A pearl of a neighborhood near Center City

STEPPING out the back door of Asian Arts Initiative's Vine Street home, Gayle Isa was quick to acknowledge the challenge presented by the bleak alleyway that greeted her. "As you can tell, there's a lot of transformation to be done," said AAI's founder and executive director, as she scanned the piles of garbage and graffiti-covered walls that line the 1200 block of Pearl Street.

"In polite terms, we've been calling it an 'underutilized alleyway,' " Isa continued. "I think most people who live in this neighborhood would feel that it's not a safe place. There's a lot of illicit activity that happens and definitely a lot of trash that collects here."

But it's also clear that, when Isa looks around Pearl Street, she sees a potential that most wouldn't find amid the detritus. With the same sort of foresight that led to the formation of the AAI as a remedy for racial tensions between African-American and Asian-American communities in the early 1990s, Isa envisions Pearl Street as a productive community-meeting place. She's working to turn the four-block stretch into a hub for dialogue between the varied constituencies that make up the neighborhood, whether you call it Callowhill, Chinatown North, Trestletown or the Eraserhood (see Page 24).

When they moved into the building five years ago, Isa recalled, "We wanted to serve as an anchor for Chinatown's expansion northward and also to help catalyze positive activity in this neighborhood. I think it's really important to acknowledge the diverse sets of people who claim this community and to create spaces for all of those voices to be heard."

This Saturday, AAI will host the Pearl Street Block Party, a free arts festival that Isa hopes will gather that diverse group of neighbors together with visitors from across the city - all to showcase what Pearl Street could be.

The AAI has been working with Oakland-based landscape architect Walter Hood to devise strategies for transforming the alleyway moving forward, and these will be presented during the festival. Hood will also lead a community furniture build, the results of which will be used during a community meal that culminates the block party.

"The idea of the block party is to ignite people's imaginations around how the Pearl Street alleyway could be transformed into a permanent space that is shared by a diversity of community members," Isa explained. "Can we help facilitate a dialogue that helps people to not only categorize each other but also find some areas of commonality?"

Hood, who lived in Philadelphia in the 1980s, sees precedent in Philly's history for creating gathering spaces within the city's narrow alleyways. "One of the things that I remember from living in Philly is the cadence of the streets," he said.

"We actually walked through a lot of the city's alleys, new and old, and tried to come up with characteristics that bind them together, because, in my optimistic view of urbanity, we're more alike than different," he continued. "The alley here is really no different than Elfreth's Alley or the alleys you see down at 2nd and Chestnut. So we've come up with ways in which people can cultivate activity within the alley building on that rich history."

Much of the block-party activity will be an extension of the work of AAI's Social Practice Lab, an artists-in-residence program that is just wrapping up its first year. Ben Volta, who worked with students from AAI's Youth Arts Workshop to create a series of banners that now adorn the fence around Peco's Callowhill substation, will paint the street green before the party. Visitors will be encouraged to add to the streets and walls fluorescent-colored circles that represent pearls, electrons and musical notes.

Since April, artists Laura Deutch, Katya Gorker, Kathryn Sclavi and Lee Tusman have been bicycling around the neighborhood with Hot Tea, a tea cart on wheels that they use to instigate dialogue among locals. "The tea cart acts like a mobile public space, or a mobile living room," Tusman said. "You have to wait for the water to boil, the tea to steep, to have it poured, for the hot tea to cool down; the whole process takes some time, and during that time we're either facilitating a workshop or encouraging conversation."

Standing just outside AAI's back door, the conflicting and transitional nature of the neighborhood was vividly illustrated: At one end of the block, a number of homeless men milled around near the Sunday Breakfast Mission, a homeless shelter; at the other, a luxury loft building is under construction.

"It's pretty stark, isn't it?" Isa remarked. "Because of our mission and our history and commitment of feeling, I think it's important for us to play an active role in this neighborhood and help ensure that some of that diversity continues to exist. Both in racial terms and socioeconomic terms, there's a whole range of people who are, in terms of the community feast that we're hosting, literally going to be able to sit down at the table together."