[UC] A Hot Neighborhood With a History -- Yeccch!

[Benseraglio2]

After finally having waded through the cloying and sickeningly sweet Inky special on our beloved hood, I have one word -- Yeccchh!   Yes, we have a wonderful place to live. But the tsunami of orchestrated rah-rah just gives me a pain in the gall bladder. The celebration of Saint Judy, the Ivy League Mama Teresa, is so overblown, so out of touch with the reality on the ground, and so WHITE that it do give one pause.   First of all, if you look at the Special Section closely, you see two pictures of little black children being HELPED by the good white folks of the Plantation (scuse me, the University). The only pictures of black adults are the portraits of chess-players in Clark Park (the dear fun loving negroes) and performers at the Farmers Market Jazz Festival (dear fun loving banjo-strumming darkies).   You'd think MOVE and UHURU had vanished off the face of the earth. The Communist and Wobblie headquarters are referred to as quaint remnants. The one article that highlights the A-Space trails off into a paean to House of Our Own Bookstore, a quaint place indeed. And you'd never know that our hood was once the matrix for a powerful social force known as the Movement for a New Society, quaint remnants of which dot the landscape.   The enormous and hugely significant phenomenon of African immigration into our neighborhood is covered in brief reviews of Cafe de l'Afrique and La Naz. So quaint, so quaint. (Not a mention of Le Mandingue, by the way.)   Lots of verbiage about our noble "civic" groups, which help UCD on its noble mission of gentrification. NOT ONE WORD about hood resident Jannie Blackwell, one of the most powerful political players in the City of Philadelphia. Not to mention Jim Roebuck or Hardy Williams.   It's weird and unreal. University City was a BAD and SCARY (read NEGRO) place to live until St. Judy rolled up with her million dollar a year salary, waved her magic wand, and kissed all the boo-boos, and now it's not only SAFE but CHI-CHI for white people to live here. Weird and unreal.   There is actually a quote from a Whartonite from Jerusalem living in I-House which I had to read twice to believe I was actually reading it:   ""I come from a Western country," she says, "so things don't look so foreign to me.... Everything is almost like in Israel.... So at first you feel at home. But after a few days you get it that you don't get it."   Almost like in Israel, but without those annoying natives.   Two notes of reality, from our local "civic activist" and our crank landlord:   Barry Grossbach:   "For the most part, we view Penn as an 800-pound gorilla - a gorilla that had systematically razed houses as it moved westward," said Barry Grossbach, a resident of University City for more than 30 years and former head of the nearby Spruce Hill Community Association.   (then the article notes delicately that:) "Penn, which moved to West Philadelphia from Center City in 1872, made a grab for land in the 1950s. Needing room to grow, the university worked with the city's redevelopment authority to target whole blocks for demolition. Many black families were displaced to make room for dormitories, stoking resentment that simmered for decades." As we used to say in the 60s, "Urban renewal means nigger removal". Of course those bad old days are behind us now. No mo simmering resentment. Al Krigman: "Can inner-city communities undergo rejuvenation without becoming urban theme parks - without displacing or disenfranchising folks who endured the lean years, positioning their neighborhoods for the fat? Can they yield the benefits of high population density and cultural diversity without forgetting that crowding people of varied backgrounds and interests together creates behaviors different from those appropriate for towns with half-acre zoning? Such enigmas aren't unique to University City. They're inherent in urban revitalization. Can a community as sanguine about its urbanity, as University City surely is, evolve equitably optimal solutions? I hope so. Because, if not here, then where?" Amen. If not here, then in Manayunk? Get real, folks -- there are some fascinating social dynamics grinding on in our hood, and developments that give real reason of hope for true diversity and true racial reconciliation. But you wouldn't know it from the Inky gush.     Ross Bender http://rossbender.org/wisdom.html