Trailer Park

FORT WAYNE, IND. - To assist her dying father, Tarah Souders made a choice: She moved her three young girls to a run-down trailer park in rural Indiana to help take care of him as his lungs rotted from emphysema. She knew it could be dangerous. The park of about two dozen homes was teeming with convicted sex offenders, with one living at nearly every address. She worried about neighbors with sex-offense records who had been helping her father get by, according to trailer-park residents, but her father, himself a sex-offender, assured her it would be OK. Weeks later, police say, a horrific tragedy unfolded.

Residents of Oakview Mobile Estates in Shamong had to attend 10 meetings of the township's rent control board before they heard the good news: Rent would only go up $7.54 a month instead of the $142 increase proposed by Eileen T. Quigley Inc., owner of the park. "It certainly was worth it," Donald Cassoff, president of the Oakview Mobile Home Association, said of the 10 meetings held since June to determine the amount tenants at the park should pay. The association represents about 90 percent of the park's tenants.

More than 100 upset residents and six public officials told the city Zoning Board of Adjustment yesterday that a proposed mobile-home park should not be allowed to take over land slated for light industry. Calling the 40-acre site at Ashton and Willits roads "prime economic land," City Councilman Edward Schwartz said the project "would be a disgrace in terms of city planning. " Willits Woods Associates wants to put 217 mobile homes on the property and sell them as condominiums for about $43,000 each.

Even though a mobile-home park operator was denied a license to operate earlier this month, the operating phrase seems to be "business as usual. " On July 2, the Shamong Township Committee denied renewal of an operating license to Eileen T. Quigley Inc. of West Hartford, Conn. The company has operated Oakview Mobile Estates since 1985, when it purchased the property from Clement Miller, a former member of the Township Committee. Though the license has been denied, the company will continue to operate the park, said Lorrie Greenberg, attorney for Eileen T. Quigley.

The Upper Providence Planning Commission has postponed a request by the A.M.C. Corp. to recommend approval of a preliminary plan to rezone the Summit Road trailer park for single-family housing. The commission deferred the request during its Tuesday meeting because of problems members found with the preliminary development plan, Chairman Donald Flounders said. "This commission will not approve this plan, even as a preliminary plan, with an attached four pages of changes," Flounders said.

A group of trailer park residents served notice this week on the East Whiteland Planning Commission that it would actively oppose plans to develop the property into an office condominium complex. Residents of the Rainbow Court trailer park who attended the Planning Commission session Tuesday evening were not permitted to make a formal presentation because the development proposal was not on the agenda. Rainbow Court is on Lincoln Highway. "We weren't on your agenda, but we better be on your minds.

A Falls Township man and his daughter were critically wounded last night by shotgun blasts fired at a lower Bucks County mobile home park by the daughter's estranged husband, who then apparently shot himself, police said. John Bubnis, about 46, and Michelle Diethorne, 19, were in intensive care early this morning at Saint Mary Hospital in Langhorne, where they were taken after being wounded about 9:20 p.m. outside Bubnis' trailer home in the 3000 block of Chandler Drive in the Pennwood Crossing mobile home park.

For four months last year, a Warrington couple with a 1-year-old daughter looked for a home to buy in Bucks County. In July, Jose Burgos and Patti Fahy found a good deal in Upper Black Eddy: a three-bedroom trailer with cathedral ceilings for $46,500. "It was on a big half-acre lot, nice and secluded," Fahy said last week. "It was the first home we were trying to buy," Burgos said. "I wanted to raise my little daughter in a nice country place. " A Doylestown real estate broker worked on the financing, and the couple prepared to move in. But then the deal fell through.

A company managing a Shamong Township mobile-home park announced last night that it would close the 100-unit park and seek eviction notices for more than 150 residents there rather than comply with a proposed ordinance that would regulate rent increases. William Gelinas, a spokesman for American Heritage Agency of West Hartford, Conn., a real estate firm that operates the Oakview Mobile Estates on Atsion Road, made the announcement during a company meeting with 15 residents at the Shamong Township Municipal Building.

When Aqua America Inc. bought a 12.5-acre waterfront site in Lycoming County in February, the Bryn Mawr company acquired more than a $550,000 property to build a water project to serve Marcellus Shale natural gas interests. It also acquired a public relations migraine. The previous owner of the land had neglected to inform the occupants — the residents of the Riverdale Mobile Home Park — about the impending sale. On Feb. 23, the owner gave the 32 tenants a month's notice to move off the land along the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, near the Borough of Jersey Shore.

When Aqua America Inc. bought a 12.5-acre waterfront site in Lycoming County in February, the Bryn Mawr company acquired more than a $550,000 property to build a water project to serve Marcellus Shale natural gas interests. It also acquired a public relations migraine. The previous owner of the land had neglected to inform the occupants — the residents of the Riverdale Mobile Home Park — about the impending sale. On Feb. 23, the owner gave the 32 tenants a month's notice to move off the land along the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, near the Borough of Jersey Shore.

FORT WAYNE, IND. - To assist her dying father, Tarah Souders made a choice: She moved her three young girls to a run-down trailer park in rural Indiana to help take care of him as his lungs rotted from emphysema. She knew it could be dangerous. The park of about two dozen homes was teeming with convicted sex offenders, with one living at nearly every address. She worried about neighbors with sex-offense records who had been helping her father get by, according to trailer-park residents, but her father, himself a sex-offender, assured her it would be OK. Weeks later, police say, a horrific tragedy unfolded.

A joint production of "The Great American Trailer Park Musical" by 11th Hour Theatre Company and Montgomery Theater, staged at Montgomery Theater in Souderton in February, reopened Friday at the Arden in Center City. This is an excerpt from a review published in February. If you have spandex, prepare to wear it now. You'll look fab as The Great American Trailer Park Musical - a little show with a wallop like a bin full of hissing trailer propane tanks - sprawls gleefully across the stage.

Blockbuster comedy director Tom Shadyac ("Ace Ventura, Pet Detective," "Liar, Liar" "The Nutty Professor") was on top of the world in 2007. And down in the dumps. His extravagant lifestyle wasn't making him happy, and he pondered scaling back to find a new balance in his life. That decision was fast-tracked after a mountain bike crack-up. Sidelined from the rat race during months of painful isolation, he realized the trappings of wealth were genuine traps. Healed, he grabbed his camera and set up interviews with scientists, spiritual leaders and progressive social critics.

A 19-year-old Philadelphia man is expected to face criminal charges after a late-night crash in Port Richmond left one man dead, police said Wednesday. Police said they suspected the man, whose name was not released, had been under the influence of alcohol or drugs when his GMC van smashed into a Ford Windstar minivan on Richmond Street near Schiller Street about 11 p.m. Tuesday. He was undergoing tests Wednesday for driving under the influence of an intoxicant. The driver of the minivan, Venustiano Vidals, 49, of Camden, was pronounced dead at the scene.

If you have spandex, prepare to wear it now. You'll look fab in your seat at Montgomery Theater in Souderton, where The Great American Trailer Park Musical - a little show with a big wallop, like a bin full of hissing trailer propane tanks - sprawls gleefully across the stage. It's an all-American hoot, as kitsch as a teased 'do on an '80s soap-opera heroine. And it brazenly dismisses social convention - in this trailer park's community garden, not a single stereotype goes untended.

In getting one of the nation's newest national veterans' cemeteries ready, Dick Kollar was prepared to do battle with nature. He got ambushed anyway. "I came to the site with a full mind's eye of having dust-control issues," said Kollar, the Veterans Affairs official overseeing the construction of the Washington Crossing National Cemetery, a few miles from the park of the same name. But instead of bone-dry conditions, since the digging began back on May 21, again and again the crews have found themselves mired in mud fights set off by a succession of serious rainstorms.

I could tell you that Gas and Electric Arts' production of Anna Bella Eema is about a mother and 10-year-old daughter living in a condemned trailer park, but that's like saying Diane Arbus was a portraitist, or Louise Bourgeois likes to keep her hands busy. Lisa D'Amour writes from the same perspective as those like-minded women, shining a black mirror at the world to reflect the cruelty outside while struggling to hold onto an identity under siege. If that's too vague, try this: There's also a little girl made of mud (the titular Anna Bella Eema, played by Kate DeRosa)

There's been something of a sea change at the Shore. With middle-income families priced out of the rental or buyers' market on the beach, many are turning to private campgrounds tucked in the pines on either side of Route 9 from Long Beach Island to Cape May. And recognizing that many of us lost track of whatever camping equipment we owned years ago, campgrounds now have new-construction, wood-framed cabins that rent for $65-$100 a night....

Contrary to popular lore, not all is sweetness and light at the Philadelphia Film Festival. Here and there, you can make out tenebrous shapes lurking about, monsters with necrotic faces threatening to devour all those breezy, French romantic comedies. There's Danger After Dark at this fest. That'd be DAD, a series of horror, fantasy and sci-fi films sure to give pause to the most hardened film freak. Best to start your descent protected by a super-hero. There's no one more dedicated - or more knowledgeable about septic tanks - than the hero of Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, a send-up of classic B-film monster flicks.