Chester Mayor Stefan Roots came up withan idea as he waited to testify Wednesday during a Pennsylvania legislative committee hearing on a proposed gas export terminal.
“I’m introducing a new initiative,” he said, “WMO — we’ve moved on .… This dangerous facility does not belong in a densely populated urban area like Chester. I’m calling on this committee to do the right thing: Protect some of the most vulnerable people in this commonwealth and say no to an LNG terminal in this region.”
Roots spoke in response to a yearslong plan by Penn LNG to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal in Chester or nearby in southeastern Pennsylvania along the Delaware River. The terminal would tap in to an existing pipeline to carry gas from the Marcellus and Utica formations to a site on the river. There, it would be compressed into liquid gas for export and capitalize on soaring global demand for LNG after Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.
The hearing, held by the Pennsylvania House Environmental & Natural Resource Protection Committee, was stacked with opponents of the plan, saying it would create pollution and be highly dangerous to surrounding communities. Democratic State Rep. Greg Vitale, the committee chair from Delaware County, said proponents, including Franc James, CEO of Penn LNG, and union leaders were invited but declined.
Penn LNG has not specified a location but has said it plans to develop a new plant to export 1 billion cubic feet per day of gas from the Marcellus Shale to Europe.
At previous hearings held by Republican State Rep. Martina White, chair of the Philadelphia LNG Export Task Force, proponents spoke of the economic change the facility would bring, including jobs.
Vitale said he convened Wednesday’s hearing because he feared the project would “proceed under the radar without sufficient public scrutiny.”
Indeed, the mood Wednesday was strikingly different from past hearings as opponents told legislators an LNG facility would pose serious health, safety, and environmental justice issues.
In 2024, former President Joe Biden put a pause on LNG export approvals in 2024 to further study the issue. This year President Donald Trump has made reviving fossil fuel energy projects a priority.
Reuters reported in June that James, the Penn LNG CEO, had met with officials at the White House over the project.
Penn LNG wants to export 7.2 million tons a year of LNG from a site near Philadelphia to markets in Europe and Asia and is considering several locations other than Chester, such as in Trainer, Marcus Hook, and Eddystone, the news service reported.
What are the issues regarding an LNG facility?
Opponents believe such a facility would pose a major threat if there is an explosion or fire in an area already densely populated with people and polluting industrial sites. They noted that Delaware County’s Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Springfield Hospital were closed this year amid a bankruptcy auction.
If there is a catastrophic explosion, they said, the nearest hospital would be 30 minutes away.
Tracy Carluccio, an advocate with the nonprofit Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said the area is too densely populated for the facility, emphasizing that a major concern is the lack of a sufficient safety buffer, which the federal government advises for LNG terminals.
She noted that similar facilities in the South are situated in areas with thousands of acres of buffer. She said a new site in the area would likely be around 100 acres.
“There is no location within the Delaware River watershed, including the bay all the way down to the ocean, for any LNG facility to be located,” Carluccio said.
Lauren Minsky, a visiting professor of health studies at Haverford College, said an LNG facility would exacerbate existing public health issues in the region.
She said southeastern Delaware County has already been given a grade of “F” for particle pollution and a grade of “D” for ozone levels by the American Lung Association.
She cited 2025 research by Johns Hopkins Universityshowing that high levels of volatile organic compounds have been measured in communities near the fence lines of LNG facilities. She also said there are elevated cancer rates in adults living in the area’s riverfront communities, citing the People’s Cancer Incidence Screening Tool, which calculates average annual cancer incidence rates in Pennsylvania.
“If we value the health of our families, our friends and neighbors, and throughout the commonwealth, we need to build a different future, one in which we can all thrive,” she said.
Already industrialized
Zulene Mayfield, an activist with Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, said older residents she knows have suffered heart conditions and cancers that she links to living in an already heavily industrialized area.
Mayfield is a longtime opponent of the Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility owned by Reworld, formerly Covanta. The facility burns trash and converts it to energy.
She said Chester, rimmed by heavy industry, lacks many things other communities take for granted, such as primary-care physicians or entertainment for children.
“We are being told that we have to accept other industries” that no other communities want, Mayfield said.
“I’m sitting here right now trying to contain my rage,” she said. “The jobs are temporary, but death is forever.”
Friday marks three weeks since the bankruptcy auction for Delaware County’s Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Springfield Hospital, and it’s not clear how much progress has been made.
Closing the sales depends in part on local authorities agreeing to tax deals that set the assessments at the transaction prices of $10 million and $3 million, respectively,for a limited period of time.
Upland Borough, which is home to much of Crozer-Chester, is working on a property tax agreement that will be filed in court, borough council president Christine Peterson said Thursday. “We anticipate that Upland Borough Council will take action in favor of that stipulation once it is complete,” she said.
A representative for Chester Upland School District did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
If the school district also agrees to a tax resolution, a company called Chariot Allaire Partners LLC is clearto acquire the shuttered safety net hospital for $10 million.
Yoel Polack, who is principal of Chariot Equities and has been talking with local officials and prospective healthcare providers about plans forthe hospital, said last Tuesday that he expected to issue what he called a “comprehensive memo” on the property this week.
Polack said in an email Thursday that there was still no update, but he is hoping to have something in the next few weeks.
The backup bidder for Crozer-Chester is the same group that won the auction for Springfield. The auction led to Chariot increasing its offer by $3 million.
Both facilities are owned byProspect Medical Holdings, whose next bankruptcy hearing is scheduled for Tuesday. Items to be considered include Springfield Township’s lawsuit aiming to force Prospect to improve safety on the hospital campus that it closed in 2022.
Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan granted a temporary injunction blocking Springfield from taking any action against California-basedProspect.
Another topic is a proposed $1.5 million settlement of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Crozer employees who did not receive 60 days notice before losing their jobs in April and May when Prospect closed Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Taylor Hospital, which has since been sold. Federal law requires employers to provide two months notice of layoffs.
A stalemate in Springfield
Lawyers for Prospect identified Restorative Health Foundation and Syan Investments as the auction winner with a $3 million bid. But it appears a tax agreement that would assess the Springfield property at the purchase price is nowhere near completion.
“The township has no interest in agreeing to a tax deal without having a better understanding of the buyer’s intended use of the site and whether it aligns with the township’s comprehensive plan,” spokesperson Pete Peterson said in an email.
A representative for the winning bidders, Aminah Shabazz Perez, told the Delaware County Times recently that the buyer was in talks with two health systems about moving into the hospital, but one of them told township officials that was not true, Peterson said.
“In addition, the township already did its due diligence prior to the bankruptcy auction and engaged in discussions with representatives of different health systems,” he said. ”There was no interest in the property due to the cost of improvements the facility would need.“
Attempts by The Inquirer to reach Shabazz Perez have not been successful. Prospect did not respond to request for comment on the property tax situation.
The Springfield School Board would also have to agree to a tax settlement, but has not voted “on any proposed resolution of the outstanding tax appeals or the tax assessments relating to the Springfield Hospital and parking garage properties,” the school board’s solicitor Mark Sereni said Wednesday.
The face value of the Springfield School District’s latest claim in bankruptcy court is $1.43 million. Under an abandonment order signed on Oct. 14 by Jernigan, the district would receive a general unsecured claim, which is not likely to be worth much.
If Prospect abandons Springfield and Crozer-Chester, the municipalities would have to foreclose on the properties to collect any of the money Prospect owes them.
As it approaches its third anniversary, the City of Chester’s historic and contentious bankruptcy also may be approaching a watershed.
In a filing Tuesday afternoon, the state-appointed bankruptcy receiver asked Commonwealth Court to rule on an issue pivotal to the city’s ability to sell water assets that are keys to Chester’s emergence from bankruptcy.
Receiver Vijay Kapoor argued that a narrowly tailored state law passed in 2012 that wrested control of the Chester Water Authority from city government was unconstitutional.
If the judge finds in the receiver’s favor, “It would likely resolve a lot of the legal questions,” Kapoor said.
The water authority, which serves 46 towns in Chester and Delaware Counties and reported $51.7 million in revenues last year, is the centerpiece of the receiver’s plans of creating a regional water authority. Aqua Pennsylvania offered over $400 million for the authority four years ago. The city’s annual budget is around $65 million.
The receiver’s office has insisted that an owner operate the water assets as a “public entity,” not beholden to stockholders.
Kapoor said that the state law transferring control of the authority was amended at the last minute and passed without debate.
Frank Catania, the water authority’s attorney, countered that the receiver’s office is attempting a hijacking and that the receiver and city officials are asking customers, 80% of whom are outside Chester, for a bailout.
“It’s not like they’re losing something they had,” he said. “They never had it “
Kapoor also asked the judge to force the authority to turn over financial documents to explain its 14% rate increase earlier this month, adding about $70 to the average annual residential bill.
He said the authority had undertaken a costly ad campaign, presumably at ratepayers’ expense, that he said appeared to include racial overtones.
The authority blamed the rate hikes on bankruptcy-related legal fees and lowered credit ratings.
“We’re a water utility,” Catania said, “and we’re also fighting a war.”
The law the receiver is challenging
In his filing, technically a bankruptcy “plan modification,” Kapoor said the 2012 legislation was crafted specifically to refer to the Chester Water Authority and was afoul of state law.
Rather than the five-member board appointed by the city council, it resulted in the creation of a nine-member board with only two representatives from the city and others appointed by Chester and Delaware County commissioners.
The law applied only to an authority that serves “parts of at least two counties” and services an area ”five times larger than the incorporating municipality.”
The authority also had to have “projects in more than two counties.” Part of the Octoraro Reservoir, from which the authority draws water, is in Lancaster County.
When will the bankruptcy end?
It was uncertain when the judge might rule, or when the bankruptcy — which as of the end of 2024 had cost the state $11.5 million in legal fees — might end.
The city, which is 80% Black, has been in the state’s “distressed” status since 1995 and entered receivership in 2020.
Kapoor’s predecessor, Michael Doweary, took it into bankruptcy in November 2022. Chester had accumulated a $48 million pension deficit and missed several years of payments.
Kapoor has said that sale of the water assets would be critical to avoiding dramatic cuts in retirement benefits.
Chester’s tax base has declined precipitously in the decades since the city’s wartime industrial heydays, and a casino and an incinerator are key contributors to its annual budget.
Other cities have suffered similar economic trauma, but Chester is a rarity. Of the more than 35,000 towns in the country, only about 30 have filed for bankruptcy.
For five glorious Sundays this summer, there was peace in Chester.
In places like the William Penn Homes and Chester Apartments, where children are often encouraged to stay indoors, shut away from the threat of gang violence, it was finally safe to play outside during the height of what is normally the most dangerous time of the year.
Roving carnivals nicknamed “Sunday Fun Days” were organized and held in Delaware County’s lone city, in areas that had weathered a surge in violence in recent years. A few bounce houses, some water ice, and communities breathing sighs of relief were rewards for keeping the peace, and motivation to continue that trend.
The parties, according to Geo Stockman, the lead gun violence interventionist with Making a Change Group, came during one of the safest summers on record in the city: Not a single fatal gunshot was fired in Chester during that time.
It was a result that local police and county prosecutors say they have been working toward these last few years, through a combination of advocacy work and interventions by groups like Stockman’s.
“This opened up the neighborhoods. It gave them a reason to say, ‘Let’s try something else, people are really looking out for us now, maybe we should put this down,’” Stockman said. “People are always telling people to stop doing something without offering them something in this place. So that’s what we did this summer. We offered them something in its place.”
Gregory Cottman left, Gregory Graves, center, and Geo Stockman say the Sunday Fun Day block parties sponsored by the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office served as both a reward for neighborhoods that have curbed gun violence, and an incentive to continue that trend in the years to come.Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer
In its five years of operation, CPSN has seen a 65% reduction in shootings overall and a 74% reduction in fatal shootings. And since the summer, only two fatal shootings have been recorded in Chester, which prosecutors say still puts the city on pace for one of its most peaceful years on record.
“Violence comes from a place of, of hopelessness, of despair. Just anger, resentment, and feeling like you’ve been left behind, like nobody cares,” Stockman said.
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He spoke from experience, as a lifelong Chester resident who spent time in prison for mistakes made on the streets of his hometown.
“That’s what makes what we do so effective. Most of us want to be stopped, but nobody stops us,” he said. “Nobody takes the time to say, ‘I’m gonna be the one to calm you down.’ It really only takes somebody with a clear mind that they understand to say, ‘Nah, that ain’t it.’”
Stockman said he and his team have successfully mediated 130 disputes between rival neighborhoods in the last two years. They settled petty arguments, usually started on social media, that were clearly heading toward a violent conclusion.
“This is a small community, so your reputation goes further than just the neighborhood you’re from,” said Gregory “G-Code” Graves, who works with Stockman.
Graves said the anti-violence messaging works because it’s coming from people the intended audience can identify with.
“We’ve been through the vetting process in all these neighborhoods, so even if it’s a little hesitation at first, it doesn’t take a great deal of persuasion to get them to come to us,” Graves said. “And we come in with meaningful things that’s going to help the situation.”
Residents of the Chester Apartments line up for water ice at a “Sunday Fun Day” block party held this summer in Chester.Courtesy Delaware County District Attorney's Office
For District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer, those results are exactly what he envisioned when he brought CPSN to the county five years ago, building it on models used successfully in other cities, including Boston.
And he is confident that the program will continue to thrive without him, as he runs for a county judgeship in the Nov. 4 election.
“People have bought into the strategy. They’ve seen it work now, and they just wanna keep it going,” he said.
Stollsteimer said making Chester safe was one of his priorities when running for district attorney in 2019. Similar programs, he said, had failed before because of a lack of buy-in from officials.
This time was different — Mayor Stefan Roots became a fixture at the Sunday Fun Day parties.
Roots said the weekly parties presented a rare opportunity for residents to meet the people making decisions that affect their everyday lives. And, in turn, allowed him and other officials to have open, honest dialogue with people living in communities most affected by gun violence.
The conversation flowed naturally, he said. No pressure. No pretense.
“This is something that’s never, never happened before,” he said. “The relationship between the city and the county is really welcome. And the results are showing themselves.”
Roots said he lost count of how many residents came up to him at the parties to talk about their own efforts to curb violence in their neighborhoods. People, he said, who told him that the block parties, and the gun violence interventions that preceded them, were a welcome sigh of relief.
“They told me that, sometimes, they don’t want to be ‘the man with the cape.’ They want to go on and have a life, too,” Roots said.
The winning bids at a bankruptcy auction were $10 million for Crozer-Chester Medical Center and $3 million for Springfield Hospital, ownerProspect Medical Holdings Inc. said in a court filing late Monday.
The California for-profit, which filed for bankruptcy protection in January, identified the top bidders from Friday’sauctionas Chariot Allaire Partners LLC for Crozer-Chester in Upland and Restorative Health Foundation and Syan Investments LLC for Springfield.
Prospect did not say in its filing when it expected the sales to be finalized. Both hospitals are currently closed.
Yoel Polack, who is in the group that wants to buy Crozer-Chester, initially declined to comment about plans for the property. “We are still working through final administrative details of the sale and will wait until next week to make any statements to the press,” he said in an email over the weekend.
Polack is identified on LinkedIn as principal at Chariot Equities, which describes itself on its website as a real estate investment and development company. Previously, Polack worked in healthcare real estate, such as medical office buildings, at Simone Development Cos. in New York.
Polack had an out-of-office reply on his email Tuesday, saying he would have no internet or phone access until Thursday.
The president of Upland Borough Council, Christine Peterson, did not respond to a request for comment Monday about the winning bidder.
No definitive information was available on Restorative Health Foundation and Syan Investments.
A phone number registered under the name Restorative Health Foundation in Philadelphia led to a home care agency called Restorative Home Care. The person who answered the phone Tuesday said she knew of no connection to a bid for Springfield Hospital. Another number for Restorative Health Foundation had a voicemail box that was full.
Restorative Health and Syan also participated in the Crozer-Chester auction, driving the winning bid up to $10 million from Chariot Allaire’s original $7 million offer. They were identified as the backup bidder for Crozer-Chester, in case Chariot Allaire doesn’t complete the purchase.
At Springfield, KQT Aikens Partners 2 LLC is the backup buyer. That involves the same group of local investorsthat bought Taylor Hospital for $1 million last month.
Prospect shuttered Crozer-Chester this spring, following the failure of government-led efforts to find a new, nonprofit owner. It had closed Springfield in 2022.
For more than quarter century, Greta Greenberger ended her tours of Philadelphia City Hall at the tower, just below the bronze buckled shoes of William Penn (1892), the shady colossus that Alexander Milne Calder sculpted.
From there, she’d point up the Parkway to Logan Square, where on hot days children sneak into The Fountain of Three Rivers (1924), created by Calder’s son, Alexander Stirling Calder, to honor the Schuylkill, the Delaware, and the Wissahickon.
She’d finish her lesson at the Philadelphia Art Museum, where an unearthly, white mobile, Ghost (1964), designed by the third generation of Alexander Calders, Sandy, sways ever so slightly in the Great Stair Hall.
“Sometimes, I’d refer to this as ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,’” she says. “It tells such a wonderful story.”
That story will be easier to tell now, with the opening of Calder Gardens at 21st Street and the Ben Franklin Parkway. The Gardens, focused on the work of the youngest Calder, known asSandy, brings another opportunity to celebrate the family dynasty’s in Philadelphia: three sculptors named Alexander Calder who have shaped the look of the city and beyond.
Exterior of the new Calder Gardens on the Ben Franklin Parkway.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
“The Calder family is incredibly important to Philadelphia,” said Anna O. Marley, the former chief curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), where so many Calders studied. “They tell us so much about what it means to be an artist in the United States and how an American artistic identity was created in Philadelphia.”
And their work here offers “a pocket history of art,” in the view of Kathleen A. Foster, the Art Museum’s senior curator of American art.
“Between the three of them, you really go from the academic realism of the grandfather through kind of shift into Art Deco and modernism in the `20s with Stirling Calder, and then all the way into modern forms, completely abstract shapes and bright colors.”
A photograph of workers and an Alexander Milne Calder eagle sculpture before installation around 1894, on display in the tower at City Hall. Calder created the statue of William Penn atop Philadelphia City Hall — and over 250 other works of sculpture on the exterior and interior of the building — from 1871-1901.Inquirer archives
‘One of the greatest’
The Philadelphia that Alexander Milne Calder, a Scottish stonecutter’s son from Aberdeen, first saw in 1868 was sorely in need of a makeover. The sprawling metropolis was known for building big things like ships and rail engines and a wealth of small manufacturers that earned it the nickname “Workshop of the World.”
It was also filthy.
“It’s clear that there is no future for a city that is just increasingly based on its industrial might, on the dirt-producing, noise-producing, the squalor,“ says David Brownlee, emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania.
The boundaries of Fairmount Park had just been established the year before and plans would soon begin for a giant celebration of the country’s 100th birthday, the 1876 Centennial, which would show the world the city’s cultural achievements. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway was unfolding, a broad boulevard lined by art and leading to what Brownlee calls “one of the greatest monumental ensembles of sculpture ever created.”
That would be City Hall, the émigré Calder’s workplace for 22 years as he presided over the creation of more than 250 sculptures from his first floor office in the building’s southwest corner — and the towering figure of the colony’s founder.
There were once almost 150 small lion heads on the ornate bronze spiked railing that surrounds City Hall. They, like most of the statuary on the building — including the big one of William Penn — were designed by Alexander Milne Calder. Less than two dozen of the lions remain after 100 years. TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer
Calder had worked at the Royal Academy in Edinburgh and on the Albert Memorial in London before sailing to America. He stopped in New York, but chose Philadelphia, armed with a letter of introduction to the city’s most eminent sculptor, Joseph A. Bailly, and to the scion of a monument business, William Struthers. Calder was 22.
He registered that year at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation’s first art school and museum, and studied “antiques,” drawing from plaster casts of classic sculptures. It was not long before Calder won a prized commission over one of his instructors, to sculpt the likeness of Major Gen. George G. Meade atop his horse, Baldy. Meade, who’d defeated Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, later designed many of the paths and drives of Fairmount Park. His statue stands now behind the Please Touch Museum on Lansdowne Drive.
Alexander Milne Calder’s Meade Equestrian Monument in the rear of Memorial Hall. It was cast using captured Confederate cannon for the bronze. Calder rendered Gen. Meade reining in his horse at a moment of crisis during battle.
When Greenberger gives tours of City Hall — though retired, she still volunteers one day a week — she likes to start in the north portico, where one can sample his expansive vision. Look up to the south, and there are Africans, surrounded by tobacco leaves, a lion. To the east, people from China, Japan, India, and an Asian elephant. West are the Native Americans and pioneers, and a bear. And north is Europe, people from Germany, England, France, maple leaves, and cattle. (She isn’t sure why cattle.)
Calder started on the Penn sculpture in 1886. The iconic figure, now visible from miles away, was the fourth version of the colony’s founder that the sculptor created. Calder’s models were one-tenth the size of the 37-foot high statue. His goal, according to an article at the time in The Inquirer, was to create “William Penn as he is known to Philadelphians; not a theoretical one or a fine English gentleman.”
The William Penn statue on display in the City Hall courtyard in 1893, the year before it was hoisted, bit by bit, to the top.Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Four teams of horses drew massive plaster sections of the statue up Broad Street to the Tacony Iron & Metal Works. It wasn’t until Thanksgiving 1894 that the head was lifted onto the statue atop the tower, completing Calder’s colossus.
He was not happy with the result.
For most of the day, William Penn’s face is shadowed. That was not the artist’s intent. Calder had wanted Penn facing south, where the sun would light his youthful face and the intricate detail of his garb would be visible for all to admire.
But members of the Public Buildings Commission wanted Penn facing northeast, toward Penn Treaty Park, the site of the 1683 peace agreement with the Lenni-Lenape.
In a letter quoted in the Dec. 14, 1894 Inquirer, Calder wrote “I think that you will agree that is very disappointing from every point of view.”
Calder’s William Penn statue atop City Hall as seen from the Comcast Technology Center in Center City.TIM TAI / Staff Photographer
While Calder lived in a number of homes around the city — a home at 2020 Bainbridge St. and a studio at 337 Broad — when he registered at PAFA, the address listed was 1903 N. Park Ave., now on Temple’s campus. Decades later, his granddaughter, Margaret Calder Hayes, would remember the North Philadelphia house as “gloomy” — four floors with Empire furniture, a long dark hallway leading to a parlor where children were not welcome unaccompanied.
Calder had met his wife, Margaret Stirling, soon after his arrival in Philadelphia and married her after a brief courtship.
Three of their sons would study at PAFA and become artists — Ralph Milne Calder, and Norman Day Calder, and Alexander Stirling Calder. But it was “Stirling,” the eldest who left the biggest mark on Philadelphia.
A portrait of A. Stirling Calder.
‘An idealist, somewhat withdrawn’
In a remembrance kept in the PAFA archives, Alexander Stirling Calder describes art as a fallback. Ever since he was 6 and saw the great Edwin Booth play Hamlet, Stirling Calder wanted to be an actor. But he was too shy. In 1885, he enrolled in art classes at the academy’s new building at Broad and Cherry, and years later recalled the first criticism of his teacher, the artist Thomas Eakins: “Attack all of your difficulties at once.” Eakins urged sculptors to paint, painters to sculpt, and to dissect cadavers to learn anatomy.
After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he returned home and won a commission to immortalize Samuel Gross with a statue that first stood on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (It’s since been moved to the Center City campus of Thomas Jefferson University). At 25, he married a fellow PAFA student, Nanette Lederer, a painter.
To the critic Malcolm Cowley, Stirling Calder was “an idealist, somewhat withdrawn, wholly impractical, creating symbolic figures while brooding on the cruelty of nature.”
Foster says that looking at the allegorical figures in Logan Square’s Swann Fountain, you can see how Stirling inherited his father’s traditions.
Children cool off at the Swann Memorial Fountain in 2023.Jose F. Moreno/ Staff Photographer
“But the figures have a kind of sleek, modern simplicity to them,” she said. “They’re more stylized. So by the 1920s the Swann Fountain represents a kind of moving from the academic past into a more expressive and abstract style.”
The fence came off the Swann Fountain on a hot July day in 1924. The next evening, 10,000 revelers danced to tangos from a police band. Not everyone was pleased — some wondering if the average Philadelphian would grasp the significance of all that Calder had created.
He was unbothered.
“The meaning of works of art is just as mysterious as life itself. It can be explained in many ways by people of different philosophies. …,” he was quoted in the Evening Bulletin as saying. “There are lots of things in life we do not understand; art is no exception.”
Alexander “Sandy” Calder installs his “Big Spider” mobile at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1943.The Evening Bulletin / Temple Urban Archives
‘A big child’
In his autobiography, Sandy Calder included a photograph of the sprawling mansion in Philadelphia where he says he was born. He called the place Lawnton. In 1898 when Calder was born, Lawnton was a neighborhood in East Oak Lane, served by the Reading Line and lined with grand homes where the wealthy went to escape the summer heat.
It’s unlikely Calder was born there. David Brownlee has dug into the mystery of the third and most famous Calder’s birthplace. While his family doctor lived in Lawnton, and it is possible that his mother delivered her son nearby, more likely, he was born near the edge of the growing city, at 1203 East Washington Lane in Germantown. City records showed that Stirling Calder rented that country place, while the family still owned a home on North Park Avenue.
In Margaret Calder Hayes’ memoir, she described how Sandy, two years younger, went to school in Buster Brown suits his mother had sewn and by 8 had built a Noah’s Ark of animals. He enrolled in Germantown Academy, when it was still in the city, but left at age 9 before moving to Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
“We love to claim him, but he only went to school here as a child,” Foster said of the youngest Calder’s time in Philadelphia.
Yet in some ways, he’s the essence of the city he was born in: practical, playful, unpretentious, no pushover.
He worked as a fireman on a steamer bound for San Francisco, spent a year keeping time in a Washington state logging camp. Trained as an mechanical engineer, he moved to New York City at age 25 to paint.
Calder with Mobile in his Roxbury, Ct., studio in 1941.Herbert Matter
He is known as a 20th century modernist, the artist who put sculpture in motion.
After visiting Calder’s Paris studio in 1931 and marveling at his sculptures that relied on little motors, Marcel Duchamp coined the word “mobiles” for these kinetic marvels.
Parisians took to him, while they scoffed at other American artists. Cowley, in an introduction to Hayes’ Three Alexander Calders had a theory:
”Of course his work in itself, continually inventive, playful, and enchanting, was his ticket of admission.” But Sandy and his wife Louisa, “a beauty,” Cowley wrote, entertained generously and simply. Calder was in the tradition of the Noble Savage, “who disregards social conventions and judges everything by his instinctive standards.”
“A big child,” as his friend the playwright Arthur Miller once put it.
Sandy Calder created Ghost in 1964 for a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York City, that included 400 examples of his mobiles, stabiles, toys, jewelry, carvings, tapestries, etc. The Art Museum bought the 34-foot-long showpiece a year later and brought it to the city of his birth.
Ghost, in the Great Stair Hall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (now, Philadelphia Art Museum). It was created to hang in the center of the Guggenheim Museum in New York for Calder’s exhibition there in 1964.Steven M. Falk / Staff Photographer
“It’s a colossal example of the mobile and it’s majestic,” Foster said. “When it moves, it’s just breathtaking, because it, it almost moves like a giant dinosaur or something. In other words, it’s got long spines and fins, and it moves very slowly and grandly in the air currents in the Great Stair Hall. … It’s delightful.”
“When every baby has a mobile hanging over their crib, you don’t think about Calder as being the genesis of this. I think he would be delighted to know that … because he was such a child at heart. He managed to keep that imagination.”
Now, Philadelphia will be home to an institution that celebrates that imagination. It’s a fitting homecoming for an artist whose life and legacy was so shaped by his family, who in turn both shaped and were shaped by Philadelphia.
The weight of a name
Tú Huynh was working at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., when he told a job applicant to look for him under the giant Calder mobile that hangs in the East Building.
That was in 1997. The applicant,Kaleo Bird, landed the job — and later, his heart. Three years later they moved as a couple to Philadelphia, where she started grad school. Soon they married.
In 2008, when their son was born, they didn’t take long to decide on a first name:
Calder.
He’s now 17, a senior at Penn Charter School.
Tú Huynh, Calder Huynh, 17, and Kaleo Bird at Philadelphia City Hall where more than 250 of Alexander Milne Calder’s sculptures adorn the building, topped by his statue of William Penn. Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
“I have yet to meet anyone my age who knows who the whole Calder family was, which is a shame because I feel they’ve had such an impact here, particularly with City Hall,” said the teen. “So many people think Ben Franklin is atop City Hall and don’t know anything about these beautiful sculptures.”
His father now runs the Art in City Hall program.
“I tell people that the true art of City Hall belongs to Alexander Milne Calder,” says Tú Huynh. “This was his Sistine Chapel. There are over 250 sculptures, leafs, busts all over this building. And that’s an homage to his ideal of what this city, state and country is supposed to be about. And he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. There are enslaved Africans, Indigenous populations, Europeans. It tells you the folks who’ve contributed to this extraordinary country.”
Calder Huynh says he feels the weight of his name — in a way that the two generations named after Alexander Milne Calder must have felt.
He paints, draws in charcoal, creates his own comic books — exploring themes with super heroes and Westerns, always with an eye on his father’s works that line the walls of their home.
“Naming me after them is such a big thing to put on someone. For me, it is a weight that Alexander Sandy Calder must have felt. A weight to achieve and create something that differs from what his family members had created, which is kind of cool. … Put something in this world that hasn’t been done yet.”
“The Magic of Calder Gardens” is produced with support from Lisa D. Kabnick and John H. McFadden. Editorial content is created independently of the project’s donors.
To support The Inquirer’s High-Impact Journalism Fund, visit Inquirer.com/giving
Jerusalem Stabile II, 1976 by Alexander Calder is shown on display at the Calder Museum in Philadelphia.Jose F. Moreno / Staff Photographer
Prospect Medical Holdings Inc. had a $7 million bid for Crozer-Chester Medical Center and a $3 million bid for Springfield Hospital ahead of an auction held in the afternoon, an attorney for the bankrupt company said at a hearing Friday.
Neither the winning bidders nor the top bids were identified publicly after the auction. Prospect did not respond to a request for information about the prospective buyers. Community members have been pushing for the restoration of hospital services to Crozer-Chester in particular.
At the same hearing, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan approved Prospect’s plan to “abandon” the two shuttered Delaware County hospitals if the sales fail to close promptly because the properties have become a financial burden to the bankruptcy estate.
Prospect used a similar tactic last summer in the case of Crozer Health’s two other closed hospitals, Delaware County Memorial Hospital in Drexel Hill and Taylor Hospital in Ridley. Both of those hospitals have since been sold.
In a court filing Friday morning, Prospect said it had reached agreements with local tax authorities to set the assessments on Crozer-Chester and Springfield at the sale price for this year and next year.
The properties had elevated assessments because of Prospect’s financial maneuvers since the California for-profit acquired the county’s largest health system in 2016. The current assessment on Crozer-Chester is $114.6 million, according to public records. That figure is $10.9 million for Springfield
The filing also said school districts and others would accept general unsecured claims in the bankruptcy. Those claims are unlikely to have much value.
Much of Friday’s hearing on the abandonment motion was taken up with discussion of complications at Springfield. An attorney for Springfield Township said his client had not agreed to the tax deal outlined in the abandonment motion and was not part of the discussions.
That’s because Springfield Township has not filed a bankruptcy claim for back taxes, according to Prospect’s attorney, Maegan Quajada, of Sidley Austin. A hurdle in any sale is a deed restriction on the Springfield property that requires the operation of an emergency department that is open all the time.
When Prospect announced late last month that it would hold an auction for Springfield and Crozer-Chester, it said any bids had to have no conditions on them, such as the resolution of tax matters or the Springfield deed restriction.
But then Prospect changed its mind and accepted conditional bids and rejected one that was unconditional, an attorney said in court Friday.
Quajada said the unidentified contingencies are being taken care of. “We already know we can meet them,” she said.
Prospect Medical Holdings Inc. said in an emergency bankruptcy motion Friday evening that it wants to “abandon” Delaware County’s Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Springfield Hospital unless local authorities agree to its property tax demands.
The California for-profit, which filed for bankruptcy in January, said it has potential buyers for the properties in Upland Borough and Springfield Township, which were once part of Crozer Health, the county’s largest health system and an important safety-net provider.
However, the bidders won’t close the deals unless tax assessments on the properties are reduced to the amount of the sale prices, Prospect said in its motion. The filing did not say what bids Prospect had received or how much Prospect owes in taxes. The assessments have been in dispute for years.
If U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan approves the motion at a hearing scheduled for Friday, Prospect would be allowed to jettison the properties from the case and stop the accumulation of property tax liabilities against the bankruptcy estate.
Then, if the tax authorities still do not agree to Prospect’s demands, the only way the municipalities and school districts could collect at least part of what they are owed would be to foreclose on the properties and put them up for a tax sale — a process that could take years.
Prospect had said previously it planned to hold an auction Oct. 10 for the Crozer-Chester and Springfield properties. It’s not clear if that plan has changed.
Prospect’s replay of earlier tactic that worked
In July, Prospect received court approval to abandon two other shuttered Crozer hospitals, Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park and Delaware County Memorial Hospital in Drexel Hill. Those two hospitals have since been sold.
Upper Darby School District acquired Delaware County Memorial for $600,000 on Aug. 14 and plans to use the property for the expansion of its neighboring high school. A group of local investors bought Taylor for $1 million Sept. 5 and hope to bring medical services back to the building.
In both of those cases, the townships and school districts accepted a general unsecured claim for past property taxes. The assessment issue was moot in Drexel Hill, but in the Taylor sale the taxing authorities agreed to a $1 million assessment for the first year or so.
Complications in Springfield
The Springfield property has a complicated ownership structure. Ventas, a large real estate investment trust, owns three of the buildings, two medical office buildings, and a sports club that is leased to the YMCA of Eastern Delaware County. The sale of those buildings happened in 2009, seven years before Prospect acquired Crozer.
The hospital and a parking garage were part of the 2019 sale of Crozer real estate to a different investment firm, Medical Properties Trust. Under that arrangement, Prospect leased Springfield and other hospitals back from Medical Properties Trust.
After Prospect’s financial condition deteriorated, MPT returned ownership of the Delaware County hospitals to Prospect in exchange for a mortgage. That happened in 2023. During the bankruptcy, MPT agreed to walk away from its interests in Crozer’s real estate.
Prospect failed for years to maintain the hospital and its parking garage, according to a lawsuit filed in mid-September by Springfield Township. The lawsuit cited the potential structural failure of stairwells in the garage and other problems and asked for an order forcing safety improvements.
Judge Jernigan blocked the township from pursuing that lawsuit last week.
Another sticking point in Springfield is a deed restriction requiring the operation of a 24-7 emergency department on the site.
Representatives for Springfield Township and Upland Borough did not respond to requests for comment Saturday.
Roses are red, violets are blue, today is the Eagles parade — and Valentine’s Day too. Express your true love with our Eagles Valentine card maker.
A Valentine's Day photo collage of Eagles players Cam Jurgens, Jalen Hurts, and Zack BaunJulia Duarte / Staff Illustration, Photography by The Inquirer
There’s no passion quite like that of the Eagles’ fan base, and with the Birds’ Super Bowl championship victory parade coinciding with Valentine’s Day on Friday, love — brotherly and otherwise — is most certainly in the Philadelphia air.
So, whether you love the Birds or are just a lovebird, take this quiz to find the perfect Super Bowl champ valentine for you.
How long have you been with your valentine?
Where can you and your valentine be found on game day?
Which Eagle reminds you of your valentine?
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An Eagles themed valentineJulia Duarte / Staff Illustration, Photography by Yong Kim, for the I
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An Eagles themed valentineJulia Duarte / Staff Illustration, Photography by Steven M. Falk, forAn Eagles themed valentineJulia Duarte / Staff Illustration, Photography by APAn Eagles themed valentineJulia Duarte / Staff Illustration, Photography by Monica Herndon, for the Inquirer
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Art Direction: Julia Duarte
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By the afternoon of Sept. 11, 1968, the hostility had faded.
Neither the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nor Cecil B. Moore was making rousing speechesoutside Girard College’s wrought-iron front gates.
No human barricade of police officers blocked the entrance, and no civil rights groups marched through North Philadelphia.
After a brutal fight to desegregate the private boarding school, which started with an intense seven-month demonstration and then spent years tied up in the court system, the color barrier was pierced without protest.
Four little boys, dressed in suits and ties and carrying their favorite board games, walked to the front door of marble-faced Founder’s Hall at 21st Street and College Avenue, and reported for their first day of second grade.
Mothers and grandmothers and siblings accompanied each child, and a gaggle of photographers and reporters attempting to capture the otherwise-calm moment circled each family.
“Nice place,” 11-year-old William Lenzy Dade told The Inquirer, “I didn’t expect it.”
The school was the brainchild of French merchant Stephen Girard, a childless entrepreneur who amassed an immense wealth in Philadelphia in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Upon his death in 1831, he set aside a then-fortune of $2 million to start a boarding school for “poor, white, male orphans.” The school opened in 1848, and offered a premium education at no cost to select students whose families had a single guardian.
By the 1960s, the campus’ imposing stone walls became a metaphorical obstacle to the enclosed white-columned buildings. Moore, then the Philadelphia NAACP president, led the charge and a lawsuit to force Girard to desegregate. In 1965, the animosity escalated into sometimes-violent confrontations with police. But demonstrators continued undaunted, singing and chanting and marching so those four boys could be the first Black students admitted to the private school.
Owen Gowans III was 7 when he walked through those gates in his bright, green-and-brown plaid jacket, the last of the four to arrive.
“Are you nervous?” a reporter asked.
He just shook his head.
In 2015, as part of an anniversary celebration of the school’s integration, Gowans found the words.
“I’m just humbled by what transpired,” he told The Inquirer. “I’m appreciative to the people who put up with beatings and bad words so people like me could go to school here.”
