I’ve never been more proud than I am today to work for a newspaper that was bought not just by a billionaire, but a true philanthropist, who so valued journalism - the only profession expressly protected by the U.S. Constitution - that he created a nonprofit to entrust us to. 🧵 As H.F. Gerry Lenfest himself once said:

“What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News? Of all the things I've done, this is the most important. Because of the journalism.”

I’ve written about a lot of weird Philly stuff - it’s my favorite thing to write about - but the Yamatorium in West Philly may be among the weirdest.

Come with me on a surreal journey through this cabinet of curiosities & panoply of the peculiar… 🧵

inquirer.com/columnists/yam… This is the door to the Yamatorium and the man behind it, artist Steven Erdman, who created this absurdist experience in the basement of his West Philly home. These photos are in the “waiting room.”

The celebration has already begun on Broad Street in Philly. #GoBirds Philly Elmo and his drum line are warming up. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

I’m downtown for the Broad Street Party and have spotted my first pole climber. #Phillies

Two weeks ago, I posted a thread on Twitter about a Philly community center that found a locked mystery safe and needed help (for free) getting it opened.

Today, because of the help of lots of awesome Philadelphians, the safe was cracked open and I was there (a thread)

https://twitter.com/FarFarrAway/status/1461708185245474823

The tip about the safe came to me from my colleague @ByChrisBrennan, who saw the Old Pine Community Center post about it on Nextdoor & sent the post my way.

"Saw this on the Nextdoor app and immediately wondered what a Farr report about this would read like," he wrote me.

I JUST GOT THE CALL THAT THE MYSTERY SAFE OPENING IS HAPPENING TODAY AND YES I AM YELLING THIS!

I have dropped everything (will worry about that anxiety later) and will be attending.

cc @LeviFetterman

https://twitter.com/FarFarrAway/status/1456647063333130245

They were able to connect with people (keeping the who on the DL for the moment) to open the safe as a result of someone seeing my previous thread and DMing me a suggestion so yay for Philly Twitter!!!

Updates to come.

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...

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. Benny F is already watching out for a little magic.

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.

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.

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) Matt's very valid concerns revolve around whether parents may try to listen in on the conversations he has with his students & how that might make the students less likely to open up. Classrooms can often be safe spaces to talk about what you can't talk about at home.

(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. "

(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…

Ireland: A thread

Drank my first full pint of Guinness at the Guiness Experience in Dublin. Walked inside New Grange and Knowth, man-made structures older than the pyramids and Stonehenge.