As Penn launches a series of initiatives to bolster its urban environment, it has to contend with a lot of history—including its own.
By Samuel Hughes
“THE EPITAPH HAS BEEN WRITTEN for so many neighborhoods,” Leo Molinaro was saying. “Almost every city or town I’ve gone to, they’d take me down and show me a bunch of formerly booming industrial areas that are falling apart, and they’d say, ‘You know, this place is really dead.’ And then some of them, I’d come back five years later, and boy … You can’t even put up a house without having a waiting list. It’s amazing.
“It doesn’t happen by any known rational method,” he added quickly. “Even with the best of intentions and minds, nobody knows how you can create community. But certain known rational steps have to be taken to even have a chance to make it happen.”
Molinaro is a likeable man with a disarming ability to sound both tough-minded and optimistic at the same time. And he has, as they say, been there. As the former head of the West Philadelphia Corporation (now the West Philadelphia Partnership) back in the 1960s, he played a substantial role in shaping that part of West Philadelphia known as University City. Those efforts had some good results and some not-so-good results, and both he and the University have learned a lot since then about cities and how to approach their problems.
Yet one essential aspect of the equation, he points out, remains constant: “Every time you make a choice, you opt for change.”
Change is in the air in University City these days, and a good deal of it is, once again, being driven by Penn. Though there is, inevitably, some disagreement about the details, most people who work or live there would agree that some things badly need changing. The decline of West Philadelphia has been a long, slow process, the result of a complex interplay of factors, and reversing it will not come easily or quickly.
“I think that this is a pivotal time for West Philadelphia — and for us,” says Dr. Judith Rodin, CW’66, president of the University. “And that’s why this is a crucial moment to act. Urban universities need to figure out a way to enhance and revive and reaffirm urbanism as a critical feature of American life … We are all stakeholders in the future of Philadelphia. And it’s critical.”
Rodin and Dr. Stanley Chodorow, the provost, have already made “The Urban Agenda — Penn in Philadelphia” one of Penn’s Six Academic Priorities, which represents a substantial commitment of both scholarship and money. The University’s schools and centers are putting tens of thousands of volunteer hours into area schools and otherwise linking its intellectual resources with the needs of the community. And over the next few years, Penn will be steering hundreds of millions of dollars into its various West Philadelphia initiatives [see the sidebars below and on pp. 22, 24].
It has made other, less publicized moves as well, such as hiring Jack Shannon, former deputy director of commerce for the City of Philadelphia, to oversee and coordinate Penn’s economic development in West Philadelphia; and purchasing ailing residences and fixing them up, then reselling them. It is also working on a package of financial incentives for faculty and staff to live in University City. And while the Gazette has already reported on the security measures taken by the University in the wake of last fall’s crime wave, it’s worth noting that Penn is now spending some $18 million a year on its various security measures.
Asked how difficult it is to sell what must be a fairly expensive set of initiatives to her various constituencies, Rodin replies with a sort of emphatic concern: “This isn’t about Penn spending half a billion dollars. This is about Penn leveraging its resources — its ability to convince other entities that also must make investments that we are serious, so they can be serious. We are going to look to the neighbors and our financial institutions and our corporate sector and our private foundations and national entities that support urban development, because we think that we have the ability to help bring all those players to the table.
“BUT WE CANNOT do it alone,” she adds. “And the entity with whom we need to work the most closely is the community. It isn’t about Penn doing for the community or to the community. It is with the community.”
Even if Penn is “leveraging its resources” rather than spending its own money, it is still taking a costly, multi-pronged approach to the problem. Whether that will result in a West Philadelphia renaissance or a herd of white elephants remains to be seen. But as Dr. Ira Harkavy, C’70, Gr’79, notes: “Anything that focuses on a single-pronged attempt — by the nature of not looking at the enormous interrelated complexity that exists in an advanced society — will necessarily fail.”
Back in 1969, Harkavy was a shaggy-haired leader of the student protests against Penn’s urban-demolition efforts and its involvement with the University City Science Center. Now, as the bald associate vice president and director of Penn’s Center for Community Partnerships — an office created under former president Dr. Sheldon Hackney, Hon’93 — he is dealing with many of the same issues from the inside. The times, they have a’changed.
On the whole, universities have done a “heap of learning” in the last 30 years, and are now well aware that their “futures are indeed intertwined with their locality,” he says. While part of their acceptance of that reality stems from “immediate self-interest, of recruitment and retention of faculty, staff, and students,” universities are also under increasing pressure to solve the problems of society. As a result, trying to solve the nation’s staggering urban problems can have considerable academic benefits. At the same time, Harkavy suggests, there is a “growing concern about civic responsibility and citizenship and development of young people in a democratic society.”
This is all in line with the vision of Benjamin Frankin, he adds. “What was the purpose of the College of Philadelphia? ‘To educate young people with an inclination, joined with an ability, to serve.'”
Everyone in the administration, from Rodin on down, recites the same basic list of needs for the area around Penn, and they’ve obviously done some listening: to community activists, elected officials, students, and members of the faculty, some of whom are considered experts in these matters. The neighborhood, they say, needs to be safe and clean; it needs a set of excellent school options; it needs a good mix of attractive, affordable residential housing; it needs vastly improved retail options and nightlife; and it needs more job opportunities through economic development.
Carol Scheman, Penn’s vice president for government, community, and public affairs, acknowledges that the efforts will be “expensive and time-consuming, and some of them will require a lot of consensus-building and political groundwork.” But, she adds: “I don’t think they’re complicated. This is as far away from nuclear physics as you can get. I think we all know exactly what has to be done.”
“Whatever the specific issues with details of the plan,” says Dr. Dennis Culhane, associate professor in the School of Social Work and a University City resident, “one must remember that the administration wouldn’t really have a plan if they couldn’t get the approval of the trustees to spend the money … The administration should be credited with being able to sell the trustees on what looks like a potentially significant effort. Other administrations may have had good intentions for community improvement, but they didn’t deliver on the resources.”
“Penn’s role is very much that of a catalyst,” says John Fry, the University’s executive vice president. “Penn can’t by itself make everything work. But I have a lot of confidence in this area. It’s been forgotten about, but all the elements to be a really successful place are there.” Ultimately, he says, “We’d like University City to be what Cambridge is to Harvard.”
They’ve got their work cut out for them.
UNTIL THE MID-1950s, there was no University City. The appellation was essentially a marketing tool, recalls Lois Bye Funderburg, CW’48, a former realtor with Urban Developers (founded by her husband, George Funderberg, W’57), which later became Urban & Bye.
“Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods,” she points out. “West Philadelphia was such a huge place, and we were trying to develop a market in these big Victorian houses around the University, to encourage faculty to move back into a diversified neighborhood. So we decided to designate the area University City.” Its boundaries extended from the Schuylkill River to 52nd Street, and from Haverford Avenue to the Media-line railroad tracks south of Kingsessing Avenue — though over the years many have viewed it as a smaller domain. And there have been tensions between those whose interests lay exclusively in University City and those whose worldview encompassed the whole of West Philadelphia.
Though University City was never mistaken for the Left Bank of Paris, for a couple of decades there it was considered one of the more up-and-coming sections of the city, surfing the swelling national real-estate wave. Houses that had sold for $10,000 in 1961 were going for $150,000 by the late 1980s. Ten years ago, Patrick Starr, C’79, was convinced that if he didn’t buy a house that came up for sale in the 4400 block of Larchwood Avenue, he would be economically shut out of University City. He bought just as the wave was cresting, throughout Philadelphia and much of the Northeast. Baby-boomers were finally having children, and didn’t always want to raise them in cities. Crack cocaine and its attendant crime ripped through urban neighborhoods like something out of The Hot Zone. And areas like University City, with marginal schools and scruffy commercial amenities, took it on the chin.
Today the worst of the real-estate slump is over, and while University City may be down, it’s by no means out. Most residents — some 4,300 of whom work for the University and the Medical Center — will still defend it fiercely, at least when talking to a reporter. And sizeable parts of it do look pretty good. The housing stock is terrific: big, handsome Victorian houses with sprawling interiors and woodwork that has to be seen to be believed; smaller twins and row houses that, while unassuming from the outside, are well built and impressively detailed inside. There are still plenty of bright, vital, interesting people — a human bouillabaise that gets its savor partly from its proximity to Penn, partly to the demographic spicerack that characterizes most big American cities. And tight-knit blocks like St. Mark’s Square and Trinity Place provide a sense of community quite rare in insular contemporary America.
But West Philadelphia is not just University City. While some of its neighborhoods are still more or less middle-class, with a high proportion of home-owning families, sections like Mantua and nearby Southwest Philadelphia are among the poorest parts of the city. What that means, observes Bill Coleman, manager of the Firehouse Farmers Market at 50th Street and Baltimore Avenue, is that you have a “mix of people who have more opportunities than they know what to do with” living next to people who have “less opportunities than anyone should have” — with grimly predictable results.
The high-voltage publicity that accompanies crimes against the Penn community — like last fall’s surge of armed robberies, which culminated in the shooting of an undergraduate and the murder of Dr. Vladimir Sled, a research associate in biochemistry and biophysics — also get an extra charge from the cross-wiring of race and class. Ten years ago, 82 percent of Penn’s graduate students lived in West Philadelphia, the vast majority in University City. Today, only 14 percent do. In a recent survey by a group of Wharton MBA students, more than 40 percent of the 428 graduate students surveyed from several schools admitted that they “never” went past 40th Street, while another 24 percent said they didn’t go more than twice a year — which suggests that some of the fear and negative perceptions come from the shrill reporting of The Daily Pennsylvanian and the word-of-mouth of terrified fellow students.
“One of the things I’m most bemused by is the difference between my perceptions and those of the DP,” says Dr. Lynn Lees, professor of history, who has lived at 44th and Pine since 1974. “My perception is that the neighborhood is filled with ordinary people who raise children, who live in really nice houses with low mortgages. Their perception is that once you get past 40th Street, it’s an urban slum. It’s not. I do not wander around in fear of my life every time I walk out my door and to my office.”
AS JOHN LINDSAY, W’70, a long-time resident and old-building-rehabber in Powelton Village, points out: “Even in the most god-forsaken blocks, 90 percent of the people there are nice. It’s just a couple of creeps” who make life miserable for the others. But as more rental vacancies open up, notes one expert, more Section 8 public-housing families move in, and while that is not by itself a problem, the lack of supervision by the Philadelphia Housing Authority often results in behavior unacceptable to middle-class families.
The area that most graduate students have fled to, the western part of Center City, “has a lot of the same problems that West Philadelphia has, but it doesn’t get put under a microscope,” says Tom Seamon, Penn’s managing director of public safety. “It’s a vicious cycle. People leave, and that adds to the perception that it’s unsafe.” But he’ll be the first to admit that the 18th and 16th police districts, which abut the University’s domain, are some of the “busiest” in the city. And he knows that no matter how many crimes his department prevents, ultimately “we’re at the mercy of some 16-year-old kid with a gun who decides he’s going to go rob somebody.”
Between 1990 and 1996, robberies in Penn’s patrol area rose from 118 to 206 — a 75 percent increase. Despite the terrible robbery wave last fall, they declined from 217 in 1996 (using a different 12-month calendar) to 175 this past year, a 19 percent drop that Seamon likes to think has to do with the increased security measures taken by the University.
But it isn’t just crime. For too many people, the urban social equation — in which fun and fulfillment are factored against fear and frustration — is going the wrong way. For every person driven out by the specter of an armed gunman, there are at least as many who leave — or want to — because the public schools are marginal and the shopping is lousy and there’s no nightlife and their car just got broken into for the third time this year. Plus, their neighbors might be … students.
Dr. Elijah Anderson, the Charles and William Day Professor of Sociology, is African American, and has written extensively about issues of race and class and poverty in urban areas like West Philadelphia. He lived for 18 years in a house on Hazel Avenue, and for a long time found it “a very comfortable place to be and live.”
But then things started happening. Six years ago, he woke up to find a man trying to break in through his window. A friend was jumped by a group of young toughs, who broke his arm. Another friend was waiting for her daughter to come outside when a guy came and put a gun to her head. His own wife was stalked in mid-afternoon. Their neighbor across the street was held up at gunpoint and forced to lie on the ground while a man relieved him of his wallet. Drug dealers were openly selling their wares on his street, and when Anderson would call the police, they would either not respond at all or else make a token surveillance and then leave, saying there was nothing more they could do.
Finally, two years ago, he and his wife decided they’d had enough, and moved to Center City. (They now live in Chestnut Hill.) “It was a painful decision,” he says. “I still have great ambivalence about leaving. I loved being close to the University, and I loved my house and the neighborhood. I still have wonderful friends in the area — and I know that many parts of University City don’t have the problems we did. But for me and my family, safety became a big issue.”
It’s not just Penn and West Philadelphia, he adds quickly. “Urban universities are at the forefront of all this. This is the reality that people face in such economically compromised neighborhoods.”
Yale University, for example, has had many of the hostile town-gown problems that Penn has had — complete with the tragic, senseless murder of a student in 1991 — and its problems have been similarly exacerbated by the economic decline of New Haven. According to Daisy Rodriguez, Yale’s assistant secretary for community relations, the relationship between Yale and the New Haven community was pretty much characterized by hostility and distrust until the administration of former president Benno Schmidt, who made it clear that “As goes New Haven, so goes Yale” — an attitude taken even further by his successor, Dr. Richard Levin. Now, says Rodriguez, “We’re turning it around, slowly but surely.”
Yale’s initiatives include: helping the city win $5.4 million in federal grants to restore three nearby neighborhoods; investing heavily in neighborhood economic development, which includes bringing in an Omni Hotel (and a Barnes & Noble bookstore!); offering employees $2,000 a year for 10 years to buy a house in New Haven; and launching a Family Campus Initiative to help local children in the realms of education, health, psychological and behavioral adjustment, and “family well-being.”
The town-gown relationship is a two-way street. For all the benefits it brings to the region, Penn has not always been an easy neighbor to live with. It has gone on colossal building binges, ripping up whole neighborhoods like some crazed Eastern European dictator, displacing residents and businesses for its own high-minded imperial aims. Its undergraduates leave trash all over the sidewalk and hold drunken parties until the small hours, smug in the knowledge that they will be treated gently by police. And it has sometimes shown an aloof insensitivity to residential groups who want to be kept informed of plans that will affect their neighborhood. As a result, it has become the institution its neighbors love to hate.
But when something needs to be done, most of University City looks to Penn — the city’s largest private employer and the only local institution with the resources and motivation to turn things around.
“This community is collapsing,” says Dr. George Thomas, Gr’75, lecturer in historic preservation and urban studies, who moved to Chestnut Hill five years ago after 26 years in University City. “Which is a terrific opportunity now for Penn, to my mind. Every time there’s a disaster, there’s also an opportunity. The opportunity here is to buy, invest, encourage faculty to move into the area — and in the end, to make it a good place. And that’s what Penn has to do. If it doesn’t do that, we might as well start talking about Valley Forge again.”
THOMAS DESCRIBES himself as a “historian of the industrializing of America, and what architecture tells us about that society” — subjects he examines extensively in his upcoming book The University of Pennsylvania: An Architectural and Cultural History. And the architecture of West Philadelphia, he says, “tells you about the triumphs of industrialization, worked out here in Philadelphia, that made it, at the end of the 19th century, probably the richest, most advanced city in the world.”
With the advent of the trolley in the nineties, he adds, “suddenly you could live pretty much wherever you wanted to, and take your nickel ride to your place of work.” The result “is this great, almost endless urbanization. West Philadelphia is a community of houses — big houses, three- and four-story twins, for the managers in these mills; it’s the two-story rows for the mill workers; and it is about wealth and comfort and the delights of the middle-class, upwardly-mobile, life-is-good world.”
That didn’t last, of course. Largely because of a “terrible loss of leadership and responsibility” on the part of Philadelphia’s leaders, Thomas argues, a “secular stagnation” set in: Convinced that perfection had already been achieved in the secular world — that “Baldwin would always make locomotives, the Pennsy [Pennsylvania Railroad] would always be the great railroad” — the city’s industrial and civic leaders stopped innovating and investing and looked increasingly to the past for comfort. To an extent, Thomas argues, so did Penn.
By the 1920s, Penn’s organized alumni were already complaining about the neighborhood in which their school was located — and dreaming and scheming of moving the College to Valley Forge. (For more on that, see “The Road Not Taken” in the November, 1996 Gazette.) Penn had also become something of a commuter school, connected to the rest of the city by its many trolley lines (and by the Market-Frankford El, which sparked even more new housing between 1910 and 1940). Perhaps because of its commuter-school status, the high-end commercial surroundings that could have been woven into the fabric of the University did not develop as they might have. And as Dr. Gary Hack, dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts, notes, the trolleys directly influenced the makeup of the commercial corridors: “When the streetcars left, the continuous strips of business fell apart, and so there are lots of holes in the fabric as you move out. Those gaps are not going to get filled in with housing and commercial shops of the same densities that were there before.
“Trolleys are so lightly used here now that you can’t really keep the place alive with what little service is on those lines,” he explains. In addition, “the people living in these areas now either are people who work at Penn, and go to and from the University, or tend to be people who don’t have the kind of incomes that support the kind of shops that you would like to create there. The ones who work at Penn probably have automobiles, and they can just as easily get in their car and go to Fresh Fields over in Center City to shop, or to any number of places.”
Other cities lost their streetcars, too, and some of them developed successful new commercial mixes along those old corridors. But West Philadelphia didn’t — partly because it began hemmorhaging jobs. “Philadelphia’s lost 400,000 jobs since the 1950s,” says Thomas. “And that’s really the story of modern West Philadelphia. You had investment, you had innovation, and now you’ve got disinvestment and disintegration. That’s really the crux of Penn’s urban problem right now.”
As black people moved in, lured by those industrial jobs, white people moved out — in droves. West Philadelphia has lost a staggering 33 percent of its population since 1950, and many of those who left were the middle-class kind.
“Population-loss in itself is a very bad thing for a city,” points out Witold Rybczynski, the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism. “A high-density city like Philadelphia needs to have the number of people it was designed for. We have the tools to expand the city, but we can’t say, ‘Well, let’s close down these streets’ so you have enough viable people for, say, a neighborhood a third the size. Our only vision is, ‘If it could only be 100 percent occupied it would all be fine.’
“It doesn’t take very many empty buildings to affect either a residential street or a commercial street,” he adds. “I think it’s something like 10 percent. Because if you have empty buildings, people will not walk on that side of the street, and if your store is next to an empty building, your store starts to suffer. And there’s a kind of ripple effect that’s very fast.”
As Philadelphia’s star was setting, Penn’s was rising, and after World War II, the University began to look beyond the borders of its home town. Three successive presidents — Harold Stassen (1948-1953), Gaylord Harnwell (1953-1970), and Martin Meyerson (1970-1981) — brought increasingly global perspectives to the University’s worldview. “By the time you’re done with those three guys,” says Thomas, “Penn is a national, global institution.”
That is, of course, a wonderful thing in many ways, and that outlook and expansion helped make Penn the educational powerhouse it is today. But as Thomas, with a dramatic stage whisper, suggests, it also had “consequences for the community: Because all of a sudden, Penn is no longer engaged in its city. And that’s been a disaster — in multiple ways.”
The liability of the global vision of Stassen and Harnwell, Thomas adds, “is that to make the modern global university, you need space. And the solution to that is redevelopment — their urban, federal partnership in which the Feds basically condemned everything it needed, and the institutions could grow.”
WHILE MEYERSON, with his planning background, was in many ways the ideal president to help rebuild University City, Thomas points out that Penn was badly strapped for cash at the time, and that Meyerson did not have the resources at his disposal to invest in the neighborhood, especially in the crucial area of local elementary schools. The University of Chicago, by contrast, invested heavily in regional “lab schools,” which helped keep child-raising faculty in the area and thus anchor the neighborhood.
In 1956, Meyerson, then professor of urban planning, proposed a “vigorous program of planning, redevelopment, and rehabilitation” in West Philadelphia to prevent it from becoming a “sea of residential slums with commercial and institutional islands.” (In the eyes of the University, that “sea” was becoming dangerous, as became apparent in 1958 when a Korean graduate student named In-ho Oh was murdered by a gang of teenagers at 36th and Hamilton Streets.) Meyerson recommended that Penn provide leadership and funding “for establishing an area-wide organization specifically devoted to neighborhood improvement.”
That was the West Philadelphia Corporation, whose founding members were Penn, Drexel, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, Presbyterian Hospital, and the Philadelphia College of Osteopathy. Its first executive director was Leo Molinaro, who quickly concluded that a “central research center” was needed to complement West Philadelphia’s educational and medical institutions. Thus was born the University City Science Center, which would be built on a 23-acre tract in Urban Renewal Unit 3, from 34th Street to 40th Street along Market.
The Science Center did do exactly what the founders intended: create good jobs and lure high-tech businesses to the area. Today, according to its Web site, it houses 140 science- and technology-based companies and organizations employing over 7,000 people, and has launched “more than 215 start-up organizations.”
But despite its original mission to “combat community deterioration,” the Science Center has so far not provided many jobs to poor people in the area. And in addition to 666 displaced residents — who, with the West Philadelphia Corporation’s help, eventually found new homes but weren’t always very happy about it — scores of buildings were torn down. Their absence is still felt, since what is left is a combination of cold, sterile-looking laboratory buildings and vast stretches of parking lots, which give the area a desolate, industrial-steppe feeling.
“We could never get the instrument to fit the task,” says Molinaro, since under the laws governing urban renewal, whole blocks, not just individual buildings, had to be leveled. He and the late Julian Levi, his counterpart at the University of Chicago, “tried to rewrite the law to make it more selective,” he recalls, “but nobody could get it through the government.”
While many of the Science Center’s incubator-hatched babies have moved out to Route 202 or other high-tech industrial parks, Jill Felix, the center’s new president and CEO, wants to stop that trend. Since she was managing partner for the same Great Valley Corporate Center that lured some of those companies out to Route 202 in the first place, she ought to know how. Plans for one new building on the north side of Market Street are on the drawing board, she says, and she is confident that others will follow.
The historical downside of the Science Center, in Harkavy’s view, “was the very bad relationship, or a worsening of the relationship,” between Penn and its community. “This occurred throughout the country,” he adds. “It also needs to be recognized that these were done with good intentions.”
There may be no starker example of that bad relationship than University City High School, a modern, fortress-like school on 36th and Filbert Streets, just north of Market. The idea behind it was to create a science-oriented magnet school — Philadelphia’s version of the Bronx High School of Science — that could take advantage of the resources of Penn and Drexel and act as something of a feeder to those schools. But the notion of a special school catering to the children of University faculty, built on land that had once been a residential neighborhood, sparked so much anger that by the time it opened in 1972 the School Board had agreed to let it become a regular, non-magnet school. Put gently, it has not been a place where most Penn parents want to send their children, though it has shown some improvement in the last two years under Principal James Lytle, and according to Ira Harkavy there is now a “deep engagement” there on the part of Penn.
Market Street was hardly the only area around Penn to taste the wrecking ball. Woodland Avenue and part of the 3300 block of Walnut Street were knocked down to make room for, among other things, Hill House and Meyerson Hall. Most of Walnut Street from 34th to 38th Street, as well as the 3600 block of Sansom, were demolished in the 1970s. And if it hadn’t been for a stiff fight led by La Terrasse’s Elliott Cook, C’66, and Judy Wicks, the 3400 block of Sansom Street would have been history, too. The consequences of that are almost too awful to contemplate.
For someone like John Fry, who isn’t trying to demolish neighborhoods but is trying to improve the ones around Penn, the Philadelphia penchant for reliving its own history and nursing old grudges is getting, well, old.
“We’ve got to put the past behind us,” he says. “It’s time to face forward and concentrate on our future.”
By the time Sheldon Hackney took office in 1981, he recalls, “People still viewed the University as the operators of the bulldozers that bulldozed the community down. So I was always looking for ways to get that relationship onto a different footing.”
Under Hackney, now back on campus as a professor of history, the West Philadelphia Corporation became the West Philadelphia Partnership and was restructured to include equal numbers of directors from neighborhood organizations and institutions. The Partnership encouraged the institutions to Buy West Philadelphia and Hire West Philadelphia — initiatives that have expanded in recent years. But Hackney says the most “dramatic shift” came when Harkavy and Dr. Lee Benson, now emeritus professor of history, approached him to teach a seminar on urban history and the University-West Philadelphia relationship. That got students out into the community, and ultimately “began to change the relationship and get Penn people into roles in West Philadelphia schools that were more normal. And we began to expand from there.”
A few years later, his administration established the Center for Community Partnerships, which dealt with a broad array of community concerns and answered directly to the president’s office. The center has sponsored a variety of urban courses — from “Health in Urban Communities” to “Tutoring in West Philadelphia Public Schools: Theory and Practice,” which are taught at Penn but often involve students from local schools — as well as various initiatives in the public schools. The West Philadelphia Improvement Corps (WEPIC), a school-based movement to revitalize neighborhoods, grew out of an undergraduate honors seminar on university-community relations. “The thrust there was to see what we could do to create community schools,” says Hackney. “I’m still enthusiastic about it, because the health and well-being of the family and of the neighborhood so affects the ability of the child to succeed in school — and in life.”
Under Rodin, born and raised in Southwest Philadelphia, the relationship has been moved front and center, as “The Urban Agenda — Penn in Philadelphia” became one of the University’s Six Academic Priorities. She acknowledges that she has a “tremendous commitment to a community that I knew well as a child,” and thinks her home-girl status gives her a certain credibility that is harder for an outsider to achieve. One aspect of that, she says, is “being able to say, ‘No, we don’t do that. This is who we are and this is what we will and can do’ — and being equally open about who we’re not and what we don’t do. Often, I think, Penn is never seen as doing enough, because nobody ever put boundaries on what we could or should be doing.”
Larry Bell, WG’89, a West Philadelphia native, is now head of the West Philadelphia Partnership, whose activities these days fall into the categories of economic development, education, and quality of life. He and the Wharton Small Business Development Center co-founded the West Philadelphia Enterprise Center, a business incubator and training facility which recently moved into the old American Bandstand studio at 4548 Market Street.
“It takes a couple of people with a spark,” he says. “I’m not sitting here thinking I can change everything. But if you can get enough of us together, it can make a difference. Enough people take notice, they want to get on the bandwagon. People want to be involved with things that are succesful.”
Bell says he understands that Penn’s mission is education, and that there is only so much it can do and invest in the area. But there is one thing that would mean a lot to him. “I’d like to see some more alumni calling me up to see if there’s any way they can get involved,” he says. “Wharton alums, Law School alums — I don’t care. We need ’em.”
