Click to enlarge.

Photographer Colin Lenton, whom I came to know during our college newspaper days, and a few of his colleagues have rented out beautiful space in the Frankford neighborhood and have made it into a unique studio space.

This weekend, Philadelphia Productions, what they call themselves, held a great grand opening party.

They had a camera set up that could take portraits with a click of a button and everyone had fun with it. See examples here.

Lenton and I did as well.

Phil Pappas, of West Frankford Town Watch, investigating an alarm near Comly and Bustleton on early Saturday morning July 10. Click to enlarge. It's my photo.

Earlier this month, I went on a ride-along with the West Frankford Town Watch in lower Northeast Philadelphia. For the love of hyperlocal journalism and community coverage, I put together a 2,500 word profile of the organization, with a handful of photos of mine. It was good to remember that I got into this whole scene for a love of writing. Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Mike Mawson smells something.

It’s past midnight on Comly Street near Bustleton in Mayfair. The sun went down hours ago, but forgot to take this sticky July heat with it. Mawson is riding shotgun in the sensible four-door sedan that his partner Phil Pappas drives. The West Frankford Town Watch patrol was circling around to head back south of Cheltenham Avenue to drive the streets of its namesake neighborhood when Mawson caught a whiff of something off in the still nighttime air.

“It smells like something is burning,” confirms soft-featured Pappas, 53, sitting upright with two hands on the steering wheel and dressed with purpose in matching earthtones. “I’ll pull over.” MORE

Read the rest of it here.

The cover of a regional edition of the highest circulated daily newspaper in Philadelphia featured a news story of my own yesterday.

Rumors on the possible sale of an alleged drug-infested nuisance property veiled as a recovery home in a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood that came out of last week’s Frankford Civic Association meeting was enough to warrant front page coverage of Metro. The property has been seen as something of a rallying call on the issue of illegal ‘recovery homes.’

I attended the meeting as a former resident and occasional contributor to NEast Philly, the Northeast hyperlocal, that started last month a content partnership with the Philadelphia edition of the international free daily newspaper franchise.

NEast Philly Editor Shannon McDonald says she entered the agreement, which features repackaged NEast content every other Wednesday, for the branding and larger distribution. Metro, which currently only pays McDonald for a feature Northeast freelance piece that usually leads the package, gets cheap content for a niche geographic readership for whom it can sell more direct advertising.

But it’s part of a growing direction for the scrappy free daily, which is likely more respected in Philadelphia than in its other U.S. markets of Boston and New York City but still takes heat for its short form, image and graphic driven product.

Since announcing the deal on April 29, Metro also has a partnership with noted cityblog Philebrity.com, which offers highlighted nightlife listings for the coming weekend, and has an agreement with election news blog pa2010 and the Philadelphia Business Journal.

It goes beyond Philadelphia.

As eMedia Vitals reported, like the Northeast for Philadelphia, the New York paper rolled out a Queens edition and uses Mashable content on Thursdays. The Canadian arm partnered with FourSquare.

The free daily is leveraging independent publishers who want to grow their reach and hit print readers to get free or low cost content and those communities and niches. It’s an angle that print isn’t dead — it just needs some cost cutting and realignment.

It seems like a brilliant strategy in my estimation.

I spent portions of a couple school years while at college helping get a newspaper underway at the Franklin Learning Center, a strong, diverse magnet school in the Spring Garden neighborhood of Philadelphia.

So, I was excited to take some time away from my freelancing work once a week to work with the journalism club at Frankford High School. It was a short walk, and I could just fill in the time lost at night.

I was suddenly the professional journalist half of a Prime Movers program that formerly had me as the student journalist.

I made it a half dozen Thursday after-school meetings, enough to meet the core group of seven or so students and help them launch a WordPress blog for their content, but some rather large, fairly unexpected changes have happened.

I bought a house in a neighborhood that made the trip a 15-minute El ride (and added some responsibility) and, as a larger conflict, I then accepted a full-time job.

So, now I’m reaching out to a host of colleagues to fill as many of the coming weeks with insightful professional journalists (if you’re in Philly and are interested, contact me). Still, though I’ve worked with high school journalism clubs before and only worked with the Pioneer Times of FHS for a couple months, I certainly learned a thing or too — in addition to, I hope, teaching some of those kids something.

Class photo from a Frankford High School long since gone

Frankford High School is a school that, like the neighborhood it served, was once lily white and has seen a dramatic complexion change since.

According to School District of Philadelphia data, as recent as the 2003/2004 school year, a quarter of it’s roughly 2,000 students were white, but now fewer than one in ten are. While Asian and Latino numbers have remained relatively stable over that time, a school that was half populated by black students in 2003 has now settled around more than 60 percent.

That usually makes for some strife, and an uptick in lower income students and suspensions seems to have followed.

But it certainly isn’t known to be anywhere near as dysfunctional and (relatively) dangerous as other big public schools in Philadelphia. Rather, it has active after school programs — like the journalism club and its celebrated culinary program, which the focus of a feature-length documentary that debuted last year. Additionally, while the student population’s look has changed, the school still has an active alumni group and some notable ones among them.

It was with this knowledge that I first came to the school in October to meet journalism club adviser Beth Ziegenfus, who, by measure of the 10 or so students attendance on that first day, was well-liked and caring.

I shared with them the coverage of their neighborhood, from community blog Frankford Gazette, to the localized coverage of NEast Philly to the Northeast Times.

Also, over the next few weeks, I came to know a handful of the group’s regularly attending members, tried to dispense as much general knowledge on journalism, writing and multimedia as I could and, yes, became certain of a few truths.

Read the take aways from last stint helping to lead a journalism program.

1. All kids aren’t ready to give up the printed product — It’s in college that most people become really Web native, with the dispersal of high speed Internet, online assignments, IM and other college standards. This will, of course, continue to shift, but my FHS kids were all interested in seeing their byline in print. (Something I’ve experienced before.)
2. Kids in a journalism club are going to be among the best of the best, so treat them that way — This is certainly something I’ve already experienced, but it’s always nice to be reminded. Kids who are going to give up their after school time for journalism are going to be
3. Make it more than journalism — Journalism and the Fourth Estate and Democracy and all that bull shit doesn’t interest 99.9999999 percent of high school students. Talk about deadline and lede writing and multimedia and Web development being great for succeeding in college
4. Do let kids play with multimedia — All the kids got excited about running around the school with a camera for video and photos. (Get them excited first, then bring on the learning)
5. Talk to high school kids like adults, because they (practically) are — Come on, you remember hating that teacher who treated you like a child. Give them the benefit of the doubt, understand that they may know something you don’t and act like it.

I hope to make it back there, at some point, if some flexibility comes my way at my new job, but, unfortunately, a three p.m. start time in a neighborhood that is probably 30-35 minutes from my work doesn’t make that seem likely anytime soon.

Frankford Terminal, taken in 1918, before the construction of the Frankford El. Obtained from the Philadelphia City Archives. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Updated h/t

He was an ogre of man, slimy, rat-toothed and overbearing, with day old five o’clock shadow and a crunch of black hair falling out of a sun-weathered red trucker hat.

This man, maybe 45, was propped up on the aged bar of Quinn’s Irish Pub II, a neighborhood drinking establishment with so colorful a stable of regulars that they made this second one just up Frankford Avenue here in Philadelphia from the first. It was passed closing time, the lights were low and the rumble of the adjacently-running elevated train dutifully making its way back home to the Frankford terminal ended hours ago.

The bar maid, fair-skinned, with light-brown hair in a pony tail and a stain or two on a white t-shirt, had taken a seat and served another round on the house. She, the man, two other patrons, a buddy and I had fallen into a conversation of seeming interest to all those involved.

What do you do with Frankford?

Frankford, once a separate borough, is now easily one of the most historic neighborhoods in Philadelphia, the historic capital of the United States. Like Philadelphia, all of that is often forgotten or misplaced for a layer of grime, and crime and unease.

[Read a recent series of stories on the neighborhood by a new online news startup in Philadelphia: parts one, two, three and four].

Frankford, once the gateway to the great Northeast — an isolated, middle-class, family-orientated swath of the city that has its own signs of wear — is now as often dismissed as being too poor, too dangerous, too dirty and, yes, probably too black to be a part of the conversation of cultural significance here.

So what was I — a college-educated, 20-something, outsider — doing there?

That’s what this man at the bar, who professed to have seen it all, couldn’t understand.

“Get out of here,” he said. “It’s not safe. It’s not for you.”

I had been in Frankford then just a few months, having moved there at the end of November 2008, looking for a distinct neighborhood that was connected well by transit and was in another part of Philadelphia — a city I so love learning about. I got that, but yes, there was the same sway of crime and drugs and poor quality of life that are found in a lot of the undereducated neighborhoods and towns in this country that don’t offer much opportunity for those living in them.

I’ve always taken to try to hear what people there think about ways to improve their own neighborhoods — if they think ‘improvement’ is what they need at all.

This man, echoed with little degree of variation by the barmaid and the others, made clear his hopelessness.

“Nothing. Nothing can be done because it’s too far now. Everyone good left. All these undesirables moved in,” he said then. “Frankford is just a dumping ground now.”

I can’t say I agreed with much of what he said. But his is an opinion that is probably replicated throughout the 40,000-person neighborhood, so it’s an opinion that needs to be known.

I don’t live in Frankford anymore. Two weeks ago, as I penned for neighborhood blog Frankford Gazette, I handed my apartment keys to my landlord and took one last look at the nice $500-monthly apartment I called home for more than a year. I moved to a nicer neighborhood, nearer to Center City. It has it’s problems too, but by just about every account it offers a better place to live. It’s a place that will offer it’s own opportunities for writing and sharing and spreading, so you’ll hear more about it.

For now, I’ve begun to make the tiny switches of my identity that come with a move — though I still have the better half of 1,000 business cards labeling me from Frankford and will keep coming back for work with the neighborhood high school’s journalism club and contributing to Northeast Philly hyperlocal NEast Philly.

I hadn’t thought about the man and the after-hours conversation that night in that tiny bar in the shadows of the El for months until the night I gave up that apartment. That’s when I revisited and remembered our rambling two-hour talk, dominated by his answers and my questions, though throughout the time others chirped in.

“Anyone who comes here now wants to take something. A neighborhood needs people to give,” the man said sullenly later in the night, allowing for a glimmer of vulnerability in the low light, speaking just above the din of an unattended TV. So why don’t you ‘give’ I asked him. “I can’t even imagine Frankford being a better place, so what would I be doing?”

The barmaid got up then to distract herself by cleaning some pint glasses she had already cleaned. She grew up in that neighborhood, went to its schools and, aside from car trips to big box stores on Roosevelt Boulevard and the occasional trip to Center City, she never left Frankford. I suppose it wasn’t anything she needed to hear again.

It was creeping toward 3 a.m. as the other patrons started to file out. My buddy and I, too, had to leave, so I wished the man well and thanked him for letting me ask my questions.

“You’re young and smart, so you’ll leave soon and good thing,” he said as I went to leave. “So what’s ever going to change?”

Dignity Recovery sober-living home at 1734 Harrison St. in Frankford, as seen on Fri, Feb. 6, 2009. Add a Caption Save CaptionCancel

The heated debate on private addiction recovery homes in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia takes the front stage in a story I wrote for today’s Philadelphia Weekly.

It’s 1997, and Jeffrey Jackson is getting wet.

He’s balled up, trying to sleep inside New Way Out, an addiction-recovery house in Kensington.

The 28-year-old addict is in the process of kicking heroin after moving on from cocaine, but he’s starving and sweating and can’t somebody stop that damn rain from coming in?

“I told the director, ‘Hey, your roof is leaking,’” Jackson says now. “The guy looked at me with a straight face and said, ‘Then move your bed.’” Read the rest here.

Go there, read the story, comment and return here to check out the extra information and quotations that didn’t make it into my final story.

• “Some of the female houses in the area are good,” says Elvis Rosado, a therapist who has worked in Frankford drug rehabilitation clinics. “Unfortunately a lot of the male ones are not.”
• There are two types of licensed treatment facilities approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Health and partially funded by OAS: licensed inpatient treatment centers, ones that house and treat, and licensed outpatient treatment centers, ones that just offer counseling and medication. No one is squawking about them. But, including Jackson’s, Frankford has at least 25 privately-owned recovery homes, which house recovering addicts who are using outpatient services and require little more than a business-privilege license to open legally. Some estimate there are more than 50 of these private recovery homes, some better managed than others, which would make Frankford home to more than any other neighborhood in Philadelphia.
• The Office of Addiction Services is an agency within the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Mental Retardation Services
• At last week’s community meeting, Councilwoman Sanchez said she wanted to coordinate weekly meetings between the police department, L&I, residents and her office.
• “The civic is at a cross-roads,” says acting secretary Elizabeth Mccollum-Nazario. “Officially we have not said anything, but we’re leaning to saying no to all of them.”
• “If we say yes to his two-beds, how will that will be perceived when we say no to someone who wants 12 beds?” Mccollum-Nazario says. “Saying yes to two is still saying yes.”
• Frankford has found camraderie among the families that remain in the hard hit neighborhood, mostly in their criticism of these private recovery homes.

I live in Frankford, an old neighborhood in lower Northeast Philadelphia. Community journalism – the important and perhaps least paying element of the craft – is something I cherish and, as I understand it, begins, funny enough, in your own community.

So when I moved here back in November, I was excited to discover and learn and experience a new neighborhood. My interests reached beyond the professional, I wanted to help and learn and develop with Frankford, like I would wherever I lived. So, I reached out to my legislators – State Rep. Tony Payton and Councilwoman Maria Sanchez. I went to the first neighborhood meeting I found and began what I hope will be a monthly habit, sitting in on the Frankford Civic Association meeting earlier this month.

As life will do, I learned plenty doing just that, a lesson I think every journalist, freelance or otherwise, should recognize.

Any journalist, any real journalist, is a commodity for people, those with stories to tell and information to give. That can be a wonderful asset because, well, journalists like very much to tell stories and collect information. I was a bit naive about that when I walked into St. Joachim’s Church in lower Frankford the first week of February, for that town hall meeting.

I thought I was going to a little meeting of an old neighborhood. I figured it would be mostly boring but that I could meet some of my neighbors and let them know I wanted to join them in making Frankford better. I went as Christopher Wink the resident.

See, looking back even now, just a couple weeks later, that seems so silly. Because, of course, if you do right by your profession, you never go anywhere without being the journalist.

I met the neighborhood residents behind the Frankford Gazette, a community blog I discovered earlier. Turns out they found me, too, and we took a liking to each other.

In no uncertain terms, I am a commodity – not because I have any great skill or knowledge, really this has nothing to do with who I am, it is what I do that is important.

As it turned out, that town hall meeting and the ensuing civic association meeting turned out to be awfully interesting. Interesting enough that I pitched and wrote a story covering their focus – addiction recovery homes in Frankford – to Philadelphia Weekly, a neighborhood story that will be told to the weekly’s 100,000 readers throughout the region on Wednesday.

Soon after I sent the story in, I realized this recovery house business isn’t over. That’s the challenge and thrill about real, true community journalism. I am not going anywhere. Many journalists – myself often included – write a story from afar or genuinely disconnected from the community or story we cover.

I remember walking into the home of a grieving family for one of my earliest clips for the Inquirer – more than 30 Nigerian immigrants packed into the family room of a tiny Mayfair rowhome, sobbing, crying and clinging. I got my quote, my facts and ran. I never felt their pain, never knew what happened to Mayfair that day. That isn’t community journalism, that was paper of record, gotta get the story buried in the B-section so we can justify calling ourselves the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It is something different here in Frankford, as I have always felt about other neighborhoods or communities I have covered and called home. Still, there is an important line to draw.

Not all stories in Frankford are worth citywide or, really, even neighborhood-wide consumption. What affects my block doesn’t necessarily affect the city – but it may. It’s my job as a community journalist, particularly a freelance journalist, to decide that.

I’m going to keep going to those town hall and civic meetings because I am a resident, but you know my pad, and camera and recorder will always be ready. They should be for you, too.

If you’re a journalist and you aren’t active in your community, well, why not? Those are the stories you can tell best, my friends. Be there because you’re a resident, be honest and transparent with your neighbors and legislators, but never hesitate to also tell those stories broadly when they need to be told.

Photo from Phillytrolley.org.