Jazz festival has helped rejuvenate West Oak Lane

THE TWO PHOTOGRAPHS in Jack Kitchen's office tell the tale:

One is a black-and-white aerial shot of the Ogontz Plaza shopping center circa 1983, dilapidated, almost entirely deserted and covered in graffiti.

The second is a full-color shot of the same block from the main stage of the 2006 West Oak Lane Jazz and Arts Festival, the clean, thriving storefronts serving as a backdrop for a crowd of more than 100,000 people - despite a weekend-long downpour.

"You never want to forget where you came from," Kitchen explained.

As executive director of OARC, the community-development corporation dedicated to the revitalization of West Oak Lane, Kitchen may need that "before" picture on his wall to remind him of what the neighborhood once was. But walking Ogontz Avenue with Kitchen, the "after" picture comes alive.

Colorful awnings advertise eclectic businesses. Plants are tended by workers sporting hats emblazoned with the Jazz and Arts Festival logo. Local residents approach Kitchen on the street as an old friend.

Celebrating its fifth year in its most impressive incarnation yet, the West Oak Lane Jazz and Arts Festival, this Friday through Sunday, has become "a marketing tool that surpassed my wildest expectations," Kitchen said.

"Last year we expected 150,000, 200,000 people. We got 300,000. This year I don't know what to expect. We've prepared for a crowd of 750,000 just in case."

Along with the anticipated crowds, the festival is expanding this year in almost every way conceivable.

Physically, it's expanding to cover two extra blocks - the four stages, artists and vendors sprawling between the 7100 and 7400 blocks of Ogontz Avenue.

The weekend-long festival is being preceded by three extra days of music through tomorrowon Stage 2, outside Sadiki's restaurant. These "pre-festival jams," from 7 to 11 p.m., feature such acts as the Nina Bundy Quartet tonight and Free Expressions tomorrow.

There will be more marquee acts during the festival, and they'll be scattered throughout the day rather than closing each night. Among them are Philly-born jazz legend Benny Golson, "Tonight Show" bandleader Kevin Eubanks, and R&B/funk acts War, Mandrill, the O'Jays, the Whispers, and Ashford & Simpson.

OARC itself is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and its story explains how the city's Northwest section has been able to foster a festival garnering increasing amounts of national and international attention.

"The festival has served to market West Oak Lane over the past five or six years," Kitchen said. "Prior to that, there was 20 years' work that went into prepping and getting it ready."

In 1983, freshman state Rep. Dwight Evans looked at West Oak Lane and saw "a community that was not moving, a community that didn't have an identity and was trying to figure out where it was going to go in the future.

"The community always had solid demographics," Evans said over the phone from Harrisburg. "The people were there, but the life had disappeared. The whole personality of the community had disappeared."

Along with a group of concerned local residents, Evans founded the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corporation, which today goes simply by the acronym OARC as its mission and impact have spread well beyond the Ogontz Avenue corridor.

Kitchen was a regional-facilities manager for Rite-Aid in 1990 when he made his first visit to West Oak Lane.

"I met this crazy, skinny state rep named Dwight Evans who wanted this drug store in the middle of nowhere," Kitchen recalled. Through that experience and a second encounter during his time with another nonprofit, Kitchen became familiar with the work that Evans and OARC were doing. He soon signed on as director of real-estate development.

Kelly H. Walker, owner of Art Noir, was looking to open a store in Germantown when Kitchen began trying to entice him into West Oak Lane.

"I don't think the community was ready for the vision that OARC had," Walker said. "When we came along with a custom frame shop on Ogontz Avenue, even the neighbors snickered at us. This kind of thing was unheard of. But OARC was behind us 100 percent with this out-of-the-box idea."

Though he only moved to West Oak Lane nine years ago, Walker has seen photos from the 1980s in Kitchen's office. "In those pictures, it is Beirut," he said, recalling that even as he moved in, he questioned the decision.

"The mall [Ogontz Plaza] had some iffy stuff in it at the time," Walker said, "and these iffy businesses started closing down one by one around me. I was literally thinking, 'What the hell is going on?' What I didn't know is that Jack had closed them - he didn't renew their leases because they weren't in line with what he was trying to do.

"OARC has been very picky in trying to find business that help make this an enclave where people would like to come. A thriving avenue is really important for any community."

April Hidouri didn't need quite so much convincing to move to West Oak Lane. She grew up in the neighborhood, mere blocks from the spot where she opened Cornbread and Coffee.

"If you cut my heart, I bleed West Oak Lane," Hidouri said. "As a little kid, I used to be scared to walk to this corner. It was like a black hole. Then I left and went to college and fell in love with coffee shops. I thought they were a safe haven, but everywhere I went, there were no coffee shops in our neighborhoods. So I decided to come back and open one."

Cornbread and Coffee opened in 2004, concurrently with the first Jazz and Arts Festival.

"Six or seven years ago, I called Starbucks and asked them to open a store in West Oak Lane," Kitchen recalled. "I think it was five minutes until the guy at the other end stopped laughing at me. So I thought, 'I'm tired of this nonsense. We're going to find entrepreneurs.' April came in with the best plan and the best passion and opened Cornbread and Coffee, and it's a wonderful neighborhood get-together place."

Starbucks might not find the suggestion quite as funny today.

Over the past five years, Ogontz Avenue has welcomed a Subway franchise, a State Farm Insurance office, and a Tastykake Outlet run as a job program for high school students. Kitchen sees those as direct results of the Jazz and Arts Festival.

"Six years ago, despite the first 15 years we'd spent doing economic development and greening initiatives and facade improvements, people were not coming to the community to buy housing. People didn't know where West Oak Lane was."

Now, Kitchen says, people from all over the world have heard of West Oak Lane, citing hits on the festival Web site from 62 countries and every state except South Dakota. Vacant housing has dropped from more than 350 to fewer than 70.

The idea for the festival struck Kitchen late one night as a way to build upon the annual Super Saturday street fair OARC had run for 18 years. "I thought, 'This is the hook we need to really rebrand West Oak Lane. We need to take Super Saturday and make it something enormous, a regional draw to showcase what we'd done, and make people understand what West Oak Lane was all about.' "

To produce the festival, Kitchen enlisted Lifeline Music Coalition, the partnership of bassist/artistic director Warren Oree and publicist/executive director Graziella D'Amelio.

"We had just come off of executive producing our first festival," Oree explained. "It's been an interesting relationship in the sense that we have the executive producer, OARC, and producers, Lifeline Music, and we have to work with each other to make this happen. You have to have the money, but you also have to have some vision and courage."

Lifeline pushed for an expansive vision of the festival, stressing the importance of utilizing local artists and devising the four-stage setup in the festival's second year.

"It's programmed so that people are inundated with the music," said Oree, who also performs each year as leader of the Arpeggio Jazz Ensemble.

"I'll never forget the experience that I had when we finished performing last year, and I came out onto the middle of Ogontz Avenue.

"In front of me was Brass Heaven on the main stage, where all you could see were the lights and the trombones up in the air; to the right of me was Eduardo Cintron and his Latin Jazz Band; behind me the Sun Ra Arkestra was on, and you could see the lights and their flashy cloaks; and on the stage I'd just gotten off of, Kevin Mahogany was on scatting and singing.

"I thought, 'This is what a festival should be - music coming at you from every angle, food, art, nobody cussing and fighting, no foul, funky attitudes, just people grooving and having a good time.' " *

E-mail Shaun Brady at bradys@phillynews.com.