PHILADELPHIA: MARCHING TO THE BEAT OF HOPE

PHILADELPHIA -- The sound of drums echoed through the streets, signifying
the hope and renewal of one north-central Philadelphia neighborhood
devastated by lost work, poverty and drugs.

Inside the rowhouse on 23rd Street where she has lived for 63 years, Alice
Barry, 81, put down her sewing and pulled back her curtains. "There goes my
children," said Mrs. Barry, who had stitched their first uniforms four
years ago.

Vicki Thompson, 40, heard the familiar drumbeat in her office in the
community center that used to be a Roman Catholic rectory, just up the
block from Mrs. Barry. "It's a different noise," Ms. Thompson said. "Years
ago it was gunshots."

She hollered out the window: "Go, Foot Stompers! Go, Foot Stompers!"

On the street, Audra Holbrook, 11 and all legs, was leading the girls, high
stepping in her red and white pleated skirt and white boots with red
plumes. LaMark Shorts, 17, the captain of the boys, brought up the rear,
the drummers marching tall, pounding out their message: The North
Philadelphia Foot Stompers have arrived.

Up and down the block one recent morning, people went to their windows and
doorways to soak up the energy of their own drill team, 16 girls and seven
boys, more welcome than any fancy parade. They were practicing, marching
through the neighborhood's past and its unfolding future, past abandoned
buildings and newly renovated brick rowhouses, past vegetable and flower
gardens that will bloom come spring in what used to be vacant lots prowled
by drug dealers and prostitutes.

"The neighborhood is rising," said Helen Brown, 56, who kept house for a
rich family on Society Hill for years, and went home at night to fight to
hold her battered block of 23rd Street together so it could rise again.

Nothing symbolizes the rebirth more vividly than the Foot Stompers, not
just a drill team, but the heartbeat of the emerging 33-block north-central
Philadelphia neighborhood known as St. Elizabeth's-Diamond Street. The
story of the Foot Stompers reflects the rebuilding that has required, in
addition to money and political muscle, all the organization, creativity,
drive and discipline that makes a drill team.

It is a rebuilding amid an urban battlefield. A man was fatally shot the
day after Christmas only a block from where the Foot Stompers were
marching. The unemployment rate is 29 percent. The median family income is
less than $9,000 a year. In this setting, a drill team, with its military
roots and rigor, is more fitting than any string band.

"Get those legs up! Get in line!" Mrs. Brown, who lost her only son, Earl,
to AIDS and poured her grief and love into the drill team, was commanding
the troops from a wheelchair. The cast on her left leg, which she injured
while marching, has not held her back, any more than all the other
obstacles.

When Mrs. Brown and a neighbor, George Maginault, started the drill team
four years ago, the young people had nowhere but the streets to play. "The
girls used to jump rope," Mrs. Brown said. "They were arguing among
themselves -- 'Who's next?' They were hollering and hooting. All that
energy. I said, 'Why don't you get a drill team?"'

Mrs. Brown being Mrs. Brown, the girls knew it was not a question. "We
said, 'All right,"' recalled Sharnae Johnson, 12.

"After the jobs left, the drugs moved in," said Mrs. Brown, who went to
work as a housekeeper after the electronics factory where she had worked
for 26 years shut down, one more statistic in the neighborhood's downward
economic spiral.

Thousands of residents had fled. In 1994, over bitter protests, the Diocese
of Philadelphia closed St. Elizabeth's Roman Catholic Church and school,
long an anchor on 23rd Street.

"People had gotten so discouraged," said Sharnae Johnson's grandmother,
Evelyn Johnson, 69, whose 24-year-old grandson was shot to death in 1989.
"They had lost hope. When a person is without hope, they don't do
anything."

There were no after-school programs for the children. There was certainly
no money for a drill team. Without drums, the boys practiced by beating
sticks against the Philadelphia phone book.

"The phone book is a very good drum," Maginault said.

The drill team was only one idea Maginault, Mrs. Brown and others had for
the neighborhood. "We had all this vision," Mrs. Brown said, "but we didn't
have resources."

Sister Mary Scullion had both.

A Catholic nun and community organizer, she moved into what had been the
convent of St. Elizabeth's around the time the drill team got started.
Project Home, the community development corporation she founded with an
accountant, Joan Dawson-McConnon, to help homeless men and women, was
transforming the abandoned convent into a residence for 24 recovering drug
addicts.

At 44, Sister Scullion has crawled down manholes and into the darkest
alleys to invite the homeless to Project Home's shelters.

"Sister Mary, she doesn't come in and say, 'We're going to do this,"' Mrs.
Brown said. "She comes in block by block and asks you, 'What can Project
Home do to help you?"'

Three years ago, Sister Scullion had her first meeting with the residents
of Mrs. Brown's block at Mrs. Brown's home. "Mrs. Barry, she said she
wanted ceramics classes," Mrs. Brown recalled. "We said we didn't want any
more houses to be torn down on our block. We said we would like to see our
houses rehabbed."

Everyone wanted a place for the youth. As meetings were repeated on every
block, neighbors who had grown wary and withdrawn through the bad times
began to reconnect.

"The energy just multiplied," Sister Scullion said.

She knew that the Philadelphia Plan, established by Mayor Ed Rendell and
Gov. William Casey in 1994, represented a huge opportunity for St.
Elizabeth's-Diamond Street. The plan has linked corporations -- the city
gives them tax breaks -- with nine community development corporations
working to redevelop devastated neighborhoods.

The Crown Cork and Seal Co., an international can company in northeast
Philadelphia, made a 10-year, $2.5 million commitment to the St.
Elizabeth's-Diamond Street neighborhood through Project Home.

The money has helped pay for the opening of the community center in the
former rectory on 23rd Street, along with another community center on
Diamond Street. Alice Barry got her ceramics classes. There are also
aerobics and adult learning classes, computers and health care provided by
a part-time nurse.

A youth center has opened in the former Catholic school. A $1 million
donation from the Sisters of St. Francis has helped finance the renovation
of four houses in the last year, with plans to renovate 10 a year for the
next 10 years.

Sister Scullion made Mrs. Brown a professional community organizer. "She
said I was doing it anyway, why not get paid," Mrs. Brown said.

Mrs. Brown hired Ms. Thompson, who went to school to learn mortgage
counseling so she could help working poor families buy the renovated
three-story houses that sell for $25,000. The first family, a formerly
homeless woman and her son, who works two jobs, at an auto-parts store and
driving a food service truck, will move in soon.

"I've been here through the bad," Ms. Thompson said. "I want to be here
through the good."

The drill team has new uniforms, and money to travel to competitions. The
Foot Stompers have become ambassadors for the neighborhood -- a drill team
with a roomful of trophies, instead of the drug dealers many outsiders have
come to associate with north Philadelphia.

"They call us the City of Brotherly Blood, North Filthy," said one of the
drummers, Ron Young, 15, known as D.J. "The first thing they see is the
graffiti, and it's dirty, and they think people don't care about
themselves."

The Foot Stompers came marching down Ron's block two summers ago. "The
noise, the marching, the drums," he said. "It was like something I'd never
seen before. It was a good noise. I just looked and said, 'Dag, I wish it
was me."'

LaMark Shorts taught him how to play the drums, and soon Ron Young was a
drummer, too.

The Foot Stompers say people look at them differently when they march.
"They see you as a smart and active kid," Sharnae said.

"When I'm marching, people are like, 'Ooh, you play the drums,"' Ron said.

It is not how everyone sees him when he is in his usual baggy jeans and
parka. "They think I'm going to rob them," said Ron, who talks of becoming
a lawyer or a doctor.

Nate Robinson, 40, a recovering drug addict in Sister Scullion's residence,
was answering the phones at the community center when he heard the drums.
"It wakes me up," said Robinson, a forklift operator and gospel singer who
is marking seven months without drugs.

The neighborhood is awakening too, but the struggle is only beginning.
Drugs are still sold openly. The sound of gunshots has faded, but not
disappeared. There are still no supermarkets, dry cleaners or banks, though
Mrs. Brown and her neighbors hope businesses will begin to return as the
improvements continue.

Mrs. Brown, whose son was 32 when he died, knows that the young members of
her drill team will have to fight to survive. "We might can't save them
all," she said. "But we might can save half of them."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company