Tag: John Street

SugarHouse Casino: Thoughts from a gentrifying homeowner in the neighborhood

The back of SugarHouse Casino on Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia on Sunday, Oct. 10, 2010. Its restaurant and walkway offers pleasant views of the Delaware River and Ben Franklin Bridge.

Last month, my neighborhood helped to make Philadelphia the largest city in the country with a legally-sanctioned casino.

SugarHouse Casino opened in mid-September, as scheduled.

The six-year battle to bring casinos to Philadelphia is not one I want to remark much on. If you want to hear argue for or against the existence of casinos in urban communities, you’ve come to the wrong place. Isaiah Thompson at Citypaper is downright obsessed with reporting on why casinos are in the net bad for communities.

That’s not what I’m writing here for.

By the time I bought my home in Fishtown, the neighborhood that the casino arguably resides within, SugarHouse was already coming. That argument was over with.

What was still up for debate were two issues that I did care about, if a casino was going to come to my neighborhood.

  • I wanted the casino to embrace, enhance and help develop its portion of the Delaware River waterfront, so we could start embracing this beautiful asset of ours and do so through the sensible, efficient use of commercial development.
  • I wanted table games to supplement slots machines so, in my experience, if there was going to be gambling, it might go beyond the droning, heartless slots. (Basically, I have friends who would play blackjack for a night socially; they wouldn’t dump coins in a machine).

This weekend, I enjoyed the beautiful weather by taking a leisurely stroll through the casino’s compact 45,000 square-foot innards and the compound that surrounds it. In an hour’s time, my initial reaction was that, if a casino were to come to Philadelphia and considering much of the debate and compromise that has come with it, what SugarHouse is to date isn’t so terrible.

Continue reading SugarHouse Casino: Thoughts from a gentrifying homeowner in the neighborhood

Nonpartisan elections: the take by Sam Katz, John Street, and others

Last week I got the opportunity to sit down with former Republican contender for mayor, Sam Katz.

We spoke on a number of subjects, more notably his view of nonpartisan elections in Philadelphia. He told me that he hadn’t given it much thought, not thinking it was worth pursuing.

Today, he followed up on our conversation with more thoughts on the subject.

As a practical matter, election law is controlled by the state—i.e. the legislature. Those laws are made by incumbents. The state has very few legislative and senate districts that are generally considered to be “in play”. So getting members of the House and Senate to vote for a system that would put their renomination at greater risk by enabling people outside of the party that nominated them to have a voice, isn’t something we’re likely to see anytime soon. Pursuing it as a political agenda item, would, in my view, be a waste of time and energy.

Continue reading Nonpartisan elections: the take by Sam Katz, John Street, and others

Interview: Sam Katz, a three-time Republican mayoral candidate

This afternoon I was privileged enough to speak with Sam Katz, one of the most successful Republican politicians in Philadelphia in the last half century. Nothing speaks more to the party’s struggles here than the truth of that statement and the realization that Katz has never won a major public office.

It also is important to say that Katz spent much of his life as a registered Democrat and registered as an Independent in May 2007, to retain the possibility of running outside the two-party structure. In the end, he found Michael Nutter a palatable enough candidate to not run at all.

Still, in 1991, 1999 and 2003, he was considered a respectable Republican contender in a city that rarely considers the non-Democrat at all, set aside considering them somewhat palatable. But, Katz grabbed a handful of meaningful endorsements, including former Democratic mayoral candidates Happy Fernandez and John White Jr. in 1999 and former Street confidant Carl Singley in 2003.

There were two topics I wanted most to address with Katz, his general thoughts on the reality of a two-party system in Philadelphia and if nonpartisan elections could add a more competitive element to city-wide elections.

Continue reading Interview: Sam Katz, a three-time Republican mayoral candidate

Interview: John Street, former Philadelphia mayor

John Street

Early this morning I interviewed former Philadelphia Mayor John Street, now an adjunct professor of political science at Temple University. I was speaking to him for my honors thesis, which is focusing on the viability of the Republican Party in urban America, particularly Philadelphia.

Not surprisingly, Street said a number of interesting things regarding his two high profile elections against Republican businessman Sam Katz.

In many respects Sam Katz was more liberal than I am… I have no proof of this, but I think if Sam had won in 1999, by 2003 he would have run as a Democrat.”

Continue reading Interview: John Street, former Philadelphia mayor

Post-racial urban politics: hardly

We have called for and expected the end of mainstream institutional racism in the United States since about the third day after it was exported to this country, maybe 400 years ago.

Back in 1999, when white Republican Sam Katz was challenging black Democrat John F. Street, Katz’s surging success in a city that had nearly as large a black population as white seemed to embolden that notion. Indeed, Katz seemed to make inroads in black communities that hadn’t voted more for a Republican than a Democratic mayoral candidate since 1972, when W. Thatcher Longstreth took on legendary Frank Rizzo, often derided as an outright bigot. Katz won the endorsement of John White Jr., a black former City Council member who lost to Street in the Democratic primary, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

When less than two months before the 1999 election, Martin O’Malley, a white Democrat, won over black voters in his party’s primary to beat out a field of mostly black candidates, the comparisons were sure to be made, as was done by the New York Times.

Continue reading Post-racial urban politics: hardly

Philadelphia magazine: Can Michael Nutter be a reformer?

Can an established Democrat in a city that has seen nothing but Democratic rule for more than 50 years really be a reformer?

Back in January, Philadelphia magazine had a great profile of Philadelphia’s likely next Mayor, who is charged to answer that question. The story, written by Jason Fagone, and appropriately called “Michael Nutter’s Dilemma” ran with the tagline: Is this man too much of a reformer to be mayor? Or so hungry to be mayor that he can’t be a real reformer?

There is Nutter the media marvel, who was lauded as the smart, savvy, outside candidate:

The moral narrative fills the gap in Nutter’s bio by suggesting a set of character traits and instincts that would serve him well as CEO of the city. Even the way he’s running his campaign — declaring his candidacy four months before his nearest competitor, thereby subjecting himself to the city’s new limits on fund-raising — boosts his executive cred. “There was never any mystery or cloud,” Nutter told a group of his donors at the Ritz-Carlton, contrasting himself with Fattah, Brady, Evans and Knox, who hadn’t declared yet. “Is he going to run? Is he not going to run? It’s called decision-making… all of you are business people. … That’s what being a chief executive is all about.”

Continue reading Philadelphia magazine: Can Michael Nutter be a reformer?

Shame of a City: a Philadelphia mayoral election documentary

PlayPlay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

In 2003, the Philadelphia mayoral contest was set to be of epic proportions.

It was a rematch of now-incumbent Mayor John F. Street and Republican Sam Katz. In 1999, Katz lost by less than 8,000 votes, the closest election in the history of mayoral popular votes in Philadelphia, particularly considering more than 425,000 votes were cast.

Filmmaker Tigre Hill followed the Katz campaign throughout the election right through Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2003, when it was announced that a recording device was found in Room 215 of City Hall, Street’s mayoral office, and that it was part of an FBI probe.

It became national, indeed, even international news, and Hill chronicled the entire thing. The film is captivating if only for the sheer drama that unfolds, heightened by the normal characters that only Philadelphia can create.

The film was released to DVD on April 10 and there have been a handful of showings. I got to see it myself, as a friend gave me an advanced copy before it was released in April. Last month, Hill was on MSNBC promoting the film, interviewed by Michael Smerconish.

I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in urban politics, documentary work or Philadelphia generally.

See the trailer here on the film’s Web site or as a Quicktime here.

Image is screen shot from documentary.