In a world where news is becoming increasingly digitized, how do individuals who don’t have regular access to the Internet stay in the loop? Bob and Jim Smiley of The Frankford Gazette provide The Digital Ave as one answer.

The Digital Ave is a storefront projection that provides a live update of headlines and tweets via The Frankford Gazette, the neighborhood’s news publication that began as a website and now prints monthly. The father-son duo teamed up with NorthEast Treatment Centers to project the feed in the NET building’s storefront area…. Read More

Picture a neighborhood, revitalized and colorful. Picture a neighborhood that highlights its past, while looking toward the future. And picture a neighborhood that makes use of its barren landscapes as canvases.

For Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, D-7th, this image of a revitalized and bustling neighborhood was at the forefront of a project she helped to initiate a few years ago. Imagining Frankford, a two-year project consisting of a collection of murals along the Frankford Avenue corridor, was a vision to help inform the residents of Frankford about the neighborhood’s past…. Read More

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she proposed supporting neighborhoods’ use of community-based initiatives.

Fast-forward 50 years, and urban planners are taking her observations into serious consideration, as evidenced by the city’s comprehensive plan,  Philadelphia2035, to play up individual neighborhoods’ strengths and improve upon their obstacles to connectivity and access…. Read More

The Frankford Civic Association held a public meeting this week at Aria Health – Frankford Campus to address the concerns of residents about the proposed building of methadone clinics in the neighborhood.

The meeting was a follow-up to a hearing at the Mayfair Community Center that was held by Rep…. Read More

Vacant buildings have become spaces for art galleries, overgrown brush in parks has been trimmed, vacant lots have been cleared from short dumping and victory gardens at local schools have been planted since PhillyRising first took roots in the revitalization efforts in Frankford last year…. Read More

The Philadelphia City Planning Commission held its second public meeting for the Lower Northeast District. Residents from the five neighborhoods of Frankford, Northwood, Oxford Circle, Lawncrest and Summerdale met at Saint Martin of Tours School recently to learn and discuss the possible future of their neighborhoods…. Read More

Paul Corbin was looking for a new way to get in shape and add some excitement to his workout routine. Becoming bored with the same routine of lifting weights and running, this Frankford resident was introduced to aerial yoga.

Aerial yoga is performed using various yoga movements, suspended a few inches in the air…. Read More

This is a two-part look at revitalization efforts in Frankford in cooperation with our partner, neastphilly.com

For the residents of Frankford, neighborhood revitalization efforts are nothing new.

The once-thriving historic community has fallen on hard times and has succumbed to blight in the past few decades, evidenced by the empty storefronts, the graffiti and trash that decorate the street, and the lack of pedestrians going out and buying wares from the local shops…. Read More

In a basement of a small apartment in Tacony, four mentally disabled adults were found chained to a boiler and locked behind a steel door in what Philadelphia police described the location as a “dungeon” and a “cellar” with a rotten smell…. Read More

Gwen Boyd said she cooks her best dishes for her church’s food cupboard. The smell of tomato sauce and chicken Alfredo filled the 200-year-old church grounds last Wednesday — a landmark that was once part of the Underground Railroad.

But church trustees of the Campbell African Methodist Episcopal Church said plates would be empty, volunteers wouldn’t be organized and the doors would be closed if Phil Robinson wasn’t organizing the cupboard every week…. Read More