No Good Deed

Antoinette Marie Johnson cleaned up a park. So why are people pissed at her?

by Andrew Thompson

Mark Stehle THE NEW GUYS: Antoinette Marie Johnson (center) and her Point Breeze Pioneers, in the cleaned-up Concert Garden.

[ turf wars ]

In November 2008, Antoinette Marie Johnson faced a now-familiar dilemma. She wanted to buy a place in Philly and had just enough money and credit to avoid the city's more far-flung outskirts, but couldn't afford Center City or other posh locales. She sought a balance between affordability and comfort, and ended up in the Graduate Hospital district.

Well, not exactly. GradHo has itself seen something of a resurgence in the last decade, and Johnson, the founder of ad agency At Media Inc., was priced out. So she looked south, just past Washington Avenue — a street that since GradHo's renaissance has acted as a physical gulf between the rich and poor, and often, between white and black. She dropped $180,000 on a three-story row home in a neighborhood called Point Breeze, which in recent years has ranked among the city's most dangerous, and which the Philadelphia City Planning Commission asked U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to recertify as a blighted area and allow the neighborhood to receive more federal assistance.

"My impression was what a lot of [drivers-by] see, which is you see the bulletproof glass in the windows and a lot of trash," says Johnson. Her house, at the intersection of 19th and Manton streets, sits far enough north in the neighborhood to avoid the most decaying pockets.

Like any homeowner, she wanted to make things better: Around the corner from Johnson's house is Concert Garden, which had sprouted thickets of weeds and become nearly unusable after years of stagnation. Johnson organized a group of 70 volunteers, procured a $5,800 grant and fixed it up.

Today, the weeds are gone. The garden is freshly planted, the gazebo and stage freshly painted. A new walkway connects the concrete to the gazebo, which dangles new flower baskets from its corners. Every Sunday, a group gathers for yoga. "Everywhere else you see trash, but there's no trash on this block," Johnson says.

Some community leaders couldn't be more upset.

The group Johnson formed with her business partner, Tyler R. Westnedge, calls itself the Point Breeze Pioneers — and that's where the problems start.

"Pioneering what? Pioneering the garden? We've been down here. We've been here," says Alice Gabbadon, a director for the low-income housing advocacy group South Philadelphia H.O.M.E.S. Inc. (SPHINC).

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The Pioneers' membership is largely representative of the new demographic creeping south of Washington Avenue — white, new to Philly and taking root around Ellsworth and Federal streets. Along those streets, home prices doubled and tripled between 2005 and 2009, often going for tens of thousands more than their neighbors' to the south, according to city property records. But even though richer whites are moving to an area that for years was more than 95 percent black, those who have problems with the Pioneers downplay the racial implications.

Still, there is an undeniable element of hubris involved in a group of white people moving into a depressed neighborhood and claiming the mantle of "Pioneers," with all of the overtones of Manifest Destiny that entails. And fears of gentrification are palpable. At an Oct. 6 city Planning Commission meeting,Point Breeze residents voiced concerns about rising property values. When a real estate analyst quoted high-end figures of more than $150,000, one woman shouted, "The demand ain't comin' from inside the neighborhood."

In forming the Pioneers, Johnson — who has previously volunteered with the Roxborough Community Development Corp. and worked for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission — added a new name to an often confounding list of civic organizations in this neighborhood. These groups — the Point Breeze Civic Association, Concerned Citizens of Point Breeze, the Point Breeze Business Association, the Point Breeze Merchants Association and so on — all come with their own alliances and enemies, their own specially relegated duties to specially relegated areas that often overlap and cause problems.

Interviews with planners, developers and community organizers in Point Breeze paint a picture of near-gridlock. Decades-old organizations are run by decades-old leaders who still wear large chips on their shoulders from fending off governmental efforts to acquire properties through eminent domain and bulldoze them to build highways in the 1970s. When Johnson first sought to clean up Concert Garden, she was unaware of the entrenched turf wars. She approached SPHINC, a nonprofit originally formed to spur low-income housing, and which later became an umbrella organization for other Point Breeze groups and responsibilities. This nonprofit now runs all official neighborhood committee meetings, and an approval by the SPHINC-run zoning board can decide whether developments sail or stall.

When Mamie Nichols, a longtime community pillar who tended the garden for years, passed away this July, SPHINC officials took over. "Even though we didn't get a dime, we volunteered, just like [the Pioneers] are doing," says executive director Claudia Sherrod.

Asked about Johnson's contention that the gardens were unusable, Sherrod replies, "She's not telling the truth. There were always flowers and stuff there. ... It wasn't deplorable." Sherrod, a 50-year resident of Point Breeze, says the Pioneers are "too aggressive in trying to make themselves appear to be what they are, instead of being user-friendly and joining in with the community. Not too many people in the community know of them.

"They speak with a forked tongue," she adds.

Johnson says she's bewildered by the sentiments of SPHINC; this was, after all, just about beautifying a garden. She says SPHINC and the committees underneath it were nearly unreachable for long periods of time, and when zoning meetings did convene, they quickly devolved into ranting matches. When Johnson finally got in touch with SPHINC, she says Gaddabon admonished her: "There are people who will really despise you if you try to fix these gardens." (Gabbadon denies using the word "despise.")

But Johnson did fix the garden. And now they do despise her.

Mark Stehle FIXER-UPPER: Concert Garden, before and after the cleanup.

"I think it kind of boils down to, here are some new people who have moved into the neighborhood and I think have perhaps not acknowledged that there are others who have been toiling away at other community projects for very long time," says one organizer who asked not to be named. "Neighbors did what they could with what little resources they had."

On the other hand, Terry Mushovic of the Neighborhood Gardens Association, which administered the grant for Johnson's group, says that the money was available for the taking, but adds that "for about five years, there was really no active group we could work with." Before the Pioneers moved in, she adds, no one approached her about getting a grant to refurbish the garden. ("We were not aware there was money there," says Sherrod, of SPHINC.)

A planner who works with the Point Breeze groups — and asked for anonymity to avoid running afoul of them — puts it this way: "I think the easiest way to describe Point Breeze in terms of its civic structure is it's a neighborhood that's changing. There are lots of organizations that have been around for awhile. And they've done a lot ... but now we have new groups, and that's not to say the old groups are going away per se, but I think the Pioneers are awesome, they have real energy. Because they are very good at that, that has made other groups really irritated at them."

That raises perhaps the most baffling question about Point Breeze's civic culture: Why such hostility towards a group that cleaned a garden?

The Rev. Jermaine Heath of St. Paul Chapel Baptist Church, which helped to fix the garden, sees that reaction as typical of the neighborhood's entrenched micropolitics. The older groups don't want to feel elbowed out: "'We were already here, so you come to us, and then we direct you.' I find out that all these old established places — if something new comes in and they don't know about you first, and what you're doing and who they are, and they find you're doing something that they didn't know about, then it becomes a problem. And I don't think it's a racial type of a problem, but I guess it's a power struggle type of thing."

"No other social organization has ever come to ask to help collaborate with the church," he adds of the Pioneers. "They didn't step on nobody's toes in this instance, because nobody else ever came to us to ask us to clean."

(andrew.thompson@citypaper.net)