The Powelton/Summer-Winter Garden is on the corner of 33rd
and Race Streets, at the heart of an area that has been the scene
of struggles between neighborhood residents and Drexel
University for over twenty years. The garden was started in
1977 by a group of about ten families from Summer and Winter
streets after the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority
demolished the houses and industrial buildings that had stood
there. Later, a second neighborhood group, the Powelton Pruners,
expanded the garden to fill the entire lot.
The dominant impression of the garden is one of free expression,
playful invention, and easy give-and-take. A wide, generous path
that cuts diagonally through the heart of the garden. The path is open at both ends to the surrounding
neighborhood, and its edges are marked by
stones, railroad ties, fence fragments, and hand-crafted gates. These boundaries are irregular; a piece of the
garden juts out here, pops out there, spills over somewhere else.
The individual plots on either side of the path have much the same qualities as
the path's border. Their boundaries are loosely defined,
discernable largely through variations in cultivation methods and
the type of plants grown.
The gardeners describe themselves as "environmentally
conscious," so fertilizers are discouraged.
A common compost pile located prominently at the garden's
entrance, is a sign of the mindful economy practiced by the
gardeners. Another sign of their environmental values is the
garden's boundary of freely-growing grasses, wildflowers, shrubs
and small trees that make the garden virtually invisible to those
who drive by in cars.
This land has seen much change in the past 200 years. In the early nineteenth century, a spring-fed stream flowed beneath the southwest corner of the garden, a tributary to the Schuylkill River. By the late nineteenth century, this land was covered with buildings and roads, but by the 1960's, several buildings and numerous lots were vacant. In 1974, a vacant house stood on the southwest corner of what is now the garden; one could hear the stream flowing within, feeding the trees which grew out of the open roof. On the opposite corner, a vacant warehouse was adopted by neighborhood residents as a food co-op. Today that land is a basketball court and a new dormitory has replaced the houses across the street. The gardeners at Powelton/Summer-Winter Garden fear a similar fate to previous occupants of the area. The Summer-Winter Association and the Powelton Village Civic Association are both actively lobbying the city government and Drexel University to maintain the site as a garden.
"The bad thing about clean-ups is you could easily slash a praying mantis case. They're a wonderful benefit for a garden. They'll eat anything that moves with legs. There are a lot of good garden creatures out there. We've got a lot of ladybugs; they're good garden friends."
"When you see these children stealing from you, it really makes you mad. If you close yourself off to it and get angry, you're not going to open things up for these kids. But if you just talk to them, we both come out of it with greater insight. The kids want to help, and the fruit from the trees, that's there to taste."
