By Robert Field
We encountered midway in an interview on Sirius XM an apparent authority discussing the economic revitaliztion taking place near Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station and Drexel University. He mentioned plans to expand development into the nearby run down and troubled neighborhoods to the north and west.
The speaker added this would be done without the usual gentrification but rather by bringing jobs to those neighborhoods and allowing current occupants to move to newer and better housing. Wow! Being born and raised in Philadelphia before moving to Lancaster, we were especially eager to learn how this was to be accomplished.
But then the speaker segued to the 80 acre freight yard that lies between Penn Station and downtown Philadelphia. He extolled the site as a wonderful opportunity to connect the Drexel Campus on the west side of the Schuylkill River with the cultural museums and institutes along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on the east side.
The question that immediately came to mind was “What do these eighty acres between two already vital areas have to do with the revitalization of run down neighborhoods to the north and west of the Drexel campus?”
The speaker went on to suggest the City bridge over of the freight yard to create further development opportunity that would connect West Philadelphia with Downtown.
The moderator thanked the speaker whom he identified as the president of Drexel University, John Fry. Yes, the same John Fry who had been president of Lancaster’s Franklin and Marshall College and rammed through the relocation of the Norfolk and Southern Railroad freight yards from the edge of the F & M campus to close proximity to a middle class residential community.
Fry’s bully tactics included ignoring the reasonable pleas of home owners for a college sponsored feasibility study of alternate freight yard locations, masking the real purpose of the mandated sole public hearing, and the college police roughing up and detaining two reporters who were simply standing across the street from John Fry’s residence.
Does Fry foresee an expansion of the Drexel Campus over the publicly funded bridged-over freight yard?
Drexel and Philadelphia are bigger venues. And Fry’s aspirations may have some legitimacy. But his methods appear to be the same old bully, bait, and switch.
