Hello everyone - I wanted to copy to the listserve my article for the May HPCC Newsletter. Our special guest at the May HPCC meeting will be local documentary filmmaker Chris Ivey, who will be bringing to us an installment of his East of Liberty film series. I would heartily encourage all of you to join us for the viewing and a time of conversation following. I hope to see you there... Eric PS. You can get a preview of some of the East of Liberty footage by visiting Chris Ivey's website, www.eastofliberty.com. /// Hello, Highland Park! The month of May brings, once again, our annual Community Council newsletter to every address in the Highland Park neighborhood. I want you to know, if you don’t regularly receive newsletters, that the Highland Park Community Council is a group of neighborhood residents and business owners who are working to make our neighborhood the best it can be. I would like to encourage you to get involved in the great things the HPCC is doing, from planting trees to celebrating Bryant street restaurants to maintaining the Super Playground to talking about issues of community concern. As HPCC President, I have the privilege of working with the outstanding volunteers on our board and committees to bring you the Reservoir of Jazz concert series, maintain the community listserve, help you connect with the local schools, coordinate the Annual Yard Sale, run children’s activities, and do all the other things in which the HPCC is engaged. I also get to write articles for our newsletter, which goes out ten times a year to all HPCC members and which will hopefully (read my lips!) start going digital this year. I am, and for some time have been, a big fan of documentaries. I loved Paper Clips, which was about an 8th-grade school project to develop a memorial of the Holocaust; Spellbound, which highlighted eight contestants in the 1999 National Spelling Bee; and Word Wars, a documentary about serious Scrabble players. I have also watched several fascinating documentaries in recent years that involved serious social commentary, most notably Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina film about New Orleans, When the Levees Broke. Part of what I liked about each of these films was the space they afforded for exploring their various subjects. There also is a certain skill involved in picking people to talk about a given event or issue, letting them have their say, and assembling it all into a narrative that’s worth watching. With the stories and film footage, you feel like you actually get to live, for a time, the lives of these people – so different from you, and yet simultaneously so much the same. Which makes it all the more shocking when you suddenly, unexpectedly, watch a documentary and you recognize some of the people talking…you see places you pass by every week…and you realize that some documentary filmmaker has turned his or her gaze towards your corner of the world. This was the experience I had a couple of months back, when I first was exposed to the East of Liberty film series by documentary filmmaker Chris Ivey. As a Highland Park resident for 13 years, I was aware of the high rises that were demolished in East Liberty a few years back to make room for redevelopment efforts. I was there with my family on the day that people got to take turns launching paintballs at the windows of one of the buildings, before the the building was actually knocked down. What I was not aware of was how many of the previous residents and their neighbors had mixed feelings about the building’s impending demise, and the larger process issues and changes that had been made in the community to get to that point. Chris Ivey, who was in the neighborhood capturing video footage to chronicle the demise of the towers, was surprised to hear about these mixed feelings. It was, for him, the beginning of a journey of exploration of the many changes that have come to East Liberty over the last few decades, and how various people who live, work or shop there feel about those changes. Ivey’s many interviews for the East of Liberty project evoked perspectives and voices that I hadn’t previously heard, or heard clearly, in many of the presentations and discussions I’ve previously been involved in regarding development efforts in the East End of the city. Many of the speakers cast a fairly critical eye on these development efforts. Watching the film made me feel like I was rediscovering a place I thought I knew fairly well, but had never truly understood. The fact that this is a neighborhood next door to me – to us – made the film all the more compelling. So I asked Chris Ivey if he would be willing to come to the HPCC and share some of his East of Liberty footage with us. He graciously agreed to do so. On Thursday, May 20th, Chris will be our featured presenter at our next HPCC meeting. During this meeting, he will introduce and then present a one-hour segment of his documentary, with time afterward for questions and answers. As the East of Liberty project is ongoing, he may be videotaping the Q&A session and using some of the questions and issues raised there for future installments of the documentary. I invite you to come and join us for this special presentation. Bring an open mind and some good questions! As the evening will be quite full, I plan to start the meeting promptly at 7 PM, so get there early to get the best seats! For those of you who haven’t joined us before, the HPCC meets on the third Thursday of most months at 7 PM at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 5801 Hampton Street. Please take some time to read through this issue of the newsletter and get a sense of the many ways the HPCC engages in the life of our neighborhood. We ask that you consider joining the HPCC, and that you also consider participating in our neighborhood listserve (neighborhood@highlandparkpa.com). I always welcome people contacting me at boardwalk_2000@yahoo.com or 412-661-1176 with any thoughts, questions, concerns or suggestions they might have. And again, please join us for our meetings the third Thursday of the month, including our special East of Liberty presentation by Chris Ivey on May 20th. I look forward to seeing you! Eric D. Randall, President Highland Park Community Council