Meredith Aska McBride | What we owe West Philadelphia

Out in the flyover, we don't get a lot of coastal news. Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, all I knew about Philadelphia until I was eight or nine was that it had been home to both the Fresh Prince and Ben Franklin. I've since become more enlightened, but it's ironic that I ended up at Penn, the Philadelphia institution that, more than any other, walks the line between these two worlds.

In the past, Penn's community efforts have focused on our relationship with West Philadelphia. For the next 30 years, we'll be looking toward Center City as we develop the 24 acres east of campus.

The administration has been discussing "the Penn community" a lot as the capital campaign has been unveiled: students, parents, alumni, faculty and staff. The University does have an obligation to this community, but it must also remember that we are part of a community located in a particular space - part of the neighborhood.

We have a dual responsibility to both our community dispersed throughout the world and our community in Philadelphia. Rather than extending the Penn bubble to the river, we need to become a conduit by which Center City and West Philadelphia can share knowledge and resources.

Integrating Penn, West Philadelphia and Center City is ambitious - but would serve as a powerful example. As countless other universities nationwide expand into their surrounding neighborhoods, it's important to have a model of sensitive development that truly works with the community.

Former President Judith Rodin espoused an "urban anchor" philosophy: Centers of learning, the "eds and meds," drive the modern city. Penn has always been an anchor of the area economy, providing thousands of jobs and training local leaders.

But we're also a spatial anchor. The Rodin administration's development of the 40th Street corridor created, as Facilities spokesman Tony Sorrentino put it, a "seam" that tangibly connected Penn with West Philadelphia. This was a welcome change from our past spatial forays, especially our 60s-era land grab in the Black Bottom district north of campus that tore the fabric of the neighborhood.

We've since promised never to expand westward beyond 40th Street. Our present efforts in West Philly are commitments of time and money - such as the West Philadelphia Tutoring Project or the Urban Nutrition Initiative - rather than of physical colonization. While negotiating our role is still challenging, I'd like to think we're becoming part of the neighborhood instead of towering over it.

Just as 40th Street development stitched us to West Philadelphia, eastward expansion will tie us to Center City, connecting the Fresh Prince's kingdom with the city that Franklin shaped. Sorrentino described the downtown as stretching from "Front Street to 40th Street," with the postal lands as "the hole in the donut." Penn's growth will fill that hole, creating a coherent Philadelphia from river to river and beyond.

"The way a university designs is a reflection of how it views where it is ... This university is urban, it's urbane and it's of West Philadelphia," said Sorrentino. Indeed, our latest design initiative reflects our heritage: A colonial university intended to educate Philadelphia's finest, and a modern urban anchor that has the resources - and obligation - to facilitate community-based development.

Penn has the urbane qualities to work the Center City connection, and there's no doubt that eastward expansion was designed with this in mind. But we can't forget that we're "of West Philadelphia." We expect alumni to give loyally to a place that nurtured them and set them on their path. In a sense, Penn has the same relationship to West Philadelphia.

West Philly has been good to us in more ways than we know. It keeps us real, puts up with our idiosyncrasies and, even after some of our more blatant abuses of power, is receptive to our community initiatives.

I love West Philly because it reminds me of my hometown - it's got a strong sense of community, old houses, kids playing in parks. Once you look past the chipped paint and the occasional weeds, it's clear that there's a lot of potential, and a lot that Penn could do to strengthen the community structures that are already in place.

Eastward expansion will transform Penn's campus and educational capacities, but that's not an end in itself. As we grow, so do our opportunities to work collectively with our community west of the Schuylkill in a responsible and productive way. And those are opportunities that we can't afford to pass up.

Meredith Aska McBride is a College sophomore from Wauwatosa, Wis. Her e-mail is mcbride@dailypennsylvanian.com. Radical Chic appears on Wednesdays.

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