Public Spaces

Let me set the scene. You're sitting in traffic with your 4-year-old. Suddenly you notice she's watching with rapt interest something in the next car. You glance over and realize that the other vehicle is equipped with one of those DVD screens that are available on certain late-model cars. The option is usually marketed as a way of keeping kids quiet on long road trips. But what the folks over there are watching is more loin king than The Lion King. Because there onscreen, before your daughter's steadily widening eyes, is a pair of exceedingly fit people using their private parts in ways the child never imagined they could be used.

The Northeast YMCA is in search of space. Not outer space, but space inside public places where reading coaches can help adult students sharpen their reading skills. The coaches and students are part of the Chapter Two reading program offered by YMCAs in Pennsylvania, said Cheryl Waldman, director of volunteer services for the Northeast YMCA, Woodhaven and Knights Roads. "The only other YMCAs that are near here are Abington and North Philadelphia, so we at the Northeast YMCA have a very large territory to cover and a large amount of people to serve," said Waldman.

The exhibition of sculpture by the late Henry Mitchell that fills both the Paley and Levy Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design pays homage to an artist whose creations adorn a number of public spaces in the city. Mitchell's pieces, like the impala fountain at the zoo and the cat fountain at the Betsy Ross House, are highly visible; Mitchell is less well known. This exhibition of 59 pieces, the majority of them maquettes for public commissions, seeks to offer Mitchell some belated recognition for enlivening the city's public landscape.

Philadelphians know their favorite places: unexpected parks tucked into residential streets, forgotten fountains along Kelly Drive. There are other places, right in the middle of everything, with their own tonic magic. Places to chill out, meet a friend, eat lunch, day dream, read, or not read. For pleasure and relief, many of us take refuge from the extreme summer days in these spots of cooling greenery and watery fountains. But they offer more than relief: They are the essence of a city, what a city needs to remain a place where people can be themselves yet live together.

Had you told me a few months ago that I'd be raving about fish and chips and warm pints of bitter, I would have said you were a bloody lunatic. Then again, a few a months ago the Dandelion was still just an odd name for the latest Stephen Starr construction site - a convenient weed metaphor for our irrepressible gardener of concept dining, then hard at work on seedling number 22 at 18th and Sansom Streets. (By April 1, numbers 23 and 24 will have poked their heads through the soils of Florida's South Beach and Washington Square, respectively.)

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - In this beach vacation haven, home to the largest number of Jersey Shore summer rentals, they really thought they would be cleaning up this season - and not just from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Ocean City, along with most other Cape May County barrier-island towns, sustained far less damage than many northern beach communities. Recovery of public spaces and rental properties has been swift in a place that counts on the lucrative summer tourism season. Other places, such as Seaside Heights in Ocean County, where Sandy pulled amusement rides into the surf and destroyed miles of boardwalk and hundreds of homes, were not as lucky.

A DRAWING of a naked woman scrawled with the catcall "Damn Girl You Thick," Beyoncé song lyrics spray-painted on a wall, a small sticker with the scribbled message "osama is a muslim. " The funny, the political, the colorful, the arresting: These are the images that catch Conrad Benner's eye as he walks around Philadelphia, camera in hand. Benner, 26, posts pictures of street art to his blog StreetsDept.com, which averages about 1,000 page-views a day, and sends on-the-fly pictures out on his Twitter account, @streetsdept, to his 2,636 (as of yesterday)

Marilyn Keating and Debra Sachs didn't need fancy. Cheap: yes. Brimming with potential: most definitely. When the two were scouting for a house to turn into a funky, comfortable haven, they turned to an unlikely spot - Gloucester City. The hard-nosed dock town fit both criteria just fine. And since they purchased the unassuming spot on Broadway, two fairly remarkable things have happened: First, the house that 20 years ago featured dead pigeons and a thick layer of dirt on every surface has been shined up to be a showplace.

Homelessness is a national tragedy. The growing divide between haves and have-nots in this country has pushed some people beyond the point of even having a place to live, while wealth at the upper end has stuffed gadzillions into the pockets of parvenus like Donald Trump and the latest prepubescent stock hustler. What this is about isn't that tragedy, though. The homeless, for the most part, are people down on their luck. They are people who need society's help just to have a chance to pull themselves up by the bootstraps - just to have the boots.

Through its new addition, the Delaware Art Museum has made a better place for itself. The addition has brought not merely an increase in space, but a change of character. Before, the museum, which stands in a prosperous and elegant residential neighborhood, felt more like a house than a museum with some collections of international stature. One entered the 1938 Georgian revival building from the driveway on the street side into a very narrow vestibule that was really all the lobby the museum had. The revised and expanded museum, which will hold an open house tomorrow to celebrate its reopening, is most emphatically a public place.