Center City

Gambling foes filled the audience at Wednesday's hearing before the state Gaming Control Board, silently standing to strongly protest the building of another casino in Philadelphia. About 75 people, mostly from Chinatown, held anti-casino signs during back-to-back testimony from gaming opponents at the end of the fourth and last day of public input on a second license. The protesters represented a coalition of community groups called No Casino in Our City. While most of the earlier speakers were endorsing one project or another, the 11 people to testify at the end of the hearing denounced gambling as bad public policy that was promoting addiction.

Last year's inaugural Center City Jazz Festival taught Ernest Stuart, its director, an important lesson: Never book yourself to perform if you're also running the show. He recalls that last year, just as he was about to step onstage with his trombone, "my phone started ringing. " The festival's headliner was threatening to walk because of problems at his hotel, and the WiFi had gone out at the box office. "Then I realized that I had been so busy working on the festival that I hadn't practiced this music," he says.

Independence from Philadelphia's power structure and those who make their fortunes from it is essential for a watchdog with bite. The mission of the city controller, an institutional watchdog, is to keep the public's money from being pocketed by the corrupt or frittered away by the incompetent. The controller has the power to review the spending and management of city departments, stop payments on questionable contracts, and deter bad behavior. The current controller, Alan Butkovitz, is facing activist and repeat rival Brett Mandel and attorney Mark Zecca in the May 21 Democratic primary.

Philadelphia didn't need Bicycling magazine to confirm that it is one of America's best biking cities (No. 17 on its 2012 list). You can see it every day on the streets: The steady stream of commuters sluicing down Center City's bike lanes. The tangle of bikes hitched to U-shaped racks and bike corrals. (More, please.) The proliferation of neighborhood bike shops. Philadelphia probably could have ranked higher in the magazine's esteem if it had a bike-sharing program, like most of the list's top 20 cities.

So this is what investors mean by patience: Three years after a smoldering economy reduced Philadelphia's premiere shopping district to an avenue of stalwart retailers sharing space with suddenly vacant storefronts, the rebound is on. And it's hot. The elegant old buildings that form the spine of a 4 1/2-block streetscape of shopping between Broad and 20th Streets are teeming with life. Vacancies are few as reinvestment restores glitz to a promenade that aspires to be the city's gold standard of exclusivity but that a few years ago was down on its retail high heels.

Mark Bucher grew up in Philadelphia but sought his fortune elsewhere. After developing casual, beef-based restaurants in the Washington area, he and his partners sought to expand to Atlantic City. During their drive to scout the site, Bucher decided to take a detour to his hometown. They saw a thriving Center City, Bucher said. "We decided that Philly was the place for us," Bucher said outside the future Medium Rare, in a new apartment building on the 1600 block of Sansom Street in Center City.

Snow began falling as afternoon slid into evening. With the lights of Center City twinkling around and below her, Jane Miles stood by the vast expanse of windows that line one side of her new 27th-floor condominium in Symphony House, watching. "The snowflakes look so big up here," she said, more than a little awe in her voice. "With all the cars whizzing by in the streets below, it's like being in another world. " A world high above Philadelphia that, even a few years ago, Miles and her husband would have been very exclusive residents of. But as condo towers grow more commonplace in the city, taller, well-heeled buyers are choosing to feather their nests in the clouds - or as close as several hundred feet above street level can get them.

JAZZ COMES in a lot of flavors, some more accessible than others. How can you tell which will please you? This weekend's bigger and better, 2nd annual Center City Jazz Festival offers a fine and friendly way to sample a potpourri of fresh, sharply honed talents, most Philly-grown or -based, in an unusually convenient and casual fashion. We're talking everyone from the intimate vocal chanteuse Laurin Talese (a former backup singer for Jaguar Wright and Vivian Green) to the camped-up drag triller Martha Graham Cracker.

MY FIANC? AND I both live in Harrisburg but travel to Philadelphia often because we love the city. What we don't love, however, are the outrageous parking rates. When he attended monthly meetings of the Black Data Processors Association in Center City, it cost him more in parking fees to attend the meetings than it did in gas and tolls to make the 105-mile trip from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. Parking also becomes an issue when we want to visit Delilah's at the Reading Terminal for a nice Saturday lunch.

YOUR Holiday Shopping Guide was a welcome sight in the Dec. 3 Daily News. But once again, it gave short shrift to Center City, whining about parking while barely mentioning that you can get downtown by trolley, El, rail, bus, foot, bike and ferryboat. Your reporter seeking Apple's new music player stated flatly that department stores "don't sell the iPod. " Just a few pages later, good old Strawbridge's display ad was featuring just that - the new 20 gigabyte iPod, no less.

IF MAYOR NUTTER gets his way, smokers and drinkers could be forking up some big dough in city taxes - but not all of them are fuming about it. Sonny Deniro, a server at Jon's Bar & Grille at 3rd and South, said he opposed the new sin taxes - until he found out the money would go to the schools. City schools "need help," said Deniro, 27, a parent of a child who hasn't entered school yet. "They should raise it up even more. " Nutter proposed two new taxes yesterday - a $2-per-pack cigarette tax and a 5 percentage-point increase in the city's "liquor-by-the-drink" tax - to raise $67 million for the financially beleaguered Philadelphia School District.

A message flashed across Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Joseph Sullivan's phone as he sat in a Center City conference room Thursday: A suspicious package had been spotted blocks away. As it turned out, the bag was harmless, the tip familiar. In the month after the Boston terror attack, Philadelphia police responded to more than 300 such reports, with 32 just on the day of the Broad Street Run, Sullivan said. Bomb-squad officers even built and detonated a backpack bomb identical to the one that killed three people in Boston.

Raise Labs Inc. , of San Francisco, last week climbed to the top of the 2013 Milken-Penn Graduate School of Education Business Plan Competition - one of several recent competitive business events. Raise, which wants to change how college scholarships are distributed, won three $25,000 prizes: the Milken Family Foundation First Prize, the Startl Prize for Open Educational Resources, and the K12 Prize for Online Learning in Grades K-12. It's the latest win for Raise, which landed $100,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-based College Knowledge Challenge in January.

Independence from Philadelphia's power structure and those who make their fortunes from it is essential for a watchdog with bite. The mission of the city controller, an institutional watchdog, is to keep the public's money from being pocketed by the corrupt or frittered away by the incompetent. The controller has the power to review the spending and management of city departments, stop payments on questionable contracts, and deter bad behavior. The current controller, Alan Butkovitz, is facing activist and repeat rival Brett Mandel and attorney Mark Zecca in the May 21 Democratic primary.

Gambling foes filled the audience at Wednesday's hearing before the state Gaming Control Board, silently standing to strongly protest the building of another casino in Philadelphia. About 75 people, mostly from Chinatown, held anti-casino signs during back-to-back testimony from gaming opponents at the end of the fourth and last day of public input on a second license. The protesters represented a coalition of community groups called No Casino in Our City. While most of the earlier speakers were endorsing one project or another, the 11 people to testify at the end of the hearing denounced gambling as bad public policy that was promoting addiction.

Philadelphia didn't need Bicycling magazine to confirm that it is one of America's best biking cities (No. 17 on its 2012 list). You can see it every day on the streets: The steady stream of commuters sluicing down Center City's bike lanes. The tangle of bikes hitched to U-shaped racks and bike corrals. (More, please.) The proliferation of neighborhood bike shops. Philadelphia probably could have ranked higher in the magazine's esteem if it had a bike-sharing program, like most of the list's top 20 cities.

Last year's inaugural Center City Jazz Festival taught Ernest Stuart, its director, an important lesson: Never book yourself to perform if you're also running the show. He recalls that last year, just as he was about to step onstage with his trombone, "my phone started ringing. " The festival's headliner was threatening to walk because of problems at his hotel, and the WiFi had gone out at the box office. "Then I realized that I had been so busy working on the festival that I hadn't practiced this music," he says.

Lara Weinstein was a second-year student at Jefferson Medical College in 1992 and was frustrated by all the time she was spending in lecture halls. Every day on her way to and from classes, she passed desperate people living in the shadows of Center City. She wanted to help, but how? Weinstein approached a professor, James Plumb, who in turn reached out to Project HOME, the nonprofit agency in North Philadelphia that helps the homeless. A collaboration began. Under Plumb's direction, students, including Weinstein, began assisting Project HOME volunteers with medical care in a shelter.

FIGHTING FOR a casino in the city is a team sport. Supporters of the six groups seeking to win the city's second casino license gave an earful to the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board yesterday at a public hearing at Lincoln Financial Field. A letter from City Council President Darrell Clarke praised developer Bart Blatstein. James White, former city managing director, endorsed PHL Local Gaming's Casino Revolution. Work ethic and track records were cited, community dedication was touted.

JAZZ COMES in a lot of flavors, some more accessible than others. How can you tell which will please you? This weekend's bigger and better, 2nd annual Center City Jazz Festival offers a fine and friendly way to sample a potpourri of fresh, sharply honed talents, most Philly-grown or -based, in an unusually convenient and casual fashion. We're talking everyone from the intimate vocal chanteuse Laurin Talese (a former backup singer for Jaguar Wright and Vivian Green) to the camped-up drag triller Martha Graham Cracker.