The Rebirth of North Broad

WITH ITS PASSIONATE and rockin’ choir and a preacher whose performance style is a charismatic mix of James Brown and Bernie Mac, the Greater Exodus Baptist Church is a helluva place to fight away Satan on a Sunday morning. On our last day in the Lofts, Dixie and I stroll a few blocks up Broad on a cool morning to hear a former football star turned minister.

The Reverend Dr. Herb Lusk is celebrating his 25th anniversary as pastor of Greater Exodus, which occupies a former Catholic church and several other buildings on North Broad just above Ridge Avenue, virtually in the shadow of the Divine Lorraine. He arrived here after a three-year career as a running back for the Eagles (“The Praying Tailback”), and seemed to think that guiding a church was not unlike winning a football game — it was all about gaining yardage.

Over the years, Greater Exodus has amassed a portfolio of properties on North Broad and the diagonally intersecting Ridge Avenue, including a former Provident bank that it runs as a community credit union, the former Traffic Court building that houses the charter school and day care center, a career training school, and a catering hall.

Reverend Lusk has a sense of humor about himself, and admits that his “hollerin’” can make some of the congregation nervous. But at one point during the nearly three-hour service, his voice rises to a scratchy crescendo, and he hollers, “Twenty-five years ago, they told us there was no way this church would grow, that North Broad Street was not a place where people would come! The bank next door wouldn’t give us a loan.” He pauses a moment, and raises his voice higher: “NOW WE OWN THAT PLACE!” A lot of his congregation shouts amen to that.

It was places like Greater Exodus that helped hold together the tattered fabric of the North Broad neighborhood long before developers like Eric Blumenfeld came on the scene. The developer and the preacher are friends. (Lusk, a social conservative, is a supporter and friend of George W. Bush, and his nonprofit, People for People, has received more than $1 million from Bush’s Faith Based Initiative program.)

Lusk tells me the developers are “licking their chops.” The church’s own development arm is hoping to build a 14-story mixed-use building on a triangle of land at Ridge and Fairmount. Lusk believes that all the properties his church has secured and all the vacant land available for private developers mean less threat of dislocation of longtime residents.

“I’ve always had hope, and the reason I maintained the hope that this area would turn around is that ultimately, the city has nowhere else to go,” Lusk says. “For 25 years, I’ve been preparing for that fact, and we’ve positioned ourselves as a player.”

Of course, there are plenty of people who don’t have the wherewithal to position themselves as players in the new North Broad version of Monopoly. The onward march of the forces of gentrification always leaves casualties in its wake. Lusk has heard from what he calls “the community factions” who worry about displacement. Having walked the corridor and its adjacent blocks, I saw plenty of evidence for his contention that — for a while anyway — there’s plenty of room for everyone. “Ultimately,” he told me, “the big picture is what people have to keep in mind.”

There was really just one final question I wanted to ask Lusk: What does he think of North Broad as a redeveloped gateway studded with new, expensive apartments full of people like Jason Lehman, Moses Malone, Dixie DeHart and me?

“The big picture is, we want development,” he told me. “That’s going to bring jobs and energy into the community, and that’s going to foster more new homes and new businesses.

“It’s really all good,” the preacher says.