Congratulations to the West Philly Hybrid X Team, a group of 15 West Philadelphia High School students who received the “Next Generation Award” yesterday at the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards. The awards honor innovators in many fields, from medicine to automotive design to space exploration, “whose work will transform the world in years to come.” Other award recipients included James Cameron who was honored for one of 3D camera rigs he created to film Avatar.

The Huffington Post has a nice piece on West Philly Hybrid X and how they came up with the idea of building this “badass hybrid” car. Here is a Popular Mechanics article dedicated to the team.
 

We’ve received information from a Calvary Center for Culture and Community board member that the Center’s boiler has broken down as cold weather fast approaches.

The new boiler is going to cost about $50,000 to install. The board of the Calvary Center, a key community asset, is scrambling to piece together the funding to cover the expense and will be looking to raise funds to help. At this point they set up a donations page at: http://www.calvary-center.org/support-calvary/ways-to-support/donate/. We’ll keep you posted about other fundraising projects when information about them becomes available.

The Calvary Center for Culture and Community occupies the Calvary Methodist Church building which was built in 1906. The building hosts a large variety of community arts, educational and religious programs, including Cedar Park Neighbors, Crossroads Music, Curio Theatre Company, Calvary United Methodist Church, West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, Kol Tzedek Synagogue, and Children’s Community School.

A 47-year-old woman was killed early this morning in a vehicle accident at the intersection of 51st and Locust streets, according to reports.

The accident occurred at about 2:15 a.m. and involved two cars. The unidentified woman was the passenger in a minivan that struck another car, an SUV. The male driver of the minivan and a man and a woman in the SUV were seriously injured in the accident, according to ABC News and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The minivan reportedly struck the SUV first and the impact was so great that the SUV flipped on the roof of a third, parked car. Rescue crews had to pry open the vehicles to extract all the passengers.

Both cars reportedly ran stop signs at the 4-way-stop at 51st and Locust.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Philadelphia office will move from its Center City location at 16th and Callowhill to West Philly by the end of 2012.

The new office will be located in 2.0 University Place, a new University Place Associates LLC’s five-story building at 30 N. 41st St. where it will occupy the first three floors (53,000 of the 97,000 square-foot space). The 15-year, $26 million lease was negotiated by building leasing and the US General Services Administration reps. The building is currently under construction.

University Place Associates founder Tom Leonard told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “they looked at what was available in Center City, didn’t like it, and broadened their (search) to West Philadelphia.”

“This will be a much nicer facility,” he added.

Located at the foot of the University City Science Center, the building will feature an extensive green roof with a 20,000-sf rooftop park, high-efficiency HVAC systems, open floor plans with 90 percent natural daylight, ‘gray water’ recycling systems that utilize rainwater to operate restrooms, onsite bicycle racks, changing rooms, and car sharing facilities among other things.

Locust Moon Comics and Movies store is no longer at their location at 4040 Locust Street. But no worries – we learned that they simply moved to a new location in University City and are planning to reopen on October 1.

The new address has not been revealed yet. We’ll keep you posted about it.

Tipped by one of our readers we learned that our beautiful Cedar Park has been vandalized. It happened earlier this week. As the Cedar Park Neighbors website reports, “someone callously and deliberately tore out more than a dozen plants and native grasses that surrounded the memorial and traffic triangle garden on the eastern side of Cedar Park.”

As a result, the park lost its collection of coneflowers, autumn joy sedum, black-eyed susans, and day lillies. Sadly, the work of so many neighbors was destroyed. The Cedar Park Neighbors Association is determined to fix the damaged portions of the park and to replace the stolen or destroyed plants as quickly as possible. But for that, they need to raise several hundred dollars and are asking for help.

To see more pictures of the damage and to donate please go to this page.