Olney the Lonely

Peering through the kaleidoscope of one of Philly's most diverse and overlooked neighborhoods.

by Brian Howard

Michael T. Regan

Go far up North Fifth, past the barrio, past the Boulevard, past the train tracks.

Some 59 long city blocks from Market Street, there's a stretch starting at Nedro Avenue that's still within city limits and yet so alien it might as well be in outer space.

Along the once-bustling Fifth Street corridor, German-style façades are adorned with Korean characters, hinting at cultural colonization.

This is the Olney neighborhood, approximately Front to Eighth and Godfrey to the Boulevard. It's not quite as far from the gravitational pull of Center City as the Northeast's most far-flung outposts, but it's certainly more remote.

Once upon a time, this stretch was Little Korea. In the '80s, the street signs were changed — albeit temporarily, due to what is now regarded as a somewhat embarrassing neighborhood outcry — to read in Korean. Nowadays the Korean businesses remain, but many of their proprietors have moved to the nearby suburb of Cheltenham.

Olney has been in cultural flux since the 1970s, when Korean residents and businesses began migrating here.

Like so many city neighborhoods, the factories have closed shop. The One and Olney strip mall (at Front and Olney) sprouted up in the footprint of the old Heintz Manufacturing plant, siphoning businesses from Fifth Street. After that, the neighborhood witnessed white flight, then Korean flight.

In 2007, Eugene Mansdoerfer, known around here as "Mr. Olney," passed away at the age of 94. The Olney Times, the community newspaper run by his daughter, Jean Pleis, closed abruptly this December.

Some longtime residents sigh about the neighborhood's glory days being far behind it. But there are others — those who point to the "good bones" of a once-thriving commercial district, the central park with ties to Philadelphia's very foundation, the steady influx of immigrants from all corners of the world — who say the best is yet to come.

Jin H. Yu remembers the day he set foot in the United States from Seoul: Jan. 20, 1961, the day John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. He landed in Seattle, matriculated at Wake Forest and, in 1964, enrolled at Temple University to pursue his doctorate in sociology.

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In 1985, Yu opened the Korean Community Development Services Center (KCDCS) in "the back of a small travel agency," for the purpose of assisting newly arrived immigrants and refugees from Asia. Back then, "half the business owners here were white, and half were Korean," says Yu. He now estimates that 60 percent of the businesses are African-American-owned, 15 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian and less than 5 percent white.

On a bitter cold day in mid-January, the KCDSC's warren-like offices at Fifth and Spencer are packed with African-American men and women using the center's CareerLink terminals. The center also provides child care, after-school and summer youth programs, TOEFL and computer training and assistance for the elderly.

Although the area's Korean presence has declined since 1985, Yu's tireless efforts in the community transcend ethnicity.

"When I came here, Fifth Street was good. Now there are a lot of vacant storefronts," he bemoans. The Olney Businessmen's Association, once a force in the area, has fallen by the wayside. One of Yu's goals is to see it re-established.

Russell Stridh remembers the salad days. A 48-year Olney resident, who's seen his children "baptized, confirmed and married" here, sits at a table in the basement of St. Paul's Church at Fifth and Nedro. He's here for the daily senior center, run by the Lutheran Children and Family Services and funded by the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging, which provides meals and companionship for about 65 visitors a day. Stridh, a retired district supervisor for the city's Parks and Recreation department, has just lost his wife. He sits with friends and holds court, reminiscing about the old days and pontificating about the city's budget crisis.

"This used to be a German and Irish neighborhood. There was a lot of loyalty and cooperation," says Stridh. "We had a great civic association, a great Fourth of July association." He misses the days when Mr. Olney ruled the roost. "[Mansdoerfer] instigated a lot of things, including the Fourth of July parade.

"It's not bad, but there has been a lot of change," says Stridh, who seems genuinely welcoming of the new faces that have come to the neighborhood over the years.

Another man a few tables down, a former employee of the aforementioned Heintz factory, grumbles, "It's a piece of shit," when asked about the neighborhood. "Look around," he sneers.

At the next table, Tong Soublee and Chang Kim play jangki, a strategy game sometimes called Korean chess. As the players contemplate their next moves, Jim Cheng, a retired produce seller at Fifth and Tabor who will head to the library later to continue practicing his English, explains that the pieces represent "tanks, guns and castles."

According to program coordinator Annette Lutz, each day the center might attract seniors of "30 different nationalities and 27 different ZIP codes." The diversity is fascinating, but it can also be problematic, she says. "Olney does not have one strong voice. Whenever there's any need, Olney is the last to get it."

Which is to say that when there are so many ethnic groups in one area, it can be difficult to get them to sing in unison.

When people who think about Olney talk about Olney, they mention these 30-some ethnic groups that make up the neighborhood. From the German, Irish and Ukrainian, to Korean, Vietnamese and Cambodian, to West African to Caribbean to African-American, Olney has been transformed over the last three decades from a mostly white area to what may be the most diverse neighborhood in the city. Perhaps people are drawn here because it's far enough from Center City to be affordable but close enough to the Fern Rock Transportation Center to be accessible. Or perhaps it's because, as longtime state Rep. Mark Cohen points out, Olney High School is one of the most linguistically diverse schools in the area, at one point offering programs in some 70 different languages.

Download the Planning Commission's 2003 study on the Olney Neighborhood.

Barbara Bishop, a longtime Olney resident, is the community liaison for the Fifth Street Revitalization Project, under the umbrella of Yu's KCDSC. A retired project manager with Cigna, she started the office in 2006 when she realized the neighborhood's vitality was slipping away.

"The business district was deteriorating. There was lots of trash. We were losing the variety of our shops. The business association was no longer meeting. I looked around and thought, 'We need to stop this in its tracks,'" says Bishop, whose husband, Jim, runs Bishop Funeral Home down Fifth.

She's taught ESL at the IHM Literacy Center for the last 14 years. When she started, her students were mostly Vietnamese. "Now the biggest number of students is from Haiti." Don W. Pak, an immigration lawyer up the street, has noticed an influx of Malians.

The project's Business Development Office holds seminars on starting businesses, paying taxes, etc. Though big-box stores and changing demographics have spelled the demise of, say, Bernstein Office Machine Co. and the Ukrainian book store, Bishop figures there's a wealth of opportunity in Olney's burgeoning ethnic population.

Bishop was "chief cook and bottle washer" of her one-woman operation until last July when she brought on Paul Aylesworth, a Wisconsin native who came to Philadelphia to teach, then went to grad school for urban planning at UPenn. Aylesworth's hard work has paid off: The project has just received a $200,000 Targeted Blocks Facade Grant from the city, which agrees to pay 70 percent of the cost of sprucing up a façade, while the business pays the remaining 30 percent. While the grant may not turn North Fifth into Main Street Manayunk, the idea is that if you start nicing things up — planting trees, replacing obnoxious signage — people might start coming to the street just because it's pleasant to be there.

Good parks make good neighborhoods.

The converse is also true. Not long ago, Fisher Park, the spiritual hub of Olney once owned by Joseph Wharton, was not a good park. "It was full of trash," says Laurel Sweeney, co-president of the Fisher Park Community Alliance. "There were drugs. It was the place people would run to after they'd mugged somebody or if they stole something. ... It was in relative squalor."

According to Sweeney, the park's now defunct friends group had become politicized. The wooded section — much of Fisher's 23.3 acres is untouched woodland — was more recently known as "keg hill."

Now the neighborhood engages in monthly cleanups. An arts camp has been started. In the last two years basketball and tennis courts have been installed, as has a playground.

A community garden that's been recognized by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society has been going strong for seven years. The gardeners of its 26 4-by-8-foot plots are fairly evenly divided between white and black, with one plot belonging to a Korean family that, says Sweeney proudly, regularly gardens circles around everybody.

The park's wooded section has become a makeshift arboretum with tree tags and a meditation garden. And while Sweeney gets burned up by kids riding their quads across the grassy bed of the old Rock Run Creek — which just a few weeks ago was a toboggan wonderland — she beams about the civility with which the park is now used.

When the Olney Times was shut down, days before its 100th anniversary, it was a surprise. "On Dec. 11 we were all shocked when we were called in to a meeting and told we were closing down — now," says Jean Pleis, the erstwhile paper's erstwhile general manager. This is what's happening to community newspapers these days. The Journal Register Corp., which owned the Times, also shut down the News Gleaner and the Northeast Breeze the same day. (Just last week JRC closed the Germantown Courier and the Mount Airy Times Express, as well.) Of course, Olney, as it turns out, is not the type of place to live and let die. Putting a new spin on the concept of citizen journalism, Pleis and others are already in talks with state Rep. Cohen and councilwoman Marian Tasco about creating a nonprofit entity for a new community newspaper.

"Truthfully, I have never worked outside of Olney, and I'd never had to apply for a job until now," says Pleis, who, despite moving to nearby Lawndale 12 years ago, still uses the "OLNEY 1" license plate she inherited from her father. "There were always jobs available."

It's unclear what form a new paper may take, but Pleis says she's anxious to be involved. The paper could happen as soon as April.

"A lot of people are still calling the office, I'm sure, to see where their paper is," says Pleis. With such a diverse community on both sides of the digital divide, "People need something to read that they can touch."

They may get that soon.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)