Category: Uncategorized
A Life of Quiet Giving: Dana Tobin, 1946-2020
October 21, 2020Editor’s note: Dana Tobin worked for many years at the Schuylkill Center from the 70s into the 90s, and was founding executive director Dick James’s right hand man for many of those years. We sadly heard he had passed away recently. Our friend Jon Roesser at Weavers Way Coop, where Dana was also very active, just wrote this essay for the Shuttle, their newspaper. We thought we’d share it with you, the Schuylkill Center family, as well. RIP, old friend.
A few years ago, Dana Tobin had an idea: Set up a way for Co-op members to have their five…
Manayunk and Manatawna: Our Lenape Place Names
October 11, 2020One of the pleasures of teaching and talking about our Roxborough land are our historic place names, so many of them Lenape in origin: Wissahickon, Conshohocken, Manatawna, Cinnaminson, Manayunk. Widen the lens a bit, and Philadelphia maps burst with Lenape words: Shackamaxon, Wingohocking, Kingsessing, Tulpehocken, Tioga.
Sadly, Phildelphians are taught too little, if anything, about the Lenape, the original people here, our First People, and too much that is taught is at best misleading and too often wrong. That statue of a Lenape chief that guards a bluff above the Wissahickon? He is carelessly outfitted as a Western Plains Indian,…
Belated Earth Day at 50 exhibition in our gallery
September 22, 2020“There is no planet B” was one of the many slogans calling for environmental action during Earth Day in 2019. Even if this year’s celebrations of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary have been subdued in the wake of the worldwide pandemic, its ideals and insights are more vivid than ever before. After a significant delay, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education is presenting for this occasion the new exhibition “Ecotactical: Earth Day at 50,” which opened to the public on September 21, in its newly reopened Visitor Center.
Since its beginnings, Earth Day has lobbied for an expansive view of the…
Our Staff Pandemic Stories
August 8, 2020Over the past five months, most of the Schuylkill Center staff has been working at home. For us, being indoors is anathema to the spirit of our mission of connecting people with nature. But, we have pressed on with our Zoom meetings and online teaching while continuing to learn how to share our passion for the environment with our students, members and the public via a virtual platform. Here are three vignettes of how our staff is facing the Coronavirus head-on.
[caption id="attachment_271519" align="alignnone" width="640"] Teacher Ann with feathered friends Louis and Serena[/caption]
Ann Ward, Kindergarten Lead Teacher
When the…
Schuylkill Center’s latest response to COVID
July 31, 2020While the Visitor Center remains closed during the week, we are open on Saturdays for the month of August. Hikers and visitors to our trails will be able to use our facilities and visit our gift shop from 9-5 on Saturdays only. The Visitor Center will remain closed weekdays
The gates to our main parking lot are now open 9-5.
The Wildlife Clinic is currently accepting patients for rehabilitation, but is unable to accept walk-in patient admissions. If you have found an injured or orphaned animal in need of assistance, please call our 24-hour wildlife hotline at 215-482-7300 x option…
Three Musketeers Walking our Trails
July 26, 2020If you’re out on our trails early on a weekday morning, most likely you’ll happen upon an energetic trio enjoying the sights and sounds of our 340 acre forest. Dr. Evamarie Malsch, Dr. Louise Lisi and Gail Harp are our neighbors from Cathedral Village, the continuing care community around the corner. As frequent visitors, they have come to know our trails intimately. “We’re really lucky to have the Schuylkill Center so closeby,” Evamarie comments, “and we’ve been going there at least twice a week to hike since the start of the pandemic.”
[caption id="attachment_271499" align="alignnone" width="640"] Three "masked" Musketeers walking…
Foraged Flavor: Eat Your Weeds!
July 9, 2020Visit almost any open space in Roxborough or Manayunk, and you’ll find a surprising cornucopia of wonderful taste sensations: dandelions and daylilies, Queen Anne’s lace and curly dock. That’s right, these are all weeds that simply taste great, and are free for the taking.
Wild plant forager Tama Matsuoka Wong has written a gorgeous cookbook, Foraged Flavor, featuring 88 recipes for the plants named above, and more. Recipes like chocolate-dipped wild spearmint leaves. Sumac and fig tart. Chilled mango soup with sweet spruce tips. Wild mustard greens and chorizo wild rice. Sound yummy? You bet.
Tama, a New Jersey resident…
Help us Restore our Damaged Pine Grove
June 30, 2020Pine Grove is easily one of our most beloved features, kids climbing in its many branches, parents inhaling the calming scent, everyone grateful for its cooling shade. But the grove was devastated in early June from a derecho-- a supercell thunderstorm-- that slammed into the region, knocking down trees and branches everywhere, causing massive power outages, and killing several people.
The storm sliced through Pine Grove like a knife cutting butter, a straight-line of trunks tumbling to the ground, more than 20 trunks snapping off and piled unceremoniously on the ground-- and each other.
We closed our trails for a…
Natural Selections: COVID at Cathedral Village
May 31, 2020As COVID-19 deaths in America hit the 100,000 mark, there has been a lot of attention-- TV news stories and front-page newspaper accounts-- on senior centers and nursing homes, and rightfully so, as fully one-third of those deaths have occurred at these sites.
So as Roxborough wrestles with the virus, it seemed especially important to talk with Charles Gergits, who for the last five years has been the executive director of Cathedral Village, the continuing care retirement community off Ridge Avenue by the Andorra Shopping Center. How has Cathedral Village fared?
“We're holding our own,” Charles told me last week,…
How We’re Navigating the Pandemic’s Whitewaters
May 14, 2020
Like all businesses, nonprofits, and even families, the Schuylkill Center has been struggling through the pandemic and the now-two-months-and-counting lockdown. While hikers and families have happily discovered the benefits of our 340 acres of forests and meadows, our staff is chafing to return, and we’re waiting for the science (and the governor) to tell us when this might happen.
It might surprise you to learn that we hire more than 50 employees: educators who lead school field trips on environmental science, rehabilitators who heal injured and sick wild animals, preschool teachers who use our forest as their classroom, artists who…
