Philadelphia Community Access Coalition
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MS. ALLEN: My name is Jean Allen, and I am speaking to you today as an educator. I'm currently employed at Temple University School of Communications and Theater, the Department of Film and Media Arts. And I want to express an appreciation for being a part of this hearing because I think the level of discussion, the information and debate has been at a very high level, and I appreciate being a part of that.

I also think it's appropriate that I'm on the panel that I'm appearing with because as an educator at Temple University, I teach a course in community arts and social change, and I know how important these organizations and communities are to the life blood of the City of Philadelphia.

So I wanted to speak to you from three positions. One, as a person who teaches the makers of film and television. Many of our students have made film and television that have appeared on Channel 12, 35, and 54. And some of that programming has been redistributed internationally to Japan, to West Germany, and to other parts of worlds. These students, graduates of this program, have achieved a level of critical mass in the City of Philadelphia that makes Philadelphia an attractive place for students not only to gain their education, but to stay and become practioners of urban, regional, and community media. Obviously public access television is an important venue for them as well as communities organizations.

But I also speak to you as a resident of Mt. Airy, where I serve on the Board of the Sedgewick Cultural Center and participate in the Northwest Historic Preservation Project. And as a citizen of Philadelphia since 1982, I would like to contribute to this panel by saying Temple University's recent inauguration of a Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management certainly tells us something about the university's anticipation of a major effort to make Philadelphia a much larger part of East Coast between New York City and Washington.

Yes, there will be multiplexes on the river. Yes, there will be virtual reality arcades in Center City, but it is very much in the interest of this city, which has perhaps, as the core of its identity, ethnic diversity, community revitalization, a tremendous sense of neighborhood importance that the money of that increasing visitor attraction not go alone to Disney, not go alone to the conglomerates who already dominate the oligarchy of communications in this country. And I would only refer you to the New York Times Sunday Magazine last week to get it finally authorized by The New York Times, I'd like to see that money go into the real blood of this city lies -- and that is its neighborhoods, that is where its arts come from.

The black churches that have spawned the artists that make this city famous are in those neighborhoods, and they deserve to be featured before their artists reach the top of the charts. They deserve to be vitalized with this kind of attention that gives visibility to where the talent starts, not where it winds up with the big contracts, with the large conglomerates, but what fuels it, what feeds it.

Urban artists are the guerilla forces of revitalizing the City. They are the Amish of the City. They take a played-out, devastated neighborhood, and they bring it back to life. And far too often, they are pushed out by the yuppification and the gentrification that many cities across this country experience. Philadelphia, I think, can be a different story.

Twenty years ago, I was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Madison had one of the primo public access television stations in the country. Ten years ago, when I was teaching at UCLA and U of C, I lived in Santa Monica. Most of the homes in Santa Monica were connected by computer, by fiber optic to their City Council meetings.

Now, in the year 1999 and in the year 2000, I'd like to see this come home to the city where it should all have started, the city where a revitalized urban culture can rejuvenate the next century.

(Applause.)

COUNCILMAN ORTIZ: Thank you.

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