May 22, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Local Life

Hill, Mt. Airy still have hardening of the main artery
by JIM HARRIS

The Germantown Avenue construction nightmare continues, with no immediate end in immediate sight. It’s been particularly devastating to businesses on both sides of Cresheim Valley Drive. As one letter-writer to the Local stated last week, “If this was happening in Ed Rendell’s neighborhood of East Falls, do you think the main road would have been completely sealed off for so many months?” (Photo by Erin Vertreace)

Construction on Germantown Avenue continues as local residents try to survive without full use of their main artery. The work is being carried out in four-foot segments, with segment number 12 (of 700) beginning this week. Within each segment, PennDOT is tearing out the “invasive” Belgian blocks and the trolley tracks, then installing “native” blocks and new “symbolic” trolley tracks to appease Blockheads and Messianic Trolleyites (as opposed to Trotskyites and Troglodytes).

Crews are also replacing a century-old sewer. A section of the sewer, along with several specimens of century-old sewage, will be put on display at the Chestnut Hill Historical Society’s “Scraps of the Past” exhibition.

Stop the presses: ‘You gotta dive off the cliff’
Criminal court reporter seeks peace in yoga studio
by LOUISE E. WRIGHT

Conroy, a former court reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, just can’t resist writing on her laptop out of habit. (Photos by Louise Wright)

It’s a long way from the Criminal Justice Center to the yoga studio, but Theresa Conroy made the trek. A criminal court reporter for more than 20 years, Conroy, 45, recently decided to devote herself full-time to a yoga career. This month, she opens Yoga on the Ridge, Roxborough’s first exclusively yoga studio.

Conroy grew up in Manayunk, moved to Roxborough as a teen and, except for a brief residence in Fishtown early in her marriage, has lived there ever since. Her husband is beer enthusiast and reporter Don Russell, a.k.a. Joe Sixpack, whom she met while working at the Philadelphia Daily News.

From an early age, Conroy knew she wanted to be a journalist. While still a junior at Temple University, she signed on as a stringer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and spent the next few years covering Bucks County courts. Conroy’s family background easily explains her fascination with crime: her father, Michael J. Conroy Jr., sat on the Municipal Court bench and, at the time of his death, was the most senior judge in Philadelphia. “Being his daughter helped me a lot,” Conroy admits, “probably more than I give him credit for.”

Local playwright is trying  to stop genocide in Darfur
by JENNIFER DIONISIO

Playwright Laura Napier (middle), seen here with her sisters Victoria (left) and Amma of Chestnut Hill, has written a play that was performed three times last month in New York that is aimed at ending genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

As a young girl growing up in Cheltenham, screenwriter Laura Napier recalls receiving an exceptional education on the Holocaust, due in part to the large Jewish population in the area. “‘Never again,’” she says she and her peers were told over and over. “We have to teach the history, so it does not repeat itself.”

The phrase stuck in her head, and caught her off-guard as an adult when she first heard about the crisis in Darfur. Since 2003, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Darfurians have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in this region of Sudan by the Janjaweed, an Arab militia working with the support of the Sudanese government. As Napier continued reading about the situation, it dawned on her: “This is genocide.”

‘Songs’ in Ambler: tired theme, ably performed
by CLARK GROOME

Jason Robert Brown wrote Songs for a New World when he was, he writes, “struggling in a city that didn’t even notice I was there, when I was a lonely and single college dropout living in a studio apartment in Greenwich Village.” He describes it as “a very personal little piece.”