Photographer: H Fruchtman for the Health of Philadelphia Photo-Documentation Project.
About The Photograph
Residents told stories of reclaiming public spaces for the health of their communities. In one powerful transformation, an urban block was taken back from drug dealers and recreated as a thriving community garden. The upside was the neighborhood now had a vital gathering place. The downside: developers also recognized its appeal.
I have lived there through a period where most of the people in the community were Hispanic...and when I came to live there in the Seventies, we had that sense of community. In the late Eighties, there was a drug epidemic in the area, and that brought a lot of changes. I mean, we had open-market drug sales. A lot of people were indicted. A lot of people that I knew went to jail. And then, we saw this new wave, this change, this interest in that area. And that was partly private development and also the City trying to address the drug problem. The City and the private developers saw that this was an area, very close to Center City, and that they could capitalize on the location. So they started relocating a lot of the people that lived in that area, 'cause most of them lived in public housing. And that was the type of housing that I grew up in. So a lot of the people were forced out. They were given an alternative, either go to where we send you, which would have been a development or housing project, or you can go and find yourself another house. A lot of people decided to move out of the neighborhood all together. So that chemistry, that sense of community, changed.
-Health of Philadelphia Participant
