Locals work to change Coatesville's image

When Sarah Alderman was a real estate agent a few years ago, clients said they would live anywhere in Chester County - except Coatesville.

A couple of years later, she came across a shirt she assumes someone made as a joke that outraged her. The front said "Friends don't let friends live in Coatesville."

"I think the reputation is a bigger issue than any real issue," Alderman said.

Nothing can change for Coatesville until perceptions of the city change, she said.

As Coatesville continues to work toward a revitalization that has stalled for decades, Alderman, 34, is one of the people trying to improve the city's image for residents and potential businesses and developers.

Alderman, a fourth-generation Coatesville native, is a writer and photographer working on an online, interactive documentary about the city called Bypassed: The Coatesville Project.

The website is to combine film, photographs, and written stories of current and former members of the community.

Alderman lives in Unionville, but she said her heart is in Coatesville. Her goal is to capture the city "in a really honest but beautiful way, but not a puff commercial."

This will be her first attempt at filmmaking.

Alderman, a single mother of 7-year-old twin girls, left real estate in 2012 and is a photographer in the midst of a busy wedding season.

She also is finishing the last few credits for her anthropology degree at West Chester University. She is to record oral histories from South Asian communities in Chester County as a fellow at the Chester County Historical Society.

She has invested $2,000 into her Coatesville project. She is applying for grants and plans to start an online fund-raiser on Kickstarter by mid-September. Filming is scheduled for the fall.

So far, about 25 people of various ages and backgrounds are on Alderman's list of interviewees.

She feels a deep connection to Coatesville, a city she describes as having "grit" and "authenticity." Alderman's great-grandfather owned a grocery store on Coates Street. Her grandmother, whom Alderman describes as one of her heroes, worked at the store and passed on her pride for Coatesville to Alderman.

Alderman lived in Coatesville until she was 13. She and her mother moved to Honey Brook as part of an affordable-housing program, but she missed the place she considered home.

A few years ago, she worked on a community storytelling project for National Geographic focusing on the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The project inspired her, she said, to do something similar for the city she loves.

"The way she was so passionate about coming back home to where she was born and telling the story of the city and its people aligned with what I wanted," said Aadil Malik, a spoken-word poet who lives in Coatesville. "It's what the city deserves."

Alderman asked Malik, a 19-year-old student at West Chester, to create a poem for the project.

Malik, whose family is from Pakistan and moved from Philadelphia to Coatesville when Malik was a preteen, said he typed Coatesville into Google and read pages of negative stories about the city. They included the arsons of 2008 and 2009, crime, and the texting scandal that led to the arrest of the former school superintendent on theft and ethics charges.

He called Coatesville "a community beyond the headlines."

He performed his poem at a gathering in April to kick off the city's centennial celebration. His poem received cheers and loud applause from the crowd assembled outside the train station, which is to be a centerpiece of the revitalization effort.

Ross Kershey, 82, who taught history in Coatesville for 42 years, called Malik's poem a wake-up call for the community.

"There are a lot of people, including Sarah, that are seeing to it that Coatesville has some kind of rebirth and are making Coatesville a better place right now," Kershey said.

Alderman plans to feature Kershey, who gives presentations about Coatesville history, in her project.

Dorothy Carter, the 92-year-old widow of Coatesville artist Lee Carter, also is to share her story for the documentary. She has spent her whole life in the Coatesville area and helped integrate its schools in the 1950s.

"There's potential here," Carter said, adding that people living outside the city "have to come and see . . . and talk to some of the people who are optimistic about Coatesville."

610-313-8207@MichaelleBond