Letters to the Editor

What You Say

I write to set the record straight in reference to "Old City's Christ Church receives close to $1 million in grants to aid in restoration and repair," in the March 8 Bell Curve, which suggests the pastor (that would be me) has purchased two 10-pound buckets of marijuana with the money. We don't have the money yet. It is true that we have recently ordered $850,000 of "bricks" that have not arrived, but I assure your readership they are of premium historic restoration grade, being fired for us in Massachusetts, and will be installed into the 270-year-old exterior walls of your venerable neighbor.

We face an enormous challenge to raise an additional $500,000 by March 31 to receive the $850,000 in challenge grants, but with coverage like yours, I trust we'll succeed.

The Rev. Timothy Safford
Christ Church

Unlike many people who see the ward appointments of three city councilpeople as reprehensible, I don't [News, "The Ward Emergency," Feb. 22, 2007]. Those councilpeople will still have to face the electorate to serve full terms. The people will have their say at the polls in May. And, at the risk of sounding like a Civics 101 teacher, our democracy is "representative" rather than direct. We elect committeepeople who, in turn, elect ward leaders. If you don't like your ward leader, elect new committeepeople! If you don't like your committeepeople, for crying out loud, run for committeeperson yourself! It's not that hard. ... At the very least, committeepeople keep their neighbors civically engaged.

Our entire system of government is based on electing representatives who will vote our interests. Sometimes our elected officials are out of sync with us, like when they vote themselves a pay raise or authorize an unpopular war based on dubious intelligence. We still get to have our say and get to toss them out, provided we show up. If we don't, we get the bad representatives and the bad government we deserve.

Jovida Hill
Logan Square

You are looking at the El with eyes of today, and it was not seen at all the same in its early years [Editor's Letter, "Turning the Corner," Duane Swierczynski, March 1, 2007]. Back in 1917, and through the '40s, the El was the image of progress, modernization and ingenuity. The El made Frankford one of the biggest shopping destinations in the city and the region; it most certainly did not destroy it — until more recently as more and more people got their own cars, when ideas of what is beautiful and modern changed.

Now, it is the elephant in the room — how to fix a commercial corridor burdened with such an impossible-to-ignore and hard-to-love feature? It doesn't help that SEPTA claims it doesn't have enough maintenance money to clean or paint the metal structure that supports it, install pigeon baffles along it, or install lighting that could illuminate the great facades of the old buildings that still line the Avenue. There are still old Frankford residents, and others, who remember shopping for hats and shoes and everything else on the Avenue under the El.

Janet E. Bernstein
Board secretary, Historical Society of Frankford

I find it unfortunate that an "alternative" newsweekly feels compelled to repeat the lies of the Republican Party and protect corporate warhawk Democrats even in a movie review [Movies, "In the Bunker," Sam Adams, Feb. 8, 2007] . That deluded liberals feel a necessity to maintain the fiction that Al Gore had a peaceful, environmentally friendly record in federal government is predictable, although not supportable by fact. Adams seems only to bolster the argument of Nader and the Greens that the Democratic Party thinks liberals "owe" them votes without needing to earn them. This revisionist history is bad enough in service to the Democrats, but the truly astounding assumption lies in Adams' inferred acceptance of Katherine Harris' farcical Florida data. ... To print a statement that Nader gave the 2000 election to Bush is to state that one somehow believes her fraudulent tally.

Chris Randolph
South Philadelphia