A Richard Allen reunion

Is Robert Farms proud?

He was standing yesterday in the midst of the sun-splashed 19th annual Richard Allen Projects Reunion on Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park, friends of six decades going to and fro, shaking hands, slapping backs, giving hugs, and singing the praises of his granddaughters.

"Straight A's," he said, beaming. "Straight A's!"

One granddaughter, Quadira Harper, had just graduated from the Charter High School of Architecture and Design.

She won a scholarship from the Original Richard Allen Committee, organizers of the reunion, to help pay for college. She will attend Penn State-Schuylkill Haven next year.

"My other granddaughter has an internship at Penn," he told fellow Richard Allen alum A. Bruce Crawley, the well-known public relations executive.

Crawley shook his hand.

"We mentor the Spring Garden School," Farms told him.

Both men moved from the Richard Allen Homes long ago, but they are tied together by the experience of growing up there, an experience that crosses decades and is filled with sometimes conflicting and conflicted memories.

Richard Allen was a massive public-housing project that broke ground in 1940, took in its first residents in 1941, and eventually encompassed more than 1,300 apartment units in 53 buildings covering 31 acres between 10th and 12th Streets south of Girard Avenue.

"You'd come outside - there were 1,200 units so there were kids everywhere," Crawley said. "Each block was a unit, a neighborhood in itself. We played baseball, football. We played marbles. It was great."

Farms' mother moved into Richard Allen in 1942.

"We were about the third family there," he said. Each building had gardens and picket fences.

"It was beautiful," said Steve Jones, whose family was living at Richard Allen when he was born in 1959.

"Everybody got along, everyone watched everyone's child. If anyone had fallen into hardship with a job, you'd go around and make a collection. We always helped everyone."

That is not to say that life at Richard Allen was without blemish. Far from it. Many friends of the hundreds at the reunion yesterday - indeed, many picnic attendees themselves - spent significant time in jail. Some fell into drug and alcohol abuse. Others were killed as a result of the gang violence that turned virulent when drugs began sweeping the neighborhood in the 1960s and particularly the 1970s.

The Richard Allen Homes themselves physically deteriorated at a rapid rate. The city housing authority demolished them in the 1990s and replaced them with several hundred traditional townhouses.

Thomas Singleton, 58, remembers the slide all too well. He became a gang member after his family moved to Richard Allen in 1965. Singleton struggled with drugs and alcohol for 20 years before breaking free.

Standing yesterday in the shade of a maple with music coming from loudspeakers and old friends and enemies all around, he said matter-of-factly, "I turned my life around."

"We are all united in community," said Singleton, who is completing work on his doctorate in higher education administration at the University of Toledo.

"That guy over there, he was in another gang. We are thankful to see each other alive."

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