Daniel Rubin: Healing the 'hood with art

Firecrackers, right? Two loud pops, then four or five more in a string.

The kids knew better.

Two schoolboys walked toward the racket, drawn down Wilder Street to where it ends at South 27th Street. One boy called back to his mom, "There's shots and you sent us to the store."

Not an accusation, just an observation. The boys kept walking, the sirens grew louder.

This is the neighborhood Nema Etebar chose for his summerlong art project/social experiment: Find a block in need, clean it, identify beloved adults, bond with the kids, photograph them all, and plaster those portraits on freshly painted walls.

The 2600 block of Wilder Street sounded Tuesday afternoon like it needed more than art and hugs.

"We're between two war zones," said Tonja Bell, who is one of the women Etebar put on the wall, a block captain and cancer survivor who credits children's laughter with giving her the will to get well. "This summer wasn't so bad. But two summers ago, the kids couldn't play outside."

It's just this sort of place that Etebar and a group of friends were looking for back in January when they first met with a mission. Etebar had seen the pictures that a French photographer named JR had taken of rape victims in Sierra Leone. Posting their portraits on walls in their country had highlighted their dignity.

So his group - calling itself Photophilanthropy - started looking for a Philadelphia neighborhood held together by a strong woman or football coach.

The group members learned of Wilder Street while making a presentation to the City Year program. When they asked for role models, a 16-year-old named Charmaine Barfield suggested Tonja Bell.

"I said Miss Tonja always has her door open for children," Barfield explained on Tuesday, when she and her twin sister, Champayne, dropped by to see their pictures on the wall. "Miss Tonja always lends a helping hand. She'd read to us, wash our hair."

For Etebar and his band of believers - among them a surgeon, a singer/songwriter, a skateboarder, and a financial services specialist - finding a role model was a lot easier than fitting in.

Etebar is 31, a half-Iranian, half-Kentuckian photographer with a wispy beard and unruly topknot of dark hair.

"Anyone who looks like me down here is taken for a crackhead, a Christian, or a cop," he said.

So how did he get the kids to engage?

He used a net.

Being from the Bluegrass State, he understood the draw of basketball. None of the hoops around Wilder Street had nets. His friend Jackson Auchinleck picked up one at Modell's, and they strung it up in an asphalted void halfway down the block. The kids eyed the net as if it were spun from gold.

First, the group worked to transform a corner lot into a garden. The members raised money with a benefit at Alfa, the Walnut Street gastro-pub where Etebar works, and over a month and a half, they recruited and helped the neighborhood kids pick up the tires and bullet casings and trash and replace them with mulch, railroad ties, and paint.

Bell says the neighbors took a while to warm to the outsiders.

"People would say, 'Who are these people?' " she recalled. "People would say, 'You are always so trusting.' But I'd tell them, 'If you don't believe in them, just try talking to them.' " They were legit, she was sure.

So was Katherine Thomas. Tuesday marked her 40th year on the block. She was the first African American captain in the then-Irish neighborhood. "I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly," she said. She said Etebar seems to be the answer to her prayers.

On the last Saturday of August, Photophilanthropy held an end-of-summer block party, renting a dunking booth, bouncing tent, and cotton candy machine. There were marchers, speakers, musicians, and an electrical storm that cleared the street, then had the neighbors dancing in the rain.

Since then, Etebar and his friends have returned to post seven more giant photos - the Barfield twins looking glamorous, a big-spectacled Louis Witcher, 10, looking like "Preach" from Cooley High. The photos should last four or five months, then start to crumble. Etebar says he'll return and power-wash the images away.

It was Tonja Bell who best described the transformative potential of these ephemeral portraits.

"The idea," she said, "is to show the kids in a different light."