John Marchese is a New York-based journalist and author, most recently, of The Violin Maker: A Search for the Secrets of Craftsmanship, Sound and Stradivari. He contributes regularly to Philadelphia Magazine.

In the hardscrabble section of West Philadelphia called Mantua, the man who could help change the neighborhood comes face to face with a symbol of its drug-infested and crime-ridden past.

John Fry, a 54-year-old resident of the leafy and exclusive suburb of Bryn Mawr, steps out of his pickup truck onto the sun-scorched corner of 33rd and Mount Vernon streets and stands in his sober black suit at the foot of a three-story tall mural painted on the blank side of a row house. It is a portrait of local legend Herman Wrice.


Wrice was a big man with a bigger personality. Brought to Mantua as a child by his mother, he was a gang member as a youth but eventually quit, going on to found a social service program he called the Young Great Society and later leading Mantua Against Drugs, a group renowned for its fearless confrontations with neighborhood dealers. Wearing MAD’s signature white hardhat, Wrice not only wielded a bullhorn to lead chants during anti-drug rallies, he was known to carry a sledgehammer to bust down the doors of drug houses. On the night before an anti-drug march in 2001, he died of a heart attack at the age of 61.

Fry is soft-spoken and physically unimposing, but he has a reputation for being strongly determined and quietly persuasive, and he possesses his own set of tools—things like tax increment financing and discretionary budgeting power—whose use might very well alter the fortunes of Mantua in ways that Wrice could never have imagined.

And Mantua’s fortunes are in urgent need of alteration. High-tone name notwithstanding (the original Mantua was the home of the Roman poet Virgil), the area of trash-strewn empty lots and rundown brick houses has long been an unsolvable blot on the Philadelphia map, separated from the city’s grand Museum of Art district by the Schuykill River and a swath of commuter railroad tracks. Long ago carved out of what had once been part of the estate of one of the country’s first federal judges, Mantua by the mid-20th century had become a stable home for working-class homeowners when white flight and urban decay turned it into a center of black poverty. By 1970, the area was almost completely African American, and most of its residents made half as much money each year as the average Philadelphian. By the ‘80s and ‘90s, Mantua was besieged by drug dealers, gangs and the crime that accompanied them. “You could see the devastation,” says one long-time resident. Those who could get out, did; over the last several decades, Mantua’s population declined by 50 percent.

Enter John Fry, who, almost from the day he assumed the presidency of nearby Drexel University in 2010, has made it his mission, and the mission of the school’s 26,000 students, to be what he called “the most civically engaged university in the nation.” And that very much involves the audacious task of reinventing Mantua, whose sketchy row houses and abandoned storefronts lie just minutes from the university’s compact urban campus.

None of this is charity, exactly. Gone are the days when urban schools walled themselves off as citadels of learning and allowed neighborhoods to decay around them. When Columbia kids stuck to a few blocks in Harlem and Yalies created another reality from the urban dystopia of New Haven. At the University of Pennsylvania, where Fry worked before Drexel, the Ivy League kids so feared crossing the campus’ western border that they called the McDonald’s there “McDeath”; no more. “There is a greater appreciation that a university’s fortunes reflect the place in which they are situated,” says Bruce Katz, urban expert at the Brookings Institution. To pull in the kind of faculty and students Fry needed to accelerate Drexel’s long transformation from a local technical school to a nationally ranked research powerhouse, he knew he had to do nothing less than transform its entire surroundings. He would need the skills not just of an ivory-tower academic but of a latter-day Robert Moses, imagining a new neighborhood amid the shards of the old.

New Window OPTICS: Can a University Transform a City? (Click to view gallery.)

Looking to invent new job opportunities for his university’s neighbors, Fry has announced ambitious development projects aimed at making Drexel’s piece of the University City area of Philadelphia—which also includes the University of Pennsylvania, several major hospitals and the country’s oldest urban scientific research park—into what is being branded an “Innovation Neighborhood.” Though that idea is still very much in the brochure stage, it has garnered national press for Fry and his vision to create a $2 billion center for high-tech entrepreneurial and educational partnerships just a short walk from an area better known for gangland shootings and drug deals.

Fry is well aware that it will require a long and difficult feat of engineering to build a figurative bridge between the shiny, high-tech “Innovation Neighborhood” of his imagining and the gritty corner in Mantua where Herman Wrice stares down from the painted brick wall with a look of protective menace over an area best known for gangland shootings and drug deals.

An Urban University's Hunger for Community In the latest edition of POLITICO Magazine's "What Works" series: How John Fry is growing hope in West Philly. Filmed by Mark Peterson. Produced by Bridget Mulcahy. Edited by Michael Schwab.

Wrice looks south toward Drexel, where the yearly undergraduate tuition of $43,135 is well more than twice the annual income in most of the homes around him. A few blocks away from the mural, Fry idled his truck recently in front of Mantua’s neighborhood school, Morton McMichael, a chronic underperformer that was recently set to be closed, but was given a reprieve thanks in part to intervention from Drexel’s school of education. Having run through four principals in three years, McMichael was a place where fewer than one in five 7th graders could read at grade level, and where discipline was so bad that teachers feared assaults not just from students, but from their parents as well.

Still, “I like to think of this as, like, the Corner of Hope,” the relentlessly sunny Fry tells me. “Right here in Mantua. Because we have a school that could be turned around. We have a recreation center that is very well used and well loved. We have some new Philadelphia Housing Authority housing.”

He’ll need that optimism: Fully half of Mantua’s 6,000 residents currently live under the poverty line. And the cash-strapped city of Philadelphia, facing a debilitating pension crisis, is not able to supply much more than basic services and moral support. With the city coordinating its application, Mantua and adjacent neighborhoods recently won a national competition to be named one of five Promise Zones around the country. The designation does not actually carry the promise of federal funding. Can a university step in to provide what a government cannot?

“There’s hope,” Fry insists. “But there’s also a lot of distress. We’re going to get into other streets here with boarded-up homes and things that are not so good.” Turning this part of West Philly around, he admits as he puts the truck into gear and drives on, will take “decades and decades and decades of commitment and work.”

***

Fry plays a long game. He is now nearly 20 years into the work of using university leadership and resources to help transform inner cities—though he took an unusual path to get here. In 1995, the Brooklyn native was a young MBA and a partner at the accounting and consulting firm Coopers Lybrand. He specialized in higher education. One of his clients was the University of Pennsylvania, which was plunged into a period of crisis sparked by a rash of armed robberies around the campus and several highly publicized attacks on its students and staff, including two murders. “At times it seemed we were in the midst of combat,” Penn’s president at the time, Judith Rodin, would write later. Rodin recruited Fry as a senior vice president, and his work quickly focused on what became known as the West Philadelphia Initiatives.

The program that emerged ranged from the superficial—planting more flowers—to the concrete—investing in multimillion-dollar real estate developments. Penn beefed up its security force, helped pay for improved lighting and surveillance cameras. Fry rounded up previously un-aligned West Philadelphia institutions to form the University City District (UCD), a cooperative organization that added additional unarmed security patrols and street cleaning. To stabilize and improve its nearby neighborhoods, Penn instituted a generous employee home purchase assistance plan. It worked with local landlords to upgrade rental properties. In some cases, the university bought houses, renovated and sold them at a loss simply to help stabilize an important block. Perhaps most importantly for the neighborhood, Penn invested heavily in a new kindergarten through eighth grade public school. Though there had long been private university lab schools for children of faculty and staff, what became known as the Penn Alexander School was a pioneer in university-public schools partnership.

Powelton Village, Philadelphia. | Mark Peterson/Redux

By the time he left Penn in 2002 to become president of Franklin and Marshall College in nearby Lancaster (where he started all over again, doing urban renewal in a smaller context), Fry had helped line up at least half a billion dollars in university and private investment in West Philadelphia, producing a new supermarket, an upscale movie theater, a hotel, dozens of new retail shops and restaurants—all of it adding up to a neighborhood transformed. Other universities took notice of what was called “The Penn Model”—or, to its detractors, “Penntrification.” Now, less than a mile across town, Fry is trying to forge an updated model of his own.

***

On a sweltering summer evening, the line is forming at a buffet table in a hallway of what had once been stables on a West Philadelphia estate. There’s bean salad, barbequed brisket, pulled chicken, corn bread. Tonight is the first open-invitation community dinner at Drexel’s new Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships, which occupies three buildings—including a restored Italianate mansion—on a grassy acre-plus lot on Spring Garden Street, the traditional boundary between Mantua and its more posh neighbor to the south, Powelton Village.

Lucy Kerman, a tall and friendly 62-year-old with a Ph.D. in history and curly, light brown hair, is acting as informal host, hugging some people as they arrive, introducing strangers. “One of the things that came out in two days of planning for the Dornsife Center,” Kerman says, “was a real hunger to talk across boundaries—across two neighborhoods.” Mantua is predominantly African American, and Powelton Village is mostly white. Nowadays, more and more Drexel students are living in Mantua and walking back and forth to the campus, but for many years there was a tacit understanding that Powelton residents did not cross their northern border of Spring Garden Street. In getting Dornsife up and running, Kerman met people who had lived a block apart for decades and had never spoken.

Lucy Kerman (right), vice provost of Drexel University, at the Dornsife Center's open-invitation community dinner. | Mark Peterson/Redux

Kerman was John Fry’s first hire at Drexel. She had worked with him at Penn and was heavily involved in establishing the new Penn-Alexander school. Now, as vice provost and director of the office that manages Drexel’s neighborhood initiatives, she has in many ways become John Fry’s John Fry. While Fry is legendary for his painfully early morning meetings—I met him at 7:30 a.m. for this article, at which point he’d already been up and working for hours—Kerman tends to work late into the evenings, provoking assistants to lock her into the office for safety.

In their nearly four years together at Drexel, Fry and Kerman have largely followed the same playbook they helped develop at Penn. Fry directed university money into street-level enhancements like beefed-up security patrols and cleaning services. Drexel introduced a generous mortgage-assistance program to help employees buy homes in Mantua and the adjacent neighborhoods of Powelton Village and West Powelton. And he appointed Kerman to head a new administrative office dedicated to neighborhood initiatives that helps coordinate everything from student volunteerism to faculty research to building a neighborhood vegetable garden.

The Dornsife Center is something different. Fry reaches for an agricultural analogy. The success of the Penn experiment, he says, allowed them to “plow some new ground” at Drexel. “The Dornsife Center was not part of our original thinking. But then one day Lucy and I were there and we started talking about extension centers—the old agricultural extension concept from the land-grant universities. That’s a concept I’m in love with, and it turns out Lucy is in love with it, too. And so we said, ‘What if we do an urban extension center?’”

It turned out to be smart politics. “Before, Drexel was considered to be the villain, that all they wanted was to gentrify the neighborhood and push poor people out,” says Mantua native Michael Thorpe, who helped represent the neighborhood in planning sessions for Dornsife. “People are starting to realize they can be good partners. They came in and said, ‘How can we help you?’ That’s a change. Now the community is actually being asked.”

The group of buildings was once a school for the deaf run by the archdiocese of Philadelphia. It had been closed and allowed to deteriorate. A few years ago, Drexel bought it and renovated using $12.5 million donated by a benefactor. The new center opened in June with gleaming, refinished floors, fresh paint and an ambitious program of community outreach.

The entire second floor of one building will be occupied by a Drexel law-school clinic that will offer pro bono help with problems like untangling home ownership titles, child custody issues or getting past criminal convictions expunged from personal records. Drexel’s culinary school developed a summer class for students and neighborhood residents to use an on-site kitchen to adapt old family recipes into healthy meals. Much of the produce will come from garden beds built by a student volunteer group called Drexel Urban Gardeners—DUG. There are computer labs for instruction ranging from basic digital literacy to web site design, studios for art and dance classes and workrooms for training in manual skills.

“I’m overwhelmed with the number of things that Drexel is able to manage and keep up in the air,” says Gwen Morris, a retired public school teacher and administrator who has lived in Mantua for 42 years. Morris has been involved in forming a new Mantua community association, and is working with neighborhood parents trying to help with the turnaround of the struggling McMichael School.

Murals across Mantua: Where many see poverty, Fry sees a "Corner of Hope." | Mark Peterson/Redux

She credits Drexel with helping inject new resources and new energy. “We have a new principal, and with good, consistent leadership you can turn that school around.” University professors and students have evaluated the reading and math skills of all 500 students at McMichael and developed an individualized learning plan for each one. The Philadelphia school district is in the midst of a severe funding crisis and recent years have seen substantial layoffs. But McMichael has managed to retain the same principal for two years and recently was given an award by school superintendents for most improved safety climate. The latest evaluations by the Drexel school of education show academic performance creeping up, mostly among younger students. “Now,” Morris says, “we have to work together and engage parents to have a vision of a Penn Alexander School in this neighborhood.”

It seems that every discussion about quality of life in the University City area eventually comes to the subject of the Penn Alexander School. It consistently ranks among the top performers in the state. Its academic instruction buttressed by ongoing coaching from Penn education faculty and graduate students, its operating budget enhanced with a yearly $1,300 per student supplement from Penn to keep class sizes down, the school is a strong magnet for parents to move into and invest in the neighborhood. Prices for homes in the catchment area of Penn Alexander are 60 percent higher than those just outside of its zone.

“People over there line up all night to get their kids into that school,” says Morris. She has heard the tales of families with homes in other Philadelphia neighborhoods renting apartments near Penn Alexander just to use the address for admission.

Now, Fry and Kerman wants to create a similar school in their part of West Philadelphia. As they see it, a high-performing public school would be the linchpin in their efforts to renew the fabric of the community.

As he drove around the campus and its neighborhoods on that early summer day, Fry arrived near the end of his tour at a complicated corner on the southwestern edge of Drexel’s campus where 36th Street meets Powelton Avenue and one of West Philadelphia’s main commercial corridors, Lancaster Avenue, bisects the street grid at an angle. On the southern edge there is a 14-acre piece of land, occupied now by several abandoned public school buildings.

Fry seeks to use Drexel as a "figurative bridge" — between widely disparate communities like Mantua and Powelton Village, and between these neighborhoods and his own vision for West Philadelphia. | Mark Peterson/Redux

The whole parcel, Fry says, “is one of the most infamous examples of urban renewal—bulldozing neighborhoods and displacing hundreds of residents.” He points to a closed school building whose architecture screamed ‘60s mediocrity. “And this is what they put here,” he says. “That’s going to be demolished.”

In a complicated and sometimes divisive move, Drexel bought this piece of property this spring for about $12 million. Fry’s plan is to fill the lot with a mixed-use development that would include nearly 3 million square feet of commercial space, and use the income and redirected tax revenue from that commercial property to help finance construction of a new, $40 million K-8 school. Fry calls it a “creative” financing solution, explaining that he can’t use Drexel’s money to build the new public school, but the beleaguered Philly school system doesn’t have the funds, either. “So we have this very complicated conversation that we’re about to get engaged in.”

The conversation already had become complicated—and sometimes acrimonious—months before, when leaders of the Powelton Village Civic Association heard of rezoning requests that the university and its development partner had submitted that would allow skyscrapers across the street from three-story row houses. The two sides talked through lawyers for a time and Drexel agreed to zoning that would keep the neighborhood side of the development at neighborhood scale.

The zoning fight is emblematic of the different obstacles Fry faces in his two target neighborhoods. Much of Mantua is a portrait of inner-city urban blight. A third of its housing lots are now vacant, weedy, forlorn places on gap-toothed blocks devoid of trees. Many of those homes left standing are tax-delinquent properties, with porches pulling away from facades and windows covered with plywood.

By contrast, the streets of Powelton Village are tree-lined and shady, filled with attractive three-story stone and brick homes. But in the last 15 years, as Drexel’s enrollment grew quickly and the majority of the student body transformed from local commuters to out-of-towners, many of Powelton’s solid, even stately, homes have been purchased by investors rather than families, and chopped into boarding houses for students. Although Powelton is ahead of Mantua in just about every socioeconomic measurement, it has become a ghetto of sorts, too: a student one.

That has angered longtime residents, says Mike Jones, outgoing president of the Powelton Village Civic Association. “One of the core things that we found in one of the initial conversations that we had with John [Fry] is that we’ve got a 12 to 16 percent home ownership rate in the neighborhood. It’s amongst the lowest in the city. And if you walk or drive around the neighborhood I wouldn’t have to tell you which blocks have homeowners on them and which blocks don’t. You can see it.”

Drexel has responded by building several new dormitories on campus (2,200 new beds will have been added by next fall) and it extended a campus residency requirement to all freshman and sophomore students. A Drexel employee is assigned to keep close watch on zoning requests in the neighborhood so that the university and neighborhood group can work together to oppose further house conversions. So the action is moving north. “I’m seeing people spend $80 or $90 thousand for a shell in Mantua,” says Michael Thorpe, whose construction company has been rehabbing affordable housing there. “They plan to turn it into student housing.”

A Drexel student in front of his rented home in Mantua. | Mark Peterson/Redux

In the meantime, Fry’s efforts to entice Drexel employees to stay local have moved slowly. Even with its generous $15,000 forgivable mortgage assistance grant, the university has seen only 28 buy into the allowed neighborhoods, and none in Powelton, where the influx of investors has made homes relatively expensive and listings scarce.

Building the new K-8 school will prove just as difficult. Though there are concerns that it could release the tide of gentrification, as happened in the neighborhood surrounding the Penn Alexander School, Fry appears determined to forge ahead. “The school is integral to our plan,” he says. “I can’t see it not being done.”

Others are not so sure. “I just don’t see how that school is going to get built,” says the head of one West Philadelphia non-profit. “The school district has no money to build a new school. But John has moved mountains before; maybe he can do it again.”

***

Touring West Philly with Fry is a master class in his brand of hopefulness. As he talks of glass towers and tech incubators he envisions near Philadelphia’s drab 30th Street train station, transforming blocks at Drexel’s doorstep that for years have been given over to shabby surface parking lots, Fry at times sounds like a real estate developer selling the sizzle. At one point, he casually refers to starchitect Robert A.M. Stern, who has designed a new Drexel building, as “Bob.”

John Fry, surrounded by books in his office, explains his plans for West Philadelphia's future. | Mark Peterson/Redux

As he envisions it, Fry’s new place would give Philadelphia its sixth public square, a vibrant 24/7 residential, retail and business district, heavy on tech companies and populated by start-ups that recognize the potential of translating academic research into new products and services. Even the very name of his campus master plan speaks to the scale of his ambition: “Transforming the Modern Urban University.”

It’s only about a dozen blocks from the center of Fry’s proposed Innovation Neighborhood to Mantua’s monument to Herman Wrice, but right now it seems like two different worlds. To everyone but Fry, that is. “If that bridge can be built, that could be really special,” he says. “That’s the big idea here.”