Rae Scott Jones: helping St. Joseph's keep up with the Scott-Joneses

As filed – without edits – for yesterday’s edition of the Philadelphia Business Journal.

WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE are students in the supermarkets.

That’s a healthy level of community involvement Rae Scott-Jones might tell you.

Scott-Jones, who was named assistant vice president for government and community relations at St. Joseph’s University, has lived in the school’s Wynnefield neighborhood for nearly a quarter century.

“I want more students in the community. I think that’s important because we all live here. The more we interact the more we are likely to get along and develop some understanding. We are less likely to antagonize individuals than groups,” she said. “We live and work here. It’s critical that we live and work here together.”

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So far from home

By Christopher Wink | March 1, 2008

She enrolled in St. Joseph’s that summer, her first time away from home.

She didn’t grow up too far away – she went to Merion Mercy – but college is about the time, not necessarily the place, and so, for her, Sourin Hall could have just as well been about a million miles away.

“I was the apple of my father’s eye,” she wrote me once, which either showed her complete lack of personal phrasing or was a better characterization than even a thousand poets working a thousand years could develop.

Her father loved her in the same way he loved her when she was seven and twirled on his feet during the father and daughter dance held by Girl Scout Troop 154 memories ago. Fathers always love their daughters as they loved them when they were seven and twirling.

Her mother only wished she could get as much attention as her daughter got.

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Bill McDowell: Designing on Philadelphia's parkway

Interview and article prepared for the Philadelphia Business Journal, as filed yesterday, without edits, to run in next Friday’s edition.

mcdowellbill.jpgOh, Bill McDowell has built in Philadelphia before.

He was chosen as senior building executive for the design and construction of the new Philadelphia home of the Barnes Foundation on the back of a career of construction in this city.Now he’s charged with helping bring one of the most celebrated art collections in the world to the city in which he was born and raised.

“I have had a lot of experience in the city of Philadelphia,” McDowell, 50, said. Like helping develop the concept for the expansion of the Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse on the campus of St. Joseph’s University, and being involved in the planning of the 30th Street Station rail yards, and heading the redevelopment of Reading Terminal Headhouse, now the front of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, as part of the city’s Redevelopment Authority in the 1990s.

“But, by far this is the most important project I’ve ever worked on,” he said. “A project like this might just come around once in a century.”With the hiring of McDowell, who works with the architects, consultants and will hire the construction team, the new building’s design has begun.“It’s full steam ahead. Not only is this a go, it’s ‘can we go any faster?” he said. “The conceptual design process will be done this year, what it will look like. The technical aspects, we will continue to work on into 2009.”The first step is to design how the building will be situated on its future site, a high profile and, to some, controversial lot on Center City’s Ben Franklin Parkway.“I always thought the parkway in Philadephia is under utilized. The creation of density is what Philadelphia needs… to move it from being primarily an auto to a pedestrian route,” he said. “But we’re interested in retaning the qualities of the current building, to see the uniqueness and its intimacy preserved.”But one of Philadelphia’s sons has had to take a professional move to the ‘burbs, by the way of Lower Merion, the current headquarters of Barnes, for now.“For work, I have a 610 area code now, it’s tough,” he said. “At least my cell phone is still 215.”