Neighborhoods Play Hardball

[Passages]

For decades, wealthy owners and financiers have gotten cities to pay for their sports stadiums. It’s not so easy anymore.

BY GABRIELLE GURLEY AUGUST 1, 2024


It’s lunchtime on a hot, sunny late-June day. The students are long gone from the schoolyard at the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Summer vacation has started, and save for a few cars cruising by, this corner is quiet. Twenty-four years ago, the city imagined a very different vibe, with cheering crowds at a new Philadelphia Phillies baseball stadium. During a neighborhood walk, Debbie Wei, a founder and a former principal of the school that focuses on the needs of Asian American and immigrant children, told me that FACTS would have been a stadium parking lot.

Philadelphia has been coming for Chinatown for decades. An indoor shopping mall hems in the neighborhood to the south, and the massive Pennsylvania Convention Center does the same to the west. The Vine Street Expressway, a six-lane connector between two interstate highways, splits the heart of the neighborhood off from homes and community gathering places to the north. If not for the 1970s protests that resulted in a scaled-back roadway, the Chinatown that exists today would have been obliterated.

When federal infrastructure dollars arrived in March for the Chinatown Stitch, a cap for the expressway that will hide the division with parks, play spaces, and other community amenities, it was a significant victory against what residents have viewed as an attempt at erasure. At a news conference announcing the grant, John Chin, the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation’s (PCDC) executive director, pronounced the $160 million grant “transformative unlike any that Chinatown has experienced.”

“We will finally be repairing a historic wrong, an injustice that was done to a community,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA).
https://prospect.org/power/2024-08-01-neighborhoods-play-hardball/