Mantua: City Robs Residents of a Mural and Morale

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Mantua residents once enjoyed a vivid, colorful mural on their walks home from Center City along the Spring Garden Street Bridge, but in the last three months diamond-plated paneling slowly stole their vibrancy. Tired of fighting the city and tired of being ignored, the neighborhood silenced itself. Until now.

“We’re a little disappointed about it,” Clarence Redding, the block captain of the 500 block of 32nd Street, explained. “I think they should’ve came to us and informed us that they were going to take it down or they were going to put it back up after they took it down.”

No one in the neighborhood has a clear idea of why the city took the mural down or even if it be will replaced with something new, but everyone feels that the mural provided a brighter mood for the neighborhood and a view into the world of Mantua that many Philadelphians never see.

“Now people pass by and ask ‘What happened to my picture?’ or ‘Why did they take it down?’” Redding, 65, said. “Now that it’s gone, we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The absence of the mural represents only one aspect of change the neighborhood sees — and feels. Quintessa Boone, a 22-year resident of Mantua, found the mural to be a pleasantry for the neighborhood that is now indefinitely lost.

“I thought it was a great idea,” Boone, 22, explained. “You know it’s the Spring Garden Street Bridge, the art museum is right across, and I think that them covering it up is kind of sad.”

Mantua residents embody the epitome of a long-standing, everyday Philadelphia neighborhood, a concept easily seen in the mural that once was. Now, it is as if their story remains untold and the life across the bridge ceases to exist.

“I think that there’s a kind of bitterness about it being taken down,” Boone suggested. “That was our representation of our neighborhood.”

The mural is one aspect of Mantua community-life that may be lost forever, yet the residents still feel a sense of kinship with the local homeowners. Now that Drexel students and university students are moving off campus and into the surrounding neighborhoods, Mantua has become a prime area for the spillover of new faces.

“There used to be gang wars, robberies, people getting shot and hurt, different things of that nature,” said Naeem Ali, who has been a resident of Mantua for 40 years and whose mother and sister were featured on the mural. “You had to worry about the kids and the ladies, but we made this block here a safe place for the neighbors.”

Ali believes that if it weren’t for the Mantua locals who stuck around through all of the hardships there, there wouldn’t be any students crossing Spring Garden Street and into their neighborhood. The area was not a safe place for outsiders, but now residents find peace and quiet in the streets aside from the occasional student party.

“There was a lot of life in that mural, a lot of hard times,” Ali, 49, recounted. “It’s a lot better down here now as far as the crime rate and different things.”

A representation of Mantua life was not the only thing the Spring Garden Street Bridge mural added to the drive into West Philadelphia, it also added something positive for local kids — rather than the tendency towards graffiti with which some had previously been involved.

“We didn’t have a lot of graffiti on the wall and peoples’ houses,” Redding said. “Once they saw what was on the wall, they were glad to see that. Some of the kids, I would say, used to go around and paint other peoples’ houses, but now you take this block here and you don’t see no graffiti at all and it gave the kids something to look forward to.”

There has been no contact between the Mural Arts Program and the Mantua community leaders about the mural’s removal. According to online forums discussing the Spring Garden Street Bridge construction, the Mural Arts Program has nothing to do with the mural’s removal and regrets to have no further information for Mantua. Being a block captain for 15 years on a Mantua street, Redding recalled the community’s complete involvement with the mural arts painters in strategizing the mural’s content and photographing community leaders. He was hopeful for what the mural would bring to the community’s youth.

“You can take a brush and you can take a spray can,” Redding explained. “You can do something with it rather than destroy property. You can make property look better.”

The community is experiencing silent outrage over the mural’s removal, but remains at peace with itself because of the improvements to the safety of the neighborhood — a significant victory many West Philadelphia neighborhoods have yet to accomplish.

While the Spring Garden Street Bridge undergoes repairs, the fate of the previous mural continues to appear grim — but the images are still alive on this one block in Mantua.

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