50th Street between Warrington and Springfield (Photo by West Philly Local reader Rachel K.)

West Philly Local readers are concerned about illegal dumping on 50th St. between Springfield and Warrington and have written us to express their frustration.

Rachel K. writes:

“I’m just sick of the dumping on my block. I have reported dumping five times since I moved into our new place in June (long time West Philly resident). It’s usually tires and construction debris (on top of the standard litter we ALL deal with). I tried CLIP for a surveillance camera, but they said because it is a heavily trafficked area the solar charged cameras will be drained before morning… so not an option. I’m so frustrated…”

Rachel says she has called the Streets Department in the past and today she used this Streets Department form to report the problem. Please note that the form should be used for reporting illegal dumping on streets and sidewalks only. If you want to report illegal dumping on private property, please contact 311 (or tweet to @philly311).

We’ll keep you posted if using the Streets Department form has solved this particular problem (and please let us know if it worked for you). But what can residents do to prevent it from happening over and over again? Well, if you witness someone disposing off of large amounts of trash you are encouraged to report it to the police (please don’t approach and confront that person or persons). Here are the instructions from the Streets Department on how to report illegal dumping:

“If you have specific information of a person who is illegally dumping, please contact the appropriate Philadelphia Police District and ask for the Code Violation Notice (CVN) trained officer. If possible, please provide a description of the vehicle and plate information such as licensing state and tag number. You can use Citymaps to find the Philadelphia Police District.”

Here’s a summary of news coming out of our neck of the woods in the past few days and a reminder on a couple of community events this week. Editor’s Note: The meeting on the potential sale of the University City High School has been postponed until Wednesday, Feb. 26.

Provident Mutual Life Insurance Co. building. (Archived photo/West Philly Local).

• Another hurdle has been cleared for the plan to move the police headquarters into the Provident Mutual Life Insurance Co. building at 46th and Market Streets. Last Thursday, Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell introduced two bills that would allow the city to borrow up to $250 million for the project, according to a report by Philadelphia Inquirer. The 87-year-old building has been vacant since 1983, when Provident Mutual Life Insurance Co. moved out, and has been put on the endangered properties list by the Preservation Alliance of Philadelphia.

• A rally was held on Saturday, Feb. 8 to protest recent purse snatching and shootings in Philadelphia. The rally was held at 53rd and Market Streets, the site of the most recent purse snatching, when a 29-year-old woman was shot to death and her companion, a 34-year-old woman, was wounded. Dozens of people attended the event, organized by Handbags 4 Piece, and many people spoke out, including the mothers of the victims (check out the Handbags 4 Piece Facebook page for photos and videos).

• Ground was broken last week at the site of the new high-rise apartment building at 36th and Market Streets. The 28-story 364-unit mixed-use structure is a joint project of the University City Science Center and Southern Land Co., of Nashville. The project, which will also include 14,600 square feet of ground-floor retail space and parking for 200 cars and 140 bicycles, is expected to be completed in spring 2015.

• Residential burglaries are still a cause for concern in University City, according to the latest crime update released by the University City District. Over 20 burglaries took place in the area in January, which is a double of the number of burglaries in December. Three burglary-related arrests have been made. UCD also reports that there were about a dozen robberies in the area, four of them at gunpoint, with arrests made in nine of these cases. August and September were peak months for robberies in the area, with over 30 incidents reported.

• Great news for fried chicken and gourmet donuts fans: Philly’s super popular chain Federal Donuts is close to opening their location in University City. The awnings to their new shop at 3428 Sansom were recently complete:

Awnings at 3428 Sansom, complete! Nice and bright to lead you straight to lunch. pic.twitter.com/ZFpucdlUOC

— FederalDonuts (@FederalDonuts) February 6, 2014

Another tweet by Federal Donuts said that the new location is opening “very soon” but the date hasn’t been announced yet. We’ll keep you posted.

• Two meetings on the sale of vacant schools and other School District of Philadelphia properties in West Philadelphia will take place this week: on Tuesday, Feb. 11 you can learn more about the future of Shaw Middle School (54th & Warrington) and on Wednesday, Feb. 11 (postponed until Feb. 26) there will be a meeting on the potential sale of the University City High School, Drew Elementary School and Walnut Center buildings. Click here for more information. If you missed our story on the Wilson School building’s future, click here.

When Dave Fine founded Schmear It six months ago, he was on a mission to “spread some good.”

Schmear It in University City (From Schmear It’s website)

Touted as Philadelphia’s first and only bagel food truck, Schmear It is an experiment on wheels in food-meets-social impact—a model based on the social good of brands like TOMS Shoes and the customizable options of chains like Chipotle. Four days a week, Fine—who has a non-profit background—rolls through the city, selling build-to-order spreads (or “schmear”) on South St. Philly bagels while featuring a variety of local causes like The Monster Milers or Challah for Hunger every two weeks.

Since August, Schmear It has raised over $800 from sales for its featured causes—its current one being Repair the World (Facebook page), and in the future, the West Philly Alliance for Children.

“Obviously food trucks in this city are fun, flexible, very useful, [and] they’re exciting, so it made sense for this unique idea to do with a food truck, where it literally can be a vehicle for social good,” Fine, 24, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, told West Philly Local. “That is ultimately the goal of Schmear It: aside from producing really good bagels and schmear, to become a grassroots fundraising and marketing platform for local causes.”

Every Tuesday in February, West Philly bagel lovers can stop by Schmear It at The Porch at 30th Street Station from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and order their unique combination of schmears and bagel for $3 to $7. Of course there’s the signature mainstays like the Loxsmith (cream cheese, chopped lox, scallions, tomatoes and cucumbers) and Nutty Naner (peanut butter, Nutella and bananas), but adventurous spirits can customize with imagination. Pick a schmear base from cream cheese (vegan available!) to egg salad, and fold in ingredients like maple syrup, wasabi, jalapenos and apples, spreading it all on a bagel of your choice. And you can wash it all down with a cup of La Colombe coffee.

But, while Philadelphia is a booming food truck town, it’s not exactly known as a bagel city, so why launch Schmear It in the first place? According to Fine, it’s precisely because there’s a bagel-sized hole in the city’s heart—especially among us New York City transplants.

“There are a couple of bagel shops here and there [in Philadelphia], but they’re not necessarily convenient,” the Baltimore native said. “There’s certainly not prevalence and for a city that has such a booming food truck culture, why not do a bagel food truck? It sort of made sense to me.”

Editor’s Note: Apart from The Porch at 30th Street Station on Tuesdays you may be able to catch Schmear It around 42nd and Locust for brunch on Sundays and at 33rd and Arch on Saturdays. Since the locations and hours may change, we suggest following Schmear It on Twitter or Facebook.

–Annamarya Scaccia

School District Chief Operating Officer Fran Burns talks about the district’s plan to sell the Alexander Wilson School building at 46th and Woodland to developers who will likely convert it to a retail/residential building.

It appears that a mixed-used retail/residential building will replace the Alexander Wilson School (46th and Woodland), which the school district closed last June.

Officials from the School District of Philadelphia said during a public meeting Thursday night that all of the leading bids on the building proposed similar uses – a combination of street-level retail and housing. The district’s Chief Operating Officer Fran Burns told about 25 residents gathered in the auditorium of the Henry C. Lea School that it’s “probably not going to be a demolition, but a major renovation within.”

The final bid will not be officially announced and approved until the School Reform Commission (SRC) meeting on Feb. 20 or March 20 (we’ll let you know when we know). No other uses for the building, which many in the community hoped would reopen as a charter school, were proposed by developers and no more offers will be accepted.

Although the purpose of Thursday’s meeting was to elicit public comment on the proposal, officials offered very few details, which frustrated many in attendance.

“I’m a little frustrated about how little of this process seems to be about the impact on the neighborhood,” said a resident who lives near the school.

Burns hinted that the offers proposed student and “multi-family” residences and that senior housing was not part of any of the proposals. No charter school offered a bid, but the nearby University of the Sciences expressed some interest, Burns said.

There are more opportunities for public input, including at the SRC meeting and during the zoning process, but that will be input on the project’s details, not on whether the building should become housing or something else.

Neither the names of bidders nor bid amounts were released. Burns would not say how much is owed in bond payments on Wilson, but said that the sale of the closed schools will not do much to offset budget problems.

“The budget will not be fixed through property sales,” she said.

Here are some more details on the sale process.

The district hopes to close the sale of the school by June 30.

–Mike Lyons

Fulani cowboys driving their cattle to water. (Photo by Anna Badkhen)

To say the least, Anna Badkhen is a wanderer.

From the edges of Mexico to the villages of war-torn Afghanistan, the West Philly-based Badkhen has roamed the earth, searching for those societies in extremis—those people living in the farthest reaches. It’s often there, in those outlying regions, where she finds a fuller picture of life: of communities surviving in areas unheeded by the contemporary world.

As a journalist and writer by trade, Badkhen has written four books and countless articles about people in extremis, translating her experiences and their realities into exceptionally woven and affected stories. And now, Badkhen has launched an Indiegogo campaign to help fund her latest book, Walking with Abel (Riverhead Books), which will publish next year.

Donations to Badkhen’s campaign, which closes on March 8, will help fund the completion of the Walking with Abel manuscript. The book tells a nomadic Fulani family’s story of “survival, perseverance and adaptation” living in the Sahel region of Mali in Western Africa, where Badkhen spent much of 2013. Ultimately, says her campaign site, the fundraiser will “make truly communal the book that explores the mega-narrative of all of our human migrations, our ancestral restlessness, our shared hejiras.”

When West Philly Local asked Badkhen about what made this trip truly unique, she replied:

“‘Where are you from?’ My hosts in an Afghan village would ask, my hosts on a farm in Western Iraq, in the velvet mountains of Indian Kashmir, in the snakepit dugouts of Azeri refugee camps. I had grown up in a country that no longer existed, in a city that since had changed its name: Leningrad, USSR. I had moved away, and moved again, and again. My point of departure was never the same: Moscow, Massachusetts, Philadelphia. It made for relatively effortless travel. It made for uncomfortable silences, odd hesitations.

The Fulani ‘are regarded everywhere as ‘the other’ or ‘the stranger,’ writes the Dutch anthropologist Mirjam De Bruijn. ‘They are always the people who come from far away.’ They were hereditary outsiders who appropriated all the space their cows required at any given time but never more than that. The Fulani never asked me where my home was.”

–Annamarya Scaccia

This is the next in the series of vignettes of local block captains drawn from Them That Do, a multimedia documentary project and community blog by West Philly-based award-winning photographer Lori Waselchuk. Make sure to go to Them That Do for more photos, videos and other information and updates.

Leonia Johnson is a young block captain on the 200 block of S. Millick Street in West Philadelphia. Photo by Lori Waselchuk

Last March, Leonia Johnson stood up at the Cobbs Creek Block Captain Association’s monthly meeting to speak about the murder of her neighbor and friend, Gregory “Chop” Scott, two weeks earlier. Scott had been shot seven times, at point blank, in front of his home on South Millick Street. When Johnson described cleaning the bloody crime scene after the police finished their work, the meeting room filled with moans. Her listeners, too, knew such pain.

“Chop was old school,” she said. Perhaps she wanted her audience to know that for her, age meant wisdom and experience. She was the youngest member of the association by decades.

Johnson described how Scott helped her keep the block safe. “If he saw young people selling drugs, Chop would ask them to move on and they would. They might not have liked what he was saying, but they respected him.”

Her message was both a memorial and a call for unity. She said that the people who lived on the 200 block of S. Millick had “prayed together and declared as a block that this will not make us weaker.”

She knew that several members of the association also had experienced violent crime on their watch. So she said: “I say all this to you so that you do not give up your hope… and so that you do not become complacent.”

Johnson’s block has a history of unity, not violence. “We are like a family,” she told me during a recent interview. Then, after thinking about her words, she smiled to herself and added, “And we can be quite dysfunctional at times.”

Block captains have been a steady influence on S. Millick. “We’ve never not had one,” said Johnson.

“When I was young, my mother was block captain. I watched the respect my mother got.” Johnson was a junior block captain, too. “I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to have a title,” she recalled.

After she graduated from college, Johnson got a job as a youth counselor at the Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network, then moved into her mother’s home. Johnson, who now is 34, became the block captain eight years ago, after the previous captain moved away.

Being a young block captain has its advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is Johnson’s ability to relate to youth. She once interrupted a dice game on a porch and a boy came up to her afterward to complain that he lost money because of her. “I told him ‘Well, you owe me thirty thousand dollars!’ and when he said ‘What?’ I said, ‘When I see ya’ll gambling, all I think about is how my property value is dropping thirty thousand!’”

Johnson understands why there are so few young block captains. “Very few 30-40 year-olds do community service,” she says. “They are trying to establish themselves and they don’t think about the next generation.”

She had her own doubts too, she said. “I wondered how I’d be able to be effective and still have a life.”

Johnson is concerned that the block captains with whom she works are getting old and there are no volunteers to take over. If the older block captains simply fade away, “we won’t benefit from their knowledge,” she worries.

Johnson has built friendships with the elder block captains and feels responsibility to assist them when she can. It’s a lot to take on. “Somebody needs to help me bridge the gap!”

–Lori Waselchuk