Guess Whats Coming With Dinner?
But in order to be taken to Common Pleas Court in the first place, they were found to have ignored repeated warnings to shape-up or close down.
THE CITY SOLICITOR’S Office prosecutes the cases in court, but that department is also short-handed.
On rare occasions, the Health Department will request an "ex-parte injunction" which allows it to take immediate legal action if there is imminent danger of widespread public health peril.
Two years ago this type of injunction was brought against the Kohr Farms Restaurant on Chestnut Street in center city which had infestation with rats, mice and three types of roaches — American, Oriental and German.
According to spokesmen for the department, the building had sub-basements, and inspectors could see the rats and mice pass each other on the stairways. Each type of vermin had a certain area of turf to call his own. The mice occupied one floor, the rats were in the basement and the roaches in another part of the building.
Within the department, critics of the Municipal Court system condemn lenient, wrist-slapping penalties and accuse Arlen Specter and State Attorney General J. Shane Creamer of using the health code violations to garnish glory for themselves. In DA Specter’s case, the glory had always been his for the taking. Some months back, he received more television exposure than Don Rickles as a result of his sanitary law crackdowns. His office made about 30 arrests in one sweeping round-up of sanitary code violators. Among those caught in the net were:
• Osner Seafoods Inc., where the fishcakes were found to have a high bacteria count, and the Osner building signs of vermin infestation. Coincidentally, Osner’s best customer was the City of Philadelphia, which used the food in the daily menu at Riverview Home for the Aged, in all the city prisons, and even at Philadelphia General Hospital.
• Dale’s Supermarket, a discount subsidy of Penn Fruit, was hauled into court because the store at 9100 Roosevelt Boulevard was selling unrefrigerated milk and meat that had been improperly stored on rusty hooks and dirty racks.
• A&P Stores Inc., whose supermarket at 2206 North Broad Street was one of the worst health hazards in the city, with rodent excreta in the popcorn and evidence of rodent activity on the bread, snack items, flour, cake mix and baby food shelves.
• The Doughnuttery at 1235 Market Street, where the health files of employees were inadequate and the sugar bins were contaminated with insect fragments.
At the time, Specter and an assistant DA were prosecuting the violators of state sanitation codes. The reasoning behind the raids was the old deterrent argument — since the entire city could not be properly policed against sanitation law infractions, the next best thing was to expose a few very bad establishments and hopefully scare the rest into voluntary compliance.
