Grid Magazine September 2026 [#208]

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Northwest neighbors save a chef from ICE deportation

How to Not Use AI

The greatest threat to Philly’s park protectors

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p. 18

p. 14

SEPTEMBER 2026 / ISSUE 208 / GRIDPHILLY.COM

TO WA R D A S U S TA I N A B L E P H I L A D E L P H I A

LOSING ITS LUSTER In 1998, the U.S. Green Building Council revolutionized design and construction with the launch of LEED certification.

Almost 30 years later, has the industry caught up?

Stuart Leon Bicycle Crash Law stuartleon.com (215) 790 - 9288

stuart@stuartleon.com zach@stuartleon.com

Black Rd Philadelphia, PA

He crashed and broke his shoulder!

Two years Ago, our client was riding his bike on this chunked out, garbage road.

So we sued the city to fix the road AND . . .

Look at this beautiful, smooth road now!

We won!

S E PTE M B E R 20 26

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PUBLI SHE R’S NOTES

publisher Alex Mulcahy senior editor Bernard Brown associate editor & distribution Timothy Mulcahy tim@gridphilly.com deputy editor Julia Lowe art director Michael Wohlberg writers

Sophie Aanerud Marilyn Anthony Kyle Bagenstose Bernard Brown Gabriel Donahue Elijah Fischer Constance Garcia-Barrio Rusty Gorelick Tasso Hartzog Emily Kovach Julia Lowe Kathryn Rice Jacques-Jean “JJ” Tiziou photographers

Taylor Ecker Jeff Fusco Tasso Hartzog Julia Lowe Tracie van Auken published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

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by alex mulcahy

With Friends Like The City

H

ow much do you love your park?

Maybe enough to organize or participate in a cleanup, raise or donate money to make an improvement, or lead an educational walk.

Or maybe you don’t have the time or money to donate, but simply find your local park to be a refuge — and appreciate the work other people are doing to keep it that way.

But no matter how deep your affection goes for your favorite park, it’s unlikely you’d want to get sued for it.

That, unfortunately, is the fork in the road that the people behind the Friends of Pennypack Park confronted in 2020. In early 2021, Bernard Brown reported on how their organization — which conducted park cleanups and educational walks — was forced to disband because, despite having no connection to two tragic deaths that occurred at Pennypack, the group was named in lawsuits.

Kyle Bagenstose returns to that topic this month, but only to say that nothing has been done yet to protect groups like this.

And they are afraid.

There have been efforts at the state level to create legislation that would protect Friends groups. Despite broad support, the legislation was never called up for a vote. It could eventually pass, but there is no timeline and no guarantee.

Which makes it hard not to look at the City’s role in all of this.

For decades, our parks have been underfunded. That means much of the responsibility for maintaining them has shifted

to citizens. As Temple sociologist Kevin Loughran has written, that can create an inequity: Neighborhoods with wealth and social capital are better positioned to organize Friends groups, raise money and preserve their outdoor spaces, while communities that have historically received less investment in their parks don’t have the same access to those private resources.

In an interview with Grid in June of 2022, Loughran asked a simple question: “Why can’t we just give more money to the Parks department and have them make the park as nice as we want it to be?”

But that’s not the path the City has chosen. By failing to provide adequate funding, it has effectively outsourced the work to these citizen-run organizations.

And that’s what makes this situation particularly galling. When the very organizations that are picking up the slack are threatened with lawsuits, the City isn’t protecting them.

Why can’t the City provide these vulnerable organizations with insurance?

As Parks Commissioner Susan Slawson says in this issue, “They are an essential partner to what we do in all our parks. They should absolutely be protected.”

So Philadelphia, let’s protect them.

a l e x m u l ca h y , Publisher

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cycling

Curb Appeal New bike lane barriers on 13th Street are an upgrade from flimsy flex posts by rusty gorelick Modular curbs were installed along three blocks of the 13th Street bike lane this spring.

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ince may, the 13th Street bike lane has sported some new protective infrastructure: a series of plastic modular curbs. Between Locust and Chestnut streets, 18 of these curbs have been installed along the bike lane, stationed between existing flex posts, which have lined many of the city’s bike lanes for years.

The new protectors were inspired by a trip to Mexico City. When Prema Katari Gupta, president and CEO of Center City District (CCD), vacationed in Mexico’s capital, she noticed bike lanes protected by small, sturdy plastic modular curbs.

“Seeing this really simple curb product they installed, it seemed like something that Philadelphia could do and scale quickly and maybe save some lives,” Gupta says.

CCD bought and donated the curbs to the City, and after working with the Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems 4 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

and the Department of Streets, they began a pilot phase ahead of potential wider use throughout the city. With just anchor bolts required to secure them to the pavement, the curbs are easy to install, says Andrew

Seeing this really simple curb product they installed, it seemed like something that Philadelphia could do and scale quickly and maybe save some lives.” prema katari gup ta president and CEO, Center City District

Jacobs, the vice president of planning and public realm at CCD. The choice of 13th Street from Locust to Chestnut was “intentional,” according to Clint Randall, CCD’s vice president of economic development. It is fully within the City’s jurisdiction, which means fewer stakeholders are involved, making the installation process faster, and it provides a microcosm of the difficulties of cycling in the city.

“It exemplifies everything that’s challenging about sharing the road in Philadelphia,” Randall says. “Incredibly narrow streets, not much real estate to work with, and this stretch of 13th Street in particular not only experiences roadway congestion, but also sidewalk congestion. It’s a very busy part of town with lots of competing interests.”

Local cycling and bike lane experts see the installation of the curbs as a step in the right direction.

“They are certainly the type of high-quality, protective infrastructure that Bike Action wants to see on bike lanes,” says Jacob Russell, a District 1 organizer with Philly Bike Action!. “They certainly improve safety in the couple of blocks where they exist on 13th Street. Any substantial buffer is what we want to see.”

While flex posts provide only a visual barrier between a bike lane and the rest of the street, the curbs are more likely to disrupt a car’s path and slow a vehicle, Russell says. They can help physically keep cars out of bike lanes, adds Lana Harshaw, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition — a goal the 2024 Get Out the Bike Lane Bill also aimed to achieve through the deterrent of increased fines for violators.

Both Russell and Harshaw said that while the modular curbs are an upgrade over flex posts alone, they would prefer lanes separated from traffic by concrete barriers. Harshaw sees the new curbs as a short-term solution and a “stepping stone” toward installing more protected bike lane infrastructure across the city.

A modular curb does “more to disrupt a car than a flex post, but it is not as good as a concrete barrier,” Harshaw said. “The buffer between car and bike lanes is very narrow. I think it’s a minor upgrade compared to just the flex posts, but we would prefer to see concrete over a lane separator or flex post.” ◆ P HOTO BY J ULI A LOWE

sponsored content

SOLAR IS MORE AFFORDABLE THAN YOU THINK Despite a shifting political landscape, new financing options are making solar more affordable than ever by micah gold-markel

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here is a surprising truth about the affordability of solar panels that few people understand: despite all the headlines, solar has never been more affordable.

It’s easy to see why people might think otherwise. If you’ve been following the news about cuts to solar incentives — and to just about anything perceived as “green” — you might reasonably assume that the marketplace has turned against solar. You might also think it’s best to wait a few years on your solar plans and see what the next administration brings.

But from where I sit, the reality is almost exactly the opposite.

Despite the political climate, there has never been a better time to go solar.

In 2025 the rules around solar incentives changed, and the industry did what it always does — it adapted, fast. The momentum moved toward third-party ownership: models where a company owns the panels on your roof and you either buy the clean power they make or lease the system on your way to owning it. These aren’t a fallback.

They’ve produced two of the strongest offers we’ve ever been able to put in front of a homeowner.

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The pre-paid lease — discounted ownership. You go solar at a significant discount to the cash price — we’re currently seeing systems discounted up to 34% off — and the system becomes yours: after five years, you own it outright. It’s full ownership, made more affordable by the incentives in place today.

Why do these often beat what people got a couple of years ago?

Utility rates have climbed, so the gap you’re saving against is wider.

A 0% lease outperforms the escalating leases many signed years back — those payments keep creeping up; ours holds flat. And discounted ownership gets you to the finish line — owning your system — for less than it used to cost.

Solar States’ app provides key metrics to track your energy production.

Could a new administration or new policies bring back something different down the road? Sure, maybe. But you don’t have to bet on a maybe — because right now, this environment is producing some of the best offers we’ve ever seen. The strongest deal isn’t somewhere out ahead of you. It’s here.

That’s the whole story, and it’s a good one: the technology keeps improving, adoption keeps climbing, and the offers on the table right now are excellent. Solar isn’t retreating — it’s still on its way up, and it’s a great time to get on board. ◆ Curious what it looks like for your home? Get a straight quote at solar-states.com/start.

Micah Gold-Markel is the founder of Solar States, a Philadelphia-based solar and storage installer.

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urban naturalist

The Oobinators Tyler Arboretum uses parasitoid wasps to kill invasive beetles threatening ash trees by bernard brown

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ill ryan faces a half-dead (yet half-alive) ash tree deep in the woods of Tyler Arboretum and ties a plastic pill bottle around its trunk. Inside is a folded white paper dotted with tiny black specks that look like poppy seeds. He ties the bottle to the tree and takes off the cap. Those tiny specks are emerald ash borer (EAB) eggs containing parasitoid wasp pupae.

The invasive bright green beetles have devastated the region’s ash trees. Scientists have pinned their hopes on what they’ve dubbed “Oobinators,” pill bottles containing miniscule, stingless wasps (Oobius agrili). Once the wasps emerge from the Oobinators and find their beetle hosts, they could kill enough of them to save this ash tree and the next generation sprouting from seeds left behind.

“They have to be placed near where emerald ash borers likely will be, which means they’re no good after all the trees are dead,” says Ryan, the arboretum’s director of horticulture and land stewardship. The arboretum has cut down about 1,600 dead and dying ash trees in Tyler’s 550 acres of natural areas. Ryan’s team flagged about 25 of the dying trees to serve as release sites for the tiny, stingless wasps.

The half-alive ash tree that will host the parasitoid wasps stands in sight of taller deceased relatives, whose trunks and thick branches still stand, waiting for enough of their roots to rot away and a strong gust of wind to knock them over. Others have already fallen. Now they are long logs that make it difficult to walk off trail, and that prospect has been made more challenging by the dense, thorny Japanese barberry thickets that have taken advantage of the 6 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

sunlight streaming through the new gap in the canopy.

Emerald ash borer was first detected in North America in 2002 in southeastern Michigan and has since spread to 38 states and the District of Columbia, according to the USDA. In the process, the beetle has killed virtually all the ash trees in its wake. Emerald ash borers start off as larvae (grubs) eating the inner bark of ash trees. Over the course of a few years, as thousands of the larvae eat away at the tree, it weakens and dies.

Soon after the EAB appeared, the USDA began searching for their enemies in East Asia, where the catastrophic beetles are native. The goal was to find some that could serve as biocontrol for the emerald ash borers. Though the search continues, says Ron Weeks, an entomologist with the USDA, four species of parasitoid wasps have been cleared for release as biocontrol agents.

Parasitoids are midway between parasites and predators. Usually wasps or flies, they live on or inside their hosts and kill them in the process. About a fifth of all insect species could be parasitoids. Of the four EAB parasitoids released in the States, three develop on or inside the EAB larvae, one inside the eggs. Since emerald ash borers are only a half inch, the wasps that develop inside their larvae and eggs are downright miniscule.

It isn’t easy to vet and raise the wasps. Potential biocontrol agents have to be evaluated at secure laboratories to avoid accidentally releasing a species before they confirm that it won’t cause problems of its own, Weeks says.

Researchers had to make sure that the parasitoids successfully kill EABs without wiping out related native beetles. “The process to get

Will Ryan treats an ash tree with an Oobinator: a pill bottle with emerald ash borer eggs containing parasitoid wasp pupae.

the release permit can take anywhere from five to 10 years,” Weeks says.

The tiny wasps can only develop inside EAB larvae and eggs, and the beetles only reproduce once per year. Since the beetle larvae only eat the inner bark of ash trees and the adults eat ash leaves, the labs need a steady supply of both.

The USDA has ramped up releases, meaning they continue to need to source EAB and their food to sustain the indoor colonies of parasitoids. But in the meantime, the emerald ash borers have killed nearly all the trees near the labs. “It is getting more difficult,” Weeks says. “They’re having to go farther to get the ash logs.” They also have to source ash leaves from California and Puerto Rico to help maintain the colonies through the winter.

P HOTO BY TRACIE VAN AUKEN

Tyler, one of three sites chosen in Pennsylvania, released its first round of EAB parasitoids in 2025. The releases, which employ multiple species of the biocontrol wasps, have continued this year. In addition to the wasps shipped in pill bottles, some arrive as adults in plastic cups, and others in small sections of ash wood (“bolts”), which Ryan also ties to ash trees.

“The goal is to get enough parasitoids out there that they can reproduce and be self-sustaining,” Weeks says. The tiny wasps have begun spreading out from earlier release sites, an indication that the strategy is working. Weeks stresses that this kind of biocontrol is one of multiple tools to recover the trees, along with treatments for particularly valuable individual trees and propagation of ashes that are naturally

The goal is to get enough parasitoids out there that they can reproduce and be self-sustaining.” ron weeks, entomologist, USDA

resistant to the beetles.

Success won’t happen overnight. “What it looks like if it works is a slow recovery of ash species as components of our forest,” Ryan says.

And if the threat to ash trees wasn’t enough, Tyler’s beech trees are now suffering from beech leaf disease. Parasitic nematodes (microscopic worms) cause the leaves to shrivel and die. It typically kills beeches within 10 years. Ryan says the arboretum is experimenting with two approaches to

helping 250 of the afflicted trees: a treatment to kill the nematodes as well as nutrient supplements. But so far, there is no solution for the disease at the scale of the forest.

The parasitoid wasp releases and the beech tree experiments are part of a broader strategy to maintain Tyler’s forest canopy long-term, as important components fade and (hopefully) return. “This is just one piece of a tree conservation program at Tyler, where we look at how to support all of the native canopy species.” ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HILLY.COM 7

immigration

Summer of ICE Asian Americans United discusses next steps for Philly’s immigrant activist groups by elijah fischer

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n may 4, following the unanimous passing of the “ICE Out” legislative package by Philadelphia City Council, a series of letters were sent by the federal government to City officials demanding they turn over years worth of materials concerning “far-left” immigrant activist groups. Among the groups singled out was Asian Americans United (AAU), a community outreach group supporting people of Asian ancestry in the Philadelphia area with leadership development and immigrant justice action. Vivian Chang, AAU’s executive director, spoke with Grid about the aftermath of the “ICE Out” ruling and the coalition of more than 60 organizations that it recently joined, urging Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration to implement the legislation. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How has Asian Americans United’s summer been? Busy and crazy, because there’s been so much increased detention and secret arrests. Recently, ICE started taking people from Philadelphia International Airport, so we’ve been fielding a lot of those calls, trying to help people find their loved ones. It’s really impacting the community.

Tell us more about those secret arrests.

The majority of ICE detainment cases we’ve seen in Philadelphia are people who are following what’s legally required of them as they are pursuing asylum, attending mandatory check-ins. What ICE has been doing for months and months now is taking people from those checkins. People are just walking into ICE headquarters and not walking out.

Vivian Chang has served as executive director of Asian Americans United since 2023.

How has Asian Americans United been assisting? We have a volunteer corps that’s at the headquarters every day, informing people as they go in. They offer resources, food and water. We’ve also been working with the Philadelphia Defenders Association, who’ve been helping us file habeas corpus petitions.

What did it feel like to see those letters from the House Judiciary Committee? It’s an intimidation tactic, one that this administration uses often. They want to get people to see our name in the news and assume we’re “anti-American” but that is not the case.

Luckily, we have some great allies. It was obviously concerning for AAU, but we have good support systems within the community. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund has been supporting us a lot, but there’s also a lot of support within the coalition of Philly’s immigrant activist groups, like Juntos.

Can you tell us about the coalition of over 60 immigrant activist groups Asian Americans United recently joined to demand Mayor Parker enforce the ICE Out bills? We are putting public pressure on the mayor because she hasn’t enforced the legislation properly yet. There’s huge gaps in training and understanding. The legislation requires training all City employees and that hasn’t happened yet, so if the people who are literally responsible for protecting City spaces aren’t trained in the legislation, then there’s no way to enforce it.

What are the next steps for AAU in the ICE Out fight? Just making sure it’s enforced, and keeping up the pressure to maintain that. We need the awareness that ICE is a threat and is already a presence in Philly.

We also want Philadelphians to have awareness of their resources. A lot of the next steps are just about ensuring access, because a lot of people end up in really bad situations due to ICE and don’t know that there’s help out there. ◆ 8 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

COURTESY OF VIVIAN CHANG

What are the first steps the coalition is looking for from the Parker Administration? Educating the community and making folks aware of the rights the package gives them via signs in City-owned buildings.

sponsored content

Meet the Faces of PA Cyber Success looks different for every student

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here is no one single type of PA Cyber student, and they all have their own personal reasons for choosing to go beyond the standard schooling option. Some start with PA Cyber in kindergarten, and for others, high school is the right time to make the switch. For all grades, the school empowers students to shape their education around their ambitions — proving there is no single path to success.

Future Olympian and Meteorologist Middle school student elijah maeding What led you to enroll at PA Cyber? My family needed to be safe through COVID for my brother’s health. Some of my older siblings had already gone to PA Cyber. Then, when I started gymnastics, PA Cyber let me be more flexible so I could go to practice and meets and still get all my schoolwork done.

What is your favorite school subject? Coding and 3D Design. I liked learning how to use Tinkercad and seeing my printed 3D projects.

My favorite thing to learn about is tornadoes.

What are your interests outside of school?

Gymnastics. I go to practice six days a week.

I have National Team camps every two to three months at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

What are your goals after graduation? I would like to be an Olympic medalist. I would also

like to compete at a D1 college in men’s gymnastics. I want to be a research meteorologist and a severe weather forecaster.

Future Veterinarian and Dairy Goat Judge High school student emily miner What led you to enroll at PA Cyber? I had been wanting to enroll in cyber school for some time before I actually did. My parents enrolled my sister and me at PA Cyber during COVID. What is your favorite school subject? I absolutely adore science/biology! One of my all-time favorite classes has been Bioinformatics.

What are your interests outside of school? I enjoy showing my goats and learning about them.

How did you benefit from being able to choose your school? I’ve been able to work with a more flexible daily schedule and accelerate my learning.

What are your goals after graduation? I plan on obtaining my Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine. I would also like to get more involved with the American Dairy Goat Association as a licensed judge, eventually as an appraiser, and continue progressing my own herd of performance dairy goats.

Future Physicist and Advocate High school student mylo moel What led you to enroll at PA Cyber? I enrolled at PA Cyber in 2nd grade because the traditional public school system just didn’t fit my needs. PA Cyber’s flexibility allowed me to thrive in a learning environment that supported how I learned, rather than holding me back.

What is your favorite class? My favorite classes are Physics and AP United States History!

What are your interests outside of school? I love reading, traveling, and all things history.

How did you benefit from being able to choose your school? PA Cyber has been incredible for me because, despite my academic rigor, my schedule is so flexible. I’m a student pilot working toward my private pilot’s license, I train in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I belong to several councils. I wouldn’t be able to dedicate the proper time to any of that without PA Cyber’s flexibility.

What are your goals after graduation? I want to study physics in college. I would also like to continue flying and being an advocate.

Learn more about our school and students at pacyber.org.

MAEDING

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culture

Dan Daly’s “Arborlogues” is performed for a tree, within a red curtain that surrounds its trunk.

Performing for One “Arborlogues” comes to Philadelphia’s FDR Park by sophie aanerud

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hroughout july 18 and 19, visitors arrived at South Philadelphia’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park with a unique task — to perform for a tree.

The production, “Arborlogues,” is a touring piece developed by Other Forms Of (OFO) Theater, a company led by set designer Dan Daly that emphasizes theatrical experimentation through unorthodox sets.

Billed as a “botanical recital,” “Arborlogues” was born during the COVID-19 lockdown, when companies like OFO were forced to reimagine the definitions of theater under quarantine.

“I came with this idea of a play you perform for yourself ... and it developed into the idea of performing for a tree, using the tree as a mirror for the self,” Daly says.

The result is a 15-minute monologue performed from the confines of a thick velvet 10 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

curtain that encircles a tree’s trunk. Within the intimate space, theatergoers address their arboreal audience through a personalized script composed by playwright Lee LeBreton.

Each time a performance is booked for a new tree, the script is rewritten. “When we find out what tree it is, the first thing we do is research, research, research,” Daly says.

“We research the type of tree, the specific tree, the land the tree is on ... I like to say, ‘What is it the tree needs?’”

“Arborlogues” has been performed in Brooklyn and New England and even toured in New Zealand. For the FDR Park production, Daly says, selecting the right tree was easy.

Anisa George, a volunteer with Save The Meadows, reached out to Daly in 2025, suggesting an “Arborlogues” production in FDR Park’s South Meadows, a shuttered

golf course that rewilded during COVID-19.

The Meadows has been the site of an ongoing legal battle between the City, which aims to execute a renovation plan that would excavate much of the land and transform it into a complex of wetlands and synthetic turf athletic fields, and Save The Meadows, which advocates for maintaining the “almost 100 acres of tree canopy and wildlife habitat,” according to the organization’s website.

“Anisa was like, ‘I know the exact tree you need to do this for, because it’s a big, magnificent tree,’” Daly recalls.

The tree at the center of the FDR Park production was a stately silver maple, one of the heritage trees surrounding the Meadows. Despite its status, the tree, along with hundreds of its neighbors, is slated to be cut down as part of the renovation.

“There’s a question mark around this land and what’s going to happen with it, so that’s where this specific script started to blossom from,” Daly says.

Produced in tandem with Save The Meadows, the performance drew many theatergoers already familiar with their audience’s uncertain future. “Many people that came to see the show already have a relationship to the meadows and already have ideas about what it is and what it should be,” Daly says. “There were actually a couple people that were even feeling emotional before they went into the piece, which was kind of new for us.”

When addressing the audience, the performer references the maple’s ambiguous future, acknowledging that its wood, which today provides shelter for wildlife and shade for passing humans, may someday become lumber.

Whatever its future holds, Daly hopes that the maple’s time as the subject of “Arborlogues” has added to its existence. “One of the beautiful things I think about this piece is that it draws you individually to a specific tree to give you that connection,” Daly says. “This tree now has memories with all these people and these people all have memories with this tree, so hopefully we’ll be able to hold on to a little bit of it.” ◆ P HOTO BY TRACIE VAN AUKEN

New To You Botany exhibit reimagines Lewis and Clark plant discoveries through Indigenous lens story and photo by tasso hartzog

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wo hundred and fifty years ago, as a new nation was being born in Philadelphia, botanist William Bartram was on the Altamaha River in Georgia — the edge of the infant United States — nearing the end of a threeyear plant-collecting expedition.

In addition to Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, he had traversed the “powerful empire or confederacy” of the Muscogee.

He spent time in the Cherokee Nation and found its people, not unlike the authors of the Declaration, committed to “the liberties and natural rights of men.” He learned about local flora and fauna from the Choctaw and Seminole.

Though he hadn’t gone farther than the Mississippi River, Bartram had traveled internationally. When he returned to Philadelphia with a wealth of scientific knowledge, much of it gleaned from Indigenous sources, he also carried a conviction that his new nation had to do more to protect the “well being of our Indian brethren.”

In “Botany of Nations,” an exhibit at the Academy of Natural Sciences that brings Indigenous perspectives to the storied Lewis and Clark Expedition, Bartram is a minor character: A copy of a botanical textbook from Meriwether Lewis’s traveling library sits open to Bartram’s illustration of a tobacco plant. But Bartram’s story — that of the botanist and explorer whose journey was made possible by collaboration with Indigenous peoples — resonates with the version of the Lewis and Clark tale that “Botany of Nations” aims to tell.

Almost three decades after Bartram’s travels, Lewis and Clark crossed 49 sovereign nations on their way to the Pacific as part of Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery. Though some versions of their story cast the expedition as an American odyssey, a heroes’ journey through rugged, forbidding terrain, “Botany of Nations” grounds its narrative in more ordinary historical and scientific realities: plant collecting, map-

making and diplomacy with Native nations.

“The exhibit tries to counter this idea of terra incognita,” says curator Marina McDougall. “They were entering into this place of trade and commerce and enduring presence.”

What was new to Lewis and Clark, after all, was not new to the people who had been on the land for thousands of years. “What were understood as discoveries for Western science really have much deeper roots in Indigenous society,” McDougall says.

At the center of the exhibit are seven plants from the Lewis and Clark Herbarium — the collection of dried botanical specimens, housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences, that Lewis gathered during the expedition.

The exhibit’s curators and consulting ethnobotanists chose this group of culturally significant plants — among them bitterroot, chokecherry and tobacco — and then, alongside tribal members, re-collected specimens as close as possible to where Lewis and Clark had found them. These new specimens, complete with ethnobotanical

information gathered from extensive interviews, will be stored alongside the originals.

When a plant is flattened in an herbarium cabinet, “you’re missing the context,” says Enrique Salmón, an ethnobotanist and the exhibit’s co-curator. “And that’s where the living knowledge is very important. It gets updated over time.”

“The exhibit is about a meeting of different ways of interpreting and knowing these plants,” Salmón says. Linnaean taxonomy has its virtues, as does ethnobotanical study. The challenge, according to Salmón, is “how to get the two approaches to complement each other.”

In this semiquincentennial year, “Botany of Nations” reminds visitors that the United States is a newcomer on the continent; understanding and protecting our environment will require collaboration with the hundreds of other nations that lie between sea and shining sea. “We wanted to make an exhibition that would include many voices,” McDougall says, “and bring people into an understanding of the ongoing presence of Indigenous people on the land.” ◆

Chokeberry is one of seven plants from the Lewis and Clark Herbarium on display in “Botany of Nations.”

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philly cooks

Bound Together Tiny shop celebrates the finer things in life: food, community and print by marilyn anthony

Catie Gainor opened Binding Agents Cook/Book Shop at 908 Christian St. in 2024.

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n retrospect, it’s possible to reconstruct a recipe that enabled Catie Gainor to create her South Philly cookbook store, Binding Agents. Start with a family connection to the food business and a mother who loved cooking for friends and family. Add a high school summer spent working at a bookstore, early exposure to classic TV cooking shows hosted by Julia Child and Lidia Bastianich and nostalgia for the camaraderie of restaurant work. Fold in a desire to honor her mother’s legacy, a growing realization that Gainor wanted more from her career in public relations and a 2018 move to the Italian Market neighborhood. An idea that formed in 2022 became, by the fall of 2024, Binding Agents: a welcoming shop Gainor describes as “the size of a sardine can.”

With millions of recipes and cooking videos available online, opening a brick-andmortar store selling cookbooks and fiction and nonfiction books about food and eating might seem foolhardy. But Gainor found reassurance in the fact that similar stores were thriving in cities across the U.S. She sees Philly as a great food city where interest in cooking and eating runs strong. Since the Cook Book Stall in the Reading Terminal Market closed in 2017, she says the city has lacked a hub for food authors, cooks and eaters to gather.

Gainor believes cookbook sales remain a robust part of the publishing industry because cookbooks offer richer, more reliable information and a more satisfying experience than sifting through a barrage of unvetted online recipes or trying to replicate a TikTok demo. “When you come to Binding Agents, you’re finding a curated selection of books that can offer you something you’ll find useful in your kitchen, [books that] have something to say and a recipe you can follow … They feel substantial. They feel heirloom,” she says.

Gainor sees a strong trend toward rediscovering the pleasures of cooking, eating and entertaining communally, as well as a growing interest in authentic, culturally and regionally specific cuisines that are less represented in mainstream publishing. She especially enjoys offering “voicey” books with strong points of view — “that’s my catnip,” P HOTOS BY TAY LOR EC KER

In addition to cookbooks, Binding Agents also sells culinary memoirs, fiction, history and children’s books.

CATIE GAINOR’S RECIPE FOR A GREAT POTLUCK The magic of a potluck is that everyone is invested in the party, but the organizer is responsible for setting some rules of engagement!

I hope that people feel they are gathered around the island in the kitchen with me … That there are people here they know and people they’d like to know.”

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catie gainor

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she confides. As a mother of a young child, Gainor takes special delight in stocking children’s books about food. To spotlight her wares, she hosts frequent events including author book signings, wine pairing workshops, cooking demos and reservation-only potluck dinners. “It’s very important to me that this is a place in the physical world …

I hope that people feel they are gathered around the island in the kitchen with me …

That there are people here they know and people they’d like to know,” she says.

After growing up in Monmouth County,

Decide on the venue first. Is there a surface (or combination of surfaces) large enough to hold all the dishes, room to navigate the buffet and space for eating? Ding, ding, ding! In my home, we often set up the food on our dining table and have everyone eat in the living room — including some folks on the floor.

Offer a theme. At Binding Agents Cookbook Club, we use a single cookbook as the source for all the recipes, but you could pick a star ingredient, a cuisine or culture, a holiday, or simply name the entrée and ask everyone to bring accompanying dishes. You’d be surprised by how much a gentle boundary empowers people. (This is why Friendsgivings work so well.)

Collect a few details in advance. I like a crowdsourced spreadsheet to corral all planned contributions, as well as any allergies or dietary restrictions. This helps avoid a table laden with desserts and no entrées, or a meat circus when there’s a vegetarian in the house.

Be clear about what the house provides. Will you take care of drinks, or should guests BYO? Do you have enough serving utensils, or should those come with each dish? Can you offer oven, stove, microwave or fridge space, or should everything be ready to serve? Let ‘em know so they can plan accordingly!

Worry less about setting the scene and more about opening the door. Break out your mismatched plates, borrow a few forks, pile your shoes in a corner farther from the door, ask the room for a playlist idea and welcome people. Your enthusiasm curates the vibe better than any tablescape could.

New Jersey, and attending college in St. Louis, Missouri, Gainor considers herself a transplant to Philadelphia, honored to be accepted into its rich culinary culture. Locating her store in the Italian Market felt like the right fit. She views the 9th Street area as a “passionate community that want[s] to preserve the independent family food businesses

… and that’s an amazing thing. I hope they thrive for all of us who have to eat.”

In cooking, a binding agent is an ingredient such as eggs, flour or gelatin that holds other food elements together. Gainor hopes her store will be a social binding agent, realizing her ambition to create “a place that people can come and find community.” ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 13

immigration

Close To Home Northwest neighbors’ grassroots grit saves chef from deportation by constance garcia-barrio

Anou (left) and Anh (right) Vongbandith have decorated a wall in Das Good Café with encouraging postcards sent by their Northwest neighbors.

14 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 26

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nou vongbandith, 51, the chef at Germantown’s Das Good Café, was driving to work on the sweltering morning of July 26, 2025, when masked men from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) boxed in his car, then abducted him. They soon sent Vongbandith to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, a facility equipped with the barbed wire and other features of the federal prison it once was.

Detainees have sickened and died at Moshannon, and the clock was ticking for Vongbandith. Due to a bout with COVID-19, “[his] heart pumps only 27 percent of the normal volume of blood, and he didn’t have his medications,” says Anh Vongbandith, his wife of 25 years and owner of Das Good.

“Also, ICE aims to deport people within 30 days of detaining them.” There was talk of returning Anou to Laos, his birthplace, though he has lived in the U.S. since the age of 5.

Anou’s arrest incensed many Northwest Philly residents. The Vongbandiths have become beloved members of that community, first through Tipsy Café and Catering, a takeout spot at 5227 Germantown Ave., then with Das Good, a spacious café on the West Chelten Avenue corridor that offers breakfast and brunch classics, often with an Asian twist.

“Anh never says no,” says Michael Lazrus, a longtime Germantown peace activist. “She provides food and a meeting place, even after ICE detained Anou,” he says, adding that the Vongbandiths give their food overages to nearby pantries. The family also serves up hundreds of free Thanksgiving dinners each year, Lazrus says.

Anh’s community involvement extends even further. “I can’t see animals put to sleep,” she says. “Right now we’re fostering four kittens and one puppy at home.”

People took Anou’s arrest personally, Anh believes. “It was as if they said, ‘No way are you going to keep our chef!’”

Northwest neighbors joined Anh in racing against Anou’s looming deportation.

Reclaim Philadelphia, Indivisible Philadelphia, the Northwest Immigration Network (NWIN) and other groups spread news of Anou’s arrest. “I learned about Anou’s detention within a day or two,” says Mt. Airy attorney Judi Bernstein-Baker, founder of NWIN. Bernstein-Baker, retired executive director of HIAS-PA, is known in Philly’s immigrant advocacy circles for her staggerP HOTO BY TAY LOR EC KER

ing pro bono caseload. She alerted NWIN members to Anou’s imprisonment through her weekly digital newsletter.

Reclaim Philadelphia, which campaigns for economic, racial and gender justice, soon got involved. Executive director Seth Anderson-Oberman and Jason Massey, leader of Reclaim’s Northwest chapter, met with Anh, who told them that bringing attention to Anou’s abduction would be a big help.

After strategizing with Anh, NWIN, Reclaim and other groups planned a rally for Aug. 9, 2025 to draw attention to Anou’s plight and push for his release.

For Anou, it couldn’t come too soon. “The food [at Moshannon] was slop,” he says.

“We were packed in like sardines. It was like a concentration camp,” says Anou, who got one of his medications after a month. It took two months for him to receive the second, more expensive one.

Even with Northwest neighbors behind them, the Vongbandiths faced tough odds.

Legal complications began for the family when they lived in Florida about 20 years ago. Their older daughter, then 15, was in a relationship with a 21-year-old man, Anh says. When Anou threatened to press charges against him, the 21-year-old’s family made allegations of sexual abuse against Anou and Anh, Anh says. “My husband took a plea for something he didn’t do because his lawyer said that there was no chance that a jury in Lake County, which is largely white, would find him not guilty,” Anh adds. “Anou has to report to ICE twice a year, which he’s been doing. That case cost us our home and our business. We came to Philadelphia in 2014 for a new start.”

ICE arrested Anou because, although he was checking in every six months as his Florida sentence required, the agency was pursuing immigrants with criminal records.

At first, no lawyer would touch Anou’s deportation appeal. “The first four firms I spoke with said they couldn’t help,” Anh says. “The fifth one agreed to represent him.” It cost between $300 and $800 just for a consultation, according to Jade, Anh’s and Anou’s younger daughter.

Meanwhile, plans for the demonstration kicked into high gear. Word of the rally spread through NWIN’s newsletter and hyperlocal newsroom Germantown Info Hub, as well as churches, synagogues and other groups. Neighbors helped.

“As I am partially disabled, I did a lot [of

organizing] via social media, email, texting and phoning,” says Reclaim Philadelphia member Ann Doley, who also made graphics and posters. Lazrus, a trainer in nonviolent de-escalation, assisted with safety plans for the gathering. Businesses from bakeries to barbershops put flyers in their windows saying “Bring Anou home.” Charles and Kathy Sutton, owners of G Town Tees, donated 100 T-shirts with an image of Anou’s face.

“Anh’s determination [to bring Anou home] was one of the most amazing acts of love I’ve ever seen,” Charles Sutton says.

“She was like a pitbull: ‘You are not going to take my husband!’”

The rally’s turnout shocked Anh. “I thought we might get 50 people, but between 500 and 700 came,” she says. “Senator Art Haywood spoke. So did [state Rep.] Chris Rabb, although we’re not even in his district.”

Anh’s determination [to bring Anou home] was one of the most amazing acts of love I’ve ever seen. She was like a pitbull: ‘You are not going to take my husband!” charle s sutton, owner, G Town Tees

The rally garnered the desired media attention, but the family still faced crushing financial pressure. “When a breadwinner is put in detention, it can leave the family at risk for becoming homeless,” Bernstein-Baker says.

Anh juggled the challenges. She became store manager at Weavers Way Co-op in Mt. Airy this spring and hired two additional staff members at Das Good. Jade moved from Virginia to Philadelphia with her fiancée to work at the café. Anh also got a couple of high-interest loans to keep Das Good going.

Given the thousands of dollars needed to file each legal motion, Jade also launched a GoFundMe account. “We raised $86,000,” she says. “The money went for legal fees.

The account is still open to update donors.”

Besides contributing to the fund, neighbors kept stepping up in other ways. “We called the lawyer to know when community support would make a difference,” Anderson-Oberman says. Two weeks after the rally, that strategy led to organizing a trip to Moshannon Valley to keep Anou in the spotlight, with Reclaim filling a bus with organizers and supporters.

Northwest residents also dropped by Das Good to write postcards to Anou to remind him he wasn’t alone. In May 2026, The Associated Press reported on spiking suicide rates among ICE detainees. Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old Chinese citizen imprisoned at Moshannon Valley, committed suicide on Aug. 5, 2025, less than two weeks after Anou’s arrival.

Doley also succeeded in recruiting neighbors to write hundreds of letters attesting to Anh’s good character to Judge Richard Bailey, assigned to hear Anou’s case. Besides that, Doley recruited 83 neighbors to attend Anou’s bond hearing via Zoom.

Bailey found that Anou did not represent a threat to the community or a flight risk, and he was released Oct. 29.

Upon leaving Moshannon Valley, Anou received a standing ovation from fellow detainees. “He was the first one to return home,” Anh says.

But the story hasn’t ended. Anou’s green card, taken after his conviction in Florida, has been returned to him. However, the Vongbandiths are awaiting a hearing date.

“We are seeing if the judge will drop Anou’s case and end it,” Anh says. “If not, we will continue with me as his sponsor for permanent residency,” says Anh, an American citizen.

Nevertheless, with Anou’s release, the family cleared a tall hurdle. They celebrated by inviting Northwest neighbors to a Friendsgiving feast in November at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, serving more than 700 free meals with turkey and all the trimmings.

“There are people worse off than us,” Anh says. “They’ve been deported. Families have been torn apart. This is not just about Anou, but every family like ours.”

Even while feeling gratitude, Anh and Anou still grapple with anxiety. “If we stop fighting now, we lose everything again, our home, our café,” she says. “The biggest thing about immigration [struggles] is to ask for help. If you fight with help, the impossible is possible.” ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 5

technology

Charlie Bailey hosted two “How to Not Use AI” workshops at the South Philadelphia Library this summer.

Intelligent Choice South Philly Librarian Teaches People “How to Not Use AI” story and photo by kathryn rice

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n a june monday evening, the loudest sound in the South Philadelphia Library was the clicking of computer keyboards. Behind the busy island of computers, another group of people filtered into a classroom filled with green plastic chairs and soft ambient music: a space of quiet resistance.

“I’m tired of AI being shoved down my throat,” one woman said, puncturing the stillness.

She’d come to the right place: a workshop called “How to Not Use AI” led by librarian Charlie Bailey.

The Free Library of Philadelphia hosts hundreds of free workshops each year, many of which focus on digital literacy.

Until now, those workshops have taught 16 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 26

participants how to use programs such as Microsoft Excel and Quickbooks. Bailey’s workshops are the first to teach people how not to use technology. This may sound counterintuitive, but Bailey believes that showing people how to disable artificial intelligence features from common apps and websites aligns with the library’s mission of advancing digital literacy.

“We’re constantly helping people navigate technology,” he says, “I see this as part of that in that it’s helping people reclaim their autonomy over the technology they use and decide if they want to use certain tools.”

Bailey got the idea for his workshop after reading a paper published by a Maine librarian named Hannah Cyrus, who leads workshops teaching people how to disable

AI features. He’d heard library patrons complain about AI features popping up in their Google searches and figured there might be a need for something similar in Philadelphia. After reaching out to Cyrus for guidance, he announced his first “How to Not Use AI” workshop on the library’s website.

All 50 slots filled up immediately. Bailey added another session in July and recruited Alison Macrina, executive director of the Library Freedom Project, to run a threepart series on critical AI literacy with him at the library this fall.

Ray Craig, who attended Bailey’s first workshop, says he signed up because he was concerned about the harm AI inflicts on workers and the environment. “Everything is becoming more expensive because of data centers, because they’re draining the grid,” he says.

Caitlin Shanley, a librarian at Temple University, attended the workshop so that she could support students looking to avoid AI. “A lot of students are very concerned about some of the issues that Charlie mentioned today,” she says. “I want to be able to better support them to opt out wherever they can.”

Bailey also wants library patrons to be aware that AI tools share information from unverified sources. “A lot of problems with AI overviews and search engines and chatbots is that false information can be regurgitated by them in a way that sounds authoritative,” he says.

Bailey began working as a librarian in December 2025, after spending two years as a library trainee while he completed his degree in library science. This was his first workshop on avoiding AI, but many of the other programs he runs at the library, including gardening workshops and a “crafting and listening club” for teens, seem designed for people who’d like to live more of their lives off-screen.

Bailey believes that AI “has the potential to be pretty disastrous for the world,” but he sees hope for the future in the teens enrolled in his after-school program, who he says have been encouraging each other to get off their phones.

“They’re really aware of the fact that a lot of this stuff is designed to make them addicted to it, “ he says. “They have a healthy skepticism of AI that I find really exciting and enheartening.” ◆

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S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 17

parks

Parks Groups in Peril Philly parks depend on volunteer groups. But six years after the Friends of the Pennypack was sued out of existence, the threat remains by kyle bagenstose

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ometimes linde lauff sees a pile of construction waste in Pennypack Park and thinks, that shouldn’t be there.

Not just in a general way in which, ideally, no litter should ever pollute a natural space, much less the enraging detritus left behind by short dumping. For her, the frustration is much more specific. A little over six years ago, Lauff was the president of the Friends of Pennypack Park, a nonprofit that regularly organized cleanups and otherwise cared for the 1,600-acre park that winds through Northeast Philadelphia. But after the families of two park users who suffered accidents sued the organization, the Friends group was left uninsurable in 2020 and dissolved.

Overnight, gone were the monthly cleanups during which volunteers spent nearly 1,000 hours a year hauling 4,000 bags of trash out of the park. Gone was the Tree and Trails committee, which planted over 2,000 trees in the park. And gone was a community of like-minded individuals who cared deeply for their local natural space and formed close bonds in the process.

Those people haven’t actually gone anywhere, Lauff says. She talks to many of them regularly, and some still perform smaller, informal cleanups. But what has disappeared is their sense of agency and ability to effect positive change in a substantial way.

“It’s hard to believe it’s been six years,” Lauff says. “People are still very much concerned about what happens in the park. And 18 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

what will happen to the park in the future.”

Lauff’s sadness is mixed with bitterness.

If there was a silver lining to the dissolution of the nonprofit, it was the possibility that what happened to it might serve as a warning to similar parks nonprofits in Philadelphia, of which there are more than 100, and a call for policymakers to implement protections for such groups.

But despite an effort by then-state Rep. Mike Driscoll to push through legislation to shield parks groups from similar liability after the group dissolved, nothing has changed. Park group leaders in Philadelphia still report regularly fielding inquiries from injured park users and are worried that they could suddenly face legal action.

“We fear getting caught up in frivolous litigation if something happens at Tacony Creek Park, even though we don’t own the land,” says Justin DiBerardinis, executive director of the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership. “God forbid someone has an accident. Someone gets seriously injured.

Someone gets hit by a falling branch, someone drowns in the creek. That could pose an existential threat to this organization and the work that we’re doing to the community.”

This constant threat to parks nonprofits presents a particular problem in Philadelphia, where independent analyses have found that the cash-strapped city funds its robust park system at far lower levels than peer cities on a per-capita basis. That means Philadelphia also relies on philanthropy and volunteer hours from Friends groups to

Linde Lauff, president of the now-dissolved Friends of Pennypack Park, says neighbors still help care for the park informally without the nonprofit group.

P HOTO BY T RAC IE VA N AU KE N

S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 9

parks

keep its parks clean and green far more than just about any other big city in the country.

Tony Sorrentino, chief executive officer of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, which organizes parks nonprofits across the city for various initiatives, says it’s an issue “on the radar screen” for many and can serve as a distraction from their core mission.

“We want [parks groups] to feel like they’ve got capacity to do their work,” Sorrentino said. “When they have to think about liability and about not being protected, it’s hard for them to focus.”

But, some still hold out hope for change.

Tom Forkin, an attorney and former deputy director for properties and partnerships at Parks & Recreation who is now chief of staff for Driscoll — who left the State House in 2022 to become a City Councilmember representing the 6th District — says the councilmember is still working on potential policy solutions. Informed by the failure to get a bill that shielded parks nonprofits from personal injury lawsuits across the finish line in Harrisburg, Forkin says Driscoll’s office is reviewing state statutes to identify an approach that can win political support.

Forkin also said the office is waiting to see if political winds shift favorably in the fall elections, where Democrats are hopeful they might win the State Senate and take full control of state government. Either way, Driscoll and Forkin plan to try again.

“Do the Democrats win control? Do they get a bigger majority in the House? Then from there we can determine who the best champion will be,” Forkin says.

The Friends of Pennypack Park had nothing to do with any of that, Lauff says, save one thing: sharing the name of the park. But that was still enough to be named in a lawsuit brought by the family of the drowned boy. Lauff says the nonprofit’s insurer hired attorneys to start fighting the suit, then decided to settle. Afterward, the Friends’ insurance premium went up.

Then came 2019, when the organization was sued again after a tree branch fell on a young girl visiting the park, causing her to be placed in a coma for several days.

Lauff says the girl later recovered and that the Friends group again had no direct connection to the incident. But it was named as a party anyway, along with the City of Philadelphia, which owns the land, and a maintenance subcontractor.

Again, the nonprofit’s insurance company lawyered up. And again, they settled.

But this time, the company informed the Friends of Pennypack that they would no longer insure them, and the nonprofit received similar rejections when it attempted to find a new provider. That left Lauff and other leaders with an untenable decision: carry on with their work and risk being held personally responsible for future incidents, or shut down.

“Why would someone want to take on that responsibility with a thought that you could be potentially liable?” Lauff says.

And so, in 2020, the Friends of Pennypack Park dissolved.

Parks advocates say it’s a danger many of them still face. DiBerardinis says his group, which cares for Tacony Creek Park, routinely fields legal inquiries of varying seriousness. In one recent case, DiBerardinis says, the nonprofit received notice that it was being sued after a woman tripped and fell in a part of the watershed in Montgomery County, even though his organization only operates within the city.

“I spent a good amount of time begging and pleading and making my case to the plaintiff lawyer that we did not own the land, that we’re an all-volunteer community group that does cleanups, and that we have nothing to do with this,” DiBerardinis said.

In that instance, it worked and the nonprofit was dropped from a suit. But that’s not always the case, and DiBerardinis dreads an existential lawsuit.

“The threat is always there, every year,” DiBerardinis adds.

Nonprofits that serve large, public spaces like the city’s watershed parks face particular challenges, says Sara Stevenson, the

For six years, Pennypack Park has had no formal volunteer group dedicated to caring for its 1,600 acres in Northeast Philadelphia.

I

n the summer of 2013, a 13-yearold boy and his brother visited Penny­ pack Park with a few friends. Local media reports reveal what happened next: Like generations of nearby Philadelphians have done, the boys jumped into the creek at the site of a vestigial dam. But the creek, swollen with stormwater and with currents raging in a hidden pocket beneath the surface, overwhelmed the 13-year-old, who slipped under. His body was later recovered downstream.

In the aftermath, locals wondered what could have prevented the tragedy. Perhaps the City should tear down the dam, where drownings had occurred previously. Or regularly patrol or police the area.

20 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 26

P HOTO BY TRACIE VAN AUKEN

new executive director of the Friends of the Wissahickon. Prior to taking the role last January, Stevenson held the same title at Awbury Arboretum, a private nonprofit in Germantown. Because that organization owned its land, legal liability was “more expected,” but also thus accounted for. That’s a different dynamic than parks groups operating in public spaces, with little control over access or operational decisions.

“What comes with it is the ability to make decisions about the property, [while organizations] like Friends groups can’t make certain decisions about public land,” Stevenson says.

Parks advocates also say the risk is particularly acute for midsize parks groups, like the Friends of Pennypack was, that are just large enough to require an insurance policy and maintain financial assets, but lack the resources of major nonprofits, which often have wealthy donors or even high-powered attorneys who can work pro bono on their boards.

Lauff says that after the second lawsuit, confidants later told her that she should have pushed the insurance company to take the suit all the way to trial. But ultimately, the Friends of Pennypack was simply out of its depth legally and financially, and the insurance company appeared to cut its losses rather than drag things out.

“The costs of what Philadelphia lawyers charge and all the extra fees, it’s not cheap,” says Lauff. “That’s one of the main reasons, maybe the primary reason, that these companies choose to settle.”

Harrisburg, City Hall may hold solutions Forkin, Driscoll’s chief of staff, says they were close to protecting parks groups when the councilmember was still in the State House in 2022. A bill Driscoll introduced to insert protections into a state law called the Recreational Use of Land and Water Act (RULWA) had passed unanimously, 200-0, out of the House. Then it cleared the Senate Community Economic and Recreational Development committee, a major hurdle.

Then, it died, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Driscoll resigned his House seat in May of that year to move to City Council, and his bill went no further.

“We were waiting for a Senate floor vote in the fall of 2022, and that never happened,”

We fear getting caught up in frivolous litigation if something happens at Tacony Creek Park, even though we don’t own the land.” justin diberardinis, executive director, Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership

Forkin says. “Something, somebody, started lobbying the Senate hard.”

Forkin says he doesn’t know who that might have been. But obvious guesses would be lobbyists representing either trial lawyers, the insurance industry or both.

Still, Forkin is a kind of Don Quixote on the issue. When he still worked for Parks & Rec in 2018, before joining Driscoll’s office in mid-2022, then-Commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell tasked him with coordinating with Friends groups on the issue. He then carried that expertise over into Driscoll’s office, where he says he’s continued to search the state code for possible solutions.

After receiving feedback from attorneys that altering RULWA would “open up a huge can of worms,” by extending immunity in unforeseen ways, Forkin and Driscoll began to zero in on other potential state statutes that could be “easier to amend.” That includes a section of code that provides protections to public service volunteers, which could be amended to include nonprofit Friends groups.

“We’ve been kind of going back and forth on what we can get that will satisfy the various lobbying groups,” Forkin says.

Despite Driscoll now being on City Council, Forkin says he believes there is ample statewide support from lawmakers, and that his office already has a shortlist of state representatives who they believe would introduce a new bill.

“This came from Philly, but it wasn’t exclusive,” Forkin says. “We were getting support of statewide parks groups, statewide trails people, other Friends groups.”

Meanwhile, some park advocates wonder if there aren’t other solutions that could be had closer to home. Several noted that the City of Philadelphia self-insures and has an obvious self-interest in keeping the robust

network of nonprofits caring for public parks both solvent and active. Could it take a more active role, perhaps by acting as a backstop insurance provider or providing some form of legal umbrella?

Stevenson, with the Friends of the Wissahickon, says she’s still catching up to the world of Friends groups less than a year into her tenure, but has already had these kinds of conversations with stakeholders.

“It makes sense — some kind of protection for the Friends groups that are doing such a civil service,” Stevenson says.

For its part, current leadership at Parks & Recreation say they highly value the role Friends groups play in caring for Philadelphia’s public spaces.

“They are an essential partner to what we do in all of our parks,” says Parks commissioner Susan Slawson. “They should absolutely be protected. They should be able to support us without having the responsibility — being concerned about [litigation.]”

However, Slawson said she believes Driscoll’s efforts are the right solution to lean into, and that she didn’t see a path toward the city providing any kind of direct financial compensation or legal support to Parks groups.

Lauff, who admits a certain sense of resignation, also doesn’t hold out much hope of a City-based solution. In her experience, that would take a level of interdepartmental coordination that she didn’t witness during her time with the Friends. In the end, she felt the City also could have made its own settlement over the 2019 incident contingent upon the plaintiffs dropping the Friends of Pennypack Park from the suit, if only the city’s Legal and Parks departments coordinated better.

“And my organization winds up being the victim,” Lauff says. ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HILLY.COM 21

the

Building Better Philadelphia is changing all around us.

Fresh off a tourism season celebrating our city’s colonial history, our building boom is racing to meet a housing crisis and is, in turn, reshaping the very fabric of our neighborhoods. ¶ As that transformation pushes forward, developers, designers and community groups are wrestling with what it means to build responsibly in a city defined, in part, by the historic structures increasingly forgotten or replaced with modern, boxy builds. ¶ So what makes a building green? For years, we’ve pointed to energy savings, materials and certifications. But green is also what we choose not to tear down, what we find new uses for and what we refuse to throw away. ¶ In this issue, we look at sustainable building not just as a checklist of features, but as a set of choices about how a structure, new or old, will shape the people and spaces around it for generations to come. How do we meet housing demand without burying neighborhoods in construction waste? Can corporate patches of lawn become productive farms? Are the standards we’ve relied on to define “green” buildings still ambitious enough? And how do we honor Philadelphia’s iconic rowhomes, churches and libraries as the city keeps building? ¶ What we preserve, reuse, build from scratch and decide to demolish — these choices will separate Philadelphia’s architectural past from its future.

22 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

GREEN BUILDING issue

OFFICE SPACE Urban farm installers help Philly-area office parks tap unused green space by emily kovach

S

urrounding nearly every suburban business center and office park are swaths of manicured grass, occasionally interrupted by ornamental landscaping. Unlike green space at schools or residential complexes, it’s rare to see this outdoor space used for recreation or sunbathing. In fact, it isn’t really used for anything.

Up Top Acres, an agricultural startup based in Washington, D.C., is looking to change that. The company designs, installs and maintains raised-bed gardens at corporate centers and on urban high-rise rooftops, planting edible crops for tenants and local food pantries. So far, Up Top Acres has installed gardens in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, New Jersey and now Pennsylvania.

As of April, there are three Philadelphia-area sites: Radnor Financial Center, Radnor Corporate Center and 620 Freedom Business Center in King of Prussia. All are managed by the Philadelphia-based real estate firm Brandywine Realty Trust.

Ron Becker, senior vice president of operations and sustainability for Brandywine Realty Trust, first encountered Up Top Acres a decade ago while working inWashingon, D.C. After joining Brandywine Realty Trust, he saw an opportunity to collaborate with them again. In his opinion, the benefits of activating the properties’ green spaces far outweigh the cost of establishing and maintaining the gardens.

Kaia Hoak manages the produce farm tucked behind 4 Radnor Corporate Center, as well as two other Phillyarea Up Top Acres projects.

P HOTO BY JEF F F USCO

Here, it’s less than 1,500 feet — not the United States average of 1,500 miles — from farm to table.”

RON BECKER, Brandywine Realty Trust

“It is another way, as a committed environmentally sustainable company, to engage with our tenants and bring fresh produce right inside our buildings,” he says. “Here, it’s less than 1,500 feet — not the United States average of 1,500 miles — from farm to table.”

Up Top Acres was founded in 2014 by Kristof Grina, Kathleen O’Keefe and Nick Berini, who wanted to apply their agricultural and soil science backgrounds to urban settings. With scarce access to land in cities, they realized commercial properties held untapped potential.

“There are all these large areas just sitting vacant, and we created a model of integrating small farms and gardens into the buildings themselves, growing food and then distributing it to the people living or working in those buildings,” Grina says.

“Now, our gardens are everyone’s favorite amenity and give buildings a way to differentiate themselves from other properties.”

This summer, the Up Top Acres sites in the Philly ‘burbs grew greens, radishes, tomatoes, herbs and more. Half the harvest — around 2,000 pounds from the three combined sites, Grina estimates — was donated to the Upper Merion Community Cupboard. Every two weeks, harvest tables were set up in the buildings’ lobbies, where workers could take whatever they wanted for free. People from different departments and companies chatted and mingled while perusing the tables — a nice break from their offices and a chance to get to know neighbors in the building.

“There are so many health and wellness benefits to having these vegetables grown on-site,” says Becker. “Not only does it reduce the carbon footprint of the produce, but [it] create[s] access for busy people. Our tenants are lined up at noon to get in on the action.”

Up Top Acres hopes to establish more sites in the region, including in Center City Philadelphia. Maybe by this time next year, a handful of rooftop farms will be quietly growing above the busy city streets. ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 23

CLEAN HOUSE Nonprofits seek to leverage H.O.M.E. initiative to curb illegal dumping by gabriel donahue

W

hile philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker’s ambitious Housing Opportunities Made Easy initiative (H.O.M.E.) sets out to close the city’s affordable housing gap, some area nonprofits have begun working against an unintended consequence they foresee: the illegal act of short dumping demolition waste, often in known dumping hotspots in Black and Brown neighborhoods.

The community “collaboratory” Trash Academy is one such group that has devised a proposal for how to manage the construction and demolition waste produced by the proposed 30,000 homes that Parker has committed to.

Trash Academy proposes that H.O.M.E. contracts require contractors to prove that they have brought demolition waste to a recycling center or repurposing facility in order to receive funding and count as one of the 30,000 builds. The group also wants oversight from the mayor’s office to ensure compliance by developers. “[The proposal]’s not setting anything new up. It’s just saying use the recycling facilities … to ensure that it’s not dumped somewhere random or just everything sent to the incinerator,” says Dallas Herbert Sr., a longtime member of Trash Academy and 215 People’s Alliance.

“This is something the City already wants to do — everything we say is about clean and green. It’s about safety. It’s about what the mayor says she wants.”

Herbert’s initial frustration with short dumping occurred when he encountered a pile of garbage in the middle of the street, causing him to drive his Cadillac up an offroad dirt hill. He became a passionate crusader against illegal dumping citywide after learning the scale of the problem — “They’ll 24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

be on people’s corners. They’ll be in parks.

They’ll be in neighborhoods. They’ll be behind people’s houses,” he says of legacy dump sites. “This is not clean and green like [Parker] wants. So we fighting to make it that way.”

The idea is similar to a voucher program

run by North10, a community development nonprofit based in Hunting Park and East Tioga and a member of a nonprofit coalition that also includes Trash Academy. The program is a partnership between North10 and Burns & Co. Waste Recycling Center in North Philadelphia. Would-be illegal dumpers can dispose of up to $120 worth of materials (one ton) for free. Between its launch last October and this June, 85 vouchers had been distributed, accounting for 215,000 pounds of waste dropped at Burns rather than on the street or elsewhere, according to North10’s Chief of Staff Avarisse Crawford.

Crawford says the organization has found that when some of the load cost is paid by the voucher, dumpers will pay for the remaining balance out of pocket.

“Once people have an incentive, they will actually pay the difference themselves.

Community development nonprofit North10 placed signs promoting their voucher program at known illegal dumping hotspots in Hunting Park.

C O U R T E S Y O F T R A S H AC A D E M Y

the GREEN BUILDING issue

They just have that incentive to get in the door and make that change,” Crawford says.

“We have provided $10,000 in vouchers. …

People spent an additional — out of their own pocket — $4,250. It’s not that people can’t afford to pay.”

The to-date success of the voucher program shows that dumping behavior can change. And Herbert, who is a retired and experienced construction worker, says that there are established channels to divert materials from being left on street corners or sent to burn in the incinerator in nearby Delaware County.

“I know that if somebody goes in to tear down several houses, and if they send a crew in to take down all the Sheetrock and put it in one container, those materials can be recycled,” Herbert says. “That takes a little time — I understand. And it takes a little expense, ‘cause you’re training somebody to do that. But if you do, that material can be recycled and used again instead of only one time.”

“As long as they do that, they’ll have no problem with the City,” he says. “But if they can’t show, it looks like they illegally dumped the material, now we got a problem.”

To move the proposal forward, Herbert says Trash Academy members have been meeting with members of City Council and hope for a supermajority passage of a bill that establishes the recommended guidelines as City rules. Herbert says they have yet to meet with Parker directly, although he says he had a strong relationship with her through 215 People’s Alliance when she was a councilmember.

A presentation prepared by Trash Academy recalls the construction boom associated with then-Mayor John Street’s tax abatement in the early 2000s, which resulted in a parallel surge of illegally dumped construction materials. The City’s 2019 Litter Index Report, which measured the scale of litter and dumping on Philadelphia’s blocks, found that construction debris was present on more than half of heavily littered blocks, the most commonly reported type of litter.

Trash Academy also reports that a year of the city’s construction waste could fill a 40-story cube the size of City Hall.

“Any time that there’s development, there should be … a community benefit that happens with business and with development,” Crawford says. “We don’t want the benefit of the city to come at our detriment.”◆

Open 7 days a week 8:00 am – 7:00 pm cosmicfoods.com

S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 25

WHERE WILL WE GATHER? What we lose when civic spaces are converted into housing by jacques-jean “jj” tiziou

I

sands of vacant lots and houses that can magine if developers quietly acaccommodate new residents. quired and developed a few acres of Community gathering space is different.

Fairmount Park every year, carving After a hall designed to bring hundreds of them off into luxury housing. Philaneighbors together has been divided into delphians would rightly be outraged.

And yet: One building at a time, spacprivate units, we are extraordinarily unlikees that were designed for public assemly to ever recreate it. Even with unlimited bly — churches, cultural centers, former funding, no one is going to convince eight schools — are being converted into private neighboring homeowners to sell their conapartments or condominiums. And because each sale is treated as an isoThe historic church at 5001 lated real estate transaction, it’s easy Baltimore Ave. sold to a New to miss what’s happening to the city Jersey-based developer this spring for $250,000. as a whole.

These places are mostly privately owned, and because we’ve never recognized them as part of the same civic ecosystem, their disappearance barely registers.

During the Nutter administration, when our libraries and recreation centers faced closure after years of deferred maintenance, public outcry pushed the City not to accept their slow decline. It ultimately chose another path through the Rebuild initiative in 2017, investing in the places where neighborhood life happens.

Perhaps what we need now isn’t another Rebuild, but a broader conversation about how we revitalize and steward the places that make community possible — regardless of who currently owns them.

This isn’t an argument for historic prestiguous properties so we can build a new ervation as an end in itself. I’d rather live community center. in a Philadelphia where a few beautiful old When we lose these buildings, we also buildings have been replaced by simple, lose all the things they might have made functional community centers than one possible. where every magnificent stone sanctuary Where will a neighborhood gather after has been preserved as luxury apartments a tragedy? Where will a councilmember with “gated access.” hold a public meeting, or neighbors come together to shape the future of their block?

Nor is this an argument against buildWhere will the next community organizer ing more housing. Philadelphia absolutely host a neighborhood dinner, or an emerging needs more homes. But we also have thou26 GRID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 26

artist stage their first performance? Where will young people find spaces to learn, create and belong? Where can neighbors who have never met gather, regardless of means?

And where will we create the community hubs that every neighborhood needs?

Increasingly, the answer seems to be: nowhere.

Or perhaps, on Zoom.

We spend a great deal of time talking about resilience hubs, emergency preparedness, loneliness, civic participation and rebuilding trust. But resilience is more than backup generators and cooling centers. It relies on local places where neighbors can build relationships, develop trust and learn how to care for one another long before a crisis strikes. Those places must exist within walking distance of where people live.

They cannot be improvised after the fact.

Organizations like Partners for Sacred Places have done important work documenting historic congregations and helping individual buildings survive. But this challenge extends beyond preservation, and beyond any one organization. Philadelphia needs a broader conversation about the future of its indoor civic commons.

There won’t be a single solution.

Every neighborhood has different needs, histories and opportunities.

What we need is a way to see these buildings as part of a system of connected civic infrastructure — and to bring together the people who can imagine new futures for them.

Most of all, we need a shared vision.

Because once these spaces are gone, they’re gone for generations.

Before we lose another place to gather, perhaps we should pause long enough to ask some simple questions: Do we want to let Philadelphia slowly become a place where there’s nowhere left for us to come together? If not, what should we be doing together to change that? ◆

jacques-jean “jj” tiziou is an artist, community organizer and block captain whose work explores the relationship between place, community and civic life. He organizes Walk Around Philadelphia, a participatory exploration of the city’s furthest margins.

J AC Q U E S -J E A N “J J ” T I Z I O U

the GREEN BUILDING issue

The project became a lot bigger than me. Being able to share the bad and the good, I think really helps, almost like catharsis.”

CHRIS HYTHA

Chris Hytha sourced stained glass windows and other vintage fixtures from salvage sellers and his online followers around the city.

FIXER UPPER Local designer emphasizes salvage in renovating his historic rowhome story and photo by julia lowe

T

he front door of Chris Hytha’s 1857 Fishtown-area rowhome opens to face a spotlit shelf cabinet — a “house museum” of artifacts: the house’s old lead water main, a hunk of its original stone foundation and a block of termite-hollowed wood. The artifacts catalogue the house’s history — and the hurdles of Hytha’s now two-year renovation project.

“There were so many surprises when I bought the house. I thought it was all made of brick, and I thought it was built in 1930,” Hytha says. When he started opening up walls, he learned that the house was 70 years older than he had thought, and that about half of its timber frame had been eaten by termites.

Despite being advised to tear the entire home down and start from scratch, Hytha kept as much of it intact as possible. He’s salvaged all kinds of materials over the course of the rehab, from old growth lumber ceiling joists he exposed in his living room,

to a basement door he saved from his neighbor’s trash, to a collection of vintage ornate door locks. They are a testament to Hytha’s effort to save old stuff, not only to build sustainably, but also to give his rowhome its history back.

Hytha, 29, studied architecture at Drexel University and worked at a firm for three years before pivoting to photography. In 2020, Hytha published “Rowhomes,” a book of composite photographs of over a hundred of Philadelphia’s derelict rowhomes. The project made him “fall in love” with the rowhome as the city’s architectural staple, and purchasing one as his first home in 2024 was a full-circle moment.

But when he realized the extent of its needed repairs, he began documenting the renovation in weekly updates on YouTube.

“I think most people just wanted to watch a dumpster fire.” His first episode garnered over half a million views, giving the house’s transformation a sudden audience. Followers helped research the home’s actual age

and offered salvage pieces like stained glass windows and floor tiles.

“The project became a lot bigger than me,” Hytha says. “Being able to share the bad and the good, I think really helps, almost like catharsis.”

When it comes to saving materials, Hytha says he came into the project “naive and romantic.” He quickly realized the costs and constraints of managing the demolition waste coming out of the rowhome. “There’s no alley, trucks can barely fit down the street.” For months, Hytha’s backyard was full of bricks and old wood. Holding onto some of that material for other projects became both a cost-saving measure and a way to reduce his waste.

“Every brick that I can save and reuse, then I don’t have to buy a new pallet of bricks, and I get to reuse the bricks that I took,” Hytha says. He inspected, sorted and chipped mortar off of thousands of bricks, saving roughly a thousand from disposal.

“I’ve touched each one of them probably at least four or five times now as I’ve moved these piles back and forth.”

Hytha feels a closeness with the bricks and other materials he’s saved. That additional labor isn’t feasible for most contractors, but he still encourages it. Since moving in this spring, he now gets to enjoy the fruits of his sacrifices and the knowledge that his house is full of pieces with provenance.

Hytha would like to see the City incentivize more restorations like his, especially with the number of abandoned rowhomes across the city and the need for housing. Rowhomes, like Philadelphia’s history in general, Hytha says, are often taken for granted.

“Once you tear this down, to me, it feels like an artifact, like a piece of history. Because there’s only less of these.” ◆ S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

the GREEN BUILDING issue

STILL IN THE LEED? Saving energy is harder than it looks, even in green buildings by bernard brown

A

t re:vision architecture’s Manayunk headquarters, energy-saving features are everywhere.

Exterior walls are carefully sealed and insulated to keep the building warmer in the winter. Windows and skylights admit plenty of sun, reducing the need for artificial lighting. Those same skylights and windows can be opened on warm days to flush hot air up and out of the building.

But perhaps the most important energy-saving equipment of the building, which sports a Platinum rating in LEED’s Operations and Maintenance (O+M) certi28 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

fication, sits on the wall of the building’s garage: three electrical boards. These flat gray boxes with cables and wires snaking in and out are about the least sexy sustainable design features imaginable — but on a visit in July, Scott Kelly, founding principal of Re:Vision architecture, and Kristie Broussard, senior associate with Re:Vision’s High Performance Consulting Studio made sure to point them out.

One board is for wall plugs, one for HVAC and one for lighting. Having three lets the firm track electricity usage carefully to make sure that their building, designed to be energy-efficient, actually uses power efficiently.

“You can’t understand what you don’t measure,” Broussard says. Reducing the environmental impact of buildings might start with sustainable design, but as mounting research and Re:Vision’s experience shows, it can’t end there.

LEED rewards sustainable design with tiers of recognition: basic certification, Silver, Gold and Platinum. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is managed by the U.S. Green Building Council, which launched it as a pilot program in 1998. It pulls multiple aspects of sustainability into one certification by scoring buildings in categories such as Location and Transportation, Materials and Resources, and Water Efficiency. Some credits, such as “minimum energy performance” within the Energy and Atmosphere category, are prerequisites for basic certification. Others such as “renewable energy production,” offer optional points that can add up to the Silver, Gold and Platinum ratings.

Broussard likens the certification process IL LUSTRATIO N BY JAM ES OLSTEI N

Scott Kelly, founding partner of Re:Vision Architecture, says there’s more to LEED than just water and energy efficiency.

to an ice cream sundae. The prerequisites for basic certification are like a bowl of vanilla ice cream, with additional points the toppings. “The more I layer on, the higher level of satisfaction I’m going to get out of this sundae. Those are my points,” she says. Re:Vision both designs buildings and offers consulting services to other architects trying to achieve sustainable certifications, including LEED. Kelly says that LEED certification can provide a client with third-party verification that their architects have actually designed a sustainable building. “It demonstrates they’re getting what they’re supposed to and what they paid for.”

Over the past 28 years, LEED has exP HOTO BY TAY LO R EC K ER

LEED gives us something to aspire to, and then as that becomes easy, the bar is raised.”

KRISTIE BROUSSARD, senior associate, Re:Vision architecture

panded to additional types of certification.

In 2007, the USGBC rolled out LEED Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance (O+M), which covers the ongoing performance of a building. With each new version of LEED — the USGBC released v5 in 2024 — the criteria have adapted to what has been learned in the previous versions and to evolving standards of sustainability.

But sustainability researchers have found that LEED buildings don’t always perform as advertised. John Scofield, then a physics professor at Oberlin College, started wondering about energy use by buildings after the college built a new environmental center in 2001. (Scofield spoke with Grid in a 2024 interview; he has since retired and declined to be interviewed again.) Schofield says the center used more energy than predicted, sparking a curiosity that led him to conduct a series of studies about the actual energy efficiency of green buildings.

“I really began following these LEEDcertified buildings and trying to find out what we can say about their measured energy savings,” Scofield said. “And what I discovered was it isn’t just LEED buildings.

Many buildings, many many buildings, end up not performing the way they were described to their owners by the architects.”

How do they actually perform? Benchmarking programs, in which cities such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia require commercial buildings to report how much energy they use, have allowed Scofield and other scholars to compare LEED-certified buildings to similar nonLEED buildings using real world numbers.

In a study published in 2021, Scofield and co-authors compared LEED and non-LEED office buildings in 10 cities and found that LEED buildings saved about 10% in greenhouse gas emissions and source energy use.

The authors also found that LEED-certified buildings’ energy use was far greater than predicted when they were certified.

A 2019 review paper that looked at 44 studies of energy efficiency in LEED buildings found a mixed bag. Some of the studies found that LEED buildings were more energy-efficient. Others, including some of Scofield’s, found the opposite. However, the authors concluded that higher levels of LEED (Gold and Platinum) were more likely to save energy than Silver or below.

In Scofield’s 2024 interview, he offered a few explanations for why LEED-certified S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

the GREEN BUILDING issue

buildings don’t end up as energy-efficient as planned. Sometimes the buildings are getting used differently than predicted. For example, the designers might have estimated based on standard building hours five days a week, but once opened, demand for the space extends into evenings and weekends.

Kelly puts a positive spin on this. “LEED buildings tend to be loved by the people who use them,” he says. People naturally gravitate towards new, carefully designed buildings and prefer to be in them, he adds.

“You have fresh air inside. You have less toxicity. You have better daylight.”

“Occupant behavior has a much bigger impact than we sometimes assume,” says Yueming Qiu, a University of Maryland researcher who studied water use in LEED buildings and found a similar disparity between predicted and actual water use. She says LEED buildings might underperform

because they scored points more in other aspects of certification, such as energy instead of water efficiency. “Another factor is that there’s often a difference between how a building is designed and how it actually operates,” she says. “And then there are the people using the building.”

Re:Vision’s Scott Kelly agrees. “The best thing you can do in this — we learned through the Quakers — is you train your people. We’ve done Net Zero Energy [a LEED certification] projects for them where they achieved Net Zero Energy, even though the energy model said, ‘you’re not going to come close.’ But they achieved Net Zero Energy because Quakers turn things off.”

Scofield also pointed out that if the baseline used to score predicted building performance is artificially inefficient, then it is easier to make new buildings look better on paper. He also said design teams have an in-

centive to lowball estimates of how a building will be used in order to predict lower energy usage. “In your calculation, you make every optimistic assumption you can.”

When it comes to energy efficiency, LEED certification standards compare the designed building’s predicted energy use to a baseline developed by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). Kelly says using their figures can lead to an easy baseline, but that this is not a cynical attempt to inflate scores. “They’re not saying ‘be best in class.’ They’re saying ‘look, with today’s technology you can be here with very little cost increase.’” Kelly and Broussard say that buildings can set a higher bar with optional LEED credits that encourage active energy and water use monitoring.

Another challenge with setting a baseline is that other non-LEED buildings are

Armstrong World Industries headquarters in Lancaster was the first building outside of California to achieve O+M Platinum certification.

30 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 2026

COURTESY O F ARM STRO N G WO RL D IN DUSTRI ES

becoming more efficient as “sustainable” design becomes mainstream. More buildings insulate hot water pipes, install LED bulbs and use automated systems, like motion detection lighting. New furnaces are more efficient than the old models they replace, and double-paned windows let less heat escape in the winter than old single-paned designs.

This widespread improvement in efficiency figured in a 2023 study looking at retrofitted federal office buildings. The General Services Administration (the agency that manages federal properties) gave building managers the option of pursuing LEED certification as one path to save energy. The authors found that in general, LEED-certified buildings were not more energy-efficient.

One explanation given by Edson Severnini, an environmental economist at Boston College who was one of the authors, was that managers could have scored highly in non-energy LEED categories, gaining certification without significant energy improvements.

Both the LEED-certified buildings and the similar non-LEED buildings became more energy-efficient over time, perhaps muting the effect of LEED certification.

“The LEED certification was just one possible strategy to potentially improve the performance of the building. All the buildings were actually getting better,” Severnini says.

This might be the case in Philadelphia.

A 2023 Philadelphia benchmarking report showed that since 2012, when the City started requiring owners of large buildings (50,000 square feet or more) to disclose energy and greenhouse gas performance, “buildings that

They’re not saying ‘be best in class.’ They’re saying ‘look, with today’s technology you can be here with very little cost increase.”

SCOTT KELLY, founding principal, Re:Vision architecture

complied with the program have improved their energy performance by about 18%.”

LEED’s constant evolution means that “one also needs to consider what is being compared and when,” says Broussard. “As codes get better, I would expect them to be closing the gap in water and energy efficiency — that’s kind of the point. LEED gives us something to aspire to, and then as that becomes easy, the bar is raised.”

LEED, which helped bring sustainable design into the mainstream, is a victim of its success. “Many municipal codes are based on LEED,” Broussard says, which then closes the gap between LEED buildings and non-certified buildings.

To ensure that all large buildings, public and private, keep improving whether or not they’re certified, Philadelphia created a Building Energy Performance Program in 2019. It builds on the city’s benchmarking program by requiring “tuneups” for buildings larger than 50,000 square feet every five years, says Charlotte Shade, Philadelphia’s senior manager of building energy programs. In a tuneup, the building owners have to make sure energy-saving systems are functioning properly. Buildings

can opt out if they have been LEED O+M certified and if “they can prove to us with their benchmarking data that they have reduced their energy use by at least 15% over a three-year period,” Shade says.

It is too soon to know the results of the first round of tuneups, but Shade hopes the City can use the data to guide more buildings to use less energy.

Scofield thinks the USGBC and the committees that draft LEED standards want LEED to encourage energy efficiency.

“They have really great intentions, and they do want to save energy,” he said. “You know, it’s like modifying the tax code. As soon as you modify it, people figure out ways to get around it.”

(Grid emailed the USGBC, but it did not make an expert available for an interview.)

Re:Vision’s Scott Kelly points out that while energy and water use are critical to LEED, there’s a lot more to it. “We’re talking about materials, construction practices, correct siting and transportation networks.”

And even if the rest of the field might be catching up, LEED remains popular. Armstrong World Industries has been part of LEED from the start, and, according to

S E PTE M B E R 20 26 G R I DP HILLY.COM 31

the GREEN BUILDING issue

sustainability manager Amy Costello, the company still gains a lot from the certification process.

Armstrong’s headquarters in Lancaster in 2007 was the first building outside of California to achieve O+M Platinum certification, Costello says. The company, which manufactures ceiling and wall surfaces that improve acoustics and save energy, was a founding member of the USGBC in 1993, she says, and their Building 701 was designed to the beta version of LEED v1.0 in 1998, though it wasn’t actually certified until O+M rolled out. They have since recertified it in 2014 as Platinum and in 2020 as Gold.

The building features a wide array of features to save energy and water. Light shelves outside bounce sunlight into windows and off of ceiling tiles to brighten rooms. Bathrooms featured waterless urinals. Costello says the LEED process has helped the company save money, not just at the 701 building. “We’ve actually taken a lot of the practices that we learned in our headquarters in Building 701, and we’ve implemented them across the campus here,” Costello says. “Almost every faucet is a low-flow faucet. Every toilet now is a dual-flush toilet.”

The City of Philadelphia’s policy is for all municipal buildings built or renovated after July 1, 2023 to earn a LEED Gold certification (previously the requirement had been for LEED Silver). “It keeps us up to date with advancing standards when it comes to holistic sustainability,” says Tammy Lee, senior manager for energy infrastructure with the City’s Office of Sustainability.

Re:Vision has had its office certified LEED O+M Platinum twice, and Kelly says it is about to go through certification again.

During Grid ’s visit, Kelly highlighted the popularity of the shower and lockers at Re:Vision’s office. “So many of our people ride bikes, we’ve got to schedule when they’re taking showers,” he says.

The firm will review how staff commute as part of their upcoming O+M recertification, but the fact that employees need to manage shower times shows that staff are taking advantage of the office’s bikeable location.

Broussard argues it takes ongoing attention and maintenance to ensure a building lives up to its certification. “It’s not just about a snapshot in time.” ◆ 32 GRID P H IL LY.CO M SEPT EM BE R 20 26

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Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies program prepares you to step up your future environmental career–whether pursuing climate solutions in law and policy, resilience and adaptation, sustainability, or another sector with environmental impact. Built with flexibility in mind, this innovative, interdisciplinary program allows you to gain real-world experience, make industry connections, and enroll full- or part-time to suit your schedule.

Take the next step in your environmental career at

www.upenn.edu/MES