May 15: A/B stops on the El | Middle neighborhood racial disparities | PPA deleted comp time records

A person was struck and killed by a train on SEPTA’s Lansdale/Doylestown Line early Monday morning, the Inquirer’s Emily Babay reports. No further details have been reported; service is suspended between Lansdale and Doylestown. Check SEPTA’s twitter for up to date delayed and express train schedules.   

New data from Reinvestment Fund and Next City examines the growing fragility of middle neighborhoods, particularly for African-American homeowners, finding “clear indications that these areas are more vulnerable to changing economic winds and market forces.” Next City reporting identified Mount Airy as an example of a middle neighborhood that “appears to be a portrait of middle-class stability,” while TRF analyzed the eviction, foreclosure, and mortgage denial rates across middle neighborhoods and found stark disparities tied to racial and ethnic differences. To discuss further, Next City is having an event at Relish on Thursday evening.

How has Market-Frankford El ridership changed by station from 2001 to 2016? Why are there A-B stops on the El anyway? Billy Penn’s Anna Orso speaks with SEPTA’s chief officer of service planning, Charles Webb, to answer seven questions about the skip-stop mechanism.

Two Philadelphia Parking Authority deputy executive directors sent emails to the agency’s payroll department to eliminate compensatory time records after the Inquirer and Daily News submitted a Right-to-Know request, the Inquirer’s William Bender reports. After an initial statement on January 17th that the agency had no comp-time records, PPA handed over documents January 20th, including released emails from the executives to PPA’s payroll director asking for their comp-time amount be reduced to zero. PPA officials stated to the papers that the timing of the emails, dated January 17th, “was coincidental to the newspapers’ Right-to-Know request.”

The Philadelphia Historical Commission voted to add the Gershman Y to Philadelphia’s historic register on Friday, Liz Spikol reports. The building, which is part of the University of the Arts’ campus on South Broad Street, was once the “largest American Jewish institutional building of its kind,” and was nominated for designation by the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia last year. UArts initially opposed the nomination, citing the building’s “troubled condition,” eventually requesting that the commission change the characterization of the building from ‘good’ to ‘fair’ in the nomination, alter the building material description, and for “the designation be confined to two of the city ordinance’s 10 criteria for historic designation.” The commission decided to grant the designation using all four criteria cited in the official nomination.