April 8-14, 2004

city beat

Fineprint

Less words, more story.

Day in the Life

For a variety of reasons, Philadelphia’s neighborhoods are constantly changing. Buildings disappear. So, too, do the people who once inhabited them. Even the word "community’ means something different today than it did for earlier generations.

With that evolution in mind, the Scribe Video Center will set out on May 1 to record Philadelphians' stories for posterity in a project called "Precious Places." More than 20 film crews, humanities consultants and community members will hit the streets in an effort to create an oral history of Philadelphia.

Project coordinator Jamese Wells says the main goal is to create a snapshot of the city as it exists today, in the year of Scribe's 20th anniversary. Looking at people, buildings, landmarks and public spaces through the eyes of 20 community groups, they'll also set out to chronicle the effects of development policies.

Among those participating is Rosemary Cubas, director of the Community Leadership Institute. She's already been working to let people know how the changes have adversely affected some Philadelphians, particularly those in a Latino community on Bodine Street near Susquehanna. Once a vibrant block of vibrant colors and neatly kept gardens, blight has taken over and all but one resident has been "relocated" elsewhere ("Neighborhood Transformation Investigated," Amy L. Webb, Dec. 11, 2003). While the project cannot rebuild the bombed-out homes on Bodine, Cubas says she has high hopes for the documentation, for which teams will head out to Grays Ferry, Norris Square, Mt. Airy, Frankford, Powelton Village and South Philadelphia, among other neighborhoods.

The videos will be screened in each neighborhood, as well as in Center City, sometime in the fall. Says

Louis Massiah, Scribe's executive director , says, "Creating an opportunity for community members to document their own neighborhoods allows all of us to see the richness of the city and provides a unique perspective from the viewpoint of the people who live here."-- Sunday D'Arcangelo

The Magic Touch

The good news is that U.S. Census statistics have shown that more than half of all American homes are wired for the Internet. The bad news is that, for those Americans in lower socioeconomic groups, that connection is often out of reach.

For that reason, the Magic Johnson Foundation (MJF) and HP Technology, a division of Hewlett-Packard Co., forged a business partnership five years ago to address the "digital divide," or the disparity in access to computers and information technology. To bridge that gap, MJF and HP have opened more than a dozen Inventor Centers in urban areas throughout the country.

On Tuesday, the legendary ballplayer will be in West Philadelphia to attend the dedication of his organization's newest Inventor Center, the first of 10 scheduled to open nationwide this year.

"So many people take computer technology for granted because it's such a major part of our society now," Earvin "Magic" Johnson writes in an e-mail. "But imagine not having the education or the access to computers? Low-income African-American children are at risk of being left behind and of not being as qualified for jobs or as educated as other ethnic groups."

Johnson says that his goal is to address those shortcomings.

"My foundation goes into the community [to] provide the necessary resources and programs," he says. "These kids now have an opportunity that they otherwise may not have had."

The new tech hub will find a home at The Enterprise Center, located at 45th and Market streets in what was the original site of American Bandstand. The center, founded in 1989 by the Wharton Small Business Development Center, is a nonprofit operation that focuses on recruiting and training local entrepreneurs. For Johnson, this project promises to be more fruitful than his unsuccessful attempt to launch an entertainment complex in North Philadelphia in 1998.

"The Magic Johnson Foundation views Philadelphia as an urban market on the rise," says Jeanella Blair, MJF's executive director and chief operating officer. "But like most other urban cities, there are limited resources that are available to urban residents that will help them attain the skills to compete for these jobs. MJF is gifting a technology center to The Enterprise Center to enable [them] to gather the necessary skills to compete."-- Deborah Bolling

WE WILL BLOC YOU: Polish Happy Hours have been drawing crowds, like this NYC crew, in recent years.

Insert Joke Here

Q: What do you get when you take a bunch of Polish-Americans and put them in a Philadelphia bar?

A: The inaugural Polish Happy Hour.

Those who want to sip a cold Zywiec will soon be able to do so a lot closer to home than Warsaw. Local Poles, Polish-Americans and those with an interest in the former Eastern bloc nation have been invited to the first gathering of the national Polish networking organization at Nodding Head Pub on April 30.

"Some young people I met in Philadelphia were actually a little excited about this," says Jerzy Michniewski, the 40-year-old local chapter head who emigrated from Lodz six years ago. "They still have strong ties to Poland and Polish language."

Michniewski attended Polish Happy Hours in New York City, but when he moved to South Jersey last year, he missed the camaraderie so he contacted organization founder Gregory Witczak.

With 250,000 people of Polish descent and thousands of Polish immigrants in the area, organizers expect a good draw. Like chapters in other cities, the group is intended for 20- to 40-somethings to network and meet friends, dates or someone with whom they can enjoy pirogies.

Witczak, a 29-year-old who immigrated from Poland as a young child, started Polish Happy Hour in Washington, D.C., four years ago because he thought the only way young Poles and Polish-Americans could connect was through the embassy.

"The embassy does good work, but everything they do is aimed at the older generation," says Witczak, who met his current girlfriend at a Polish party. "Our gatherings are more for people to let their hair down."

From there, friends in other cities contacted him about starting chapters in Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto. Today, 1,500 people in 10 cities subscribe to Witczak's listserv, which announces meetings. The D.C. group has about 200 people who meet monthly. They also get together for ski trips and nights at dance clubs.

According to Witczak, most people who attend speak to one another in their mother tongue. He did say that Russians, Ukrainians and other non-Poles, such as people who previously worked in Poland for the Peace Corps or had dated Polish speakers, have been known to show up. He stresses that all are welcome, Polish and non-Polish alike.

Just don't try to spell any of the names.-- Rachel Zuckerman

The Days After

Who doesn’t love a frightening worst-case scenario? Well try this one on for size: a 20-megaton nuclear explosion over City Hall.

Within one-thousandth of a second, a 20-million-degree fireball disintegrates everything from University City to Penn's Landing. Buildings in Roxborough are smashed by 600 mph winds. Bunkers within six miles are useless. Anything flammable within 16 miles -- hear that Haddon Township, Media and Willow Grove? -- instantaneously ignite. Folks in Pottstown who looked at the blast are permanently blinded. Body count? Three million to 4 million.

Such was the uplifting message Saturday at the University of Pennsylvania's Meyerson Hall, where 17 distinguished writers, scholars and medical practitioners gathered for a program titled Global Health and Security in the Second Nuclear Age. The eight-hour conference organized by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) addressed health concerns that have gained new relevance in the post-9/11 world, particularly those involving biological and nuclear terrorism.

As PSR's Web site identifies the public-policy group as being "committed to the elimination of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction," the general consensus was that President Bush's policies -- particularly national defense and international diplomacy -- are security's version of a four-pack-a-day habit. Unilateralism and a failure to distinguish between civilian and military targets in combat, some said, have left the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the problem is an unsubstantiated suspicion of Iraq as a potential source of weapons for terrorist sects.

"Outlaw regimes are not the problem," he said, echoing views Condoleezza Rice may hear when she finally sits before the Sept. 11 panel Thursday. Rather, he said, it's "poorly guarded Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles." (He cites similar problems with Pakistan, where a regime change could disrupt nuclear-arsenal security, giving terrorist groups easy access.)

PSR co-founder Dr. Ira Helfand agreed; she estimated that up to 20,000 Russian nuclear warheads -- Cold War relics -- are still armed and on "hair-trigger alert." (How's that a problem? In 1991, when Russia thought a weather balloon was an attack harbinger, oft-inebriated leader Boris Yeltsin was the only stopgap between global life and nuclear holocaust.)

All, however, is not already lost, said PSR's national field director, Ira Shorr. Shorr said he puts faith in the proposed Sensible Multilateral American Response to Terrorism (SMART) resolution which would turn America's focus on improving intelligence and creating a multilateral approach to combating terrorism. (The resolution, introduced last month by U.S. Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a Democrat from California, has gotten support in Congress, including that of Rep. Joe Hoeffel, who originally voted for military action in Iraq.)

"Behold, I have sent before you life and death," Helfand said, incorporating a passage from Deuteronomy into his speech's conclusion, "therefore choose life so that you and your children might live."-- Morris Bracy IV

Friday Night Without Fights (except in the stands)

Cries for less NHL violence had nothing to do with a brawlless Flyers game last week.

Flyers fans heading down to the Wachovia Center last Friday night may have rightfully been expecting the hockey game to quickly degenerate into a back-alley Golden Gloves competition. After all, last time the organ-I-zation faced off against the Ottawa Senators, that's precisely what happened.

"Oh What a Night" read that evening's Flyers media-packet section about the March 5 brawl-game that saw the teams break National Hockey League records for most penalty minutes in a game (419) and in a period (409).

Hearkening back to the Broad Street Bullies era, there was a time-honored message in those fisticuffs that saw gloves being dropped on one faceoff after another: One of your players cheap shots one of ours, it's open season on everybody -- especially if said offender hides in the penalty box while the punches fly. And seeing Flyers enforcer Donald Brashear rallying the fighting troops from behind the bench after being ejected was 1974 all over again. (For what it's worth, the Flyers won 5-3.)

That game was so beloved here that it got the "Instant Classic" rerun treatment on Comcast, but five days later came Vancouver Canuck Todd Bertuzzi's neck-snapping assault on the Colorado Avalanche's Steve Moore. The incident re-energized the people who jerk their knees and equate the sport to neanderthalism. As expected, the league cracked down, letting teams know that on-ice violence would be dealt with swiftly and sternly.

All of which brings us back to Friday night's final home game of the regular season against the Senators. Though all the punching principals took their places at the rink, the teams combined for a prissy 12 penalty minutes. (For what that's worth, the Senators won 3-1.)

Novices could be expected to say the crackdown forced cooler heads to prevail, but they'd be wrong. The real reason the teams didn't brawl was that it was a close game that could ultimately determine playoff positioning. It's the governing principle of hockey fights: Send a message when you can, but not at the expense of the team. (Even though they lost the game, a tie on Sunday against the Islanders meant the Flyers won their division and home-ice in the first round against the New Jersey Devils.)

To that end, coach Ken Hitchcock barely mentioned the bad blood during his postgame press conference.

"We told them to play as if it was a sudden-death playoff game," Hitchcock explained of the Ottawa matchup. In other words, no stupid penalties. (With no bloodbath, the media contingent prodded about the next best thing: whether the seemingly annual goalie controversy was rearing its head. Hitch didn't play into it, but struggling goaltender Robert Esche didn't duck questions in a ripe-smelling locker room. "I read the papers, but it's nothing I can worry about. You guys have a job to do and I understand it. It's a copout if I sit here and say that's the problem," he said.)

Though the ice was relatively peaceful, the same couldn't be said for the stands.

With about 10 minutes left in the second period, a loud roar went up from the crowd -- during a stoppage of play. All eyes turned toward Section 220, where bodies were flying into one another and arms were flailing. The scuffle ended just after one fan narrowly averted being dropped from the sixth row and onto the concrete hallway below. Security soon led him through that very same hallway. A guy in an Ottawa jersey was heckled as he was evicted; a Flyers fan received a warm ovation.

Seven minutes later, a similar flare-up across the upper deck in Section 209A ended with guards in maroon sweaters hauling a guy out by his wrist.

Considering the stereotypical view of hockey enthusiasts, one would figure brawling is a Flyers fan's right of passage, much like being able to boast of having pissed in a sink at the Vet during an Eagles game, right?

"It's very infrequent," says Comcast Spectacor spokesman Ike Richman. "In fact, that was the first incident we had reported in the stands this season."

With a playoff series starting against those despised Devils tonight, intensity should be at a premium in the Center. But it's likely that, despite the bad blood, there's just too much at stake in this final playoff run before an offseason of potentially devastating labor discontent to expect a March 5 repeat.

Still, pugilist-hockey aficionados won't go entirely ignored. Each fan entering the building tonight will receive one special gift: a Donald Brashear Bobble Gloves Doll. --Brian Hickey