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Tensions mounted as Audenried High School faced closure and the Greater Grays Ferry Estates replaced the Tasker Homes, so students pulled out their cameras.
"Rising on the Hill," one of 40 locally filmed documentaries covering area communities and created as a part of Scribe Video Center’s three-year oral history "Precious Places Community History Project" is a firsthand look at Audenried, Grays Ferry and their reputations for violence and racial tension. The 10-minute "Hill" portion can be found on volume one, program four of the three-volume series.
"I was getting straight A’s, never been in a fight and was very involved, but people like me were put into the pool of the violent ones," Aisha Abdullah, who served as student-producer of the project during her junior year at Audenried in 2004, said in an e-mail. "The documentary was an effort to shed some light and move beyond the unfortunate tragedies at the school."
Wanting to give first-person perspective and dismiss negative attention on the area around Audenried, EducationsWorks, a youth-media initiative at the Grays Ferry (formerly Audenried) Beacon Center, responded to Scribe’s requests to film their neighborhoods. The latter chose the after-school program because it included many students that attended the school who were aware of the neighborhood’s changes, Scribe Executive Director Louis Massiah said.
"[Grays Ferry] was a neighborhood that really was in transition," he said.
The aging Audenried was set to be torn down, giving way to a replacement in the same location at 33rd and Tasker streets. Meanwhile, southeast of the school, the Philadelphia Housing Authority was building the low-income housing to be known as the Greater Grays Ferry Estates, which was set to open in summer ’04 to replace the Tasker Homes following their ’02 demolition.
Armed with equipment such as digital cameras from Scribe, the first-time directors prepared with Jacqueline Hart, a humanities researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and Scribe filmmaker Serena Reed.
"We wanted to make sure the students learn about the equipment and documentary production, but also how one goes about sharing history with the broad public," Massiah said.
The documentary was shot by 12 pupils over spring ’04, the second to last year of the school’s existence. Bianca White, director of youth media programs at EducationWorks, took care of the editing. Some footage is from buildings that no longer exist, White said. The students interviewed fellow classmates, community members and Assistant Principal Reuben Mills to get their take on what was happening in their community. Included in the many interviews is a long-time resident who gives historical perspective on race relations in the area, White said.
After a screening at the Prince Music Theater in ’05 and at various community events since then, the "Precious Places" series has aired on WHYY TV12 — most recently with an Oct. 28 showing of the "Hill." The footage will be replayed several times on the public television channel over the next few years although these rebroadcasts are not yet scheduled, Massiah said. The series or individual volumes on DVD are also available through Scribe.
Audenried simply did
not have a good reputation. Violence filled the halls with 75 incidents between ’02 and ’03. After Principal Dr. B. LeFra Young took the reins in early ’03, violent incidents fell to 25 the following year and seven in the school’s final year, according to the district’s violent crime index report. Still, the reputation was unshakable.
"I was on [radio station] 103.9 one morning because they were broadcasting about how bad of a school Audenried was since a young girl got sliced across the chest from another student carrying a razor," Abdullah, now a junior at La Salle University, said of her call-in comments. "I had to defend our school. I wanted to let the people of Philadelphia know that we were not happy with the state of our school and that that was just two students of nearly 500."
Originally built in 1931 as a junior high, Audenried closed following the ’04-’05 school year and was demolished in ’06. After starting to rebuild in June ’06, the new Audenried High is expected to open in ’08 and will probably accept freshmen for the ’09-’10 academic year, district spokeswoman Felecia Ward said.
"[Audenried] was the first replacement high school that started construction," she said referencing the district’s $1.5 billion Capital Improvement Plan that began in ’04 to repair structures and replace aging high schools in order to accommodate the district’s new curriculum .
The new Audenried will be split into five academies — one solely for ninth-graders who will focus on career preparation, while the remaining four examine distinct career paths, she said.
The documentary touches on concerns about who would attend the rebuilt school. "There would not be accessibility," White said, adding former Audenried students now travel to schools such as Bok and South Philadelphia high. "They were going to make it a magnet school."
The documentary also delved into the reflections of community members.
"Economically speaking, there was concern from some of the people in the area that were being displaced [from Tasker Homes]," White said. "They were not guaranteed to be able to return to that area."
Before tearing down the complex, a $5.3 million development originally built in ’41 for defense workers at the Navy Yard and low-income residents, the Philadelphia Housing Authority relocated its tenants to PHA sites throughout the city, spokesman Kirk Dorn said.
The original homes consisted of two- and three-story buildings with 1,000 units, while Greater Grays Ferry Estates consists of a community center and 554 homes to rent or own. The number of crimes in the development decreased from 75 in ’99 to 14 in ’06, Dorn said.
"When you eliminate that liability and add what is now an asset to the community, the value of the houses around [Greater Grays Ferry Estates] have now doubled," he said.
The new Audenried will nicely complement Greater Grays Ferry Estates, Dorn added.
"From the time [PHA] planned to rebuild Tasker Homes, it was always in mind that the school district would rebuild the high school," he said. "We were just really happy that they were really working it out."
The students were pleased their work shows the bright spots of the neighborhood while dismissing the negative attention the school was getting at the time, Abdullah said.
"Apparently, the media ran with the idea of Audenried being ‘prison on the hill,’ so ‘Rising on the Hill’ contradicted that," she said.
