A Beautiful Day in the Jay-borhood...

Wow (4.00 / 2)

almost all pavement. Next to no green. I'd die.

You're made of tougher stuff than I am Jay.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Wed Mar 21, 2012 at 02:40:59 AM UTC

Squares and parks... (4.00 / 1)

...are interwoven here and there, they're nice.  :)

Cemeteries, too.  And once the leaves come back, the streets which have them are nice and shady.  Mine has no street trees, unfortunately, but a couple of the neighboring streets do.  This place is pretty much 100% close to my ideal neighborhood, personally.

You'd probably appreciate Greensgrow Farm, which is about 6 blocks north of here!

I really like that there are only a couple small vacant lots here and there on this side of the neighborhood.  Even abandoned homes (of which there are a few around here, unfortunately, which look like they've been boarded up since the Reagan years) are better than urban prairie, especially rowhouses which make for a nice enclosed living room feel on the sidewalk with their continuous street wall.

I like that for a city of its size, particularly one that experienced a long and at times steep decline in its population (although that's reversed now, the 2010 census showed Philadelphia's first population increase since 1950), Philadelphia never went the way of Detroit or St. Louis and tore down vast swaths of the city wholesale, just to let it sit there forever as nothing, cutting neighborhoods off from each other.  Even though Philadelphia lost an entire Portland's worth of people (lost almost 600,000 people from its peak population of 2.1 million) between 1950 and 2000, even in the hardest-hit areas of the city there isn't anything like the desolate stretches of mistakes that too many other cities have sadly made.

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by: JayinPhiladelphia @ Wed Mar 21, 2012 at 12:59:28 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Different people like different habitats that's for sure (4.00 / 2)

You did move to way nicer weather! It's been snowing here off and on all day. :-(

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Thu Mar 22, 2012 at 00:14:05 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

I'd gladly trade youze 20 degrees or so, though! (4.00 / 1)

80 here tomorrow.  Yuck.

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by: JayinPhiladelphia @ Thu Mar 22, 2012 at 02:38:51 AM UTC

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More than 5 inches of snow from Salem south to Eugene. More to come overnight. (4.00 / 1)

Snow in the west hills, but none down where I live. Still, cold and rainy. I could be very happy with some high 60s maybe 70 degree weather about now.

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by: caseyOR @ Thu Mar 22, 2012 at 04:22:19 AM UTC

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They say it's going to warm up into the 50s here in a couple days (4.00 / 1)

We'll see if that actually happens.

In the mean time I've got around 3" of snow here. I'm going to let the CSA members who were scheduled to pick up today to wait until tomorrow or they can skip this week and I'll tack the week onto the back end of their terms.

It'll be good tracking conditions though. I went out around 2am to get the mail and noticed pretty good sized tracks crossing the highway and going down my main driveway. It was either a coyote or a neighbor dog who got out.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Thu Mar 22, 2012 at 11:17:21 AM UTC

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I will be visiting Greensgrow and we can meet (4.00 / 1)

I have buckets for you and some compost I rented part of my house to a professional landscaper and came home the other day to my veggie garden filled with leaf mulch courtesy of my new roomie so I have extra compost I just came back from Produce Junction which has  locations everywhere They buy from the distribution center slightly "off" veggies. Not organic but I see stuff there I don't see other places like 6 kinds of eggplant or black garlic And they have a garden center with amazing prices like beautiful herb plants 3 for 5.00 I just came with tarragon and oregano.The Philly seed people are on Facebook I think most of them live in West Philly and you can get interesting stuff from them.

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by: LeeN @ Thu Mar 22, 2012 at 22:10:00 PM UTC

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How close are you to Fishtown? (4.00 / 2)

I saw the Irish flag in one of those pics. Is Kensington an Irish neighborhood?

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by: caseyOR @ Wed Mar 21, 2012 at 04:30:58 AM UTC

Oh, yeah... (4.00 / 1)

This part of it is very much Irish. ;)

I've been to South Boston and this place would even give that a run for its money on Irishness.  Definitely one of the largest, and last remaining, ethnic Irish neighborhoods in the US.

There aren't really any 'official' borders, but Fishtown is a sub-neighborhood of Kensington and I'd be just a couple blocks inside of it, or a couple blocks outside of it depending on who you ask.  Or depending on how much the leasing agent wants to charge for rent.  Heh.

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by: JayinPhiladelphia @ Wed Mar 21, 2012 at 12:22:37 PM UTC

[ Parent ]