The hands reach out.
And, black and white, they touch.
In Grays Ferry, the South Philadelphia neighborhood troubled for decades by tensions between blacks and whites, residents who helped design a huge mural consider touching hands an accomplishment.
Yesterday, Mayor Rendell and Grays Ferry leaders dedicated the mural, on the side of a rowhouse facing a vacant lot at the southwest corner of 29th and Wharton Streets.
The mural, 25 feet tall and 45 feet wide, is a painting of hands, black and white, touching.
``This is a good thing for Grays Ferry,'' the mayor told a crowd of more than 100 as he stood in front of the mural yesterday, ``and a great thing for the city of Philadelphia.''
And the mayor announced that a community development council would be set up soon, with $115,000 in private and public funds, to help Grays Ferry deal with its concerns.
The William Penn Foundation on Thursday agreed to an $85,000 grant, a Rendell aide said, to go along with $15,000 from the Philadelphia Foundation and $15,000 from the city's Office of Housing and Community Development.
The mural stands across from the city-owned Finnegan Playground, where, in the warming sunshine yesterday, a few neighborhood folks were taking shots at four basketball backboards.
``It's good,'' Dwayne Parks, 14, said of the mural. ``Maybe it means black and white people are finally coming together.''
``It's uplifting,'' said Kathy Diering, 44, ``for a place that's downtrodden.''
Parks, who is black, was shooting hoops with a couple of young black friends. Diering, who is white, was shooting with a white friend.
In an earlier decade in Grays Ferry, whites played basketball at such a city playground at one time of day and blacks at another.
The mural was designed by Jane Golden, the artistic director of the Mural Arts Program of the Philadelphia Recreation Department, and painted by a staff of four, primarily Peter Pagast.
Why hands?
Neighborhood leaders suggested other motifs, Golden said in an interview, but mostly they ``kept talking about hands, hands joined together, hands united in peace.''
And so the finished work is of 11 hands, hands of several Grays Ferry folks, hands of many skin tones.
``We had a lot of people come,'' she said, `` . . . black, white, young, old.''
Golden's husband, Anthony Heriza, a TV producer at Rutgers University, had stood on a ladder and asked folks to stand in circles beneath him while he photographed their extended hands.
