New rules proposed for food handouts on the Parkway

If you're poor and hungry, you can get a free meal almost any day of the week on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

On Sunday and Monday nights, the volunteer group Food Not Bombs hands out hot dinners.

On Monday afternoons, Adam Bruckner, an advocate for the homeless, sets up in front of the Free Library with chicken hot dogs and pasta - his routine for 10 years.

There are meals from members of a Korean church, as well as once-a-week rice dinners from an older woman whom everyone calls Mom.

The outdoor feedings draw dozens, if not hundreds, of the city's most desperate people. They come from shelters and halfway houses. Some live on the streets; others are just out of prison.

But the routine on the Parkway could be disrupted if the city's Board of Health succeeds in setting new regulations for outdoor feedings.

The presence of food lines in the heart of the city's museum district has been a long-simmering source of tension between those who want to help and those who think there is a better way to do it.

Last week, the Board of Health approved a draft of new rules - the first such guidelines for outdoor feedings. If the rules are made final, groups will have to get a permit from the city to hand out meals. The kitchens where they prepare meals will have to be inspected and they will have to tell the board where and when they will dispense food and what they will serve.

Deputy Mayor Donald F. Schwarz said the city does not now have any regulatory authority over groups that give away food outdoors. "My purpose in doing this is about the safety of food for people in Philadelphia," Schwarz said.

A final vote on the new rules cannot occur until after a 30-day comment period that ends March 15 and another hearing.

Many organizations view the proposed rules as an attempt by the city to rein in outdoor feedings on the eve of the opening of the $200 million new home of the Barnes Foundation, one of several big investments on the Parkway. The Rodin Museum also completed a $19 million face-lift, and the $4.7 million Sister Cities Park is opening across from the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul.

Schwarz, who also is health commissioner, denied any connection between those events and the new regulations. "I don't really want to take on all the people who are concerned about the Barnes," Schwarz said. "There will never be a time to implement regulations where something isn't going on."