A Quaint Little Public Scandal

This blip shows the front of Squirrel Hill Falls in West Philadelphia. It is the oldest of the developed "pocket parks" in my area. One person has controlled the funding and the park itself for its entire existence. Development began in 1986 and the little place was finished in 1996 --fifteen years ago --at the cost of something like three hundred thousand dollars (all donated of course). I have almost always lived within a short walk of it since 1989, and it has been locked and neglected throughout its entire existence. "Herself" is married to a developer and lives across the street. The neighborhood is very ashamed of it and sometimes people say they live in adjacent Cedar Park, rather than Squirrel Hill where they really live, to avoid embarassment. Here is a story that goes into minute detail.

What galls me most about it is that anarchists, who include me, have been creating a living culture and reviving the physical neighborhood a few blocks from this disgrace for all of the same years. Our projects came from our own sweat and imaginations, and rarely is any outside donation sought or received from entities like the electric company or Shell Oil (which this little park sought & received). From something resembling the thin air of the city, we have restored abandoned buildings, planted beautiful gardens, held probably tens of thousands of public events, built thriving businesses (some collectivized, some not), created annual celebrations that still continue, held puppet parades, --it's mind-boggling to guess at how much we've done. This park you see in the photo is an example of how capitalists change a neighborhood, and yet even now I hear some people sneering and mocking the anarchist idea.

So let me take a turn at the art of sneering. We anarchists count among our living and dead Leo Tolstoy, Noam Chomsky, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Capitalists count amoung them Dominique Strauss-Kahn, George W. Bush, and Jay Gould. So Capitalism can just go right ahead and keep all of its moral slobs. We anarchists don't need them and their wars and global economic collapses. We'll just keep on creating things like Wiki-this and Wiki-that and simply give all of the fruits to every person on the Earth for free.

So there you have it: Anarchism is the hope of the world, and the global toilet bowl flushes into the Black Hole of Wall Street. All of that applies, precisely, in my West Philly neighborhood.