"Fifty-fourth and Upland Way!" shouts a woman living in the West Park District over to community planner Andy Meloney at a banquet hall on Parkside Avenue on a hot July night.

"Ooh," he replies, looks down, spots it on a big map of West Philadelphia, puts a purple circle around it and gestures to a facilitator across the table who scribbles the intersection in black marker on a whiteboard atop a list of other sites these neighbors want improved over the next 10 years.

"Yes, 54th and Upland Way, another good one," he agrees. "That is a tough intersection."

Crammed around a dozen roundtables, these 150 residents didn't come out to play Bingo: this is their Philadelphia 2035 kickoff, and it's serious business: the city's first comprehensive growth planning initiative since Eisenhower was president.

"For instance," explains Meloney, manager of this district plan and a few others coming up: "our zoning code hasn't been remapped in the city on a large-scale fashion since the 1960s. There's a park at the corner of 52nd and Media. It's a big baseball field. It's zoned for industrial use. But it's a baseball field. We'll look at that and say, 'that needs to be zoned for recreation.'"

The Citywide Vision goals adopted by the Philadelphia Planning Commission on June 7 charter Philadelphia2035 to make the city more competitive by generating economic development, enhancing neighborhood livability, capitalizing on land assets, connecting transportation and improving safety, efficiency and convenience while adapting services to changing technology and consumption patterns.

The West Park District Plan is the first of 18 district plans city residents will sink their teeth into. Every Philadelphia neighborhood gets a crack at shaping their own community destiny in this interactive take-it-to-the-people program, a public input process leaving no street corner unvisited � the first of its kind on a grand scale the likes of which the city hasn't seen in half-a-century.

An Opportunity for Residents to Make Change

At the overspill table, which sat empty before the capacity crowd dictated otherwise, Meloney, Cousar and West Park neighbors pore over a district map big enough to function as a tablecloth.

Armed with green, purple and red markers, they brainstorm, compliment, complain and identify physical challenges and barriers encountered in their communities, issues they want the city to address, things they want more of in town and things they love most about the place they call home.

Home to The Philadelphia Zoo, Memorial Hall and Fairmount Park, the district is comprised of West Parkside, Cathedral Park, Wynnefield, Belmont Village, Wynnefield Heights and East Parkside. Overbrook Farms, Green Hill Farms and Overbrook Park are also included in the district, and all three are listed on the National Register of Historic Districts. Based on the 2010 Census data, districts' geographies are neighborhoods grouped together with similar development patterns and issues.

"Breaking out into groups with big maps on tables makes a game out of it with game pieces and markers," says Meloney. "But this is our chance to go through and get the planning process right, change the way planning works in the city for the foreseeable future."

Fanning around the banquet room are city planning managers, staffers and officials embedded at each table elbow-to-elbow with vocal residents eager to talk, be heard and recorded, seizing the opportunity to impact the direction of their environment in the hope that major improvements to their respective communities will last decades.

Development projects already underway include 54 properties at 52nd and Parkside Avenue being converted into a mixed-use zone for senior housing, restaurant, retail space, gardens and apartment building, and a new bus turnaround area at 50th Street which will be completed within the next few months.

Living in the district since the late 1970s, Cassandra Savage, 60, resides at the 4800 block of Merion Avenue and actively participates at Meloney's table, contributing experiences and making recommendations next to neighbors that a facilitator documents. She promises she and her friends will better organize before the next public meeting, and expresses frustration for West Park looking down the road.

"I remember that we had the ACME, we had the bank, we had businesses. Now you have too much of nothing here. Everything started going, going, going," she says. "Nobody can fix anything until you bring some things back here. You gotta get people jobs. We as a whole, living in that community, need to put a better effort forward."

"A lot of things that used to be an easy fix years ago the city has made hard today," she continues. "They need to go back to cleaning the alleys every so often; they need the rat patrol."

Work Already Happening in Some Neighborhoods

In East Parkside, where Robert Cousar's immediate family has been living since the mid-1940s, he remembers as a kid walking around the neighborhood, seeing doctors' offices, restaurants, shops and other mainstays that standard, busy, diverse communities can take for granted.

Now in his mid-40s and a private developer partnered with community groups, Cousar has a half-dozen projects in the works through his Sustainable Construction Corporation. He hopes they will mark a return to those days.

"Over the next few years, we will definitely become one of the great places to live in Philadelphia. A rising tide floats all boats," he says. "We used to have what they call now a 'walkable community' and we're working to bring that back."

"Moving forward together," Cousar explains, is working with Meloney on the West Park district plan since its inception, providing the city planner with the master plan he and community leaders created for East Parkside a few years ago. District plans are larger than neighborhood plans, highlighting issues and attractions of citywide and regional importance.

"The community devised its own master plan, and they understood if they didn't do something to revitalize themselves to stay, they were out," he says. "So they came up with a plan that worked where it helped existing residents by creating jobs, creating a tourist commercial corridor and getting rid of blight.

"That's our biggest hurdle: the vacancy and the blight," he continues. "If we could get rid of the vacancy, the community will continue to rise up and thrive and all the other issues will go."

Today, Meloney and his staff are synthesizing the takeaways from the July 11 meeting and incorporating vital data collected from citizens' voices into a plan draft to present to the public at the next session late in September. Then, the topic of key opportunity zones gets debated: where to develop them and what the community has to say about how to establish and transform these sites over the next 5 to 10 years.

Paralleling West Park on the same timeline is the Lower South District covering The Navy Yard, as residents there met up at the Swedish Museum the next night down in Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park on Pattison Avenue.

The final public meeting in late November will be an open house of sorts for both West Park and the Lower South District, where feedback and recommendations will help shape the final plan, presented to the city planning commission in December and presumably, approved.

PAUL ELLIS is a freelance journalist from South Philly. He divides his professional time between working in the information technology industry and writing feature, human interest, municipal and technology stories for The Scranton Times, The Citizens' Voice, CNET and various business journals. He can be found at Phillies games, or listening to concerts at the Linc from his front porch.

PHOTOS:

Attendees participate in break-out sessions at the Philadelphia2035 West Park District kickoff meeting

Andrew Meloney of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission speaks at the 2035 Planning Meeting

Callalily Cousar of Poplar Street has lived in Parkside for over 50 year and is considered the "Face of Parkside"

Break-out session

The future is now

Attendee observes district plan map

Attendees are mostly residents who come out to make sure their position is considered in the delicate planning process

Richard Redding, director of community planning at the Philadelphia City Planning Commission

All photographs by JEFF FUSCO