Mount Vernon Cemetery
Mount Vernon Cemetery was founded in the latter half of the 19th century when rural cemeteries were becoming fashionable in the United States’ and the Swampoodle neighborhood in lower northwest Philadelphia was on the outskirts of town.
Today, the neighborhood around Mount Vernon Cemetery is known as Strawberry Mansion and it has been the subject of disinvestment and neglect for decades. The absentee former owner of the cemetery is one of the perpetrators of that neglect. For decades, flora and fauna have been the caretakers of the grounds, transforming the once manicured lawns into an unruly urban forest.
Unfortunately, neglect also lead to the destruction of monuments, an easy dumping place for inconsiderate contractors, and eventual takeover by invasive porcelain berry vines. In the summer of 2020, a neighbor of the property had the parcel placed under conservatorship so a community group could begin rehabilitating the space. Since then, we have spent thousands of man-hours cutting dangerous trees and invasive vines, removing litter and illegally dumped materials, and surveying the land to understand where monuments exist and in what state they are. The cemetery is now in the process of being sold to a cemetery operator that specializes in green burials. The stated goal of the new owner is to maintain the cemetery as a refuge for wildlife and human life alike by taming the land enough to make it safe, but not so much that the deer and foxes are compelled to retreat.
Schuylkill River Rats
Schuylkill River Rats is a multidimensional project aiming to build community in the urban and post-urban areas of Southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and Northern Delaware. It identifies, elevates, and celebrates unique social and cultural features of the area to counter prevailing, unfavorable narratives about the region.
The mission of the River Rats project is to provide a resource that collects & distributes art, history, and other media drawn from the streets and underground scenes in Southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and Northern Delaware. It displays the crafts & stories of this region as a form of folk art unique to the urbanized east coast of the United States.
Genealogy Research
I use the open source Gramps software to build a comprehensive genealogy that tells the story of my family. Gramps includes family trees, life events, GIS, and media archives to store & organize photos and reference materials collected from family members and other resources. I’ve also scanned hundreds of pages of typed family history, which I then used Tesseract open-source OCR software to digitize. I’ve also collected documents, slides, and photos dating back over a century which I am in the process of digitizing.