Phone Home

Councilman Clarke's revenge inflicts collateral damage on a fragile community.

by Bruce Schimmel

Everyone in Strawberry Hill knows Dottie Smith's big blond 'do and her big broad smile. They'd be hard to miss. From a three-story mural of the legendary jazz singer, a giant "Mother Dot" — as everyone calls her — beams broadly over a pretty pocket park at 33rd and Arlington.

But today, the neighborhood matriarch is not smiling. Mother Dot is angry with Darrell Clarke. Since spring, the councilman has pursued a personal vendetta against a political adversary. And the community is suffering from collateral damage.

"It's unfair how Darrell is treating the community," says Mother Dot, who's lived in this neighborhood near Fairmount Park for over 50 years. "Strawberry Mansion? Not now. I call it Blueberry Hill."

The local jazz diva once made campaign commercials for Clarke's election. "Darrell was like a son to me; he still calls me Mother Dot," she says. But since early summer, when she tried to persuade Clarke to stop his attacks, he hasn't returned Mother Dot's calls.

You can see Clarke's revenge in the streets. Mother Dot's pocket park is still tidy. But many other clean-and-green lots, part of the mayor's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, are now brown and filthy.

Just after Haile Johnston lost his May primary contest with Clarke, Clarke allegedly arranged to have Johnston's community greening contracts with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) canceled. Since June, trash has piled up on hundreds of vacant lots, as the drug dealers return.

Clarke's ire could not be more foolishly directed. Haile Johnston and wife Tatiana Garcia-Granados are literally the poster couple of community organizers.

In the offices of their East Park Revitalization Alliance hangs a PHS poster featuring the young couple. Both Wharton grads, they moved to Strawberry Mansion six years ago. In addition to keeping hundreds of lots clean, they've started after-school and summer programs for neighborhood kids. They've also attracted private and public capital to this blighted area. Backed by The Reinvestment Fund, they purchased an abandoned factory to create jobs through a family-farmer food distribution center. Mayor Street personally presented them with an NTI Ambassador Award. They were praised as "the heart and soul of neighborhood transformation."

And yet, their contract was the only one in the whole city PHS did not renew in June.

PHS' Lisa Stephano confirms that Johnston and Garcia-Granados did great work for three years, garnering two commendations. With a crew of eight, they cleaned 275 lots, 75 more than required.

But during the primary, according to press reports, Clarke went to PHS to complain about Johnston. When PHS refused to dump the couple, sources say the councilman next went to NTI, who then sent him to Joyce Wilkerson, Mayor Street's chief of staff.

In June, Wilkerson's office presented PHS with a list of acceptable candidates, and Johnston didn't make the cut.

Wilkerson doesn't wear perfume without John Street approving the scent. So it's likely that the mayor had a hand in helping Clarke — his protégé — wreak his revenge, and ruin a neighborhood.

Wilkerson defended yanking the couples' contract, saying that she wanted more competition in the bidding, and more transparency in the process. But Wilkerson couldn't say why Johnston's was the only contract tagged. And she also didn't know who had been cleaning the lots since June, or even if they'd been cleaned at all.

As for Clarke, he denies knowing anything about Johnston losing his contract. Since no one is doing the cleaning, I asked what he's saying to people who complain that their neighborhood is filling up with garbage?

The councilman demurred, and attacked me instead: "You're being very unprofessional," he said. "I want to talk to your boss."

"Sure, Councilman. Call my boss. Explain to him why this neighborhood is hurting."

Clarke never did call, and maybe I was wrong to ask. Because the councilman doesn't need to talk to me or to my boss. He needs to phone home.

He needs to talk to Mother Dot, who says she wants to offer "her boy Darrell" a little piece of maternal advice: "When you do the dirty digs — down the line, it catches up with you."

(bruce@schimmel.com)