Tag Archives: Mount Airy

A national crisis, hyperlocaled to Mount Airy

Leave a reply

Notice: I am neither dead nor AWOL. Just busier than ever, with a suddenly-really-pending deadline, new blogging at Guernica, and reporting for Newsworks.org – the web portal of WHYY, my local PBS/NPR station.

Here is the very first story I ever pitched to WHYY’s Alan Tu, back in September, Given my background in sussing out tenant stories in Manhattan, I knew quickly that there had to be a story in our slice of the national foreclosure crisis. It’s a story about predatory lending, about neighborhoods, and about a pioneering legislator who figured out 30 years ago what to do about all this.

The story’s also a phoenix: it sat in the pending pile, right behind breaking news, until the city suspended all foreclosures AND I happened upon the perfect interview subject. I hope it absorbs and amuses some folks.

Now to my follow-up story, and to cutting my book manuscript by two-thirds.

Advertisement

the Mount Airy thing with feathers

1 Reply

As Woody Allen said many years ago:”How wrong Emily Dickinson was. Hope is not the thing with feathers. The thing with feathers is my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.” What hope has is claws.

If you told the girl from that Times article that she would soon be living in one of our favorite Philadelphia neighborhoods,  five blocks from Philly’s top food co-op and our version of Mudwimmin Books, she’d have told you two things: 1) You’re dreaming, and 2) What is this, 1988?

I’m superstitious enough not to say much more. I was gonna use a Back to the Future clip, but the one above summarizes how we feel about it. More after June 1, when I’ll no longer worry that it was all about as real as that TV show I keep referring to.