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Saluting Sandy: A Look Back at the NKCDC Executive Director’s Illustrious Career


  The flying pig and the fish mobile no longer hang over Sandy Salzman’s desk, to the dismay of her colleagues. It had seemed sensible, as her 21 years at the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC) wind down, to start cleaning out her office. But the newly empty spaces on her ceiling put a damper on the staff’s usual upbeat enthusiasm. So Salzman halted the exodus to her house in Fishtown, where she raised two children and first thought about getting involved with the community.

  It all started with pineapple upside-down cake. Salzman’s children were in kindergarten and second grade in 1978 and she was waiting on approval of a loan and grant through a Fishtown Civic Association (FCA) program.

  “The FCA was looking for volunteers,” she remembers, “and I thought helping them out might move my application quicker.” Salzman chuckles. “It was approved 3 years later, but by then I was ineligible because the FCA had hired me.”

/Jacquie Mahon

/Jacquie Mahon

  Her first day as a volunteer, she was confronted by dark windows and a locked entryway. A business owner down the street had a key and let her in. Immediately, a woman bustled in the door with a large, foil-covered pan and deposited it on a rear table. She exited and returned with another pan.

  “Um, excuse me?” said Salzman.

  “Pineapple upside-down cake . . . cake sale today . . . you’ll need to price them,” the woman tossed over her shoulder as she rushed off. People poured in all morning, until the table was laden. Salzman started calling Board Members to find out what to do.

  Her second day was similar.

  “I sifted through a stack of photos from all over the Riverwards and picked the winner of that year’s Cutest Baby Contest!” The Executive Director of the two-person office was still out sick.

  This is the can-do attitude that brought Salzman to the Executive Director position at FCA from 1978 to 1988, followed by the Executive Director position at the nonprofit NKCDC.

  She is proud of two FCA projects in particular.

  “We started a smoke-detector program in the early 1980s. Two families had lost a child in fires. We worked with the Fire Commissioner, Joe Rizzo, and received a lot of publicity around the country. Now, whenever there’s a major fire, the Philadelphia Fire Department checks the whole neighborhood for smoke detectors.”

  The other project is the expansion of Penn Treaty Park. A former industrial site was annexed to create eight acres at the heart of Philadelphia’s riverfront, with some of the best views in the city.

  Salzman’s favorite NKCDC projects include Awesometown, a 14-home, mixed-income, energy-efficient development in Fishtown that resulted from a partnership between NKCDC and Postgreen Homes, a for-profit developer. Another is the Coral Street Arts House, which was transformed from a vacant mill factory in East Kensington to 27 units of affordable living/working space for artists and their families.

/Jacquie Mahon

/Jacquie Mahon

  “Public, private, and community partnerships are key,” says Salzman.

  Salzman is a Philly girl from way back. She attended Holy Name Grade School and Hallahan Catholic Girl’s High School. Her mother met her dad while waitressing at a restaurant “where the El turns on Kensington Avenue.” Salzman’s paternal grandparents also were born here.

  “That was a mixed marriage,” she says. “Grandpa, Hugh Clarence McKeown, was Irish, and Josephine Heart was German.”

  Salzman’s mom died when she was in 7th grade.

  “My dad’s mom died when he was very young, and he and his sisters went to orphanages, so no way was he going to do that. My father raised me and my two sisters—at a time when that was unusual.”

  And who else but a Philly girl should lead the Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby?

  “I rode in the police car at the head of the parade one year. My granddaughter, who was with me, kept telling everyone she was being taken to juvie.”

  After a chuckle, she discusses her pets. Salzman shows me a photo of her huge white cat, Danny, a former stray. He is napping in the lap of the skeleton-scarecrow seated by her home’s front door. Danny had taken up residence in the greenhouse of the NKCDC garden center on Frankford Avenue.

  “But now he’s living like a king and accepts only the most expensive and well-presented food,” Salzman says.

  So what’s next for Sandy Salzman?

  “I’ve been renting a place in Wildwood for 11 years. I’ll be spending more time down the shore.”

  Sewing, ceramics, and stained-glass projects are also on the horizon. Even more exciting is her plan to research and share the history of the Riverwards.

  Cover photo provided by NKCDC.

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