Fred Druding was driving his son to work one recent morning when he passed Mifflin Square. It was well before 7 a.m. and the park was deserted, except for one woman.
She stood in the middle of the park, Druding said, unloading bags of garbage from a pushcart.
Short dumping is a 24-hour-a-day problem at Mifflin Square, Fifth and Wolf streets. So are drug-dealing, gang activity, illegal gambling and violence.
In July police made nine arrests in the park, with charges of attempted auto theft, possession of a firearm, gambling, selling of fireworks, receiving stolen property and drug offenses. Four years ago, a 17-year-old boy was shot multiple times and wounded.
Most of the charges have been related to Asian gangs in the area, police said.
Druding said the problems continue. He is the executive director of the Weccacoe Development Association, a nonprofit group under the umbrella of the Whitman Council that has been rehabilitating abandoned homes and selling them to first-time homebuyers in Whitman, Greenwich and Pennsport since the mid-1980s.
He and the executive director of Whitman Council, Janet DiGiovanni, tried for most of the summer to get the city to address the problems in the park. DiGiovanni said she has received complaints about Mifflin Square daily for the last several months. The most pervasive problem is the trash.
"I’m talking about mountains of trash, not only on the outside perimeter of the park but also what’s being dumped in the middle of the park," she said.
Some of the trash generated in the summer was from an open-air fruit and vegetable market that is run as a partnership between some of the local Asian residents and an organization called The Food Trust, a nonprofit that has run farmers’ markets at various locations in the city for 20 years.
Merchants leave behind bags of trash in the center of the square, as the city has requested. And the Department of Recreation, which oversees Mifflin Square, collects the debris three times a week. In between pickups, residents add to the pile with their own garbage, often causing the piles to overflow with household items like sofas.
At the same time, Druding said, the market has led to festivals, which started out small but have outgrown the square.
"It started drawing people from outside of the community — large numbers of people. You’d go by there sometimes and there were like 2,000 people in the park," said Druding, adding that he has seen cars with license plates from as far away as Connecticut parked around the square during festivals.
When The Food Trust approached Whitman in May, DiGiovanni said, she thought it might be a way to legalize and monitor the produce and food sales that have been taking place illegally at Mifflin Square for years.
Since then, there has been no communication between The Food Trust and Whitman Council, she added.
"Whitman Council has been trying to encourage them to come … to let us know when they are having these types of functions so we could in return inform the residents what’s going on," said DiGiovanni. "We’re trying to make people understand that Whitman Council is for the community. We are the community organization; it doesn’t matter what ethnic background you are. We’re here for everyone."
The Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia estimates 14,000 Cambodians are living in the city, ranking Philadelphia third behind Long Beach, Calif., and Boston in Cambodian population.
The largest concentration of Cambodians is in South Philly. More than 4,000 Cambodians reside here, making it the largest population of any section of the city, followed by North Philadelphia, Southwest and then West Philly. Most Cambodian residents live in the area between Oregon and Washington avenues and Fifth and Seventh streets.
According to Brian Lang, a program associate at The Food Trust, the market at Mifflin Square has been running six days a week — at least until recently, when the weather has gotten cooler.
Lang said his organization got involved at the requests of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society — an adopted caretaker of Mifflin Square — and the Recreation Department. The group is working with about six Cambodian produce merchants in the neighborhood. It has hired a part-time market manager to run the market, and Lang said he is frequently onsite as well.
"Selling fresh fruits and vegetables in that neighborhood is a positive thing," he said, "and we’re helping people from the community do that better."
The Food Trust ensures that vendors clean the area each day when the market closes, said Lang. Although residents say some of the gang activity takes place during the day, Lang said he has not witnessed it.
"I have definitely heard about that, but I have never encountered gangs myself," he said. "That’s definitely not anything that is going on in relation to our work there."
Druding and DiGiovanni have contacted Councilman Frank DiCicco and the Fourth District police to find a solution for the problems at the square.
DiCicco said he has been trying to address the issues since he took office in 1996. He blames the more serious issue occurring in the square — the drug-dealing, gambling, dogfights and violence — on Asian gangs from the surrounding neighborhood.
The city has invested money in the park’s playground several times, and every time vandals destroy the equipment within days, DiCicco said. The Philadelphia Eagles donated new swing sets in 1999 and a month later the swings were stolen.
Now the councilman is hesitant to invest more until there is evidence the city has a handle on the problems.
"We don’t want to just put good money into a bad situation," he said.
DiCicco isn’t the only one thinking that way. Druding has concerns about Weccacoe’s plans to rehabilitate at least six homes bordering the square, investing at least $75,000 of grant money in each.
In August, at the request of the councilman, Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson instructed Fourth District Capt. Thomas Thompson to assign a patrol to Mifflin Square.
DiCicco also said he is working on scheduling a meeting between residents and police to further discuss the topic.
"I honestly don’t know what more can be done other than keep police there on a 24-hour basis," he said.
