Pretty much the smallest quantity of mulch you can buy is the standard 2 cubic foot bag. The good news is, it's cheap (about 3.75 right now for hardwood mulch). The bad news is, you'll have a very hard time finding it in the city anywhere but Home Depot or Lowe's. (Don't buy the dyed garbage, go all the way to the end of the row and get HARDWOOD MULCH, no dye, no bark)

However, you can get FREE mulch in any quantity you want up to 30 gallons at the Organics Recycling Center in Fairmount Park, if you are a Philly resident. However, you will need to drive there, bring your own container, and pay attention to their not-totally-convenient hours: https://www.phila.gov/services/trees-parks-the-environment/get-organic-materials/

I don't think Urban Jungle sells mulch, unless it's some precious tiny bag of something for a terrarium that costs $25.

EDIT: I just remembered that they now have a nursery at Morris and Water Street, but their web site says they are still closed for the season and does not give an opening date. I'm assuming they would sell mulch there along with their outdoor plants, but I haven't managed to check it out since it opened so I can't verify. https://www.urbanjunglephilly.com/nursery

I have actually encountered zero people smoking on the bus, and I take the bus all the time.

Maybe there are people smoking on buses and I'm just missing it because I mostly take the same few buses within Center City and rarely any later than mid-evening?

I rarely take the subway/EL but the few times I've been on them since the pandemic there is always somebody smoking on the train or in the station.

You can, but on a weekend it's soooooo crowded it will be a bit hard to navigate a stroller (or scooter or wheelchair). Also, a lot of the exhibits up front have walk through paths (and long lines to get in them) - more are like this than in previous years - also making strollers hard.

On the plus side, they have *lots* more places to sit down than in previous years. Applause, they must have finally listened to the many complaints about this

Yes, there are columns in the main hall. But not of the number and type you would normally see in the skeleton of a skyscraper. Think more of the typical large parking garage underneath a tall building to picture how interrupted the space would be with columns.

(it was may 1992 and Gorbachev was launching his foundation, which was later headquartered at the Presidio. Just had to look that up and remind myself that I'm old)

If you are a newish resident most of your Convention Center knowledge is apparently from the pandemic era. So yeah, it was 100% empty during the pandemic, and it's taken a while to ramp back up to normal business.

I think rather than going by how it "feels" to you at street level, you might want to look at some actual figures about number and size of events that are held there. The flower show, the car show, these are things that locals attend and are not representative; they don't bring in the hotel business.

You're thinking of events which draw in primarily locals, which are not the norm at the Convention Center. The Flower Show does bring in some people from outside the area who stay at hotels, but not that many compared to the really massive medical and scientific conferences that draw from all over the US and worldwide.

this is the same discussion we've had about the proposed arena and whether it should also have a high rise building stacked on top of it.

The answer is that, for structural engineering reasons, you cannot stack a high-rise on top of a huge clear span roof.* A huge clear span roof has enough to do holding itself up. This is why you don't have arenas and large convention centers on the ground floor of high rise buildings.

*edit for clarity - I shouldn't speak of the convention center as having a "large clear span roof" as it certainly doesn't, in the manner that a large sports arena does. There are columns in the space. But it is still not the type of space you can easily place on the ground floors of a tall high-rise.

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I can think of a few big city hotels with quite large ballrooms as part of their meeting space, but even those are generally not right under the tall towers. (I'm thinking of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, where I saw Mikhail Gorbachev in 199? give a talk with alllll the ballrooms opened up and an audience of about 2000....that portion of the building is not underneath the hotel tower.)

I suggest Trader Joe's. Good day to get a whole haul of groceries since the lines should be short.

Not so much encouraging driving, I don't think, as just being passive and fatalistic about the majority of their visitors driving in. They could do a lot more to encourage transit use and orient the park toward people arriving by transit.

The story of the Southeast Asian Market in FDR Park is one of those rare, precious examples of Philly not sucking. The market started out as a totally unauthorized thing. But instead of shutting it down and arresting and/or fining people in the process, the city and the Parks department actually worked with the vendors to get the market officially authorized, and then actually made a permanent home for the market a commitment in the master plan.

They did know as soon as last summer that they were designating an office space for the market's vendor association, and that is going into the renovated "Welcome Center" which is the building off Pattinson to the east of the Swedish Museum. Maybe hearing that is why I was picturing that the market would have its home near there, instead of at the extreme southern edge of the park away from the major entrances and from transit.

ETA: I thought the market was going to stay an open-air market, but this story does refer to a "structure" being built, without making it clear what that's going to look like. Maybe just something like a large shelter rather than a fully enclosed building? There is mention of a $100,000 grant but the way the story is written makes it unclear whether that's just planning and design or whether construction costs are in that total.

And what about elders who want to buy a bunch of groceries that they can't get elsewhere? "Only" a ten-minute walk to the market, and ten minutes back, when you're carrying or wheeling groceries, on top of however many trip segments it takes you to get to and from NRG station or the nearest bus stop.

I take the 17 bus to FDR park pretty often. Get off at the park entrance at the NE corner and walk in. When I went to one of the walking tours about the master plan for the park, I piped up and said "I got here by bus from Center City, but when you sent out the directions to get here there were only driving directions, nothing about transit." The leaders of the tour said airily "Oh, but most of the visitors to the park come by car!"

The head of the park and the head of the Fairmount parks conservancy were leading the tour. And not even *pretending* that they wanted to encourage people to come by transit or make it easier for people to even know that's an option.

They had previously announced that there would be a permanent home for the Southeast Asian market. Which is 100% awesome news, don't get me wrong!

But this announcement of the location decision is really disappointing to me. I guess I had been picturing the market somewhere in the vicinity of the redone Welcome Center along Pattison, near the corner of Broad. It seems like the right location for something akin to an urban farmer's market. Instead it is going in the center of the extreme southern edge of the park. Could hardly have been less friendly to people arriving by transit. Of course there needs to be good vehicle access for the vendors to load in, but visitors to the market arriving by bus or subway will now have to hike even further than they do now. It just seems like once again FDR park is primarily catering to people with cars.

I buy my kombu at Hung Vuong. I'm pretty sure you're dealing with the same species of kelp regardless of the packaging; is there something special about a Japanese brand besides the packaging?

Candles are always very popular on Buy Nothing groups, I second this

Yep, checks out with the "History" section of the church's website - Church of the Holy Trinity (Episcopal) on Rittenhouse Square.

https://htrit.org/history/

SOSNA (South of South Neighborhood Association) put them up and maintains them. SOSNA also provides the tables and chairs in the Triangle plaza and maintains the space. We also replanted the garden this year so feel free to admire it extravagantly.

They went out of business at the start of 2020 - right before the pandemic in fact. They had two locations, the other in Passyunk, both closed. https://www.inquirer.com/food/green-aisle-grocery-close-adam-andrew-erace-passyunk-20200102.html

It feels like we usually have at least one snowfall by this time of year, even if nothing that sticks.

Instead we've had repeated HEAVY rainstorms - if any one of those had been snowstorms it would have been an epic amount of snow. Thurs/Friday's storm looks like the same thing again, lots of rain but well above freezing. And then it's going to get SUPER cold for multiple days after that. Anyplace with uncleared drains is going to be a skating rink.

You know, there was a guerrilla artist some years back in Los Angeles who added a sign at a major freeway interchange to make a certain turnoff clearer and safer - perfectly reproducing the sign style, font, every aspect of standard freeway sign. Can't recall how long it was up before somebody official noticed and removed it. I think it would take a fraction of the effort to make guerrilla wayfinding signs for SEPTA...

And then there's getting lost in the tunnels under city hall. So scary. I once literally thought I would never make it out and would be found in a later era as a skeleton.

and by the way speaking of physical limitations: I have always said that SEPTA's bus stop motto is "Fuck you if you need to sit down."

Regular bus user here, very rare subway or rail user. SEPTA is the source of many frustrations. But every new city I've ever moved to or spent time in, it's always damn hard to figure out the buses at first except for the very simplest situations.

SEPTA's app alone is no use for trip planning. My first few years in Philly I always used the transit tab on Google Maps directions for figuring out how to get from Point A to Point B. Supplemented by SEPTA app just for tracking the current bus that I'm waiting for. I have not yet become a real user of the Transit app because I have most of my regular places to go figured out by now, but I agree it has a much nicer interface.

Even with better tools for trip planning...detours will absolutely screw you every time. They happen so often and with so little warning. I have through bitter experience trained myself to check the SEPTA app before I leave the house for any detours on my route, but there are still pitfalls - the sudden unannounced detour; the completely impenetrable SEPTA prose in which a detour is described because they have not yet figured out how to show them as a line on a map; the planned and scheduled detour that ends EARLIER than planned and scheduled (this happens all the time) so that you are, once again, waiting like a chump in the wrong place for the bus.

The "invisible bus" is one of my favorite manifestations. Sometimes the app does not show a bus when there is one supposed to be on the schedule. This may mean that the bus in question is never coming. It may *also* mean that the bus in question has a non-functioning transmitter and you will only know it is coming by beholding it in the flesh. Cue once again waiting like a chump for a bus that may or may not be coming.

Nevertheless, I still prefer the bus to most other modes of transport (physical disability means I can't ride a bike or take really long walks) and I just have to content myself with regular complaining, apologizing to anyone who might be waiting for me at the other end, and taking those delightful little surveys that SEPTA occasionally issues to let me know they're listening...