On 6/11/07, Anthony West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Which of course it was. Parents who used the playground during the 1990s often told of picking up crack vials from the playground in the mornings. One local artist even made sculptures out of recovered crack paraphernalia. On Town Watch patrols 1996-99, we did ample surveillance on the occupied vans that parked beside the park into the wee hours. There was coordinated activity between Town Watch, the 18th Police Dist. and UCD patrols for a long time to encourage them to move on.
Judy's full florid quote re the park is below:
This, in turn, led to greening projects--such as the planting of 450 trees and 10,000 spring bulbs and the creation of four public and three children's gardens--which set the stage for the dramatic transformation of Clark Park from a dangerous drug-infested space into a thriving recreational venue for children and the locale for a weekly farmer's market.
Funny. Maybe my memory is giving out, but I'm almost positive that my son, born in 1987, spent a good portion of his tender years in that dangerous drug-infested space, and as I recall, really enjoyed it. Not the drugs, but the old low-rent playground in the north park, which, while certainly not as fancy as the new playgrounds they've got in the south park these days, provided lots of fun for a wee toddler. There was a low wall which he enjoyed learning to walk on, an old fashioned slide, a couple of crude dinosaurs, and the turtle. I spent about a year with him as a stay-at-home dad, and remember meeting lots of other (friendly) parents and their toddlers in Clark Park. Don't remember running into any whores, but maybe I was just too naive to recognize them. I do recall the crack vials, with their multicolored lids, but basically I remember finding them on the 4700 block of Cedar, which was almost as tony then as it is now. Crack, if y'all can think back through that cocaine haze, was not a peculiar affliction of nasty ghetto West Philly, but a national urban curse. Of course at the same time, powder cocaine was extraordinarily popular with the white upper classes (and future presidents), although they never seemed to go to jail for it. So Judy's claim to fame as the Good White Fairy or Goddess or whatever she believes herself to have been, is quite overblown on the face of it. I'm not saying she didn't do some good things in cooperation with Fast Eddie, but puh-lease!! OK, she was the first lady Ivy League prexy, and of course she was a Columbia Ph.D., which speaks volumes in her favor. But she was also the first million dollar a year Ivy League president, and thus more of a corporate CEO than an old-style academic. Her salary was umpteen bazillion times that of the humblest Penn employee; if you think that's a good trend, well, that's your opinion. IMHO it's part of the Banana Republicization of the USA. What really bugs me about her razzamatazz is the fact that while I've lived here 22 years as of June 2, I didn't notice any sudden magical transformation when she blew into town. As other long and longer-term residents have been witnessing on this list, this has always been a pretty fine place to live, and lots of people have made it that way. A million-dollar flackette waving her wand and puffing herself apparently has made a big impression on some gullible folks, but I just don't see it that way. -- Ross Bender http://rossbender.org
