Volunteers spruce up a W. Phila. neighborhood

Light morning rain couldn't dampen the spirits yesterday of about 100 volunteers who hammered nails, painted walls, fixed leaky bathrooms, and weeded an overgrown garden and alleyway in West Philadelphia's Walnut Hill neighborhood.

Rainwater streamed in rivulets off tents and an outdoor grill smoked in the drizzle while most everybody was hard at work cutting drywall or raking debris to help stabilize the neighborhood just south of Walnut Street. And the sun came out for the afternoon.

"I like to see people come together like this instead of hanging out on street corners," Dion Edwards, 45, of the 4700 block of Sansom Street, said as he carted a wheelbarrow of weeds and branches to a Dumpster.

The nonprofit group Rebuilding Together and volunteers including the 25 members of the Philadelphia Panthers minor-league football league, did cosmetic repairs on five houses. They also cleaned out an overgrown lot and planted white and orange flowers, putting the garden back into Walnut Hill Community Garden.

Wireless carrier Cricket Communications Inc., which markets prepaid phone, texting, and broadband services, financed the project with a $50,000 grant.

Jeri Morton, 58, of the 5000 block of Chancellor Street, had the first of 10 volunteers into her home about 7 a.m. Four hours later, the crew had installed a new wall where the second-floor bathroom had leaked and were painting the living and dining rooms. In the previous week, Rebuilding Together had repaired Morton's leaky roof and fixed the front porch.

"I'm not handy," said Morton, who has owned the two-story house for 30 years. "I have no shame when it comes to that. I can clean. But I can't put a washer in a spiggot or hang drywall." She estimated that the Rebuilding Together repairs would have cost $10,000 if she had had to hire contractors.

Across the street, Anita Brooker, 50, who has lived there for 32 years, was having windows replaced and a bathroom leak fixed. Rebuilding Together had previously fixed her roof, too.

She stood outside her front door and talked about the financial drain of maintaining an older house. "You try to save up for these things and then you use the money for something else," she said. "This is a blessing."

Rebuilding Together, a national nonprofit group with local chapters, was assisted by the Enterprise Center Community Development Corp. for Walnut Hill, a neighborhood of about 8,600.

Rebuilding Together's parent organization in Washington fixes about 10,000 homes a year, making improvements of an estimated market value of $100 million, said national vice president John White, who participated in yesterday's project. The Philadelphia chapter, led by executive director Carrie Rathmann, works on about 40 homes a year. "Some people can't afford the repairs that would allow them to stay in their homes," Rathmann said.

Cricket, part of Leap Wireless International Inc., launched its service here in March and has 230 employees in the Philadelphia area. There are 20 company-owned Cricket stores in the Philadelphia area and 90 other Cricket dealers.

John Long, national vice president of marketing for Cricket in San Diego, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1990s. He ran the Philadelphia chapter of Rebuilding Together while a student at Wharton. Long said yesterday he had persuaded Cricket management to donate $1 million to the national Rebuilding Together organization, which passed along $50,000 of that to the Walnut Hill project.

The rest of the money will be distributed to other cities. Long, who did repairs on Brooker's house, waved his hand around Chancellor Street as he spoke on Brooker's porch: "These are a lot of our customers."