June 18: 22nd and Market memorial artwork | Suburban Station naming rights | Pitched school funding fight | Blackwell on University City HS sale | Clarke fundraiser
Good morning Streeters. We may be a few days before the official start of summer but we’ve got the year’s first heat advisory today. Go lightly.
Three sculptors are finalists to design a memorial artwork at 22nd and Market for the planned memorial park, the Inquirer reports. The sculptors are alumni of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Fundraising is ongoing to build the park and a daylong design charrette is planned for the fall for the park itself. (Recall our Ashley Hahn hopes for the park design.)
Will Suburban Station become Verizon Station via corporate sponsorship? City Paper finds SEPTA will neither confirm nor deny the rumor. Verizon sponsorship for a transit hub that is soon to serve evermore Comcast commuters takes the FiOS v. Xfinity fight to new levels.
Will Philly schools open in September fully staffed only to close when the School District runs out of money? That’s among the strategies being entertained by Superintendent William Hite, reports the Public School Notebook. Given the district’s dire financial state, Hite says the alternative is to open schools that are so understaffed that they are no longer really educational institutions. Hite and School Reform Commission Chairman Bill Green’s are ramping up please to City Council to fund schools as fully as possible. That prompted a scolding from Darrell Clarke and Twitter spats between Green and his former council colleagues.
“If I have a big project, it’s best to work things out behind the scenes.” That’s how Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell said she would have preferred to negotiate about the University City High School site, but the project was simply to big and important. City Paper’s Ryan Briggs caught up with Blackwell about the Community Benefits Agreement (though it has not been made public yet) that enabled the sale of the 14-acre site to Drexel to advance.
John Dougherty, business manager of the Electricians union, hosted a fundraiser this week for Council President Darrell Clarke’s possible mayoral run, the Inquirer reports. “He combines the best of John Street and Ed Rendell,” Dougherty said. Under Doughterty Local 98 has become a massive political force through campaign contributions.
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