East Side

Under pressure from firefighters, ambulance workers, and residents with safety concerns, the fire district has restored 24-hour-a-day ambulance coverage on the east side of town. Fire Chief Donald Maxfield angered residents in October when he scaled back late-night ambulance service on the east side to enhance coverage later in the day. As a result, the Kresson Station, which serves the east side, wasn't staffed between 2 and 6 a.m. Monday through Thursday. "After listening to the public comment, we decided to restore coverage," Maxfield said yesterday.

The search for Latoyia Figueroa continued yesterday, this time in Southwest Philadelphia. Men from a Philadelphia drug-treatment house searched the east side of Cobbs Creek seeking anything that might help locate the young pregnant woman who disappeared July 18. Community activist Paul "Earthquake" Moore said he planned to lead about 30 men from Outley House north along the creek bank from where Cobbs Creek meets Woodland Avenue. Moore, who organized the group on his own without sponsorship of the Figueroa family, said he did not think this section had been searched adequately.

"Over there. " With a sweeping hand wave and an over-yonder attitude, that's how Center City residents describe the distance from Rittenhouse Square to Washington Square and points in between. The daunting concept of "over there" can refer to the distance between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, or from 15th Street to 13th Street. The kicker is Broad Street. The four lanes that make up the spiffy southern blocks of the Avenue of the Arts constitute more than a street crossing for most Center City residents.

Members of the San Salvatore Society carry a statue of Jesus out of Holy Savior Roman Catholic Church for the traditional procession through Norristown's east side. Yesterday's procession marked the last day of the weekend's Holy Savior Feast. For the 91st year, participants flew Italian flags, played and listened to traditional music and feasted.

The New Garden Planning Commission has approved preliminary plans for the second phase of the township's only clustered development, Broad Run Ridge. The plans for Phase 2 presented Wednesday night showed 27 lots near the east side of Watson Mill Road near the Delaware border. The first phase of the development contained 13 houses. Forty houses on 50 acres are being developed by Wilkinson Enterprises Inc. of New Garden. Land planner Rick Longo of Hillcrest Associates Inc., Newark, said the houses would be clustered on lots along the edge of the steeply sloping site around 23 acres of open space.

Mayor Aaron Wilson Jr. and Delaware County District Attorney Patrick Meehan visited a drug-plagued East Side neighborhood Friday, promising to shut down open-air dealing and encouraging residents to get involved in community revitalization efforts. The mayor and the prosecutor took their hour-long walking tour to follow up on a wave of drug arrests a week before that netted about 40 suspects, and to get feedback on the recent introduction of state police patrols in Chester. The troopers will conduct periodic patrols, mostly on weekends, alongside their Chester counterparts.

First Pennsylvania Bank has appealed a zoning officer's decision that would impede renovations planned for a branch office and an adjacent sidewalk area on Bryn Mawr Avenue in Bryn Mawr. Thomas Berk, an attorney representing the bank, told the Lower Merion Zoning Hearing Board on Thursday night that the renovations would strengthen safety and improve parking. First Pennsylvania recently halted renovations to the branch at 52-54 N. Bryn Mawr Ave. after receiving notification in December from the township that it could not create a street curb near the building.

Skirmishing over security at Independence National Historical Park is flaring up again, with merchants and residents concerned about the impact of new procedures proposed by the National Park Service. Officials at the park - who once pined for the permanent closure of Chestnut Street in front of Independence Hall - now want to screen all park visitors at the old Liberty Bell Pavilion on Market Street. Those visitors who want to take a look at Independence Hall would then be escorted - in screened and quarantined groups - from the new Liberty Bell Center across Chestnut Street at Sixth Street to the Hall.

And then there were 25. That's the latest total of condemned houses in Wissinoming, after city officials yesterday added five more sinking homes to the demolition list. Deputy Mayor Kevin Feeley said this might be the last of the sinking homes to be condemned. "We believe we're finished in terms of demolition," Feeley said. "We don't have any more inspections scheduled, and we haven't seen any evidence the problem has extended to other areas. " Also, for the first time since the crisis began, Feeley held out hope the city would offer financial help to fix houses not damaged badly enough to tear down.

Sometimes, a setback can lead to an advance. That's a lesson that the RDC Institute staff says it learned in recent years. RDC announced plans Wednesday to build the Deshong International Circle, a 22-acre hotel and office building complex just off Interstate 95 in Chester, using the 15-acre Deshong estate plus 7 acres of privately owned land. This isn't the first time that RDC has proposed a large project in Chester. A few years ago, RDC tried to promote a large-scale development on Chester's east side but failed.

The Philadelphia Historical Commission, concerned about a potential collapse, Friday approved demolition and reconstruction of the crumbling east side of the Spring Garden house once owned by abolitionist Robert Purvis. Last month, a commission panel recommended denial of the project, arguing that the developer's plans were vague and that the engineering drawings were out of date. Preservationists attending that hearing also expressed concerns about the owner's financial resources. The developer, Miguel Santiago, whose family has owned the corner rowhouse at 1601 Mount Vernon St. since the 1970s, insisted he had the financing to proceed.

When Richard Price finally got around to writing the novel about the Lower East Side that he'd been itching to do for 25 years, he realized that his teenage daughters knew more about the neighborhood than he did. "They knew where the best clubs were, the best hole-in-the-wall clothing shops, and where the Knitting Factory is," says Price, who will read Tuesday from his new novel, Lush Life - a capacious crime story and character study of cultures...

When school lets out on Coatesville's east side, Police Cpl. James Audette regularly stands on a busy corner in this old shot-and-beer steel town and watches the children walk by. "Hi, Officer Audette," an African American elementary school girl said one day last month, smiling broadly. Another called his name and waved as she passed. It's a sign, however small, that Coatesville's policing revolution is rolling. For more than a decade, Coatesville police bred antipathy on the town's largely black east side with aggressive tactics that featured some of the highest arrest rates in Pennsylvania - and the nation - for minor crimes such as disorderly conduct and violating curfew.

When school lets out on Coatesville's east side, Police Cpl. James Audette regularly stands on a busy corner in this old shot-and-beer steel town and watches the children walk by. "Hi, Officer Audette," an African American elementary school girl said one day last month, smiling broadly. Another called his name and waved as she passed. It's a sign, however small, that Coatesville's policing revolution is rolling. For more than a decade, Coatesville police bred antipathy on the town's largely black east side with aggressive tactics that featured some of the highest arrest rates in Pennsylvania - and the nation - for minor crimes such as disorderly conduct and violating curfew.

Out-of-town visitors, especially those from other countries, gravitate first to City Hall - and not the Liberty Bell or Independence Mall - when they want to know what to do while they are here. That is why the city, state, and three nonprofit organizations pooled $282,000 of their resources to renovate and enlarge the City Hall Visitors Center and staged a grand reopening for it yesterday. "You want to make visitor information convenient for visitors," said Bill Moore, president and chief executive officer of the Independence Visitor Center, one of the three organizations.

The search for Latoyia Figueroa continued yesterday, this time in Southwest Philadelphia. Men from a Philadelphia drug-treatment house searched the east side of Cobbs Creek seeking anything that might help locate the young pregnant woman who disappeared July 18. Community activist Paul "Earthquake" Moore said he planned to lead about 30 men from Outley House north along the creek bank from where Cobbs Creek meets Woodland Avenue. Moore, who organized the group on his own without sponsorship of the Figueroa family, said he did not think this section had been searched adequately.

The religious character of this stretch of Montgomery County is easy enough to read: Just drive north from the Philadelphia city limits on Old York Road, and keep your eyes to the right. In an ecumenical procession, lovingly maintained houses of worship line the east side of the road, testimony to changing settlement patterns. "I can't think of any other street that has as many churches and synagogues along it as Old York Road," said Simeon J. Maslin, retired rabbi of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park and author of One God, Sixteen Houses, a book about the collection in the approximately four miles between the Philadelphia border and Susquehanna Road.

I'd been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum once before and knew I'd have time between buying my ticket and taking the tour. After all, the "museum" is not a collection of artifacts in a room but a set of lovingly reconstructed apartments you can visit only with a guide. It's fabulous. Anyway, in late March we go. We get to the Tenement Museum office - 90 Orchard St. - about 12:30, and every tour is sold out until 2:45. So we - Joe and I - buy tickets for the 2:45 and then we go to Katz's Deli for lunch.

I enjoyed Joe Gambardello's article on Tuckerton Road ("Stuck in the past, on Pinelands road," March 19). In 1993, when we were looking for a house in Medford and I was staying temporarily in Tuckerton, I looked at a map, and all the roads were represented as lines of the same width. Turned out, some roads were wider than others. I left the McDonald's in Medford one summer evening, a half-hour before dark, and thought I would take the obvious shortcut to Tuckerton, namely, Tuckerton Road.

Skirmishing over security at Independence National Historical Park is flaring up again, with merchants and residents concerned about the impact of new procedures proposed by the National Park Service. Officials at the park - who once pined for the permanent closure of Chestnut Street in front of Independence Hall - now want to screen all park visitors at the old Liberty Bell Pavilion on Market Street. Those visitors who want to take a look at Independence Hall would then be escorted - in screened and quarantined groups - from the new Liberty Bell Center across Chestnut Street at Sixth Street to the Hall.