October 23, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Opinion

Dollar decisions

Time is right to buy local

So, this is what recession looks like.

Although many politicians have steered clear of the “R” word, economic experts are predicting a slump that could last at least two years. Many agree, no matter the language used, that the United States is facing its toughest financial challenge since the Great Depression.

What does that mean for Chestnut Hill and the rest of Northwest Philadelphia?

This week, our associate editor, Jennifer Katz, spoke to many business owners in Chestnut Hill to take the temperature of our local economy. What she found was certainly not catastrophe, but sales on the Avenue have slowed.

According to the Chestnut Hill Business Association’s main street manager Fran O’Donnell – who also owns the local toy store, O’Doodle’s – told Jennifer that business is down on the Avenue between five and 15 percent.

This slowdown was likely helped in no small part by two substantial “events.”

At the “Top of the Hill,” the 8400 block is visibly less active following the closure of Caruso’s Market. The 100-year-old grocery store was regularly drawing local residents to the block. Now those residents are in their cars to a nearby grocery store.

Also, the ongoing construction on Germantown Avenue has hindered travel between Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy. It’s difficult to tell how much of an impact it has had on Chestnut Hill (Mt. Airy businesses have certainly been hit harder, an issue we will take up next week) but it has likely prevented shoppers from making an easy trip to our section of the Avenue.

All three things have taken their toll. According to many business owners Jennifer spoke to, people are shopping for less and when they do buy, they are buying less expensive items. The trend does not bode well for the holiday shopping season.

One way that the local business community is fighting forecasts is to aggressively promote their services. The CHBA is promoting a campaign to go green, with reusable shopping bags and other contests. It also hopes to have trees on the Avenue lit with new holiday lights, an attraction they believe will help draw shoppers to the Avenue for an experience they can’t get at the King of Prussia mall.

Chestnut Hill residents can do their part by doing their best to shop locally. There’s no doubt that the economic downturn has people in Chestnut Hill minding their wallets more closely, but there’s a lot of money in this neighborhood, and people are likely to spend, particularly on gifts for the holidays.

Residents of Chestnut Hill who don’t want to see more vacant shops can help by spending their money here when they can. You can go out to eat in Chestnut Hill. Buy your holiday gifts in Chestnut Hill.

Shopping locally when possible is always a good idea. These days, it’s a better one.

Pete Mazzaccaro

PennDOT not as bad as reports imply
by Laura Morris Siena

In last week’s local newspapers, articles about the

Germantown Avenue reconstruction project left me deeply concerned that there is a side to the story that isn’t being told.

I was present during the incident on Friday, Oct. 10, when the PennDOT offices were strewn with trash. As one who has participated in nearly all of the Friday morning meetings with PennDOT, the construction company, East and West Mt. Airy Neighbors and local business owners, I want to reflects my experience of this project, with a goal of providing balance to the accounts in newspaper articles and letters to the editor over the last year.

First, about the incident Friday a week ago, reported in this paper [“Local leader loses cool over construction, Oct. 16”]:  a significant portion of the materials which were strewn around the PennDOT offices were construction materials such as bricks, or debris from the project such as pieces of asphalt. Some of it, also, was litter picked up on Germantown Avenue near Wawa – that litter could have come from Wawa patrons, passersby, or just about anywhere else. While it certainly could have come from construction workers, if you have patronized Wawa for years, as I have, I am sure that you will agree that litter has always been a challenge around the store.

According to eyewitnesses, both the bricks and the debris came from within the construction zone. This area is off limits to anyone who is not a construction worker – i.e., entering a construction site is trespassing — and the construction company is well within its rights to store both materials and construction debris within the construction zone.  Strewing the trash around PennDOT’s offices created a needless mess for PennDOT’s landlord to clean up.

In trying to provide balance, I am not claiming that this project has been trouble-free:  there were problems with C. Abbonizio, the construction company at the beginning when they did not have adequate experience for the complex task of replacing 100-plus-year-old utilities under Germantown Avenue and installing the trolley tracks. They learned, however, and the project has picked up speed and is expected to be completed before Thanksgiving. And, if you have travelled the section of the Avenue near Trolley Car Diner and New Covenant Church, I am sure you will agree with me that the finished project is absolutely beautiful. We will be enjoying our lovely new boulevard for many years to come.

What Mt. Airy residents who aren’t intimately involved with the project can’t know is how responsive PennDOT, their subcontractors and the construction crews have been to our needs.  Many weekends, I have been on e-mail with Lou Marraffino of Urban Engineers, who is handling community relations for the project, even as early as 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning, as he works to get a resident’s gas or phone service restored.  Lou has worked tirelessly with us at EMAN, WMAN, and with city agencies and Ward Leader Vernon Price to solve problems as they occur.  Likewise, John Harakal of Abbonizio, has worked day and night and has been extremely responsive.  Crews worked hard last week to complete the sidewalk through the construction zone so that the Breast Cancer Walkers could come through unimpeded.  These are just a few of hundreds of examples of how PennDOT and the construction company have worked to respond to myriad problems large and small.

Ken Weinstein wrote in his letter to the editor last week:  “PennDOT’s continued delays and poor planning has led to… decreased residential property values for those people who have had to sell their houses this year.”  He doesn’t present evidence of this, but I can share the experience of a friend who sold her house on the 7400 block of Germantown Avenue in June.  She writes:  “We sold the house in one day for the asking price, which we did not deflate because of the construction.”  This friend also told me that Abbonizio built a special ramp so that the movers could use the front door. Back in June, she wrote the following note to Lou Marraffino, copying me:

“Thank you again for all the work you did to accommodate our move.  The crew was terrific — please pass on my thanks to Gill and John Harakal [of Abbonizio] for their assistance, too. It was a pleasure working with your team. Good luck with the rest of the project.  The finished parts of the Avenue look beautiful!  I can’t wait to see the whole thing!”

That’s my reality as relates to this project.

Laura Morris Siena is the executive director of West Mt. Airy Neighbors.

Another view on PennDOT project
by Dan Muroff

Nearly two years ago, weekly meetings were established so that PennDOT and its contractor could keep the community informed of progress and problems surrounding the Germantown Avenue reconstruction project. These meetings have been held most every Friday morning and everyone from the community has been welcomed. They have served as an exceptional resource, providing a consistent venue for information exchange, project status updates and effective coordination with affected residents and businesses. They have also offered a setting to express concerns and air complaints in an open, public forum that delivers accountability. I have attended nearly every one of these morning meetings for more than a year.

Throughout this process, both East and West Mt. Airy Neighbors have been deeply concerned about the chronic and potentially irreversible impacts the construction project might have upon local businesses. As businesses are struggling, the impacts are bearing down not only on owners and employees, but their fortunes are integrally tied to the potential of our entire community, so we are all affected. And while the strain upon businesses could destroy livelihoods and negatively alter the landscape on Germantown Avenue, we have also been seriously concerned about the acute yet pronounced disruption near neighbors have had to endure.

My responsibility is fiduciary to our community. Consequently, I have remained publicly silent on what I have considered sometimes unfair and inaccurate accounts of PennDOT’s and their contractors’ actions.  Since the project commenced, every public account has presented a powerfully critical tone, portraying project managers as insensitive, incompetent and worse.   More recently, the consistent demonizing of PennDOT and its contractors has become so unsettling as to compel me to comment.

This project has hardly been perfect. To be sure, mistakes have been made and there was room for improvement. The contractor could have dedicated greater attention to develop a sustained program to maintain site cleanliness in coordination with the newly formed BID, a more deliberate approach that may have calmed tensions. And over-ambitious goals to complete segments on a committed schedule sometimes went unmet, inevitably raising tensions. For its part, while PennDOT builds roads, it has no mechanism or state agency partnership to otherwise promote economic development or remunerate businesses in distress, even for unique projects with special impacts. And the agency designed an unrealistic work schedule, established to accommodate earlier community pressure to have the job completed in one working season (Spring through Fall).  To meet ambitious targets, the contract called for entire cross street intersection closures for weeks or months at a time, putting the burden on the contractor and other site managers to develop creative strategies – slowing their own progress at a cost – to accommodate business needs for patron and commercial delivery access.

However, through all the tension and the constant criticism, on site project managers have responded promptly to community concerns, have worked tirelessly to accommodate needs and do not deserve condemnation for inattention or indifference.  In particular, Lou Marraffino of Urban Engineers and John Harakal of C. Abbonizzio are always available and have shown a sincere commitment to find accommodation for business and resident concerns whenever possible. Most notably, and in contrast with so many unsubstantiated reports to the contrary, the project is likely to be completed on target and before Thanksgiving.

Dan Muroff is president of East Mount Airy Neighbors.

Backstage at the Mike Douglas Show, Part 1
by HUGH GILMORE

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

— George Orwell: “Politics and the English Language,”1946.

I intend for this piece to be funny and rich in anecdotes about the year I spent backstage at the Mike Douglas TV talk show produced by KYW here in Philadelphia a number of years ago. Aside from one visit, I was there illegally, thanks to my moxie. Most of my time was spent backstage in what is popularly known as the “Green Room,” the place where guests, performers and their retinues wait to go on stage for their segments. During my time there, Amy Vanderbilt, Graham Kerr “The Galloping Gourmet,” Miss Universe, Louis Nye, Bob Hope, William F. Buckley, Jr., Bruce Dern, Captain Kangaroo, Muhammed Ali, and Norman Mailer, to name but a few, were among the celebrity guests I met.

But first a few words … no, not from our sponsors, but about the special circumstances that brought me to the show.

You may recall that last year I wrote a series of columns about how I corresponded with, and then came to know, the great writer, anthropologist and philosopher, Loren Eiseley. So influential had he been on my youthful ambitions that I gave up my job as Chairman of the Humanities Department at Abington High School in order to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught. I did not, however, choose to enter his field, archeology, but entered instead the field of Physical Anthropology, also known as Human Biology. Within that specialization I focused on primates, especially their behavior, especially communication. For my doctoral dissertation, I went to Kenya and studied free-ranging Olive baboons, noting and trying to understand every vocalization, every gesture, every facial expression I saw them make during the year and a half I lived among them.

On paper, Penn was not the best place to be trained in those days to undertake such a task. While I was doing my coursework (20 courses), there was not a primate behavior specialist anywhere on campus. For the most part, my training in primate anatomy, physiology, and behavior came from my reading and my knowledge was therefore full of gaps, though I didn’t know it.

Penn, however, was full of opportunity for anyone interested in studying communicative behavior. I’d had the requisite coursework in lingusitics, but Penn also offered then several scholars who had developed powerful techniques for interpreting all the behaviors and context dependency that went along with communication. Ray Birdwhistell, for example, often credited as the inventor of the word “kinesics,” taught at the Annenberg School. He taught courses in what now is popularly known as “body language.” Erving Goffman, the incredibly astute sociologist, had offered the theory that all public behavior was “performance,” and extended the stage metaphor so far as to say that when we showed our “real” selves we were acting in a “backstage” manner. Dell Hymes talked about the use of “speech events” and had us analyze how language was actually used in context to shape its meaning. And even over in the Biology Department, I lucked into finding the amazingly insightful and fastidious W. John Smith, a bird specialist who’d developed a method for analyzing the semantic content of what animals were “saying” to one another.

I felt myself lucky to have studied with these men and when the time came to go to Africa and study the troop of wild baboons I’d be following, I felt confident that I had a powerful and unique set of mental tools ready to help me do the task.

In the meantime, however, I had to pass the classes those men taught and each required that I do a field observation and write a paper. By the time I studied with Dell Hymes I had become intrigued with the notion that certain kinds of speech, even when they seemed natural, or spontaneous, were actually “performances.” These acts were actually quite rehearsed and formulaic. People were appraised as “natural,” or “real,” based on how well they performed their well-rehearsed, supposedly-impromptu speech events.

Consider, for example, the current U. S. presidential campaign “performers”: John McCain, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin. Each one strives to convey sincerity, confidence, vision, and capability, while simultaneously trying to appeal to multiple ethnic, religious, social and occupational classes by their use of gestures, head tilts, and appropriately timed smiles. Coats on today, or off? Necktie on, off, or loose? Voice: rhythmic, patient, angry? And so on. Thousands of details that the candidates’ handlers and coaches suggest in order for them to give an “impression” of being a certain kind of person and potential world leader. Former Philadelphia Inquirer writer Joe McGinniss first opened our eyes to all this with his book The Selling of the President 1968. The situation has worsened since.

But, back then, when I studied with Dell Hymes, I became intrigued by wondering how a TV talk show was put together so that it seemed as though the “Host” and the “Guests” were actually having a real conversation. Or were they? That’s what I wanted to know.

After going through several levels of public relations procedures I was granted a one-day Visitor’s Pass to visit the Mike Douglas show and find out what I could.

More next week.

(The Loren Eiseley series in six parts can be found at the Chestnuthilllocal.com Web site. Archived for 2007: Sept. 20; Oct. 4; Oct.18; Nov. 1; Nov. 15 and Dec. 12.)

Contact Hugh at gilmorebooks@yahoo.com.