Market Street

For the Mummers, one march on Market Street was enough. After a one-time experiment this year, they say they want to return the New Year's Day parade to its traditional route up Broad Street. Leaders of the four Mummers divisions are scheduled to meet Feb. 13 with Mayor Rendell at City Hall to decide where the 1996 parade will be held. And those leaders say they've already decided what they'll tell him. "The mayor has united the Mummers," said Ron Drais, outgoing Fancy Division president.

Now that they are ready to show their dream house to the world, city officials are left worrying about the only thing that they did not get for half a billion bucks: a front door. That is their dilemma as the dazzling new Pennsylvania Convention Center starts bringing some really big shows into Philadelphia. The last we heard of the historic Reading Headhouse Building, the center's grand entranceway to Market Street, the Internal Revenue Service had nixed a deal in March that would have allowed a private developer to earn $18 million in tax credits for rehabilitating the entire structure.

POLICE in the Southwest Detective Division are on the hunt for a pint-size punk in connection with a series of brazen attempted gunpoint robberies in West Philadelphia. The boy targeted five people, including this Daily News reporter, near 46th Street between Market and Chestnut from Monday night to Tuesday afternoon, police said. One incident was reported Monday night, and four others unfolded between 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Tuesday. The victims told police that the would-be robber looked to be about 12 or 13. In some instances, he asked victims for the time, then pulled out a silver handgun and demanded their belongings.

The word terrorism has grown so worn yet charged that its etymology is easily forgotten. Terror is the whole point, the means and the end. And, let's face it, there is plenty to go around. A major American city, several of its suburbs, and the nation's busiest passenger rail line came to a halt last week as authorities hunted the suspected Boston Marathon bombers. Panicky public and media speculation about their identity landed cruelly and mistakenly at the doorstep of a Main Line family already grieving for a missing young man. And earlier in the week, a New York commuter quoted by the Associated Press colorfully expressed a widespread desire for maximum security: "They can give me a cavity search right now, and I'd be perfectly happy.

There is a wonderful place in Philadelphia, a kind of forgotten treasure, still intact but constantly threatened with deterioration or destruction, and nobody seems to notice. This place is Market Street from Fourth Street to the Delaware River. Here is the one place at which the original character of the city, unblemished by the sterilizing touch of modern architecture, still survives as it was a hundred, two hundred years ago. We have watched modernism creep up and down Market Street, and we've seen block after block of wonderfully diverse store facades give way to faceless new buildings.

Mummers bass fiddler Harry Murray is coming out of retirement, never mind the neck surgery and gimpy knees. The healthy lure of Market Street - yes, Market Street - is too great to pass up. Murray, 61, will be in there plunking when Fralinger String Band "Reigns in Spain" on Jan. 1. He sat out last year, and other recent Broad Street parades, because the three-mile strut was too taxing. "I just couldn't make the parades any more," he said. "When they were talking about moving it to Market Street, I decided to give it a try. " Murray isn't alone.

Dozens of colorful bouquets were carefully placed at the foot of a speed- limit sign at the corner of Market Street and Stites Avenue in Gloucester City yesterday. A few feet away, a telephone pole was decorated with hand- written signs that honored the woman "who loved all the school children. " Vera Hummel, a 70-year-old crossing guard who was a charter member of the local Town Watch, had just taken a group of students across the heavily traveled intersection yesterday morning when she was struck and killed by a vehicle traveling east on Market Street.

The XXX-rated films are gone, along with the customers who trolled the Forum Theater on Market Street seeking public arousal. As videos and the Internet killed porn theaters, the Forum was among the last to die, but it finally closed Nov. 30, giving Philadelphia the opportunity - for the first time in decades - to develop this key link between the city's east and west sides. Richard Basciano, the man behind the proposal to revive the area with new apartments and street-level commercial space, is best known as the king of Times Square porn.

The phone was ringing off the hook when the H&R Block office in the shopping center at 23d Street and Oregon Avenue in South Philadelphia opened Monday - tax day - and the last-minute filers began streaming in, waving their paperwork and hoping the pros could make things as painless as possible. Denise Evans, a bus driver clutching her pay stubs and Form 1040-A, said she had tried to avoid paying extra. "I thought I could do this on my own this year," she said. "I looked it up on YouTube.

On Dec. 23, I drove a family member to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital for a doctor's appointment. I parked on Spruce Street between 10th and 11th and put $2 in the parking meter. After doing some shopping on Market Street, I returned to the hospital and when told my family member was still being treated, I ran from 111 S. 11th St. to 10th and Spruce to put more money into the meter, which was ready to expire. I went back to the hospital and when I returned to the car, a Parking Authority officer was writing me a ticket, not for the meter I was parked at, which had eight minutes left, but for the expired meter at the car parked in front of me. The officer told me I was parked at the expired meter even though the unexpired one was next to my car. Sixth District police officers arrived, and also could not understand why she was writing tickets on my vehicle and the one in front of me, yet not for the vehicle behind me, which had no parking meter anywhere near it. The Parking Authority officer then called for a supervisor, who told me I was in the wrong.