Tacony

In the dry, bright light of a full June sun, the shops and businesses along Torresdale Avenue in Tacony look pale and tired. A dried-up cactus is turning brown in the window of La Mode Barbers, which closed about a year ago when its owner died. The Mary Ford Dance Studio has rolled-up rugs in the window; the walls are covered with pictures of little girls in sunny yellow costumes posing before a blue backdrop. Through this bleak, airless window, they look like open buttercups on a breezy spring day. How do they breathe in there?

Longtime Tacony Civic Association President William Harden stepped quietly into retirement Tuesday night amid tributes both short and direct. "He has done an excellent job. He knows where the bodies are buried," said vice president William Lamey. "If I can do half the job that Bill has done, I'll do all right," added incoming president Terry Tobin. "Tough shoes to fill, but I'll try. " Harden's retirement ended a six-year term at the helm of the 700-member civic association.

In Tacony, even the brilliant red of spring tulips cannot mask the ugly splotches of color sprayed throughout the neighborhood. Nearly every garage door, shop front, stop sign - indeed, just about every surface in sight - has been painted with graffiti. Some are obscene, but often the marks simply say "09," the name of a neighborhood gang. Even a window at the Tacony United Methodist Church has been defaced with the number. On Thursday evening, the church, at Longshore and Hegerman Streets, played host to a community meeting on the problems of graffiti and the 09 gang, which community leaders say has harassed children and senior citizens.

The area's month-long, bi-state commuter nightmare has come to an end. Beginning at noon today, commuters who have been paying 90-cent tolls and fighting traffic on the access roads to the Betsy Ross Bridge were once again able to get from Northeast Philadelphia to South Jersey for a quarter. The narrow, mold-green Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, the portal of innumerable shore trips for local residents of a certain age, has reopened to traffic. The Burlington County Bridge Commission even waived the quarter toll for the first 24 hours after the reopening of the 59-year-old span.

Lisa Kucinskas stations herself every day at Princeton Avenue and Hegerman Street, helping dozens of youngsters from Our Lady of Consolation School make their way home through the busy traffic of Tacony. Her job seems every bit as taxing as that of a Center City traffic officer during rush hour, with cars and trucks rumbling down Princeton en route to Interstate 95. The school is in the shadows of the superhighway, and neighborhood residents have complained for years of the potential for accidents there.

Owners of a trash-transfer station in Tacony have agreed to close their operation within 45 days, ending nearly two years of high-pitched battles with state and city regulators, neighborhood leaders and nearby businesses. The owners of Disposal World Inc. were under siege in recent months with court challenges and other troubles. The company had remained in operation since the fall of 1986, even though it did not have a state permit and despite a flurry of complaints from city and state inspectors.

Pulling a strip of green from a palm frond, Angie DiSalvio delved into the past while her nimble fingers went to work. In the basement of Our Lady of Consolation Church in Tacony, the 67-year- old executive secretary chuckled about Depression days when she and her grade-school classmates wove and braided palm leaves into cones and sprays. None of the children was allowed to talk while weaving because the eagle-eyed palm police - a/k/a nuns - swooped down on anyone who spoke. About a minute later, DiSalvio lifted up a 4-inch long palm plat.

Eighteen months after Pennsylvania's retirement system began investigating Dorothy June Brown for collecting full-time salaries from two charter schools, Brown's pension benefits have been slashed. The state Public School Employees' Retirement System (PSERS) has informed Brown that her monthly benefit is being cut from $14,150 to $3,254 - a 77 percent drop. Ruling that Brown had provided incomplete and conflicting information, the system wiped out all employment credit she had claimed since July 2004.

NAYDA MORALES has been forced into a neighborhood on edge, where she worries about the next shooting, the next house to get torched, the next house junkies take as their own.   She lives on a claustrophobic block in West Kensington, across the street from four boarded-up houses, two of them charred. Potential landlords won't rent to her. Owners refuse to sell to her. For a while, Morales, a mother of three, had to move in with her mom. Her credit has been ruined. It is all because she rented a decrepit house seven years ago from Robert N. Coyle Sr., a notorious Philadelphia slumlord who stands charged with defrauding banks of $10 million.

A Baptist minister took the Tacony Civic Association to task last week for what he considered lackluster opposition to neighborhood beer sales. In an animated, evangelical scolding, the Rev. Arthur Johnson told association members they should have done more to block a local delicatessen's application for a beer license. "You're going to lose if you don't get off your duffs," warned Johnson, pastor of Tacony Baptist Church, which was the site of Tuesday night's meeting. "It's not all cut and dried.