A Philly community center has an old-fashioned mystery on their hands and they're seeking someone in the Philly area with the knowledge and devices (blow torches? industrial drills?) who would be willing to volunteer their time to bust open a safe (a thread):
Staff at the community center (which for now shall go unnamed so people don't show up at their door with blow torches) discovered the safe in the back of a closet last month. Nobody knows how long it has been there. It'd been turned around so people couldn't see the front...
....so nobody knew it was a safe. They just assumed it was a rusted mechanical device with wheels they couldn't move for many years.

But when a junk removal company came in & a very large man finally got it to budge, the staff realized they had a mystery safe on their hands.
There's a turn lock on it that just spins, and an x-like knob to turn, but they couldn't get it open.

They talked to a few locksmiths to see if they could open it, but everything was out of the community center's price range.
They then put out calls for people to get into the safe, by any means necessary: "At this point, it's not as much cracking as much as drilling or blowtorching to crack it open.

The curiosity of what's inside of there is the only thing keeping it here," one board member told me.
But they can't find anyone to do it. Some people in the community have offered to donate the money to pay someone to crack it open, but the center needs donations so badly it can't rationalize funneling money to this instead of their programs.
So, after talking to them (and being a fan of mysteries myself) I offered to put a call out here to see if anyone might help them solve this mystery (and allow this reporter to be present when they do!).
The safe is from the 1950s. It's about 4 1/2 feet tall and 2 1/2 feet wide.

"If someone can open it, and we take whatever is in it, they can have a big safe if they want it," the board member said.
If you have the interest and skills, you can email me at sfarr@inquirer.com or DM me and I will connect you.

The center and I realize there may be nothing within, but there maybe something inside too.

So how about it, Philly? Can anyone help solve this mystery?
Just got a photo of the safe, for those following or who may be able to help!

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More from @FarFarrAway

3 Nov
I’m at the @TheFranklin’s media event announcement for the Harry Potter exhibit and we all had to choose a house scarf when we registered and this may be the best media check in ever. ImageImageImage
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9 Mar
As promised, I'm going to do a thread of some of the amazing things I couldn't squeeze into Tom Garvey's incredible story of how he lived inside an abandoned concession stand at Veterans Stadium for three years. So hold on to your butts, here we go:

inquirer.com/news/the-secre…
While Tom did initially keep the apartment a secret, as the years passed he'd share his story with friends and strangers whenever the Vet came up in conversation.

But very few people believed him.
"If I was telling a total stranger about this at the beer distributor, after a while I could see it doesn’t hold up against reality," he said. "I’d look at their faces & see the incredulity. I get it. I wouldn’t believe it either."

HE WAS TELLING PEOPLE THIS AT BEER DISTRIBUTORS
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13 Jan
Adam McNeil, 34, rents out entire laundromats to allow Black Philly moms to do their family's clothes for free, and he gave away 25,000 diapers, 2 fridges and 2 sets of washers & dryers to Black Philly moms in the last six months alone (a thread):

inquirer.com/news/sistatalk…
Here’s the thing about about McNeil's program, SistaTalkPHL: It doesn’t have a fancy executive board or big donors — it’s just got McNeil, his unemployment checks, and donations from people who believe in his grassroots work.
McNeil himself has a hell of a story, having spent nearly a decade of his life in prison and having survived getting into a near-death car wreck.

"I have taken so much in my life," he told me. "Now, I just want to give."
Read 10 tweets
13 Aug 20
One of Philly's most incredible teachers, @MattRKay, who also founded Philly's slam poetry league for teens, is getting dragged through it on Twitter b/c Fox News picked up on some of his tweets about virtual learning & open discussion of race & gender in the classroom (thread)
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Matt pushes his students to have these conversations about race and sexuality - sometimes conversations that they've never had before.

And you know what - he's eminently qualified to do so. HE LITERALLY WROTE A BOOK ON IT.

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4 Jun 20
(Part II of my thread of my conversation with Herbert Hawkins): Under Rizzo "Police harassment was a normal thing. I think in a lot of cases it was something they felt they was supposed to do. There was a special unit called civil disobedience. We got to be quite personal w/them"
"They knew all of us, we knew all of them. It was very hostile. They didn’t like us. We didn’t like them. There was blacks in the unit. They thought we were anarchists, we thought they were pigs. "
I asked what he thought of this year's protests:

"It gives me some hope but I know there’s so many different ills that plague the black community that police brutality is only one aspect. It might be the most detrimental because they take black lives."
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4 Jun 20
(A thread): Yesterday, I asked whose reaction you wanted to hear about the removal of the Rizzo statute. @RobertSkvarla suggested one of the Black Panthers who were stripped naked & arrested at Rizzo's command in 1970.

This is Herbert Hawkins, 71. He was one of those men.
Here's some background on the totally unfounded, dehumanizing, racists raids across Black Panther offices in the city on that day in 1970 in Philadelphia.

explorepahistory.com/displayimage.p…
Herbert invited me, a stranger, into his Brewerytown home yesterday - during a pandemic - to talk about his recollections, his thoughts on Rizzo and what's going on today for 45 minutes.
Read 25 tweets

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