West Philly community leaders worked alongside staff and students from the Stuart Weitzman School of Design to create a new community garden that celebrates the area’s rich cultural history.
West Philly’s Lancaster Avenue corridor is located between 32nd and 48th Streets and known as the New Freedom District. It is now home to the Lex Street Garden, which was planned and built in collaboration with PennPraxis’ Studio+ initiative at Weitzman.
Under the vision of community leaders like Abdul-Rahim Muhammad, who pioneered the New Freedom District, the Lex Street Garden came to life as a collaborative effort between neighborhood residents and the school to honor the area’s Civil Rights heritage.
“It was about giving a place for the community that they can be proud of and that they can cherish,” said dual-degree architecture and landscape architecture student Chanju Yang, who worked on the project.
Muhammad sat down with Ellen Neises, associate professor of practice in landscape design at Weitzman, to discuss how his work with the New Freedom District and Penn came together.
“Your Stories: The Lex Street Garden & New Freedom District.” Abdul-Rahim Muhammad, West Philly community leader and pioneer of the New Freedom District, sits down with Ellen Neises, associate professor of practice in landscape design at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, to discuss how the New Freedom District and Penn collaborated to create the Lex Street Garden.
“I knew the community had a very rich history in terms of African American history,” said Muhammad. “I was a boy growing up in West Philly, and the idea that we had these prominent voices for freedom, justice and equality right here on Lancaster Ave, Dr. King and Malcom X, they were the biggest voices to articulate our struggle. And so the idea for the New Freedom District came from that.”
“I think we all really loved being able to build [the garden] cooperatively,” added Neises, “That spirit of, ‘we all built this,’ I think was definitely the most rewarding part.”