🛤️ City playing hardball to build new rail park

☕ Where To Grab Coffee in Philly

Forget Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts. Philly has a plethora of local cafes with social missions, cool merch, and of course, amazing coffee. Whether you’re looking for a good drink or a change of scenery, here are our recommendations for where to grab a cup of joe in the city. [🎧 City Cast Philly]

🛤️ Philly’s New Rail Park May Finally Happen

The city has been wanting to acquire the old Reading Viaduct to convert it into a green space and connect it to the Rail Park, but property owner Reading International has refused to sell. Now Philly is preparing to condemn the site, exploring all legal options. [Axios]

🇺🇸 Potential Removal of Slavery-Focused Exhibits Spark Outrage

Activists are pushing back against efforts by the Trump administration to remove exhibits at Independence National Historic Park that acknowledge the horrors of slavery. More than 100 people rallied in Old City, angered by the federal review process and concerned that visitors won’t learn the country’s real history. [🎧 City Cast Philly, WHYY]

🏫 How Philly’s Deciding Which Schools To Close

With school closures on the horizon, the School District of Philadelphia is finalizing its facilities master plan. But deciding which schools get upgrades and which ones shut down is tricky when nearly half of the city’s public schools are in poor condition. [🎧 City Cast Philly, 🔒The Inquirer]

🕤 Curbing Crime With Curfews

Philadelphia’s Community Evening Resource Centers are providing safe spaces for youth to play games, learn new skills, and make friends. By keeping them off the streets at night, community leaders hope the initiative reduces violence. But how effective are teen curfews? [The Trace, 🎧 City Cast Philly]

Philadelphia is well known for cheesesteaks and pretzels, but there’s another food deeply woven into Philly’s history: Oysters. New York might get the publicity for its oysters, but by the 1800s Philly had nearly 400 oyster houses and Philadelphians consumed 300 million oysters a year.

For National Oyster Day, Hey Philly chatted with Rowan University history professor and seafood connoisseur Stephen Nepa to learn about Philly’s briny food history.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

What type of oysters were found here?

“Certain climates will foster a certain type of oyster, whether it's kind of crunchy, whether it's milky, whether it's shallow cup, deep cup. We had kind of a northeastern equivalent of what we would call today a Gulf Oyster. So relatively shallow cup and not so much crunchy, but a little bit. These were a little bit milkier, kind of higher salinity.”

How accessible were oysters?

“If we're talking the 1700s, they were locally harvested. It was not hard to find them. Bookbinder’s started as an oyster stand. It basically was a cart, and it was open-faced. There wasn't really a lid on it and then there was just usually ice. The oysters were laid out and you would have a guy there that would just shuck them right on the spot. They'd be kept in a bucket.

“Long before there's hot dogs or pretzels, oysters were kind of the original street food.”

How did people eat oysters compared to now?

“The easiest way to eat them is from a cart. If you have more refined recipes, baked oysters [and] oyster pie.

"In 1775, when the first Continental Congress was getting together …when these guys got out of Congress at three in the afternoon, they'd go to these really elaborate dinners that the wealthiest Philadelphians would host. And they would have oysters. They would either have them baked or on the half shell.

"Oyster stew is something that probably people figured out along with all the other soups — the snapper soup, the pepper pot soups — that you'd see on the streets.”