Photographs by Jeff Fusco

Moore Better Blues

A North Philly rec center, once slated for closure, now serves as a model for community renewal.

by Cassidy Hartmann

"You ain’t that cool, Khalil. You ain’t that cool with those glasses and that gum—take those off,” says Hellen McCollum to a gangly strutting 7-year-old in dark sunglasses and a school uniform that looks two sizes too big.

Khalil grins, magenta gum dangling from between his teeth. Quickly the glasses come off and the books come out, as other students filter into the cozily cluttered room at the Cecil B. Moore Recreation Center, thrusting themselves into seats with the kind of exhaustion and pent-up energy that consumes a child’s body on sticky school-day afternoons when summer screams out from everywhere.

These kids, who come from local public, charter and Catholic schools, will finish their homework, then head outside for tennis lessons followed by an African drumming class in the rec center’s newly furbished auditorium. Outside older boys play a heated game of basketball on a brand-new court with fresh nets and pearly white backboards.

Things didn’t used to be like this. Just two years ago the Cecil B. Moore Recreation Center—which sits just off the corner of 22nd and Lehigh in one of North Philadelphia’s most troubled neighborhoods—was barely operational. Years of neglect and community indifference had left the 6.8-acre 84-year-old recreation center a crumbling shell.

“The living conditions were deplorable,” says McCollum, who’s volunteered at the center for more than 35 years and now serves as vice president of its advisory council. “The gym floor was puckering, the auditorium roof was leaking, the outdoor basketball court was cracking … ”

In 2004 the city compiled a list of 46 recreation centers, 40 summer camps, 20 swimming pools and all five of the city’s ice rinks to be closed due to funding shortages. Cecil B. Moore, named for the fiery ’60s local civil rights leader, was on the list for closure.

“I said, ‘They will not close my center and my pool—no way in the world,’” says McCollum, who learned of the impending closure in the newspaper. “Our kids in the summer, it’s like where you gonna go, what are you gonna do when it’s 90 degrees out there?”

McCollum grew up in the ’50s down the block from Cecil B. Moore, back when it was called Fun Filled and then Connie Mack. She climbed its jungle gym, swam in its pool, and took dance and pottery lessons there. The rec was the heart of life in the thriving community, particularly during the summer months.

Back then the neighborhood was home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, sustained by the presence of legendary Connie Mack Stadium at 21st and Lehigh, and two powerhouse Catholic churches nearby.

Moore the merrier: Kids come to the center to play sports, and gather inside after school for homework help.

“This was always a classy community,” says McCollum. “The homes were owned. People were employed. We had a lot of businesses around here.”

But when the stadium closed in 1970, things changed.

“Black and white—Italians, Irish, Jewish, those were the dominant groups in this neighborhood,” says McCollum. “They all rallied around baseball, and once the stadium was gone, they were gone.”

The churches lost parishioners and downsized. Unemployment rose. The rec center remained active, but shifted its focus to athletics over other programs.

“As the people who participated in sports grew older, the programs declined,” McCollum says.

Over the years the rec’s managers became less interested in engaging the community. The community, in turn, turned away from the center.

Then in February 2004, 10-year-old Faheem Thomas-Childs was shot and killed several blocks from Cecil B. Moore in the crossfire of a drug-fueled turf war.

“That mobilized the community about having some safe place for our kids to go,” says McCollum. “We had professional people who grew up in this community, whose parents and grandparents lived here, who wanted to come back and help.”

Hellen McCollum

Now property values have risen in the area, and new leadership at the rec center is providing long-absent life.

Fifty years after spending her carefree days here, McCollum thinks the Cecil B. Moore rec center can once again flourish in a different kind of neighborhood with a very different generation of kids. Two years ago she and a small group of committed individuals set out to recreate that vision. What they came up with could provide the model for much more than a rebirth of recreation in Philadelphia’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods. It could actually save lives.

As recently as 10 years ago Philadelphia’s 160 playgrounds and recreation centers were integral to the fabric and quality of life of the city’s diverse neighborhoods.

Mayor Ed Rendell—and Wilson Goode before him—were avid supporters of the city’s recreation outlets, which are part of one of the last remaining big-city rec programs still operated by a combination of city employees and volunteers. (Recreation programming in most major cities is sustained solely by volunteer organizations.)

But in the mid- to late ’90s things began to change. Murder rates shot up, and the focus shifted away from recreation to policing and improving education. Schools began implementing after-school programs, which kept kids away from rec centers. Mayor Street took office, and rec funding began to run dry.

“They used to have six or seven people working full time at a class-A rec center, and they were open seven days a week,” says Michael McCrea, president of the Philadelphia Recreation Advisory Council. “Now you’re lucky if you have two full-time and one part-time, and they’re open five and a half days a week.”

McCrea says part of the problem stems from the city’s inability to find or fund replacements for the older generation of rec workers who’ve retired. Volunteers are also less plentiful now than in previous decades. McCrea says the current administration also hasn’t helped matters.

“Mayor Street has absolutely been the opposite of an ally,” he asserts. “From 1996 to 2000 we’d done a lot to reduce crime numbers and violence. And this mayor just basically stopped funding [the centers].”

The city instead sent money that would previously have gone directly to the recreation department to private organizations, such as Philadelphia Safe and Sound.

Andrew McLaughlin

“It really didn’t produce the same results,” says McCrea.

When the list of rec centers marked for closing appeared, it was the last straw for McCrea. He rallied volunteers from centers around Philadelphia, and filed a lawsuit against the city. A judge threw out the first case, and by the time McCrea moved to refile, he was already in talks with the city about a compromise.

Ultimately, several buildings were sold and a few centers deemed unsalvageable were closed down. Mayor Street gave the remaining rec centers an ultimatum: Demonstrate value or lose city funding.

With some unexpected help, the Cecil B. Moore community did just that—and then some.

Last spring local pastor Parris Bowens took the helm of the advisory council, and Hellen McCollum stepped back into a leadership role as vice president. New rec manager Andy McLaughlin came on board around the same time, and he and assistant rec leader John Ryan worked zealously with the council to start an African drumming and cultural program, as well as hip-hop, modern dance and adult exercise classes.

Early last year singer Jill Scott, who grew up on 23rd Street, just a block from Cecil B. Moore, and who shot her first music video on the center’s grounds, inquired about making a donation to improve the facilities. In May of last year Scott’s Blue Babe Foundation donated $100,000 to renovate the center’s auditorium and outdoor basketball court, as well as its kitchen and bathrooms.

Two years after its closing was announced, Cecil B. Moore was on the long road to recovery.

But progress, as usual, didn’t come easily.

“Jill Scott’s donation was the catalyst,” says Rev. Bowens, who took over as president of Cecil B. Moore’s advisory council a little more than a year ago and who now runs the rec’s 6-week-old curfew center on weekends. “That instigated more money coming in.”

Scott announced her donation in May of last year. By this past April the city had stepped in with $185,000 in capital funds to repair the roof, refurbish the gym and make other minor improvements.

“The city has always been involved, but we’d not made a definitive decision if we were going to tear down [the rec center] or build a brand-new one,” explains Victor Richard, department of recreation commissioner. “But when the opportunity arose with Ms. Scott, and then also with the new leadership and the vigor that came with the community, that was the angle, and the time was there.”

Richard is quick to credit the Rec Capital Maintenance Squad, a special unit within the city’s recreation department convened last July of highly skilled tradespeople—plumbers, welders, carpenters among them—dedicated solely to capital-eligible recreation projects.

Parris Bowens

Supported by the mayor and City Council, the squad allows the recreation department to address maintenance problems directly, rather than by going through the laborious bureaucracy of the city’s fiscal process. It’s the first of its kind and a boon for a department that had been subject to what was essentially a funding freeze for three years.

“Doing things internally allows us to do them at a cheaper cost and a very accelerated pace,” Richard explains. “The last spreadsheet I saw, they had completed 34 of 36 projects with a little more than $900,000 in savings.”

After Cecil B. Moore began improving its programs early last year, the city proposed to tear the place down and rebuild it.

“My question was when?” says McCollum. “They had three other centers on the drawing board to complete before us and no idea where the money was going to come from. What are we supposed to do in the meantime when this big gap of land is sitting here and our kids have no place to go?”

The advisory board took a stand.

“They said, ‘We’re going to keep the same structure and work our tails off a piece at a time to bring it back,’” says Richard. “And that’s what’s been happening.”

Before they could go about getting the rec center back on its feet, they faced another major obstacle. For two years the city had been using the center as a “code blue” overflow homeless shelter.

John Ryan

What had begun as an emergency-only agreement quickly evolved into an all-winter imposition when a private organization began housing homeless men at the center nearly every night.

“The community was not alerted,” says McCollum. “The city contracted it out to a private agency, and then the next year it just grew bigger; it was a snowball effect.”

The homeless men were to arrive at 9 p.m. and be admitted into the building an hour later to sleep and clean up. But they began arriving earlier and earlier in the evening, and hanging around during the day.

“That scared some of the local people away,” says McLaughlin. “Some of the men had mental and emotional problems or criminal backgrounds, so some people were intimidated by that.”

There were other issues.

“Those who were responsible for the homeless didn’t keep the place clean, and didn’t control the process,” says Bowens. “I’m coming here and finding feces and urine in the building, cigarettes and smoking.”

The homeless program returned for two winters until last November, when the community again drew a line in the sand.

“We decided we didn’t want the homeless in here—that was the first battle we fought and won,” says Bowens, who met with the recreation commissioner and those running the homeless program to negotiate a compromise.

One fall evening, before a decision had been made, a truckload of cots arrived at the door.

“When that happened I went off,” says Bowens. “I wrote the mayor, the recreation commissioner and Councilman Darrell Clarke’s office saying, ‘No way.’”

The cots were removed the next morning. Two weeks later a letter arrived from the city saying the center would no longer be used as a homeless shelter.

Rev. Parris Bowens is a warm, playful man with a vigorous laugh and absolutely no excuses.

At 1 a.m. on a recent Saturday night he roams the Cecil B. Moore auditorium with a police officer and several other volunteers, stopping to play pool and explain the value he sees in the curfew program and the rec center’s role in it.

“It’s needed in our community to keep our young people safe,” he explains. “It helps identify kids at risk, first of all getting them off the streets, and then getting them information through the volunteers we have in the building, and giving them hope. And the same thing for the parents.”

Beat smart: Seku Neblett (right) conducts a drumming lesson on the rec center's new stage.

Last year the city introduced the program, in which police drop off kids under 18 who are out past the city’s midnight weekend curfew at centers around the city. There they meet with counselors until their parents arrive. The first curfew center was established at Dixon House, a South Philadelphia community center. Since its inception the proportion of gunshot victims 18 and under in the neighborhood has dropped from 24 to 18 percent.

After hearing about the program last November, Bowens led a fight to bring one to Cecil B. Moore. He had two weeks to put together a proposal, to find someone to write the grant and to gather volunteers.

Local nonprofit the Institute for the Development of African-American Youth carried the grant. Members of Bowens’ church signed up to help. Still, the city rejected the proposal on the grounds the center was a publicly owned building. Bowens called everyone he could think of to protest, including neighborhood councilman Darrell Clarke, who’d been supportive of the rec center.

“I said, ‘Listen, we’re ready for it. We have our staffers ready, and now you’re telling me we’ve done all this work and we’re not going to house it here because it’s a city property? That’s more reason to have it here,’” says Bowens. “Through the councilman’s meeting with the right people, they came back about a week later and said okay.”

Cecil B. Moore became a curfew center, the sixth of its kind in the city, opening its doors on Thurs., April 26. Since then Bowens and his team of volunteers have worked 9 p.m. to 7 a.m., Thursday through Sunday, sometimes seeing 20 or more young people in a single evening.

“There’s absolutely a need for this,” Bowens says. “The statistics of murder and violence—never mind the weapons offenses and woundings. It’s way up off the scales.”

This particular Saturday night is slow. Heavy rain has kept a lot of kids inside and off the streets. Around 2 a.m. the center’s resident police officer receives a call on the radio.

Jill Scott donated $100,000 to renovate Cecil B. Moore's auditorium and basketball courts

“We’ve got two coming in,” he says.

Shortly afterward a 16-year-old girl in high heels and bright yellow pants and a 17-year-old boy in a long white T-shirt, smiling sheepishly, are escorted inside by officers. The teens were picked up at 20th and Montgomery, where they were talking on the street.

Their information is taken down, and their parents are called. Both kids meet with intake and behavioral counselors, then are sent to the auditorium, where they’re offered movies, comic books, games, Hot Pockets and caring adult conversation.

The two are well behaved and sober, which Bowens says isn’t always the case, and both provide accurate contact information for their legal guardians. The boy’s mother doesn’t have a car, so he’ll have to stay at the center until the morning, when he’ll be taken to the Department of Human Services if his mother can’t pick him up. (A police car will also be sent to the boy’s house to offer his mother transportation.)

The girl’s mother is at work, but when she arrives she’ll also be made to meet with counselors before she can take her daughter home. No one mentions any fathers.

Sitting at a table inside the auditorium, the girl remains quiet. She says she was just out with her older cousin to get a soft drink at the store when they ran into some boys. She says she has a 3-month-old daughter at home, who right now is being watched by another cousin.

Both teens say they know about the curfew, but they didn’t realize they were out so late. The boy is playfully combative when Bowens and Officer Scruggs challenge his assertion that “cops see a kid like me on the street, they just assume I’m doing something wrong.”

Before long the teenager is devouring a Hot Pocket and fully engaged in a debate about police profiling.

“They act like they’re not listening. They act like they’re punkin’ out,” Bowens says later. “But you’re putting ideas in their minds, and it resonates.”

“I saw this place when it was in its full glory, so I know it can be done,” McCollum says as she walks the spacious grounds of the recreation center, past the new basketball court and beyond the freshly mowed baseball diamond to the tennis courts, where a counselor from the Arthur Ashe tennis program is in the middle of a lesson.

“I’m not living in la-la land. I’m looking at things the way they are now, but providing something for young people they can actually enjoy. I think rec centers can have the same impact as they used to.”

McCollum is optimistic, but no one at Cecil B. Moore is pretending there aren’t obstacles.

“Poverty is the first problem we face,” says rec manager McLaughlin. “A lot of people don’t have the resources to pay program fees.”

Court in the act: The Arthur Ashe tennis program comes to Cecil B. Moore on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Knowing this, Cecil B. Moore offers most programs for free, and those that aren’t free are heavily discounted.

There’s also the ongoing battle against drugs and crime. Last August, McLaughlin says, a man was shot across the street in the middle of the afternoon.

“You see the drug bags lying around, and you see and smell and hear drug activity in the area. Any time I see any drug activity going on, I ask whoever’s doing it to go somewhere else,” he says.

During his tennis lesson, Khalil, who’s still wearing his school uniform’s baggy shirt, pants and tie, takes turns hitting forehand shots with five or six other children of different ages.

At one point several loud pops echo through the air, and two girls in pink-and-gray-plaid school uniforms freeze.

“Those were gunshots,” one of them says.

Turns out they weren’t—and the lesson continues as the comment floats away with the breeze.

After finishing their tennis lesson many of the children head inside for an African drumming class led by Seku Neblett, a former civil rights activist and a veteran teacher of a program called African Culture and Its Realities (ACAIR).

The group has been working on a performance since October, and it shows—eight kids walk confidently onto the stage striking their instruments. Drumbeats fill the air.

The sound carries outside the auditorium doors, through the halls of Cecil B. Moore and out onto the street. As the powerful rhythms overtake the block, it almost seems possible that the hollow pangs of African percussion could replace those of gunshots through something as basic as community will.

“It’s not the government that’s messing up your block. It’s not the mayor who’s selling drugs on your corner or the commissioner who’s writing graffiti on your block,” says Bowens, who preaches this very message to his congregation in the center’s auditorium on Sundays. “Take responsibility for your life, for your block. If something’s happening, it’s on you.”

Three amigos: Young students work together on homework after school.

The leaders at Cecil B. Moore have plans to extend the center’s reach even further in the coming months. A performing arts center is in the works for the building’s basement, and senior and preschool programs will start next year.

In a few weeks the center will really come alive, when summer day camp begins five days a week, and kids flock to the rec for that most indispensable of summer sanctuaries—the swimming pool.

“I realize recreation isn’t as important in a city budget as police, fire, education and some other human services. But our role is important—we support all of those things,” says McLaughlin. “Was it Ben Franklin who said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? I think recreation is that ounce of prevention.”