King Kenny

Gamble sold his mansion and moved back into a rowhouse in his childhood neighborhood, on South 15th Street. Back to the pushers, the dealers, the pocketbook-snatchers and thieves.

From there, he began his redevelopment effort in earnest, starting Universal Community Homes, which grew into a nonprofit empire called the Universal Companies, which includes the housing development company, a charter school, an investment fund, and various social services, from credit building to computer classes. Universal’s “target area” lives up to the company’s name: It’s an enormous parcel that comprises the entire south-central part of the city, running from 5th Street out to 22nd, and from South Street down to Tasker.

The umbrella’s president and CEO, Rahim Islam, recently took me on a tour of Universal’s good works. We started at the Universal Institute Charter School, which houses 700 students in three buildings. Then we visited Universal Court, at the corner of 15th and Christian Streets — the site of Kenny Gamble’s childhood home. His first attempt at development, it’s a whole block of rebuilt and rehabbed townhomes, and includes a courtyard with a playground.

Then Islam drove us past block after block of similar developments, hundreds of red brick doorsteps outfitted with nice lamps and a touch of landscaping. So far, Universal has rebuilt or rehabilitated about a thousand houses, he said.

We stopped at 16th and Federal streets, where Islam hopped from his car and stood in the street with arms outstretched, turning in place as though starring in an urban Sound of Music. Behind him, people strolled unafraid from a tidy Universal housing development toward a little grocery.

“This corner had the most notorious open drug trafficking in the city,” he said. “Over a five-year period, we’ve put almost $45 million worth of investment just into this area. And now we’re a catalyst for change.” And he was right: The intersection was dominated by a Universal satellite office, and elsewhere showed every sign of growth and industriousness, including a little hair salon, a dry cleaner, and new construction by private builders. The intersection was full of the sounds and smells of men sawing lumber, and trucks bearing construction equipment passed each other coming and going. Across from Universal’s office, someone had planted a bed of flowers in a small front yard, and a more modern type of flower — a digital television satellite — had sprouted on the roof.

We toured Broad Street starting at Catharine, where Universal owns a huge plot of land on which it plans to build an upscale residential building, called 777 Lofts, with partner Dranoff Properties. Down at Broad and Washington there’s another enormous plot, which Islam said marks the epicenter of Kenny Gamble’s dearest, most ambitious desire. He envisions South Philly as an entertainment corridor with an emphasis on the city’s musical heritage, similar to Beale Street in Memphis. In a major step toward that goal, Gamble persuaded the Rhythm & Blues Foundation to move from New York to Philadelphia, and next he plans to develop a $50 million National Center for Rhythm and Blues on the empty plot at Broad and Washington. He envisions a massive complex including a concert hall, a music academy and a Hall of Fame.

Those are majestic aims. But not everyone in South Philadelphia admires Universal, or its work. Some residents say Universal is too heavy-handed in its tactics, and that it gets cheap properties through political connections; many of those new doorsteps Islam showed me were acquired when Universal lobbied the city to exercise its “eminent domain” policy: to seize blighted properties, or properties whose owners owed long-overdue taxes. One of Gamble’s staunchest critics was Barney Richardson, his childhood friend who also sat at the feet of Mr. Lewis in the Ideal Barber Shop.

Richardson hasn’t left the neighborhood in the entirety of his 70-plus years, and is now the area’s unofficial historian. “I had five properties,” he said recently. He had bought them as cheaply as two-for-$5,000. “They needed paint and all, but in our neighborhood, you couldn’t get a loan from a bank to fix up your properties.”

He received a letter from the city alerting him that his houses would be seized under eminent domain. He blamed Kenny Gamble, publicly. “I fought it,” he said. Ultimately he agreed to spruce up his homes, and was allowed to keep them. But the strong-arm maneuver angered him.

Other residents say that Universal, once it acquires properties, moves too slowly to develop them, and so actually contributes to blight. South Philly activist Lisa Parsley, for instance, gnaws on Universal like a determined dog with a bone. She tracks the company’s business dealings, tax payments and development progress; she says Universal may have done good for South Philly long ago, but now it’s holding back development and even fostering crime. She offers the Royal Theater on South between 15th and 16th  as an example: Universal acquired it in 2000, and she says the company promised to renovate it. But all they’ve done — visibly, at least — is paint a mural on the front.

I asked Rahim Islam about her assertion, and he said, “For somebody to say we wanted to buy [the Royal] to develop it is just a misleading thing. We bought it to preserve it.” But a press release announcing the purchase in 2000, and bearing Islam’s name, seems to confirm Parsley’s claim: It said the Royal had been bought “for conversion into a live performance theater.”

Parsley said the empty Royal — along with other bare lots owned by Universal — invites drug traffic and other crime. Gamble recently lent his name, voice and time to a program called 10,000 Men, an effort to tamp down deadly crime in Philadelphia’s black community. But Parsley’s dim view of Kenny Gamble persists.

“Crack baggie,” she said recently, bending down to pick up a tiny pink plastic bag from the sidewalk on Bainbridge Street near 21st Street. We’d spent the evening walking through South Philadelphia, looking at Universal’s properties — the Royal Theater, among others — and now she held the baggie aloft as evidence. “All the abandoned housing makes it still attract this kind of thing.”

“For which you place some of the blame squarely on — ”

“Universal. Absolutely.”

Activist resident Laura Blanchard, a former board member of the South of South Neighborhood Association, said that Gamble’s work in the neighborhood has been, on balance, a good thing. But she mentioned a touchy aspect of Gamble’s approach to development:

“Sadly, Mr. Gamble’s faith and some of his reported comments about preserving an African-American community have been polarizing,” she said, “particularly in our uneasy post-9/11 world.”

She said some people fear Gamble wants to build a black Muslim enclave. I promised to ask him about that.