Avenue on Ice

Can a teen-run water ice stand help Point Breeze remember its entrepreneurial past?

by Andrew Thompson

[ cool ideas ]

Jessica Kourkounis SCOOPER MAN: Justus Pridgen mans Sweets Water Ice.

In front of a vacant storefront at 21st Street and Point Breeze Avenue, Dennis Jones waxes nostalgic, pointing around him and recalling what used to be there. Instead of the super-saturation of beauty salons, Chinese food joints and check-cashing stores, Jones, 51, remembers a diversity of businesses — not to mention many more of them. "It used to be thriving down here," he says wistfully. "You didn't have to go to Market Street for nothing."

This summer, a neighborhood nonprofit recruited a team of 10 youngsters to try and change the way things look on the Avenue —albeit a tiny, tiny bit. Their business model was an ancient and trusted one, employed by generations of small-time Philadelphia entrepreneurs: the humble water ice stand.

A couple of weeks ago, Justus Pridgen, 14, stood outside First Trust Bank on 21st and Point Breeze hawking water ice on behalf of Sweets Water Ice. Pridgen is the "hype man," as he calls himself, pulling customers in. "Would you like some water ice? Hi, sir, like some water ice today?" he asks passers-by —mostly African-American residents of Point Breeze, like himself. It's his first job.

The enterprise, on its surface at least, is a fairly modest one: a few teenagers, a tidy white cart with a rainbow-colored umbrella, a pile of wax-coated cups and a bunch of frozen slush. But a surprising amount of work went into it.

Sweets came out of a desire on the part of Diversified Community Services (DCS), a neighborhood nonprofit, to promote business literacy and entrepreneurship among the kids of Point Breeze. In past summers, DCS has teamed up with another nonprofit, the Philadelphia Youth Network, to hook up neighborhood kids with summer jobs.

This summer, they wanted to see if the kids could generate an income with their own business. The group cobbled together roughly $4,000 for the stand and to hire a small-business consultant to help show the kids what it takes to start a business.

The kids helped figure out the rest — the pricing, suppliers, distribution and marketing. The spot outside the bank is part of a special deal brokered with First Trust: The bank bought two buckets of water ice and a box of pretzels to give away to bank customers.

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Part of the plan is simply to plant in the kids' minds the idea that running a locally owned business on the Avenue is possible. Point Breeze is one of many moldy commercial corridors that fell hard in recent decades, and, like other once-robust thoroughfares in African-American communities (Lancaster Avenue in West Philly; Ridge Avenue in North Philly), much of the business has dried up, and business owners still on the Avenue are largely from elsewhere.

One consequence is that fewer dollars are recirculated within the neighborhood. According to Daryl Williams, director of research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship, a dollar spent in an average white community recycles within that neighborhood four times before getting sucked away. In a black community, it does so once.

No, a single water ice stand isn't going to stop the flood of dollars out of the community, and the main purpose is purely educational — but Sweets' organizers hope the little stand has symbolic power, as well.

"Kids from that area don't understand that that area used to be thriving," agrees minority-small-business consultant Eric Grimes, who was hired to help the kids start Sweets. "If you're under 40 or 50 years old, you don't really understand that there was a time when business development for black people was essential, and if you weren't entrepreneurial or running your own communities, your community would die. Back then, when you went to a restaurant, they were your people. People who don't see that lose sight of who they are and what they can do."

How well this little experiment worked isn't clear. The kids are shy, and —they're teenagers, after all — aren't necessarily drafting their next business plans. Part of the challenge, perhaps, of getting kids from rough neighborhoods interested in business is that they've got other, more pressing, issues on their mind.

"Do you like business?" I ask Imani Jefferson, one of the Sweets teens.

"Maybe it'd be good as a backup plan," she answers.

What does she want to do instead?

"Criminal justice."

But the cost of failing to inspire home-grown entrepreneurs, says DCS special projects coordinator Mitch Little, is real.

In Point Breeze, says Little, "the idea of ownership is a foreign concept. A lot of renting or bartering goes on here. Everything in the home can be rented, from the furniture to the apartment itself. Where does ownership come into play?"

(andrew.thompson@citypaper.net)