The Hill’s “heck no” factor Every Philadelphia neighborhood has its charms.

South Philadelphia is noted for row houses and cheese steaks, Mt Airy for its liberalism and diversity and Chestnut Hill for its architecture, copious commuter train stations and robust retail corridor.

But another thing Chestnut Hill is known for is the protracted zoning dispute. Hardly a project is proposed that does not meet fierce opposition. This is a neighborhood that can produce protestors for a planned picket fence.

Chestnut Hill has recently been host to numerous zoning battles. Some have been epic like the Woodmere Art Museum’s Venturi Scott Brown-designed addition that will finally proceed after six years of court battles.

In the last few months we’ve seen one minor but bitter dispute in the debate over the Good Food Market’s zoning variance (denied last week, see page 1) and a brewing battle over Chestnut Hill College’s plans to apply for an Industrial Development District zoning, which would allow it to function outside of community oversight as it executes a five-year master plan to develop Sugarloaf.

What is it about Chestnut Hill that provokes these clashes? There’s a fierce feeling here for preservation —that the Hill’s history is an asset worth preserving. That attitude can be healthy. If not for such deep feelings, the Hill probably would not be what it is today.

At other times, that preservationist streak can become simpleminded protectionism – and with that comes the transformation of neighbors into armchair experts. In the Good Food Market debate, opinions on parking, traffic, lighting, etc. were slung around without a shred of scientific evidence. Couldn’t someone have asked an independent traffic engineer what the store’s impact would be?

Business advocates here argue it’s that facet of the zoning dispute that has kept a lot of investment out of the neighborhood. Many I talk to still recall the more than 15-year-old Napoleon dispute – in which neighbors fought the opening of a restaurant at the Gravers Lane location now occupied by The Little Treehouse. That dispute ended in a CHCA meeting that nearly broke into a fistfight.

In remarks made to me regarding the story about the findings of the CHCA’s retail vacancy committee (see page 1), both CHCA president Walter Sullivan and CHBA president Greg Welsh said that Chestnut Hill’s reputation as a community in turmoil kept it from receiving substantial state grant money for revitalization.

How does Chestnut Hill balance the right of neighbors to express their opinions – positive or negative – while working to present the Avenue as a welcoming community for investment? That’s the million-dollar question the retail vacancy committee has likely grappled with.

It’s not a question with an easy answer. Perhaps there is no answer. As long as there are residents who feel strongly about preserving their community (a good thing) there will be protracted and sometimes ugly zoning battles (a bad thing). As much as you want development, you can’t have it at the expense of cutting out resident input.

It might be messy, but maybe it’s the cost of living in an “in-demand” community. You just have to hope it doesn’t cost you much needed progress, too.           

Pete Mazzaccaro

Why I didn’t shake hands with Roger Tory Peterson, Part 2
by HUGH GILMORE

I wrote last week about how I’d happened upon Roger Tory Peterson’s “Field Guide to the Birds” when I was a young man. My casual attempt to identify a bird in my backyard made me want to discover and identify more birds. The pleasure awakened then has driven me ever since.

Yes, I know, we’re just talking about tweety birds here, but once your spirit has been captured by the idea that there are creatures roaming the earth that you’ve never seen, and could see — if you just looked up, and therefore want to see — you’re a goner. That hope marks the beginning and end of every day for me.

For example, as I raise the blinds each morning lately and look out at my yard, I wonder if the American Goldfinches have left to go south. Meanwhile, I search the bushes for the familiar white tail flash of the Northern Junco, usually an October-arriver and a sure sign that winter’s on the way. Small pleasures add up over a season and a lifetime. And they add a lively sense of “anything can happen — any minute” to one’s life. This time of year, even here in Chestnut Hill, if you stop and look up to the skies often enough, you’ll see eagles soaring by.

For introducing me to this pleasure, and, more importantly, helping me understand what I was seeing, Roger Tory Peterson has my lifelong admiration, respect, and gratitude. He made the process of immersion in the natural world easy for me and millions of other people. Before he developed his “Peterson” system of showing field markings, field guides were difficult to use and less reliable. His system has been broadly adapted to produce Peterson Field Guides for plants, mammals, fishes and reptiles, the earth and sky, the seashore and ecology. They are the most successful and popular natural history works ever published.

Peterson was born in Jamestown, N.Y., in 1908, and grew up there. After high school he moved to New York City, where he studied at the Art Students League and The National Academy of Design. For three years after that he taught high school science and art, while he developed his own system of field identification for birds. He painted all the eastern North American birds, in several plumages, and gender differences, showed their field marks, described their calls and songs, and drew maps showing their geographical ranges. His first field guide appeared in 1934. It sold out almost instantly and has never been out of print since. The first printing is now considered a rare book and is quite valuable.

Ever since I first used his guide to identify that female cardinal back on Wayne Avenue, he has been a constant figure in my life. I have read numerous biographies of him, read all his books, followed his career. I have never taken a vacation without taking my beat-up Peterson along. I introduced my two youngest sisters, Jody and Kathy, to birding when they were little and they have never stopped loving to take nature vacations, binoculars and bird book always a necessity.

With the rise of birding interest in America (nicely described in Scott Weidensaul’s recent book, “Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding,” 2007), a number of other field guides have come to take precedence over Peterson’s, notably Ken Kauffman’s and David Sibley’s. Peterson’s is outmoded, or old fashioned, to most advanced birders. It’s certainly not as thorough.

I own both of those new guides and several others that have appeared, but my Peterson has the advantage of having my hand-scrawled notations throughout it. Next to Lesser Black-backed Gull, for example, scrawled in a shaky hand, I can read: “Seen Feb 13, 1988 at Conowingo Dam, northeastern Maryland.”

Those words evoke memories of squinting through my telescope for several hours, looking through a gathering of thousands of Herring and Greater Black-backed Gulls who stood on the ice below the huge dam. I was with my friend Dick Tyre, who used to be Head of English at GFS and Nancy Posell, former director of Abington Library, and my wife, Janet. Neither Janet nor Dick was a birder, but they gamely kept us company.

The Delaware Valley Ornithological Club’s telephone hotline had said a Lesser Black-back was there on the ice below the dam. Yes, but where? We played “Where’s Waldo” with thousands of lookalike birds, stamping our feet and drinking hot chocolate and blowing on our cold fingers, till, finally: there he was, a smaller black-backed gull, with YELLOW, not flesh-colored legs. Yowzah! A new lifelist bird for two of us, and a reason for Dick and Janet to grab us by the collars and back to the warm car.

Just one of hundreds, thousands, really, of wonderful days spent walking around, hoping to see something I’d never seen before. A lifelong gift. 

Once, just once, in my lifetime, I had a chance to meet Roger Tory Peterson. A few years ago, my wife and I had gone down to Cape May to watch fall migration. From the third-floor window of our beach-front hotel I looked down in the parking lot and said, “There’s Roger Tory Peterson.” He was talking with some other men.

Janet came over and looked. “You should go down and say hello,” she said.

Life is not that simple for me, not where my heroes are concerned. 

We did go down — we were going out for breakfast anyway, and were parked in that same lot. Peterson was still there, talking to three men, whose vests and hats showed they were serious birders, possibly even the organizers of the event they’d invited him to.

Janet nudged me.

I thought of that afternoon in Germantown and the cardinal I’d identified by using his book for the first time. I remembered the thousands of hours I’d spent since, walking alone in swamps and bogs, or on lonely mountain trails ... in Florida and Maine and Colorado and Michigan and the Caribbean and Kenya ... searching... for birds, of course, but also for ... whatever it is a person who compulsively walks alone a lot is searching for.

I wanted to tell him how he had shaped much of my life. How much pleasure he had given me. But what can you say in five seconds? Especially when the man is a titan who has been awarded every science and nature medal of every nature society in the world. What can you say to such a genius, when he is standing in a parking lot on a Sunday morning talking to other people? And maybe hasn’t had breakfast yet either!

Janet nudged me.

I paused for a second. Peterson and the other men were enjoying a good laugh. The words formed in my mind, “May I interrupt? I’d just like to say hello and say ‘Thank you’ for all the hours of pleasure I’ve had using your book.” He’d then shake my hand and say “Thank you,” or “Glad to hear that.” And I’d leave and go have breakfast and make “I’ll never wash this hand again” jokes.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. The words felt so horribly inadequate. 

I regret that now. As Bob Dylan sang, “But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

Too late now. Peterson died in 1996.

 If you didn’t know about Peterson till you read this, I’ll have done you a service by writing about him. And if you like the sort of simple pleasure I’ve described, and you treat yourself to it, I’ll suggest to you the simplest way to show you appreciate a kindness done: pass it on.

And by the way, the Wyncote Audubon Society is sponsoring a talk by recent Roger Tory Peterson biographer, Elizabeth Rosenthal. She’ll be at Plymouth Meeting Friends at 7:30 p.m. this Friday, Oct. 16.

More late nights with the Phils in store
by ADAM SERFASS

I was texting back and forth with my friend Allie Beer last week. A Yankee fan, she was at the new Yankee Stadium for a playoff game against the Twins.

I was glad for her.  I hate the Yankees but, appreciate as a baseball fan the intense feeling she was experiencing.

I was right there a few days before her.  Not at Yankee Stadium. I was at The Bank to watch the Phillies for Game 2 of the NLDS. We lost that day, but the ballpark experience was great.

Which brings me to a sore subject.  Money. Money and MLB (or any sport) should not be mixed. They are ammonia and bleach. The Yankees got a great time slot for their divisional series simply because they have a larger market. Philly doesn’t. It gets the shaft in the form of a 2:37 p.m. start time.

And the fans get the shaft, too. My wife bought postseason tickets for us but learned soon after the schedule came out that she couldn’t make it. I wanted to share the experience with my wife, but she had to work. So I took my brother instead. I lent him a Phillies jersey and we caught the train to Citizens Bank Park…  I missed Nicole

Aaron and I made our very first postseason game ever together. We were pumped. We lost, but the rush and noise I made was incredible.  I lost my voice.

How could I keep quiet watching Charlie manage the pen? He used Blanton and Happ? Bastardo?  Moving on to use Myers? Big gamble that didn’t work. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t work.

But things worked out for us big time on Monday night. We came back from the brink and are headed to L.A. for the NLCS and no more whacky 10 p.m. or 2 p.m. start times.

But what can we expect going forward?

The offense is good. If Jimmy Rollins hits, we win games

I’m still queasy about our pen, though, even after Lidge took care of Troy Tulowitzki to win the series. Whenever he comes up, I still hide my eyes. Oh no!! A Lidge-tastophy is about to happen!  He still has 11 blown saves this season.  

How will Cole Hamels do in Game 1?

Hamels did a great job this season. Now we need him to do a great job this postseason. We need last year’s Cole Hamels.

In Game 2 Hamels was OK.  His wife went into labor, and he was off and running. I hope now with the baby out of the way (ho ho) that he can focus on the games in front of him. There’ll be plenty of time in a few weeks for diapers and interrupted sleep. Right now, we need a pennant.

There is a deep concern in Philly for our pitchers and how they are played.  I just touched on one side of the problem. I’m not even too sure I gave a solution (I don’t have one).  If it was only that simple we could throw in a sports psychologist in the bullpen and make everything better.  

Anyway, we’re in the NLCS. And more late nights are ahead. If we make the World Series, I think Fox doesn’t get the games started till after 9:30 p.m. They need lots of prime time for Joe Buck and Tim McCarver to talk and talk and talk and… snore.

Anyway, we’re on tot the next round so I can put the Prozac back on the shelf… until the next time Ryan Madson appears in relief.