Public Spaces

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.

The first percent-for-art programs, which were initiated in Philadelphia in 1958 and 1959, arose as an attempt to mitigate the effects of modernist architecture and planning. Looking around, their sponsors saw bleak environments that they hoped to "humanize" with art. That didn't quite work, because the supporters of such programs didn't reckon with the nature of modernist art, which tended toward the personal, the self-referential and many of the same abstract principles that underlay the architecture and planning they disliked.

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.

For the last week or so, three artists have been busy digging, welding and otherwise building things in Washington Square, under the watchful eyes of curious - and perhaps apprehensive - residents of the park's perimeter. Those who haven't had the nerve to ask what's going on needn't be concerned. The activity is part of the We the People 200 celebration of the bicentennial of the Constitution, and the structures the artists have created are only temporary. After Oct. 12, they'll be removed, and the park will be put back the way it was. In the meantime, however, the three installations - by Charles Fahlen, Peter Hutchinson and George Trakas - should stimulate some thought about the state of contemporary sculpture and the catalytic role of sculpture in public spaces.

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.