July 12, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Neighbors revitalize a Mt. Airy park
by KRISTIN PAZULSKI

Mt. Airy residents Bruce Murray and his wife Ronda Throne-Murray hold the sign a neighbor made for the renovated Ned Wolf Park, located at McCallum and Ellet streets.

Almost 30 years after its initial dedication and subsequent dilapidation, a small rundown city-owned park in Mt. Airy is receiving a makeover, and what started as a safety issue has become a larger community project helping to bring that corner of Mt. Airy together.

For years, the overgrown area at McCallum and Ellet streets — filled with weeds, unruly bushes, tires and metal spikes — was a bit of a mystery to Ronda Throne-Murray and her husband, Bruce Murray.

“We have lived in the neighborhood for 10 years, and we always wondered what that area was,” Murray said.

Last October, they learned the area, originally thought to have been the unkept yard of a neighbor, was a small, city-owned park. Murray and Throne-Murray attended a neighborhood safety meeting, at which 150 Mt. Airy neighbors gathered in a room of Summit Presbyterian Church to discuss concerns about a group of teenagers and young adults who were burglarizing and vandalizing.

That summer, there had been a mugging and a gunpoint robbery two doors away from Murray and Throne-Murray’s home. They and other neighbors were on edge.

Two of the solutions to come from this meeting was to get neighbors to know each other and clear yard growth that was offering potential cover and hiding places to a mugger or burglar.

One of the neighbors asked for help in lighting a park next to her home after she was burglarized and one of her television sets was found in the park’s overgrowth, said Throne-Murray. It was the same patch of land that Murray and Throne-Murray had pondered over for years.

One light was added, but kids were still drinking and smoking in the park.

“It was a veil of invisibility,” Throne-Murray said, so her husband trimmed just a few of the bushes around what they had learned was not a neighbor’s yard, but a city-owned park. They were shocked by the difference it made.

“Everyone was like, ‘oh my gosh, that’s so much better,’” Throne-Murray said, and a wider cleaning effort began.

The park’s overgrown paths and gardens were recently a hide-out for drinking and smoking teens, neighbors believe, and cleaning the park has not only added safety to the neighborhood, but has brought that small part of Mt. Airy together and resurrected the memory of local activist, Ned Wolf. (Photos by Erin Vertreace)

As they began to clear more of the park, they discovered more trash, including tires with spikes, beer cans and small baggies that Throne-Murray suspected had held drugs.

The wooden border to the path was in disrepair — one section even had metal spikes coming out of it where a piece of wood was missing.

“It was just a mess, nothing had really been done in a long time,” she said.

Asking around to neighbors through a listserv started after that October meeting, they discovered that the park was named after Ned Wolf.

As she was unfamiliar with the name, Throne-Murray decided to do a Google search. She found two mentions of him. One was on the sculpture of children dancing in Saylor Park, off Lincoln Drive, that was created by a friend of Wolf and dedicated to him. The other was in the Temple University archives.

A call to Temple University revealed a number of articles about Wolf and his dedication to the community and the law.

Ned Wolf, the grandson of the founders of Wolf Block law firm, still a strong law firm in the city today, was an attorney who challenged others in his profession to fight discrimination. In 1969, he founded the Philadelphia Committee of Lawyers for Civil Rights, which in five years was incorporated into the nonprofit Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, otherwise known as PILCOP.

Murray discovered that Wolf, a Mt. Airy resident, was a former president of West Mt. Airy Neighbors and was active in discouraging the “white-flight” of the area’s residents and, thus, was instrumental in establishing Mt. Airy as the diverse community it is today.

“He was an incredibly fascinating man,” Murray said. He learned more about him, Murray said Wolf has become a kind of role model to him.

“He was audacious and was afraid of no one,” he said. “Ned turned out for me to be someone inspiring.”

Temple’s archive department also sent photos from the dedication of the park in 1979, two years after Wolf died, at the age of 39, after a seven-year battle with breast cancer.

The photos showed budding trees and tiny bushes that now loom several feet into the air and shade the park. The paths, now in disrepair, were perfectly manicured in the photos.

The city, though it sent officials out to the plot a few times to meet with the neighbors, hasn’t been able to fix the low, wooden wall because it no longer uses that material. And as for a sign, the city was unable to make the wooden one Throne-Murray and Murray envisioned for the park.

So instead of giving up on the idea, the Murrays got their neighbor Jack Larimore, a furniture maker,  to make a two-slatted, wooden sign reading “Ned Wolf Park/Department of Recreation,” which they hope to put up soon. The city has promised to make two benches for the park.

Throne-Murray has since “shamelessly” solicited help from every neighbor she meets, she said. She had a clean-up day in April that brought 23 volunteers out and a planting day in May, during which 39 people planted 880 native plants, she said.

They have also received money and supplies from WMAN, Philadelphia Green, Weavers Way Cooperative and other local businesses and organizations, and held a plant sale in June that raised $500.

“The neighbors have gotten to know each other in more than a superficial way,” Throne-Murray said. “It’s more than just matching a face with a house. We really got more intimate with each other.”

They have even developed the Mt. Airy Garden Club that, last month, held a garden tour in the neighborhood and shared wine and cheese.

“This is actually something I’ve been wanting to do,” Throne-Murray said. “I love gardening and wanted to get to know my neighbors. I like to be able to share my passions with people.”

Now, people stop by the park to ask if Murray and Throne-Murray knew Wolf, which they are encouraging because they are collecting stories for a potential rededication of the part this fall.

Wolf’s widow, children and grandchildren even attended one of the planting days, and 30 years later his spirit is still bringing people together in the community.

“It’s a lovely little horticultural gem, and I can’t wait to see it in five years,” she said.

Contact staff writer Kristin Pazulski at 215-248-8819 or Kristin@chestnuthilllocal.com.