Pushing Back the Gates: Neighborhood Perspectives on University-Driven Revitalization in West Philadelphia

2. West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Rough Road to Revival and Cooperation

For many reasons,theWest Philadelphia/University of Pennsylvania case is one of the most notable examples of universitydriven revitalization and university–community collaboration. In the mid-1960s, Penn began to develop strategies for improving campus life.This required expansion into previously residential and commercial strips, which led to a continuing need for negotiating a new relationship with surrounding communities.To that end, in the 1990s Penn developed both an infrastructure for community engagement and service learning and a parallel and somewhat complementary real estate development agenda.Together, these systems created one of the most celebrated examples of university-driven urban change and redevelopment.This chapter reviews the history of the university’s efforts of the 1990s and early 2000s in order to place them in their proper context. On Halloween night in 1996, a purse snatcher fatally stabbed a University of Pennsylvania researcher, vladimir sled, on a West Philadelphia sidewalk.1 In the weeks before sled’s murder, the university had been victimized by a rash of crimes,including the shooting of a student near campus.2 Although crime was nothing new West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Rough Road to Revival and Cooperation 2 14 C h a P t e r 2 to West Philadelphia by 1996, sled’s stabbing, in plain view of his girlfriend and twelve-year-old son,struck a painful chord with many West Philadelphia residents and Penn students, faculty, and staff. It exposed long-standing tensions and anxieties about the urban crime that manyWest Philadelphians had come to accept as their way of life. At a meeting with concerned parents during the university’s homecoming weekend a few weeks later,then Penn president Judith Rodin and then Philadelphia mayor Edward G.Rendell were booed off the stage as they tried to assuage the crowd’s fears about crime in the area. long before this meeting, Rodin and Rendell had known of West Philadelphia’s problems and were developing a plan to improve public safety in the area. nevertheless, they were given their marching orders to clean up the crime or lose students. several university staff and administrators interviewed for this study recalled how important that experience was for Rodin and the university. More than any other event, the stabbing served as a major turning point in Penn’s resolve to seek solutions to the “West Philadelphia problem.”A few days after the parent meeting, a group of area residents held a candlelight vigil in nearby Clark Park to commemorate the life of the slain researcher and to draw attention to the problem of neighborhood crime.The parent meeting and the vigil sparked the emergence of a new wave of activity collectively known now as the West Philadelphia Initiatives (WPI). As a program for neighborhood revitalization, theWPI were not intended to be a comprehensive plan for the area.Their focus was on five main areas of activity: the fortification of public education, increased housing availability and quality, clean and safe streets, improved economic opportunity for residents, and increased and improved retail options. According to study participants and other commentators on the Penn/West Philadelphia case, many of the improvements in University City andWest Philadelphia were,in some manner,because of the university’s efforts.What follows is a history of both Penn and its university–community relations. Placing the WPI in a longer trajectory of tensions and relations between university and community reveals how activity since 1996 represents the apex of work begun by t h e ro U g h roa d t o r e v i va l a n d C o o P e r at i o n 15 Penn president Gaylord Harnwell in the 1950s and how that work has been touched by every president of the university since. Perhaps more than that of any other urban university,the work of the University of Pennsylvania has been well documented at both a local and a national level. However, much of this documentation has been initiated by the university itself.3 Many in the Penn community would regard Rodin’s tenure as president as one of the most successful and distinguished because of her leadership of the WPI and the growth of the institution’s prestige and standing.4 Additionally, Penn’s netter Center for Community Partnerships is internationally known as a model of university–urban engagement and servicelearning curricula.To date, much of...