Major Expansion Slated For Business Entrepreneurial Center
Development project for West Philadelphia entrepreneurial facility is backed by Citizens Bank and Federal Government
The Enterprise Center Community Development Corporation (CDC) recently unveiled a major expansion project for its business incubator program that will create community wealth through entrepreneurship. The CDC will invest in the neighborhood's real estate infrastructure and serve as a catalyst in bringing back a new economic base by attracting growing new companies to 46th & Market. The end results will create a live, work and play environment with access to capital, technology, know-how (training) and a new generation of talent.
Envisioned in four phases, the Enterprise Heights project will contain 500,000 square feet of new and rehabilitated office, retail, green, parking, and transit-related space. Once completed it will be a new, first-class, $75 million entrepreneurial campus attracting credit, office tenants, retail, and financial and intellectual capital to West Philadelphia. The project's central location in the area will tie together other, seemingly far-flung investments, and solidify West Philadelphia's foothold in the regional economy. It will complement the investment in West Philadelphia that local institutions are making, help to anchor the activities already underway with the University City District, and leverage the reconstruction of SEPTA's Market-Frankford Elevated Rail Line (the El).
Phase One, set to begin during the first quarter of 2003, involves building a $13 million, 84,000-square-foot office/retail structure. This building will be dramatic to look at and provide a business environment with major amenities, including build-to-suit capability, state-of-the-art data and communications systems, energy efficient and environmentally conscious utility systems, all at a very cost effective rent.
"We are excited about spearheading this project and the opportunity to work with Citizens Bank, Community College of Philadelphia and SEPTA," said Della Clark, President of The Enterprise Center and Enterprise Heights. "The CDC will attract new businesses to West Philadelphia and a new generation of employees."
The Enterprise Center CDC, formed in December 2001, will be seeking institutional, corporate, and governmental tenants; high-tech start-ups and the VC firms that cultivate them; incubator graduates and "dorm-room start-ups;" and community-based organizations.
"The Enterprise Heights initiative is a major step in transforming West Philadelphia and bringing new jobs and opportunities to the neighborhood," said Stephen D. Steinour, Chairman and CEO of Citizens Bank of Pennsylvania. "By providing resources to help entrepreneurs pursue their dreams, the project will cultivate home-grown talent and help our City's new businesses succeed. Citizens' support is part of our ongoing commitment to programs that nurture small businesses, strengthen Philadelphia's economy and make a positive impact on our region."
In addition to the support of Citizens Bank, the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration (EDA) has provided a $429,000 grant for the development of architectural designs and plans. According to Paul Raetsch, Regional Director of the EDA, "In the past half century, West Philadelphia did not have the capacity to amass the wealth and capital necessary to create new businesses, to create a restructured diverse economy, and to create new jobs. The Enterprise Center is making progress at addressing those economic problems."
The Enterprise Center trains thousands of entrepreneurs each year, some of them as young as 12 years old, and provides the key resources and hands on training necessary to become an industry leader. It is helping to create both new businesses and a new breed of innovative and socially responsible urban leaders. Since 1999, The Enterprise Center has created 371 new jobs. It serves as the incubator for 13 firms, 10 of which are housed in its West Philadelphia headquarters in the former home of the television show American Bandstand.
The Enterprise Center is one of America's premier urban business incubators. It was founded in 1989 with support from the Small Business Development Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. The Enterprise Center's mission is to develop entrepreneurs, grow businesses and revitalize its West Philadelphia neighborhoods near 46th and Market. For more information, visit The Enterprise Center's web site at www.theenterprisecenter.com.
Citizens Bank of Pennsylvania is a $17.8 billion bank with more than 322 branches, 574 ATMs and a convenient network of commercial banking offices throughout Pennsylvania. It also operates four retail branches in southern New Jersey. It has more than 4,500 employees. Citizens Bank of Pennsylvania is a subsidiary of Citizens Financial Group, Inc., a $53 billion, Providence, R.I.-based commercial bank holding company with more than 710 offices and more than 1,495 ATMs, operating as Citizens Bank in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Citizens is one of the 20 largest commercial banks in the United States. It is wholly owned by The Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc. For more information, visit Citizens' Web site at www.citizensbank.com.
A neighborhood fights back - and wins
BY THOM NICKELS
Special to the University City Review
On the evening of July 1, Karen Allen, treasurer of the Cedar Park Neighbors Association, noticed something strange when she looked out the window at the view of the parking lot used for residents and area businesses.
"I saw five or six tow trucks with their headlights on and other lights flashing, parked on Warrington Avenue." An occasional tow truck wouldn't have been so bad but these trucks were not moving. Further observation revealed that the tow trucks would load cars on large flatbed trucks every twenty minutes or so. There was noise, too much light, and the co-motion was an obvious intrusion into the peaceful life of the neighborhood.
Then came the partitioning of the lot with cars so that people with cars could only come into the lot from Baltimore Avenue. On the Warrington Avenue side a Philadelphia Parking Authority car blocked the entrance so that people couldn't enter, Allen said.
Karen Allen wasn't the only one to witness the strange goings on. Across the way, Bob Helms was busy at work writing an email to alert neighbors to the destruction in their path. Without warning, he wrote, the city had created an impound lot at 4718-20 Baltimore Avenue, which faces the 4700 block of Warrington Avenue. Named "Operation Live Stop," the plan was to tow any vehicle with paperwork issues, leave their cars in the lot until the flatbed trucks transported them to a permanent facility. The 24-hour operation would entail a lot of noise and constant coming and going, not to mention flashing lights, about as intrusive as a bomb going off in this quiet community.
"To make matters worse, " Helms wrote, "the trucks often stand in the driveway to Baltimore Avenue, with the driver talking on a cell phone and ignoring anyone wishing to enter or leave the lot." Adding insult to injury, the city then added a 7' fence around the Warrington Avenue half of the lot. "Be prepared to employ whatever means of redressor doing some other thing you know how to do that emerges straight out of your angry heart and your creative mind," Helms added.
Clearly, war was declared.
Karen Allen says she went to Jannie Blackwell's office and filed a complaint. "I confronted the people working in there and told them that this is not appropriate in a residential neighborhood." She then made a flyer and distributed them in mail slots. "Philadelphia Parking Authority Go Away, No Impound Lot," the flyer stated, then Allen went on to explain how the ordinary parking lot had been converted overnight by the city, without any warning to neighbors, into an impound lot, where tow trucks loitered and drivers loitered while waiting for calls.
Not far away, Judy Gernon, president of Warrington Community Gardens, the little garden that was created by Cambodian immigrants in the 1970s and that runs along the perimeter of the lot, wrote to City Managing Director Estelle Richmond, that PPA employees were ripping down the garden's prized Champagne Grape vines, imported from New York's Finger Lakes district. She told Richmond that through the years Cedar Park neighbors had been growing flowering vegetation to clean up the ugly parking lot as well as keeping it clean.
"Through the years, we have had to deal with prostitutes, and last year we were sent two little old gentlemen who cleaned up the place. They thought the garden was lovely but this time PPA sent two young guys who went after the grape vines, not the weeds, and when a neighbor confronted them one of the guys said some very nasty things to her."
Gernon says that she called Director of Off-Parking, Richard Dickson, and told him she just couldn't believe that for a couple of weeks the drivers of the tow trucks just sat there all day in their trucks with their engines going just waiting for the cops to call and send them somewhere to tow a car back to the lot. According to Gernon, protest activity in the neighborhood picked up when the fence went up, since that seemed to indicate that the impound lot, which was supposed to be temporary, was possibly headed for permanent status.
Karen Allen was concerned about the tow trucks speeding down Warrington Avenue "as if they were on I-95." "This endangered children and residents and businesses have lost parking facilities because of this," she wrote on the flyer. Then there was the possibility of an enraged motorist coming to the impound lot and causing more trouble.
Jannie Blackwell's office was flooded with more letters, this time from Carol Walker, Vice President of Cedar Park Neighbors, as well as Maureen Tate, president of the same organization.
Allen mentioned a near-fistfight that occurred between one of the neighbors and a tow truck driver. "It was a hostile scene," she said. "People living in the block of houses at 4800 Warrington Avenue also complained about the noise the tow trucks were making."
The unexpected happened on Tuesday, July 16, when the gate was removed; on the following day, the 7' fence was gone. Immediately after this, Gernon said that the city promised that it would inform Cedar Park residents when and if it intends to do something with the lot.
The happy ending, Allen says, illustrates the power of having an organized community, especially since Cedar Park was named by 'The Inquirer' as one of the 6 good areas to live in the city. Gernon said that the parking lot once housed an old warehouse and a movie theater, and that when the warehouse burned in the 1970s, the nuns from Saint Francis deSales parish brought over the Cambodian refugees, who started the garden.
She recalled how she once watched a Laotian grandmother taking a bucket of water "and sprinkling the garden like she was blessing it."
CPNA rises anew to fight for a city-wide community voice
By Mark Brakeman
Special to the University City Review
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the city's sole
organization to try to unite community organizations has pulled itself back to life.
Recently, the Coalition of Philadelphia Neighborhood Associations held its first meeting in three years to try to revive the city-wide group and throw the blanket of common goals over the city's civic groups.
CPNA founder and executive director Colleen Puckett said when she got a call recently from Mary Tracy, executive director of the Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight (SCRUB), about uniting civic organizations, she thought, why not revive CPNA instead of reinventing the wheel."
The consensus among former members of CPNA that she polled was yes, so Puckett organized a meeting. "Rather than starting fresh again we decided to revive the old organization. It still had some credibility."
"It's not that it wasn't around [for the past three years]," said Tracy. "It was lying dormant." She said the reorganization, "...provides us with the opportunity to address issues that are important to us. We need a vehicle to do that"
CPNA was founded in 1995 by a number of neighborhood associations working together for the next four or five years on the issue of riverboat gambling; according to Puckett. The group became dormant when the gambling issue was defeated.
Puckett said although CPNA held its last regular meeting in 1999, the group was active again last year in opposing City Councilman Frank DiCicco's bill 629 that would have restricted the appeal of Zoning Board decisions to those directly affected by the issue at hand.
Despite her own enthusiasm, Puckett said she was nervous to send out e-mails again to CPNA's old members because it been so long since the group had met, but people were enthusiastic in their responses, she said. "There was a lot of interest."
In all approximately 70 people representing 32 civic/CDC/neighborhood/Friends groups showed up for the meeting at the Friends Center at 1501 Cherry Street. All the original organizations were there, including Washington Square West, the Center City Residents Association, Fishtown, Kensington, Germantown, Mt. Airy, and Roxborough.
But new groups were pulled in, too. Like Chinatown, South Philadelphia's Packer Park and the University City Community Council. The UCCC is itself a compendium of neighborhood groups from West Philadelphia.
Puckett credited SCRUB Tracy, with pulling in so many people. In addition to packages about the meeting that she mailed out, she e-mailed an announcement to Tracy who sent it on to all her neighborhood contacts who in turn forwarded it to everybody on their lists.
"It's revolutionizing organizing," she said of e-mail. "It's incredible."
Puckett said CPNA members agreed to put together a web site for neighborhood access. Specifically devoted to zoning issues, the site will be set up so that users can cross-reference specific cases as to topic, developer, zoning attornies, etc.
The site will be built by Ed Goppelt, who built and has managed www.hallwatch.org since March 11, 2001. The sometimes controversial site lists news stories and statistical reports on Philadelphia's municipal government and offers links to governmental information.
Prior to that, Goppelt built a site for dog owners call devbob.com, which lists news stories about governmental action of interest to dog owners.
Puckett said neighborhood web sites exist already, but the CPNA site would be different in that it "would be more than just a chat group." Their goal, she said, would to actually become a group. "The real power would come when we get back together as a group, when we could go city wide."
She would like to use the site to display community-friendly candidate scorecards for next year's municipal elections, or at least have Goppelt dig up voting records and display the information.
Melani Lamond, secretary of the University City Community Coalition spoke to the group about how her organization already does what CPNA proposes to do by serving as an umbrella organization for six community groups in University City.
The UCCC meets every two months, with a rotating chairperson hosting at each meeting, and the secretary of the coalition cannot be a member of any of the civic groups, Lamond said.
The coalition runs fairly smoothly, she said, but issues that have arisen include how to determine that a group wanting to join the coalition is a valid organization; and how to respond quickly to issues when each UCCC member has to check with their respective groups before voting on a measure.
In addition to developing the CPNA web site, Puckett she said she would like CPNA to develop a consensus on the issues among CPNA's members. That, she added, could lead to the development of a standard list of questions for political candidates and the refinement of a rating system to the point where CPNA could endorse neighborhood-friendly candidates.
But in an e-mail Maureen Tate, president of the Cedar Park Neighbors Association, wrote, "I continue to have questions about taking official positions because ensuring broad informed participation on a regular basis may be difficult initially. I am more in favor of being part of a coalition who's primary mission is neighborhood advocacy and sharing information, resources and strategies.
"However, I definitely agree with Colleen about the importance of pressuring public agencies and officials to take a stand on neighborhood related issues so that we can determine best strategies to either change public policy or our political leadership."
John Arneth, vice president of the Washington Square West Civic Association, called the meeting "very positive."
"Personally I like the idea of the sharing of information," he said. "What's the sense of re-inventing the wheel if you can e-mail other people who've [experienced the same problem] and ask 'who did you contact.' We all had a lot of the same problems. Working together we can work them out."
He said the community representatives at the meeting showed a lot of vitality and concern and were committed to living and staying in Philadelphia. "Not only do I live here, I own a business here," he said. "A lot of people at the meeting had the same sort of commitment."
But without the defensiveness that such commitment can sometimes provoke, he added. "I was pleasantly surprised that you could have that many people in a room who had so much commitment to Philadelphia and have everyone so upbeat and positive and not be in a negative frame of mind."
Lou Coffey, of the Center City Residents Association (CCRA), said, "Any time you have communications between organizations that are involved in similar activities, there's an opportunity to learn from each other."
He said he thought CCRA would most directly benefit from the group if CPNA served as a unifying organization for a particular cause. "There probably will be a time when we will want to act jointly [in response to] the city," Coffey said. "Any structure that enables these organizations to work with each other will be positive."
Mary Tracy said there is no commanding issue facing CPNA right now, but individual group's battles are so numerous, "It's more, where are you going to pick your spot... The more gnarly issues center around zoning."
"There's a high level of frustration in communities [over the] abuse of discretion by the Zoning Board."
The SCRUB leader said "Public policy is driven by private industry rather than the Zoning Board. We need a balance."
Both Puckett and Tracy said CPNA is also committed to working on quality-of-life issues, and Puckett said a suggestion was made at the July 10 meeting that the group also take on taxes and education. But many at the July 10 meeting thought those issues would be overwhelming.
"To take that on as an issue would capsize us," Puckett said.
In her post-meeting e-mail, CPN's Maureen Tate wrote that she would also like to see the group develop "...strategies for addressing deteriorating housing in addition to abandoned housing and vacant lots. Short of tax reform we need strategies to identify and pressure those who are sitting on property in our communities and for many reasons refuse to sell, or develop.
"We want to focus on everyday neighborhood things that we could impact...We're just going to keep going [and] see what happens," said Puckett.
The next CPNA meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, September 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the Friends Center, 1501 Cherry Street.
