Germantown : Innovation + Job News

Historic Fair Hill (HFH), a landmark burial ground on Germantown Avenue, houses the remains of some of America’s most prominent abolitionists and women’s rights advocates. After decades of neglect, the rejuvenated site is planning another year of programming growth under new executive director Jean Warrington.

A Philly native and current Chestnut Hill resident, Warrington got involved with the project over a decade ago. In 2004, the HFH board hired her as its part-time program director and as of January 1, 2016, she took on the role of the organization’s executive director.

The HFH site dates all the way back to the early 18th century. It was started by George Fox himself, founder of the Religious Society of Friends and the land’s original owner. According to HFH, his will asked that the space be used "for a meeting house, a burying ground, and a garden and grounds" for kids to play and learn.

The site’s adjoining Quaker meeting house at Germantown Avenue and Cambria Street was sporadically active from 1703 all the way until 1967, when shrinking attendance led the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to sell the property. Maintenance of the grounds -- the site of the graves of American luminaries such as Lucretia Mott and Robert Purvis -- deteriorated.

In the late 1980s, "it was the biggest open-air crack cocaine market in the city," says Warrington of the five-acre site. In the 1990s, a dedicated cross-cultural neighborhood coalition slowly reclaimed the site as a safe green space. Outreach to local Quaker leader Margaret Hope Bacon (a Mott biographer) resulted in renewed attention and eventually a nonprofit that raised funds to buy back the grounds in 1993.

"What we’re doing is using a historic site…to carry forward the values of the people buried there. We’re using the past to serve the present," explains Warrington of HFH’s current work, which hearkens back to Fox’s will by focusing on urban gardening -- both on and off-site -- and a reading program at the neighboring Julia de Burgos School.

There are currently 20 HFH "reading buddies" who volunteer in the classroom there and work to restore the school library that was closed down (along with many others across the city) in 2010. A large local Hispanic immigrant community means this kind of support is crucial: Many local kids have parents who don’t speak English, so bridging the English-speaking literary gap is important.

"The kids are so lovely," says Warrington. "They are respectful, eager, curious, bright. They’ve got to have a library. They’ve got to have books. They’ve got to have people who can read with them."

In her new role as executive director, she wants to increase the number of reading buddies to 50 and expand the site’s existing gardening programs. Working outside "increases the peace," she argues. It correlates with better performance at school and is "just a good thing in this society that is so wired and pushy and loud and unjust."

Also on the horizon is increasing the site’s visibility with an improved website, better social media presence and monthly events. That includes an upcoming Women’s History Month tour on March 12 honoring the graves of leaders of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s right’s convention.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Jean Warrington, Historic Fair Hill
 

The Philadelphia Department of Commerce has a dedicated program to cover 50 percent of the installation costs of outdoor security cameras at city businesses, but it recently realized that in some neighborhoods that isn’t enough.

"We have been finding that businesses in low-income areas are not as prone to be able to take advantage of that," explains Karen Lockhart Fegely, the Commerce Department’s deputy director of neighborhood & business services.

So, with help from Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI) dollars, the Department launched a pilot program to fund the entire cost of outdoor security cameras in two targeted neighborhoods.

One of those areas is a stretch of the Germantown business corridor: the 5600 to 5900 blocks of Germantown Avenue. According to Germantown United CDC Corridor Manager Emaleigh Doley, the Philadelphia Police Department helped to identify the right locations. 

"Once this project is complete, there will be at least 25 businesses on this area of the corridor…that will have new security cameras" facing the street, she explains. This is "exciting" for those investing in Germantown’s business corridor. "Not to get all 'Big Brother' on people, but shoppers like knowing that the corridor is safer, so I’m really hoping that helps set a new tone in that area."

The other spot getting new security cameras through NTI funds is the N. 22nd Street commercial corridor of Allegheny West, which the Commerce Department chose because it’s already the site of streetscape upgrades through a capital improvement project.

Allegheny West Foundation's Thera Martin-Milling is the N. 22nd Street corridor manager, and she did the legwork of securing plans and estimates from camera companies. The Commerce Department, again with input from the Police Department, hopes to install the devices at evenly distributed intervals along the stretch.

The corridor managers on both 22nd [Street] and Germantown Avenue contacted the business and property owners at strategic locations to solicit their approval to have the cameras installed and to maintain the cameras.

So what is the effect of putting more eyes on the street?

"At this point, we do not have hard evidence on return on investment in terms of increase of foot traffic and sales revenue," says Fegely, but the basic goal is to support commerce through increased public safety. To receive Commerce Department reimbursements for the cameras, participating business and property owners must register their cameras through the PPD’s SafeCam program.

"It is widely accepted that the first step to revitalizing and sustaining a corridor is to make it clean and safe," adds Fegely.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Sources: Emaleigh Doley, Germantown United CDC; Karen Lockhart Fegely, Philadelphia Department of Commerce

Emaleigh Doley, a longtime community activist, has a new hat: she's one of two full-time employees at Germantown United CDC (along with executive director Andy Trackman). Thanks to support from the Philadelphia Department of Commerce, she started in late August as the nonprofit’s corridor manager, and is now nurturing and managing a slew of projects at the upstart community development corporation.

These include the latest round of GUDCD's Fund for Germantown grantees, who receive micro-grants for "community-driven beautification projects" in the neighborhood; those winners were announced October 1. The dollars come via local real estate developers Ken Weinstein and Howard Treatman, and have supported 17 initiatives (with amounts ranging from $100 to $1,000) since the program’s inception.

The latest grantees include photographer Tieshka Smith for her "Peaceful Places" public signage project, Maplewood Mall’s iMPeRFeCT Gallery, which will be installing an interactive sidewalk mural, and Susan Guggenheim’s Freedom Gardens, which connects local gardeners eager to share crops with those looking for homegrown produce. Other grantees include the Germantown elementary school Fitler Academics Plus, the West Central Germantown Neighbors, Men Who Care of Germantown and the East Germantown's Chew-Belfield Neighbors Club.

According to Doley, the Germantown Artists Roundtable, a previous grantee, stands out as a successful example of what the funds can do. The group recently mounted a display of information on current arts and culture events outside the Chelten Avenue train station, and plans to keep it updated as a community resource for happenings around town.

"We’re starting to see how that could be a really attractive feature in other areas of Germantown," she explains. "We’re learning from the project ideas that are coming through, and thinking about how we might like to build initiatives around some of them."

Applications for the next round of Fund for Germantown grants are due December 31, 2015.

Also looming large on GUCDC’s horizon is a new website for the neighborhood featuring a business directory. Doley notes that while Historic Germantown does a good job of providing online information about the area’s historic sites, residents and visitors alike often aren’t aware of other amenities, from parks and public spaces to hardware stores and restaurants. She hopes the new website will remedy that.

GUCDC is working with P’unk Avenue to develop the site. Input is being gathered via interviews and workshops with community leaders, residents and business owners. The site is on track to launch in early 2016.

Other projects for the commercial corridor in Germantown include the installation of new security cameras and a storefront activation initiative in partnership with local artists. Check back with Flying Kite as we keep up with the latest in our former On the Ground home.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Emaleigh Doley, Germantown United Community Development Corporation
 

G-Town Radio station manager Jim Bear says that though it might not yet be visible to the public, big changes are underway for Germantown’s Internet radio station, which at its highest listenership has over 15,000 people tuning in worldwide.

The major news broke in January, when the station got its permit from the FCC to become a Low Power FM radio station -- new federal legislation gave non-commercial neighborhood groups access to low-power airwaves previously denied them in favor of major broadcasting frequencies.

"To serve the community as best we can, being on the radio allows us to do that much better than we can online,” explains Bear who is still "a big believer" in Internet radio. "I love the medium. I love what you can do with it, but at the same time, there are real limitations to who you can expect to reach. I think that would be true anywhere, but I think it’s even more evident in a community like Germantown."

In many neighborhoods, the digital divide is still very real. Unlike Internet access, which can be costly and require certain skills to tune in, radio is still a ubiquitous and easily accessible medium, free for everyone with a car or a radio in the home. (The station will continue to broadcast online as well.)

With an existing studio and programming, G-town Radio (which will share airtime with Germantown United CDC and Germantown Life Enrichment Center) is ahead of some nascent LPFM stations who must build their presence from the ground up.

Right now, Bear is looking into locations and lease agreements with local property owners who might be able to host a radio antenna on the roof. The studio space itself won’t require much additional equipment: the primary expense of shifting to LPFM will be that new transmission equipment, including the gear that beams the audio from the studio to the tower.

To that end, G-Town Radio has launched a "Drive for the Sky" crowdfunding campaign through Indiegogo, hoping to raise $5,000 by October 3. That will cover the initial costs of equipment and installation, and possibly the first few months of rent for the antenna location.

"We want to make sure we get to the air… [and] demonstrate our worth, and hopefully when we’re doing that, people will recognize the value of community radio, and give us access to a larger pool of donors and supporters and listeners," enthuses Bear.

He hopes the new G-town Radio signal -- available at 92.9 FM -- will hit the airwaves as soon as possible: They’re on an FCC-administered deadline requiring completion of LPFM construction within 18 months of receiving the permit, which means launching by next summer at the latest. The signal is expected to reach what Bear calls "greater Northwest Philadelphia," including Germantown, East Falls, Nicetown, Mt. Airy and West Oak Lane. (Depending on location and the density of area buildings, LPFM signals typically have a three to five mile radius.)

"A lot of it’s behind the scenes so there’s not much to see," says Bear of the LPFM progress so far, "but we’re actively working on it and we’re still moving forward."

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Jim Bear, G-Town Radio

On August 2, Germantown photographer, blogger and activist Tieshka Smith formally launched a project she calls "the most important work that I have done to date.”

The kick-off discussion for that effort, "Racism is a Sickness," took place at Maplewood Mall’s G-Town Radio space. It drew so many interested locals over the course of an hour that the place was packed.

A combination of portraits and interviews conducted by the artist on how racism has affected her subjects, "Racism is a Sickness" is an extension of work Smith did over the last year through a residency at the Painted Bride Art Center. There, her portrait series titled "Private Pain, Silent Struggle," documented people of color with the objects and activities that help to insulate them against the pain of prejudice in everyday life. Smith wanted her subjects to have a say in how they were portrayed because "people of color are not given the agency to find their own imaging."

The current photo project has similar themes, but the portrait style will be more uniform: They’ll all be taken in the lobby at G-Town Radio in front of an upside-down American flag. That flag represents "a country in distress," she explains -- it’s like "shooting up a flare" for racial injustice in modern America.

Each subject (five of whom had already been photographed as of early August) will wear a medical mask with a word written on it representing something they hope to protect themselves against such as "shame," "fear," "stereotyping" and "suspicion." Ultimately, Smith hopes to include 25 subjects in the project. She aims to raise $5,000 to support the work through an Indiegogo campaign.

Beyond finding and photographing her subjects, the artist’s next step will be broad community engagement, an exhibition of the portraits and lots of associated programming developed out of the themes of the interviews. Smith is on the lookout for a final exhibition space and plenty of "co-investors" -- she is hoping to connect with a wide range of community groups who want to combat the social, economic and sometimes life-threatening dangers of racism.

For more information or to find out how you can participate in this project (open to people of all colors), e-mail [email protected] or follow along on Twitter @RMUS2015.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Tieshka Smith, “Racism is a Sickness” 

With a major new grant in excess of $100,000 from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Historic Germantown (HG) is tackling the "Elephants on the Avenue" – i.e., long-standing issues of race and class.

"The impetus for the project really was continuing Historic Germantown’s vision to contribute to the cultural and economic development of this community,” explains HG executive director Trapeta Mayson of the newly-funded "Elephants on the Avenue: Race, Class, and Community in Historic Germantown."

That means respectfully interpreting Germantown’s deep and diverse history on a few main themes, including slavery and abolition, inclusion and exclusion, and tolerance.

"I don’t think people can always easily find themselves in some of these stories, so we feel that some of the responsibility of our historic site is to make this information accessible and relevant to today’s public," says Mayson.

The project, which will launch in October and last two years, will pair local artists and historians to "collaboratively curate text and image-based public art and educational workshops about race and class" with the help of member sites and community partners.

The project boasts four historians: Dr. Abigail Perkiss, Dr. Matthew Countryman, Dr. Molefi Assante and Dr. Thomas Sugrue. Participating creative types include visual artists, educators and poets: Barbara J. Bullock, Ife Nii Owoo, Diane Pieri, Sonia Sanchez, Yolanda Wisher and Benjamin Volta.

Pew dollars will let HG compensate the artists and historians, Mayson explains, and cover materials for workshops, festivals and other community events. "Elephants" will also have a dedicated part-time project manager.

And it’s not just about reckoning with the past -- exploring the full potential of Germantown’s historic fabric has economic importance, too.

"Economics is something that people tend to forget when we think about historic sites and how important they are to a community," insists Mayson. "People come to a neighborhood, they spend money, they become interested."

That means Germantown has a lot of growing to do, from upping the number of available restaurants to improving walkability and transit -- that’s why HG already partners with several non-historic community organizations, meeting monthly with Germantown United CDC, Germantown Community Connection and others.

"We’d be missing a great opportunity if we didn’t realize we were just as essential to economic development and community planning," adds Mayson.

"Elephants on the Avenue" will culminate in a final performance/exhibition curated by iMPeRFeCT Gallery co-founder and Germantown resident Renny Molenaar.

Source: Trapeta Mayson, Historic Germantown
Writer: Alaina Mabaso

When you need to give your loved one an ETA or figure out the quickest way to your next meeting, there are many ways to do it: A peek at the clock, your calendar and maybe Google maps, a bit of mental math, and opening up a messenger app to tap out a quick note.

Wait. Too many steps? 20-year-old Ari Weinstein thought so, and decided to give a new meaning to the word "workflow."

In his new app, released last December with partner Conrad Kramer (an 18-year-old Cherry Hill native), workflow has become a singular, individualized concept. For example, here’s a workflow for you: I have a picture on my phone that I want to share on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all at once. I want a button on my home screen that’ll do all that automatically. Or, I'm viewing a website, and I want to make, save and send an instant PDF of it. Thanks to the Workflow app, there’s "a workflow" for that -- in other words, a way to customize and automate multi-step digital tasks you need throughout the day -- and pretty much anything else you want to do on your smartphone.

"One way to describe it would be that Workflow lets you automate different things that you do every day, so you can do them just with a push of a button," explains Weinstein. "You can sort of make these really personalized experiences that automate things that only you do.

You can get creative and make your own workflows or you can engage with an online community sharing the workflows they’ve invented.

Weinstein (son of Philly Office Retail president Ken Weinstein) is a West Mt. Airy native who graduated from Germantown Friends School, took a "gap year" before college to work in California, and then started at MIT in 2013. But in December of that year, he and Kramer applied for a Thiel Fellowship, granted every year to 20 college students under the age of 20 nationwide. The fellowship offers the winners $100,000 over two years to pursue a passion outside of the classroom. (Workflow is Weinstein’s second app launch; he also developed DeskConnect.)

Weinstein and Kramer, now based in San Francisco, found out they’d been selected for the fellowship in May 2014.

Since then, things have moved quickly.

"The launch went incredibly well," recalls Weinstein. Apple selected Workflow as an editor’s choice in the app store, showing it on a banner to everyone who visited the site.  

"It was the no. 1 most downloaded app on the [paid] app store for four days," he continues. "We’ve just been thrilled with the way people have taken advantage of it. People have made hundreds of thousands of workflows, some of which are really cool that we never would have thought of."

There are now three guys on the startup's team: 18-year-old Nick Frey, from Iowa, has joined Weinstein and Kramer.

And this is still just the earliest version of the app -- Weinstein hints at "a big update" they hope to launch by February.

So does he want to go back to school?

"That’s a hard question," he muses. "I’m not sure I can make that call right now."

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Ari Weinstein, Workflow

The annual Philadelphia Honey Festival, a celebration of the importance of bees and the honey they produce, has been in existence for just five years now. But to hear Suzanne Matlock of the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild explain it, the three-day festival -- running September 5 to 7 at three historic locations throughout the city -- can trace its genesis back to Christmas Day 1810. That was the day Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth was born at 106 S. Front Street.
 
Widely known as the "Father of American Beekeeping," Langstroth is the man responsible for inventing the Langstroth bee hive. Consisting of movable frames and resembling a stout wooden cabinet, the Langstroth is still considered the definitive beehive for keepers worldwide. So important was his contribution to beekeeping that on the 200th anniversary of his birth, a historical marker noting his accomplishments was raised outside his former Front Street home.  
 
The first annual Philadelphia Honey Festival was also celebrated that year, largely to honor Langstroth's memory and his significant impact on the craft. Only 500 people took part.

But in the seasons since, the event has evolved into a family-friendly educational and cultural celebration promoting urban beekeeping. It aims to "increase awareness of the importance of bees to [the] environment" and "the impact of local honey on our economy," according to a release. Last year, over 2,300 bee-curious locals showed up. 
 
Organized by the Beekeepers Guild and hosted at Bartram's Garden, the Wagner Free Institute of Science and Wyck Historic House, the festival's free events range from bee bearding presentations and open beehive viewings to a honey-themed happy hour and honey extraction demonstrations.

For a complete schedule, click here. (Don't miss the Beekeeping 100 panel on September 7.)
 
Writer: Dan Eldridge
Source: Suzanne Matlock, Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild

In a neighborhood as historic as Philadelphia's Germantown, the Germantown United CDC (GUCDC) is an anomaly: The organization isn't yet three years old.
 
When it formed in late 2011, the community was still reeling from allegations of severe mismanagement on the part of Germantown Settlement, a social services agency. During its formative months, Germantown United's main goal involved becoming known as a trusted and transparent community partner.
 
To a large degree, that goal has been accomplished. GUCDC regularly hosts well-attended events and forums, and recently undertook a business district tree-planting campaign.
 
Now, according to Executive Director Andrew Trackman, the organization is hiring its first commercial corridor manager. The position's first-year salary will be covered as part of a reimbursable $75,000 grant from the Commerce Department.
 
The corridor manager's responsibilities will mainly involve working as a liaison to the business and property owners of the Germantown and Chelten Avenue business districts. They might listen to retailers' complaints, for instance, or help them apply for development grants such as the Commerce Department's Storefront Improvement Program (SIP).    
 
"We're looking for this corridor manager to be kind of a defacto business association head," explains Trackman. The new employee will also be heavily involved in business corridor cleanup efforts in coordination with the Germantown Special Services District.
 
"[Local businesses] need help with capacity and technical assistance," he adds. "We're just trying to improve the overall business climate of the district."

Writer: Dan Eldridge
Source: Andrew Trackman, Germantown United CDC
 

Many people have had the experience of killing time at a neighborhood pharmacy by checking their vitals at a blood pressure kiosk. But now, at a QCare clinic located inside an East Falls grocery store, customers can take advantage of the very first kiosk in the nation screening exclusively for behavioral and mental health issues.
 
The kiosk was the result of an annual design challenge organized by the Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation, a local philanthropic group that works to change how behavioral healthcare is practiced in the Greater Philadelphia area. In 2013, the Foundation's design challenge addressed the stigma of mental health conditions on college campuses. 

Also known as convenient care clinics, the popularity of retail clinics within pharmacies has grown exponentially in recent years. Some experts estimate that as many as 3,000 such clinics will exist nationwide by 2015. And yet nearly all currently exist without the infrastructure to deal with mental health issues.  
 
The Scattergood Foundation hopes to alter that by bringing its kiosk to other retail clinics in the future. In the meantime, Philadelphians can access the iPad-powered stand at QCare's 2800 Fox Street location, inside ShopRite.   
 
Gregory Caplan, a foundation project manager, points out that while the results generated from the kiosk don't represent a formal diagnosis, anyone who completes the screening -- the process takes just a minute or two -- will be offered a list of specific mental health resources. To experience the screening online, click here. 
 
"The main point [of the kiosk] is to get people to realize that mental health is just as important as physical health," explains Teresa Moore, who also worked on the project.  
 
Writer: Dan Eldridge
Sources: Gregory Caplan and Teresa Moore, Thomas Scattergood Foundation 
 

Giant koi swimming up 13th Street? Believe it. The Favela Painters are coming to Philadelphia. In mid-September, Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, better known as the team Haas&Hahn, arrive here for a major public art project that spans three Philadelphia neighborhoods, trains countless new artists and brings a bit of Brazil to the city.

Favela is the term used for the slums of Rio de Janiero, lawless places ruled by criminal syndicates. Over the past five years, Haas&Hahn have transformed the walls and streets of these mountainside neighborhoods that loom over downtown Rio. Outrageous color and imagery, visible from all parts of the city, have transformed trash strewn chaotic areas into internationally renowned public art galleries.

Now the Favela Painters are set to transform Philadelphia, and the location of their work will be in some pretty high profile places: the 13th Street corridor owned by Goldman Properties in Center City; in North Philadelphia at Lehigh and Germantown Avenues, near The Village of Arts and Humanities (where Haas&Hahn will reside during the project); and in Manayunk, on old industrial buildings facing Interstate 76.

Funding, which is budgeted at just under $500,000 for the three-part project, comes from The Knight Foundation, The U.S. Department of Commerce, Goldman Properties and The Manayunk Development Corporation.

The teams that will work on the project will be trained by the Haas&Hahn guild. "People who don't have a lot of opportunities will be able to work with international artists," says Golden, who describes the artists' philosophy as a model for passing knowledge on. "What's the test of a good project? The shifting perspectives of people who made the art and people who live with it."

This will be the first permanent U.S. project for Haas&Hahn, who also created an installation for Art Basel Miami in 2010. Jane Golden, Executive Director of the Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia, met the Favela painters through hip hop art consultant Todd Bressi, who brought Haas&Hahn to Miami. Bressi is a lecturer at The University of Pennsylvania and also worked on the Philadelphia Airport Gateway Project.

Golden says Haas&Hahn are on MAP's dream list of artists. "We're philosophically aligned. They're colorists with a background in architecture," says Golden. Kickoff is September 27 with a welcome reception. The entire project is set to last 18 months, including training and pop-up studios throughout the city. At its conclusion, a major exhibition is planned, which will also span Philadelphia and is slated for late 2013 to early 2014.

Source: Jane Golden, Philadelphia Mural Arts Program
Writer: Sue Spolan