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Hunting Park: Past, Present and Future |
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By Victoria Waldrom and Megan Smith During the 1970s and 1980s, Hunting Park was a neighborhood where children safely played in the street and neighbors knew one another. In the late 1980s, gentrification took over in Center City. This trend also affected urban neighborhoods such as Hunting Park and served as a catalyst for the mass movement for two groups. People, who used to live in the neighborhood, moved out. Hispanics then moved into the neighborhood. This became a problem for the original residents of Hunting Park for several reasons. Gentrification started to occur as welathier residents moved into deteriorated sections of the city and started to transform the neighborhoods. However, this change usually means that the poorer people who were living there can no longer afford it and are forced to move to another neighborhood. It just so happened that in the 1980s, the Hispanics were those with lower incomes. They were forced out of other parts of Philadelphia, and Hunting Park is where they chose to move. According to City Councilman Juan Ramos, one of the reasons for people moving out of Hunting Park at this time was that "they were just getting old. I don't think that there were actual reasons for them leaving. It's just they weren't raising a family anymore and they left." However, when the residents of Hunting Park moved out of this neighborhood, they didn't sell their homes. Often they gave them to family members, friends or just abandoned them. This is how the neighborhood became a sea of rundown homes. Because these homes were old, deteriorating and built on older sewage systems, the homes began to sink because the foundations were too heavy for the ground. "I would walk into some of these homes and feel like the house was tipping over," Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller said. "The earth below these homes hasn't been taken care of for years, and it's becoming weak." During the 1980s when Ramos lived in Hunting Park, he was an active resident. He, along with other members of the community, started organizations to help those in need. Now that he is an elected official of the city, specifically a city councilman at large, he still feels the need to help what he calls, "a great neighborhood that unfortunately has been neglected over the years." With all this said, the neighborhood has elected officials who are attempting to provide funds and sources for this community to get back to the way it once was. Hunting Park could become that safe place for kids to play outside by themselves again, all it needs is a little help from the community residents. |
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