Are we still in Philly or is this Brooklyn?" But, now it almost seems like the diversity has disappeared or at least gone into hiding. Where did all of the culture go? Have all of the true artists been pushed out? Have they sold out or have they all given up and relocated to New York and DC?

Source: Urban Cusp
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Philadelphia Science Leadership Academy principal Chris Lehmann is among those educators calling for a redefinition of how technology is used in education, according to TMCNet.

As Chris Lehmann closed the recent International Society for Technology in Education's annual conference, he implored the audience at his keynote address here to redraw the educational technology battle lines.

"No one is arguing we shouldn't use technology in education anymore," said Mr. Lehmann, the founding principal of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy, a public high school devoted to inquiry-based, project-driven learning. "The question is how." The call for redefining debate echoed throughout the formal sessions at the conference last month and at informal events at nearby hotels, restaurants, and bars, and even in casual conversations among the more than 20,000 estimated attendees. And, perhaps more important, it was expressed in data released by Project Tomorrow, the Software and Information Industry Association, and technology company CDW-G.

Source: TMCNet
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Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement has fast become a model for uplifting urban teens and will compete in a national competition this month, according to CNN.

Alana Gooden never thought she would live to see her 18th birthday.

Her brother died in a car accident when she was 12 years old and the emotional impact lingered in the family for years.

By the time Gooden had reached her junior year in high school, her world came crashing down. After a falling out with her mother, she moved in with a friend and her family in poverty-stricken North Philly.

After relentless urging by her creative writing teacher, Cait Minor, she joined the Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement (PYPM) near the end of her junior year in 2010.

Source: CNN
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Three time Grammy winning Philadelphia native Jill Scott's new album The Light of The Sun carries a powerful feminine message, according to the New York Times.

"Womanifesto," the title of a song-poem on Jill Scott's fourth studio album, "The Light of the Sun," could apply to her entire catalog. Ms. Scott's songs are proudly and forthrightly feminine, and they set out to persuade and motivate. "Grown woman, making decisions and choices," she calls herself, "Utilizing everything inside of me -- my soul, my heart, my mind, my voices."

The intimate and the instructive are never far apart for Ms. Scott; neither are lyrics and prose, melody and recitation. Although she started her career as a spoken-word performer, she's a flexible, blithely swinging singer. With her 2000 debut album, "Who is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1," she settled into neo-soul that harked back to the early-1970s sound of glimmering electric piano chords and trickling electric-guitar lines, steeped in Marvin Gaye and Al Green.

Source: The New York Times

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