Wilma,
You are opposed, then, to the Friends of Barkan Park and the Friends of
Malcolm X Park and Cedar Park Neighbors and Saunders Park Neighbors. All
of these groups are bad gentrifier groups, in your experience, you say.
What is your particular experience with each one of these groups, which
leads you to accuse each one of them of being bad gentrifiers? Was
trying to make their parks better a bad thing in itself, because
gentrifiers might like a better park?
"Friends of X Park" support groups are widely dispersed around the city,
mostly in bluecollar neighborhoods. Do you also condemn Friends of
Carroll Park, at 58th & Girard, of being bad gentrifiers for lobbying to
get that exercise track installed 7 years or so ago? Are you asserting
Carroll Park is at risk of gentrification?
"Friends of X Park" groups are a basic part of the city's
park-management strategy, because the city's public park-management
bureaucracy has been grossly underfunded for decades (compared to other
cities), so there are not enough public employees anywhere to handle
community relations. We park volunteers have stepped into the breach. We
do it everywhere, because we love our neighborhoods and we love our city.
Please be specific about why you are opposed to each park improvement in
each park, and explain why not a single one of these community groups
"represents the community," which you say is always against every
improvement in every park, everywhere in Philadelphia. Do you have any
evidence for this claim? It seems awfully far-reaching, to say the
least, Wilma. Give us at least one concrete example, somewhere.
I'll stand with my park-loving buddies across West Philadelphia and
across the city. I know my man Greg Cojulun at Malcolm X has my back and
I have his. Honestly -- I don't get you park-haters at all. I mean, what
have you got against parks, that you want them all to be crappy and
never get any funding?
-- Tony West
On 6/18/2011 9:56 PM, Wilma de Soto wrote:
The Fairmount Park System is one of the best in the country and has worked
hard to maintained our vast system of city parks. If the City and Park
Commission are making the decisions for Clark Park and not FOCP along with
Penn and the UCD, why is an organization such as FOCP deemed necessary? I
am not trying to be funny, but I really don't get it.
It has been my experience that the various and sundry "Friends of..."
groups in UC have been a huge part of the gentrification drive in the
neighborhood and tend to set the agenda for various public and private
projects to transform use of these spaces as they see fit and for whom
they deem fit in the name of the community, which they do not actually
represent.
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