Northeast Times

Our local newspaper, Northeast Times, is pretty awful. I know that it's important to give the everyday person a voice, but up here in the Great Northeast, your everyday man is a privileged, ignorant, hate-spewing moron. Or at the very least, the type of person who would submit a letter to the editor for the Northeast Times is the type of person to fit that description. There's also the distancing that the Northeast Times does, probably unintentionally, from the rest of the city. I already feel like I live in the suburbs, and I don't need a newspaper to remind me of this emotion. I dunno, it just makes for a very gross reading experience. Our copy usually goes directly from sidewalk to trashcan.

But I was a loser with a lot of time over this summer, so I spent a little time searching the archives of the newspaper's website (via the Internet Archives, which is fucking awesome) for a couple very specific articles, both related to something that we've written about on the blog before. I'm gonna post both of them in full, and then I'll write a few words about them, and why they are relevant to our purposes here. Might make for a quick Wednesday morning of blogging, which I'm cool with.

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Fox Chase takes another brutal beating
By Nicole McLaughlin
Times Staff Writer
November 12, 2001

William Scheb was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He apparently was an innocent victim who was randomly attacked by a group of teens as he talked with friends at a neighborhood playground.

Scheb, 16, was hanging out with friends at the Fox Chase Recreation Center last Friday night when he was beaten on the head with a blunt object.

According to witnesses, several carloads of teens from Mayfair came to the neighborhood, looking for a fight.

Scheb was with his girlfriend at the recreation center, at Ridgeway Street and Rockwell Avenue, when a fight broke out around 11:30 p.m.

"A car came up and a kid jumped out and hit him (Scheb) over the head," said one witness, a girl who asked that her name be withheld. "He fell down and started having convulsions. His eyes were rolling in the back of his head and bubbles were coming out of his mouth."

The young woman was visibly upset as she recalled the night's events.

"I just stayed with him and held his head," she said. "I told him that he would be OK and that he was at the Fox Chase Rec, and I screamed for someone to get an ambulance."

Scheb was transported to the Albert Einstein Medical Center. He suffered a fractured skull.

Another teen said she was shocked that such an attack could have happened, especially after the highly publicized death of Eddie Polec. The 16-year-old Polec similarly was beaten with a baseball bat, an innocent victim who was chased down and savagely attacked by a gang outside of St. Cecilia's Church in Fox Chase—just a block from the site of Friday's incident—in November 1994.

Polec died of his injuries.

"Everybody knew what happened to Eddie Polec," said the teen interviewed about the Scheb attack. "Bill is really friendly and athletic. He's the nicest kid and he doesn't deserve this."

SUSPECTS ROUNDED UP

Police have charged seven people with Scheb's beating, including five teens whose identities were withheld because of their ages. The two adults arrested by police, identified as Patrick Cahill, 18, of the 3500 block of Sheffield Ave., and Joseph Bryzycki, 19, of the 3300 block of Bleigh Ave., have been charged with aggravated assault and related offenses, police said.

Investigators believe that Scheb, who lives on the 600 block of Stanwood St., was beaten with a wooden stick and The Club steering-wheel lock.

As the Times went to press this week, the teenager, a student at Cardinal Dougherty High School, remained hospitalized at Einstein. A hospital spokeswoman said that Scheb was in fair condition.

Detective Frank Powell, of the Northeast Detectives Division, said that a confrontation between youths from Fox Chase and Mayfair preceded the attack on Scheb.

Two of the Mayfair youths called their friends and asked them to come to Fox Chase, Powell said. About a dozen teens from Mayfair showed up shortly after.

"He (Scheb) had nothing to do with it," Powell said.

Initially, 11 teenage boys were taken into custody after police spotted one of the cars that witnesses saw leaving the scene. The blue Chevrolet Cavalier was found at Russo Park, at Frankford and Torresdale avenues, shortly after the incident.

Seven of the suspects were taken into custody. The other teens were released.

Powell said it is likely that the investigation will result in more arrests.

On Sunday afternoon, some of Scheb's friends were at the recreation center. One of them, a 19-year-old male who asked that his name be withheld, said he also was hit during the fight and received stitches in the back of his head.

"I heard someone say something about a fight. I went over and got hit in the head," he said.

He said he didn't know what could have prompted the fight. But some participants came to the recreation center armed with weapons, including sticks and steering-wheel locks, he said.

TALK OF A RIVALRY

The trouble, he said, started shortly after the end of the Jeanes Fair near Jeanes Hospital and the Fox Chase Cancer Center, which are several blocks from the rec center.

"We never had a beef with Mayfair," he said. "Maybe something happened at the fair. I don't know. This is a good neighborhood. We ain't no gang."

He and others at the center on Sunday afternoon spoke of the similarities to the Polec beating and disputed the notion that a rivalry exists between the two neighborhoods.

"We weren't trying to fight with weapons," said the 19-year-old male. "After what happened with Eddie, we were just going to use our hands."

Another youth at the rec center said he knew some of the Mayfair individuals involved in the attack and was surprised they were capable of such violence.

"They ran their mouth because they thought they were tough, but there's no rivalry and never has been," the teen said.

Many adults who were at the recreation center on Sunday to watch a soccer game did not want to comment on the incident.

But Gary Beatty, who has been a Fox Chase soccer coach for the past 15 years, said that rivalries are common in the middle-class neighborhood.

"There are constant rivalries, but not with Mayfair," he said. "Lawncrest is a normal rivalry, and that's inside of sports as well as outside."

Beatty also said that teens hang out at the playground late into the night. He thinks additional police are needed to patrol the area.

"They are here partying every Friday and Saturday night. Kids have to know that they can come here to have fun, but they can't come up here with an aggressive attitude," he said. "We need an increased police presence, we're the farthest (neighborhood) out. We have an active Town Watch but volunteers can only do so much."

Seven years ago, after the death of their son Eddie, John and Kathy Polec spoke out against teen violence and were instrumental in achieving reform of the city's 911 emergency system. Witnesses made repeated and often frantic 911 calls after the assault on Eddie Polec, but help was not dispatched until some 40 minutes after the initial calls.

On Monday afternoon, Kathy Polec declined comment on the Scheb case.

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I needed to find proof of this incident in print because I was beginning to think that I had made it up, but nope, it happened. I was partial witness so some of this incident on the night in question. I wrote a few years ago that I had been to Jeanes Fair with family friends and we had to run to our car because a large group of teens were beating the fuck out of each other and heading right toward us. I mean, I couldn't even find proof on the internet of Jeanes Fair (Jeanes Hospital's annual carnival fundraiser) even happening, let alone a fight that happened there, so I was starting to go a little nuts in thinking that I had exaggerated something in my mind.

And there is a clue in this local news story as to why the world seems to have forgotten about it. Did you catch it? Yup... this happened the weekend before September 11th. I did a double take when I saw the date of this issue as September 12th, because every story reads as business as usual. I guess the paper was already on its way to the presses to change much. There is one tiny story that you can tell was tacked on there at the very last minute, and it's so jingoistic and cringeworthy that I'm not even going to talk about it here. Bottom line: no one cared about some dumb "neighborhood rivalry" by the time Tuesday morning rolled around.

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Booze Blues

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer
October 11, 2007

It may not be their legal right, but there's little doubt that young people in Northeast Philly still consider drinking in the woods their birthright.

Their determination to keep up a generations-old local custom is evident in the perpetual cat-and-mouse game they instigate with police, civic leaders and individuals unfortunate enough to live nearby the kids' favorite stomping grounds. Much like the old cartoon Tom and Jerry, the cat rarely wins.

On any given weekend night throughout the year, and very often on weeknights during their summer vacation, dozens if not hundreds of kids and young adults can be found lurking in Pennypack Park, say police and civilian witnesses.

While some folks would just as soon let them continue, rather than see all of the rowdies congregate in more-populated areas like residential corners and commercial parking lots, park advocates and police warn that the behavior poses a greater threat to the community than many realize.

"It's no big secret. They're all in the park. We chase them away and they keep coming back," said Jim Ryan, vice president of the Friends of Pennypack Park. "A lot of times, we get neighbors who call us, so I go over there and, being on the [local civilian police advisory council], I just notify the police."

Technically, not even those of legal drinking age—21 in Pennsylvania—are allowed to imbibe in the park at night without a city permit for a special event.

Officially, the park closes at dusk, but that doesn't seem to matter to the throngs of revelers who routinely rove the 8,900-acre urban oasis mostly at-will late into the night. They know that park rangers don't enforce the curfew with any consistency, while city patrol officers spend most of their time running down 911 calls in the neighborhoods, rather than canvassing the vast Pennypack underbrush.

Similarly, drinking is prohibited in the park. But the piles and piles of empty beer, liquor and malt beverage containers found littering various enclaves many mornings belie what seems yet another barely enforceable ordinance.

The youths meet in obscure but easily accessible spots like a ballfield off of Holme Avenue behind Nazareth Hospital; some clearings off of Winchester Avenue north and south of Holme; and other hangouts behind Austin Meehan Middle School and St. Dominic Cemetery.

"Friday night is the big drinking night. If you see cars parked on Holme Avenue (outside the ballfield), they're back there," said Ryan, whose non-profit park advocacy group has two "Gator" patrols that collect 20 to 30 garbage bags of debris each week from inside the park.

The patrols use all-terrain utility vehicles to navigate the paved and unpaved trails. Ryan personally spends countless hours in the park, too, as a police liaison for the friends group.

"And right at the corner of the Lincoln (High School) ballfield, you'll find a couple of rusty cars in there. That's where the kids party," he said.

Park volunteers have pulled everything from beer kegs to couches out of the woods, Ryan added. Locals have plenty of reasons to complain.

"It's the noise," said Ryan. "And they steal chairs from in front of people's houses. They take their lawn furniture. There are fights and trash all over the place. It's always in the same places."

Ironically, litter—that most common and readily visible proof—is one of the least undesirable outcomes of the illegal behavior. Citing anecdotal and statistical evidence, police note the prevalence of underage drinkers who subsequently get behind the wheel of a car, placing not only themselves and their passengers at risk, but potentially every member of the community, as well.

Also, police say, many related ills generally accompany underage drinking, like vandalism, fighting and sexual assault.

"Everybody knows somebody who's been killed due to underage drinking or who has been affected by (underage) abuse of alcohol," said Officer Todd Merlina of the State Police Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement (LCE).

According to the most recent Pennsylvania Youth Survey, underage drinking in the state is on the rise while drinking and driving among youths is occurring at an alarming rate.

Every two years, the state's Commission on Crime and Delinquency sponsors a survey of middle school and high school students across Pennsylvania. In 2005, 85 percent of high school seniors said they had drank "more than a few sips" of an alcoholic beverage in their lifetime, while 54 percent said they had done it within the previous 30 days. Both rates were all-time highs.

Further, 34 percent admitted to "binge drinking" within the previous two weeks of being surveyed. Binge drinking was defined as consuming five or more drinks in succession.

Of those 34 percent, about two in five said they had done so four or more times in the previous two weeks, meaning that, "a fairly substantial number of twelfth graders are essentially drinking at dangerous levels every weekend," a survey report concluded. Meanwhile, 30 percent of high school seniors said they had driven a motor vehicle while drinking or shortly after drinking during the previous year.

The trend wasn’t limited to high school seniors. Almost 20 percent of 10th grade students said they engaged in binge drinking at least once in the previous two weeks.

For a combined sample of students in sixth, eighth, 10th and 12th grades, 59 percent had drank alcohol at least once in their lifetime, while more than 26 percent had done so within the previous 30 days.

Few seem to doubt that kids in Northeast Philly are doing their part to boost those statewide numbers. Stats aside, underage drinking here is often compared to a cultural tradition.

Parents, neighbors and even police often find themselves in the surreal position of having to condemn a behavior in which they once gleefully engaged and as a result of which they've incurred no real personal harm.

The common experience is widespread, as portions of Pennypack Park lie in three of the four police districts that comprise the Northeast.

Like many, Inspector John Heath, commander of the Philadelphia police department's Northeast Division, did it as a kid.

"Of course. Everybody did," Heath said. "The problem is, with kids, they don't see the danger in it."
Sgt. Steven Davis, of the state police's liquor enforcement bureau, agrees.

"Just because it's one of the rituals of youth that everyone has done, it doesn't make it right," Davis said. "I think everybody has short memories."

Davis maintains that drinking has always been a dangerous activity for minors, despite the fond memories that older generations may have of their school-age exploits.

Heath theorizes that societal factors, particularly the changing family structure, have contributed to the prevalence of underage drinking and added to the risk.

"Growing up years ago, you had a one-income household and you always had someone around the house minding the kids and raising the kids," Heath said. "And they knew when you'd be home."

Today, there are more families with two working parents or just one parent, Heath noted. That leaves teens with less supervision.

"Unfortunately, kids get more input from the street," the inspector said.

While kids are more street-wise, attitudes among parents have changed, too, and often stand in the way of efforts by police to make a real dent in underage drinking, Heath explained.

"When cops grab (their) kid, it's 'Why did you grab my kid?' Not, 'What did my kid do wrong?'" he said.

Kids "dummy up" too, when local police press them for information, Heath said, particularly when it involves revealing the source of the booze. While underage drinking is a summary citation, comparable to a traffic ticket, furnishing alcohol to minors is a third-degree misdemeanor.

The summary offense usually carries a fine and mandatory participation in an alcohol education program. First-time offenders often get into alternative programs where they can have their arrests erased from their records.

"The intimidation factor of the police (toward kids) and the support of parents for police has changed," Heath said.

Davis, the LCE sergeant, expressed similar frustrations. "We try to find where minors procured the alcohol from, but a lot of times, they won’t tell you," he said.

Nonetheless, authorities refuse to allow young people free rein over the park. Two recent undercover investigations by officers of the LCE shone a bright, albeit limited, spotlight on the local problem.

On Aug. 15 and again on Sept. 5, LCE officers rounded up a combined 33 minors for drinking or possessing alcoholic beverages during Pennypack Park Music Festival concerts at the band shell near the park's Welsh Road and Rowland Avenue entrance.

According to the law enforcement agency, the Fairmount Park Commission asked the state officers to patrol the concerts. Park officials claim that community complaints about drinking at the events prompted the commission to seek LCE help.

The LCE focuses most of its underage drinking resources on attacking the problem in bars and other state-licensed establishments, as well as on college campuses, at sporting events and at other large public gatherings.

Also, the LCE tries to undercut the problem by cracking down on businesses that sell alcohol to minors. According to Officer Merlina, the bureau's age compliance program routinely catches merchants red-handed.

In the program, the state agency hires kids aged 18 to 20, who go out and try to buy alcoholic beverages. If a merchant asks for proof of age, the young man or woman is instructed to show his or her real ID card.

Since the program began in late 2005, Merlina said, the LCE has conducted more than 2,430 compliance checks. Of those, 1,084 or about 45 percent were adjudged "non-compliant." In 364 cases, the young adults showed ID cards and still got served.

The usual loosely organized drinking parties in the park are mostly a job for local police to contain, Heath said. Captains in each police district attack the problem in their own way. This year, however, enforcement is on the rise. From January through August this year, police made 309 underage drinking arrests in the Northeast, compared to 195 for all of 2006. Citywide, the partial 2007 tally of 502 compared to 486 for all of last year.

While the districts rely on 911 calls, local property owners and Town Watch groups and other community leaders to report problem spots, cops have a not-so-secret weapon.

With funding from local community groups, the 7th and 8th districts have purchased and operated off-road motorcycles for more than a decade. The vehicles go places that police cars or SUVs can't and are quiet, so they give police the added advantage of stealth.

"The only thing that bothers these kids is the motorbikes," said Ryan, whose organization helped fund the vehicles. "(Kids) can't hear them and can't see them. They go in there and get them."

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Shit, man, this is a legendary opening line to a local news article. "It may not be their legal right, but there's little doubt that young people in Northeast Philly still consider drinking in the woods their birthright." We wore this shit like a badge of honor back in the day. Mandy directly quoted it in her own PoYB post about the phenomenon. She knew about it because I had this article printed out and tacked on my dorm room wall. We weren't the only group of friends that felt that way, I'm sure. When I was originally searching for the article online, I googled the opening line, and the only hit was some random Father Judge graduate who had it in the description section of his Facebook profile.

In terms of facts, I feel the same way about this article now then I did way back when—the facts are true, kids do drink in the woods, cops are never going to stomp it out, it annoys the neighbors, no one knows what to do about it, kids keep drinking in the woods because they know all this and know that they'll never be stopped, and 'round and 'round it goes, until kids age out of the process and become adults.

In terms of my opinion on it, well, I guess it remains to be seen whether my opinion will change or stay the same. I currently live next to the very same woods in which I threw multiple keg parties in back in the day (I also have a distinct memory of dropping my cousin Andrew off with a quarter keg right in front of the house I now currently own). If kids are still drinking back there, then my daughters are going to have the opportunity to participate in the ritual, in their "birthright."

I talk a lot about that in my family portrait, the idea of cycles, and how my kids are going to have to make the same decision I did when I was a teenager, whether to participate in the rites of passage here in the Great Northeast. I will withhold my opinion until they near that age, because I have no idea what my reaction as a parent will be. On the one hand, I know in retrospect how dangerous and stupid it was to be standing in the dark woods getting incapacitated. On the other hand, I only know that now that I'm in my mid-30s and I have the benefit of wisdom on my side. I know that my parents wouldn't have been able to stop me if they tried. I also think that they didn't really even try that much other than a general "don't drink" that was easily swatted away on a Friday night. So maybe there's a way to honor the tradition while still keeping my children safe. I don't know yet.

I do know for a fact that they will receive very specific advice on one aspect of this whole ordeal: don't talk to cops, don't get near cops, if you see a cop then you should run like hell and don't stop until you're inside your or a friend's home. NE district police officers investing tax dollars in motorbikes to catch kids drinking? Get the fuck out of here with that shit. Defund the police. Reinvest in the community. Educate kids on alcohol and its joys and dangers, both short- and long-term. Giving kids a court date does nothing to curb the behavior that you had a problem with in the first place. Fucking morons.

Alright, that's enough of that. I really just republished this article to give another perspective on what I'm constantly yapping about on this blog and in real life—we drank in the woods, and it was a crucial part of my upbringing in the Great Northeast.