The City has announced that trash and recycling collection has been suspended for today. Residents with regular Monday trash and recycling collection should hold their trash until next week for regular pickup on Monday, Jan. 3. On Tuesday through Friday, residents with rear driveway collection should place their trash and recycling in front of their homes for pickup. Rear trash collection will resume next week.

Tuesday pick-up appears to be on as usual.

In a recent piece in Philadelphia Magazine, the new Drexel president John Fry lays out his hopes for the remaking of the neighborhoods near the campus – the Eds and Meds (universities and medicine/science) approach a la Penn. Fry imagines a Drexel that is the most “civically engaged university in America.” The plan seems to be similar to what has taken place at Penn, where Fry was a vice president under former president Judith Rodin. The plan includes more police, help with faculty and staff mortgages and improved schools.

From the piece:

The short-term goal is to make the northern University City neighborhoods around Drexel more like the clean, leafy, surprisingly safe and prosperous precincts that adjoin the Penn campus, whose very niceness Fry had more than a little to do with creating during a seven-year stint as Penn’s executive vice president under then-president Judith Rodin.

The piece is also sprinkled with contrasts between Fry and the neighborhoods he proposes to revamp – references to his Land Rover, his degrees and the fact that he lives in Bryn Mawr.

Here’s an interesting map showing racial and ethnic population distribution in our part of Philadelphia (though it will also work for any town in the country)  put together by the New York Times using 2005-2009 survey data. West Philly writer Patrick Kerkstra alerted us to this. The distribution in West Philly shouldn’t surprise anyone. Cedar Park, for example, shows up 47 percent white and 40 percent black. Walnut Hill is 60 percent black and 29 percent white.

The data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, not the 2010 Census itself. The data was released yesterday.

Thanks Patrick.

We came across this video, which includes interviews with longtime Walnut Hill residents, on the website of The Enterprise Center. Asia Ray, a West Philadelphia High School graduate, shot the film a couple of years ago during the Walnut Hill planning process. It has only become available recently on The Enterprise Center’s website. The piece provides a good perspective on the past, present and future of the neighborhood, which runs from Spruce to Market Streets, 45th to 52nd Streets.

This is Home: The Story of Walnut Hill from The Enterprise Center CDC on Vimeo.

Nasty weather like today’s brings along high heating bills. There is help for folks who need it. A number of assistance programs exist to help pay gas and electric bills. The Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), for example, can provide grants  for energy bills for a family of three with a gross income below $29,296.

A complete list of assistance programs is here.

Last year’s record snowfall left sidewalks like this one on 44th Street near Spruce buried.

The City Council passed legislation recently that will now require property owners to shovel at least a 36-inch path – up from 30 inches – down snowy sidewalks. The change is designed to make a wider path for  people in wheelchairs, many of who were stranded during last year’s record snowfall. City Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller, who proposed the changes, also said the bill will help people pushing strollers.

The catch to all of this, of course, is enforcement. We’ll see if the city backs it up, especially considering that, as the Inquirer reported, City buildings are often the worst offenders of leaving treacherous winter sidewalks.

There’s not much more to it than that, but here’s the actual changes if you’re interested: