the spirit of penn's garden april 7, 2016

THIS

WEEKAPRIL 7, 2016

VOL. 1NO. 12

PRESS

HOTOFF THE

KNOW YOUR HISTORY!

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Otto Wolf, architect of more than 60 buildings in North

Philly

ACCU REGGIE

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Weather forecast for the Penn’s Garden region.

COMMUNITY CALENDAR

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Events and happeningsin Penn’s Garden.

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FAIRMOUNT + NORTH CENTRAL + BREWERYTOWN + TEMPLE + STRAWBERRY MANSIONFRANCISVILLE + POPLAR + LUDLOW + SPRING GARDEN

TEMPLE STADIUM

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Temple hireslargest Afri-can-American architecture

firm for stadium design

DEVELOPMENTNEWS

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New projects forthcoming in Brewerytown and

Francisville.

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SEPTA says no fare hikes.

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Hundreds of local kids jumped, climbed and slid their way through Smith Memorial Playground and Playhouse during a recent hands-on sneak peek of the playground’s spring sea-son.

The March 26 Play-A-Palooza allowed youth and their families — who numbered close to 1,500 — to take over the massive East Fairmount Park playground before it opened to the public April 1. Apart from the famed 39-foot Ann Newman Giant Wooden Slide, a 100-year-old fixture at the playground, one of the star attractions of Play-A-Palooza was the new Nature Play Space. In the lushly landscaped and tree-shaded area, kids burned off energy while interacting with and learn-ing about nature.

“It’s such a cool space,” Smith communications manager Zoe Hillengas said during Saturday’s event. “When you go in, the space dictates how the kids engage with it. Kids outside are running around like crazy and then you go into the nature space and it’s serene and kids will be picking up branches, exploring. It’s cool to sit and watch what the kids do, totally undictated by anyone.” The space was made possible by Nature Explore — a collaborative effort between Arbor Day Foundation and Dimensions Educational Research Foundation — through funding provided by the United States Depart-ment of Agriculture Forest Service. The grant supported nature-focused

“It’s, well, it’s, um… the basic framework is… how to I describe this show?” This is how Sean Lally, member of Found Theater Company, typical-ly begins describing the company’s next show, “Nothing to See Here”. Found was, well, founded by Lally and Brewerytown-based actor Alison Hoban in 2009. When they begin talking about “Nothing to See Here”, it’s usually accompanied by a far off look, shoulders straightening and slumping, and hands gesturing in the empty air, as if their respective bodies are attempting to help find the words to describe the show. The

labored response isn’t one of somebody with a lack of things to say, but more the approach of somebody who doesn’t know where to begin. “I ac-tually practiced [describing the show] today,” Lally laughs. Lally is credited as “lead artist” for “Nothing to See Here” and joins Adri-enne Hertler, Steph Iozzia, and Brewerytown-based Joe Palinsky as direc-tors. As lead artist, Lally is in charge of developing the show’s concept and organizing the process in which the show is written. He describes the

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The Spirit of Penn’s Garden – April 7, 2016

Know Your History!W R I T T E N B Y S P E N C E R H O M A N

T W I T T E R : @ A C C U R E G G I E • F A C E B O O K : A C C U - R E G G I E

Although small in total land-area, Brewerytown is known for its distinct location, architecture, and history. Most people can assume how this Philadelphia neighborhood earned its nick-

name, but who is responsible for the unique architecture and development of this region? Otto Wolf had around 500 buildings credited to his name by the time of his death. His architecture can be found in Oslo, Norway; Sacramento, California; Calgary, Canada; Havana, Cuba; and many other places. Most of his work was in the Mid-Atlantic States, New York, New England, and Pennsylvania. This famous architect attributed more than 60 buildings in Brewerytown, and he incorporated German aspects to his projects, similar to the houses, sa-loons, and community in which his breweries resided in. Otto Wolf was born on November 11th, 1856 in Phila-delphia, and he comes from German descent. He spent most of his life in Philadelphia until his death on Decem-ber 19th, 1916. Otto received a public education and then earned a B.S. Degree in Architecture and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1876. Before Otto built breweries in the area, he worked in Chicago with Frederick Wolf from 1880-1883, when he decided to come back to Philadelphia and opened his own firm. As if a man in his mid-twenties living in Philadelphia needs another reason to devote his life to the beer indus-try, it helps that Otto’s father was also very active in the business. His father, Charles Wolf, was an early partner of Theodore Engel. Charles decided to walk away from being a partner for a specific brewing company, and decided to become a manufacturer of brewer’s supplies. Many years later, Otto would build several buildings for his father’s old friend Mr. Engel. While English brewers maintained their locations near the Delaware River, German brewers began moving out in the mid-1850s, just before Otto Wolf was born, and just before the beginning of the Civil War. Because beer needed to be kept in either cool cellars or excavated caves in order to remain chilled during their “lagering” phase, German brewers settled to the vicinity of 31st and Thomp-son Streets, north of present-day Fairmount Park. This area allowed these German brewers to escape the heat of Philadelphia’s summers, which is why twelve different breweries were located within four city blocks of each oth-er. Brewerytown became an area where German architects made German-style beer in high-tech breweries with in-fluences from German architecture. One may be wondering why the beer industry had such a significant impact on the area. The National Register of Historic Places states that beer was the fifth most valuable product in Philadelphia in the 1880s, after cloth, carpets, steel, and construction. Not only was the industry boom-ing, but the city of Philadelphia also had the brilliant mind of Otto Wolf creating innovative buildings and aes-thetic designs.

Breweryhistory.com’s 2013 article, Brewery History, de-scribes Otto’s work as “reflect[ing] the growing sophisti-cation of American breweries at the height of the pre-Pro-hibition development.” Of all of Otto Wolf’s brewery buildings, one of the most famous is the former F.A. Poth Brewery Complex. German immigrant Frederick A. Poth contracted Otto to build several buildings (main refrig-erator building, stables, brewery, offices, cooling towers, other facilities) of his brewery complex, and then hired him again to build row houses across the street from 216 N.33rd Street. Phillyhistory.org states that this was then named Powelton Avenue, and the houses remained in the Poth family until the 1950s. The main building of the F.A. Poth brewery is now a dormitory used for Temple University. After this building was a brewery, but before it was a dormi-tory, the F.A. Poth building was used as civil defense supply storage during the Cold War. In the 1950s, the walls were re-inforced to withstand nuclear attacks from the Soviet Union. Other achievements from Otto Wolf include: Carriage House at 2005 Cambridge Street. Company went out of business after automobiles became afford-able and nobody needed carriages anymore. It is currently the headquarters for “Save Our Sites.”Built Bergdoll Brewing Complex at 29th and Parrish Streets. All of the remaining buildings have been convert-ed to condominiums.Invented Coin-Stamping technology that he sold to the Japanese government.Built the Northwestern National Bank at 1828 Ridge Ave-nue, of which he served as the Vice President. It has been converted to a Baptist Church.

Lastly, the friend of Otto’s father, Theodore Engel, stayed with the brewing business and found a new partner to create the Bergner & Engel’s Brewery. Bergner and Engel found themselves in some trouble when local agents of their company were arrested in Savannah, Georgia along with the local agents of several other breweries for vio-lating Revenue Laws in early November 1883. They had decided not to properly destroy the Revenue Stamps on their kegs so that they could receive a tax refund on their product multiple times. After some time, the authorities let them go and refused to press charges, so these local agents never had to go to their November 11th trial. The brewing companies had to pay a fine as retribution. This scenario was summarized in the Proceedings of the An-nual Convention for Brewers Foundation on March 21st, 1884. The beer industry in Philadelphia, and specifically Brew-erytown, has shaped the society in ways that one could not have imagined. Remnants of the 1800s are still observable today as you drive past the converted buildings of the bril-liant architect, Otto Wolf.


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Last week was warm and mostly dry with tempera-tures in the 60s and 70s — Not a bad week at all. This forecast starts warm like last week, but then we get smacked with some wild winter-like

weather. Yeah, this is unreal. Basically, next week could start with a visit from the Polar Vortex! Before that, we get a rainy Thursday into Friday. The good news is that any cold this time of year will be short lived. Overall, it looks like spring is going to start cool and wet. Snow chances this week: Chance for flurries late Satur-day night. Wow, welcome to April!

Thursday is warm, but clouds increase during the day setting up rain later in the evening. The rain clears out for Friday, but it will be breezy and slightly cooler with temperatures falling through the 60s. Saturday is a cooler day that will feature a reinforcing shot of cold air from the north. The Polar Vortex may drop down just south enough to nip us with some very unseasonably cold air — Ouch! We could also see some flurries around Saturday night into Sunday as the cold air drops in. Sunday and Monday are downright cold for this time of year. Temperatures will be in the 40s with lows in the 20s

many places. Thankfully, it starts to warm up on Tuesday as we climb back into the 50s setting us up for an even warmer Wednesday back in the 60s. After the rain on Thursday night it looks like we enter a nice dry stretch — the Friday to Wednesday period does not feature any major storms!

The weather winner of the week is Friday; the weather loser is Monday!



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play spaces in urban areas, and Nature Explore selected Smith as the first such site in the program. Project orga-nizers consulted with the playground starting this past fall, with construction wrapping up earlier this year. Lansdowne resident Rome Arquines and his son, 2-year-old Miro, spent time at a table in the Nature Play Space that introduces kids play to natural objects like pinecones and leaves. Arquines said the setting and its many activities kept his son’s attention. “This new outside area is really fun,” he said. “Usually his attention span is about five minutes and he gets antsy but we’ve been here an hour and he’s spent the entire hour here in this space.” Jenni Drozdek, of Kensington, brought her 15-month-old, Mina, to Play-A-Palooza specifically to check out the new nature area. “This is the reason I wanted to come,” she said while in the Nature Play Space. “We live in the city so I want to expose her to nature as much as possible, so that’s where she’s been playing most of the time. She loves it.” The nature space featured activities led by the city’s Grow up Green program, one of many community partners in-volved with Play-A-Palooza. Elsewhere in the playground,

Philly Tutors representatives played board games with guests, Words at Play led literacy-focused activities, North-East Treatment Centers offered carnival games and kids tried their hands at arts activities with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture and The Hacktory. Guests at Play-A-Palooza represented the diversity that Hillengas said the playground sees all season. Visitors come from all Philly zip codes, she said, as well as about 20 percent from surrounding counties and 14 percent from outside the region. About half of the average visitors are African-American, 32 percent Caucasian, 10 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian. About one-third of the guests are families in poverty. Smith is free and open to the public, but the organiza-tion does offer paid family memberships, which provide benefits like free admission to special events, such as Play-A-Palooza. Once the playground gates are officially open for the season, staff will be gearing up for a full lineup of spring and summer events, including Kidchella. This year, music lovers will have three opportunities to take in the music festival, as it expands from a one-time event to a monthly celebration in June, July and August. For more information, visit smithplayground.org/visit.

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new show as Found’s first foray into political theater. Lal-ly distills “political” into four themes: forgiveness, debt, complicity, and resistance. “We started with the question, ‘how do we or I make the world a better place?’ And we are deconstructing this question through those themes.” Lally said. The show itself is split into four vignettes loosely framed as surreal trail scenes, each one grappling with one of the four themes. “My goal, at least, is to distill the chaos of the world as opposed to telling one narrative,” Lally said. “I like coming up against the impossibility of understanding something.” Found formed in 2009, when a handful of Temple the-ater students began working under a graduate director and Fulbright scholar named Felipe Vergara. Vergara was assigned a project in which he would have to direct a piece based upon myth and, in what seemed to plant the seed of the group’s future methodology, asked them to the-matically respond the question: is God dead? A handful of undergraduate students signed up, including mem-bers of Found Theater Company like Hoban and Phoebe Schaub (still an active member and assistant director of “Nothing to See Here”). The show they put together with Vergara, “Something With Wings”, inspired the group to produce the show outside of an academic environment, so they entered it into the Fringe Festival. After one more year of directing, Vergara moved back to Colombia, but the group decided to stick together and keep producing work together. Hoban said, “It’s funny, when people ask me what the process is for writing the shows, I kind of say, ‘well, we don’t write the shows, actually,’ we create the movements, the atmospheres, the scenes, how it looks, how it sounds first. Then from there we develop a script.” Vergara influenced the rigorously conceptual methodol-ogy used to create each piece from the ground up. The pro-cess first involves choosing a theme or themes members of the company research and talk about. Besides hard data, the ‘research’ can take the form of essays, poetry, and im-ages relating to the themes. Where “Nothing to See Here” focuses on the themes of forgiveness, complacency, resis-tance, and debt, in past productions, those themes have included outer space (“The Twilight Kingdom”) and the end of the world (“Event End”). For “Nothing to See Here”,

one of the bits of research mentioned was a poem called, “And I Fall Asleep Just Like That” by Xu Lizhi, an employ-ee of the Taiwanese company FoxConn who, among many others working at the company, committed suicide due to the poor working conditions while producing iPhones for Apple Inc. Joe Wozniak, a performing artist in “Nothing to See Here” and another Brewerytown resident, said, “You form a vocabulary of actions. You find the action in those words.” Next, the directors create assignments for the other art-ists to help them engage with the themes, usually in the form of short performances. For “Nothing to See Here”, Lally assigned most artists four individual assignments

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per week over the course of 14 weeks, each artist fulfilling around 56 assignments each. Pulling from those assign-ments, artists then take part in slightly more challenging and communal exercises, such as improv. Once original music is created, the directors and artists begin cobbling these experiences together to form a final production. Wozniak said, “It’s a very unique group of people. The things we create together, it’s a combination of selves. The pieces are very much shaped by each person. We color it differently. Somehow, we find this oil spill in a puddle.” You can catch Nothing to See Here at JUNK in The Boy Scout Room (2040 Christian Street), April 20th-May 1st, Thursday through Sunday at 8PM. Tickets are $10.

W R I T T E N B Y T H O M A S B E C K

N E W P R O J E C T S F O R T H C O M I N G I N B R E W E R Y T O W N A N D F R A N C I S V I L L E

septa proposalW R I T T E N B Y J O R D Y N C O R D N E R

S E P T A S A Y S N O F A R E H I K E S

According to The Philadelphia Tribune, SEPTA’s new proposed budget does not include any in-dication of a fare hike. Hearings are planned, and will reach through-

out the five-county region, regarding the budget for the fis-cal year from July 2016 through the end of June 2017. The budget proposes a 3 percent increase in regards to their previous spending plan. It maintains current SEPTA ser-vice arrangements. Officials said that The Southeastern Pennsylvania Tran-

sit Authority’s proposal reflects their attempts to control costs, some of which include the replacement of older, buses with diesel-electric hybrids with better fuel efficien-cy, and reducing costs for injuries and damages due to the heightened use of video evidence from surveillance cam-eras. Each of the five counties will receive two hearings in late April. The region of focus is made up of Philadelphia, Bucks, Delaware, Chester and Montgomery counties.


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Development NewsW R I T T E N B Y T H O M A S B E C K

N E W P R O J E C T S F O R T H C O M I N G I N B R E W E R Y T O W N A N D F R A N C I S V I L L E

Naked Philly has come across a number of de-velopment projects in Brewerytown and Fran-cisville: On Thursday, March 31, Fairmount Civic

Association held a community meeting at which sever-al developers showcased their plans to convert a vacant warehouse situated at the corner of 28th and Cambridge Streets in Brewerytown. The property served previously as home to the Commonwealth Brewing Company. The buy-ers plan to tack on an additional two stories to the edifice. They aim also to include three single-family housing units on George Street in the back. The first floor is reserved for parking spaces as well as a commercial outlet. 14 apart-ment homes will constitute the second floor. Approximately two years ago, the long-abandoned Old English Tavern at the intersection of Taney and Poplar Streets was torn down. On Wednesday last week, the va-cant space was presented to the Zoning Board of Adjust-ment (ZBA). Owners plan to construct a 75-unit apartment building with 38 parking spaces to boot. An unnamed Naked Philly source reported that the con-struction of a residential building at 1926 Brown Street in Francisville is in the works. Similar properties in the area have been zoned to accommodate a host of families. The site is strategically located between Ridge and Fairmount Avenues. Lastly, the architecturally inventive properties at 877 and 879 Perkiomen Street in Francisville bear great testi-mony to the innovative kinds of developments sweeping through these areas of the city.

temple stadiumW R I T T E N B Y J O R D Y N C O R D N E R

T E M P L E H I R E S L A R G E S T A F R I C A N - A M E R I C A N A R C H I T E C T U R E F I R M F O R S T A D I U M D E S I G N

According to The Philadelphia Tribune, Temple University has selected the nation’s largest African-American architecture firm to under-take the design of their highly controversial

stadium project. On Monday, March 28 Temple announced their choice of Columbus, Ohio-based firm Moody Nolan to head up the project. They are known for the element of “collabo-ration” in their projects, and they hold expertise in col-legiate athletics and recreation, having worked on proj-ects for Vanderbilt, Indiana, Ohio State, Penn State and DePaul universities. Their website boasts a claim to $500 million in design and construction each year. Founder Curtis J. Moody told to The Tribune that he’s looking forward to collaborating with Temple and the sur-rounding community on the project,

“Creating a vibrant and cohesive streetscape experience that blends together the planned stadium, the significant re-tail components, the adjacent indoor recreation facility and various pedestrian plaza and green spaces will be a signifi-cant part of the evolution of the overall design strategy.”

“Moody Nolan is regarded as a national leader in design-ing beautiful sports and recreation facilities that not only fit their purpose but also fit the communities in which they exist,” Temple President Neil D. Theobald said. “We are excited to partner with such an outstanding architec-tural firm.” Moody Nolan will be partnering with both local engi-neering and design firm AECOM and Langan Engineer-ing and Environmental, a civil engineering and landscape design firm, on the highly contentious project, which is opposed by many in the community and by Mayor Jim Kenney. Both partners have offices located in Center City. A proposed student recreation building has also been placed into Moody Nolan’s hands. The Temple Board of Trustees vowed to spend no more than $1 million on initial design before determining the best use for the proposed building, the site of which is adjacent to the stadium site.

It has been reported that Moody Nolan has met with res-idents of the affected neighborhood, a courtesy that, as mentioned in this Billy Penn article, Temple itself has al-legedly failed to adequately offer. According to Anna Orso of Billy Penn,

“Board members and school officials have for months prom-ised to reach out to community members who may be directly impacted by the construction of a stadium. No one Billy Penn spoke with this week had heard from the university; however, Temple has engaged with five block captains in the area.”

However, a press release sent to Spirit News on April 1st by Stadium Stompers, a group of community members and Temple students that has been fighting the proposed stadium project, claims that no evidence exists that a meeting has occurred between reporestenatives of Moody Nolan and the community. Block captain and long-time resident Gail Loney said, “Smoke and mirrors cannot replace genuine respect and accountability. We have spent months speaking with stu-dents at the University. They certainly aren’t confused either. We do not support the construction of an athletic stadium in a residential community.” As previously reported by Spirit News, the general senti-ment in the community surrounding the proposed stadi-um is one of anger and the feeling of exclusion. At a recent planning meeting labeled as “open,” Temple barred entry to almost all but students and journalists, stating that lim-ited space necessitated these adjustments to admissions. At the end of that particular meeting, one 54-year-old

community resident, Glenda Bryant, uttered the phrase, “How dare you just not include us?” According to Philly.com, the racial undertones of Tem-ple’s stadium fiasco were addressed at the meeting, but not from the inside. Outside of the building, people held a demonstration so loud that those inside could hear them. Temple student and community member Deandra Jef-ferson voiced that she felt that Temple was “systematical-ly destroying a hub of black culture and creativity that has been here for years.” “That is not a good neighbor,” she said.

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the spirit of penn's garden april 7, 2016

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