Locate an Auto Repair Shop in Midvale, Utah

Here's what happens to a neighborhood when the manufacturing sector leaves: A mural in a Nicetown park depicts a matriarch presenting a turkey dinner to smiling relatives. Its message bespeaks social order, homey virtues, and veneration of the old - precisely the notions that were shattered last Monday when a well-regarded, 68-year-old handyman was shot on Rowan Street. The daylight killing of Lawrence Bennett, allegedly by Tyrone Roberson, 17, has riled and disconcerted Nicetown, an impoverished neighborhood f sporadic violence bifurcated by the Roosevelt Expressway and Germantown Avenue in a postindustrial sector of North Philadelphia. "Ordinarily, the elderly in Nicetown are given respect by virtue of their age," said Police Capt. Stephen Glenn of the 39th District. "People don't think the shooting is justified in any way, shape, or form. "So I don't quite understand this." Others say they do. "Yes, it's unusual a young guy kills an older one," said Mary Suttles, 66, a community liaison from City Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller's office and a longtime Nicetown resident. "But there's no respect anymore. Kids don't care any more about an old person than anyone else. "Lack of jobs, drugs, and bad education are to blame. It's depressing." Older residents will tell you life in the Nicetown neighborhood was comparatively grand half a century ago. Like much of North Philadelphia, Nicetown had a heyday, a time of bustling verve that made it a great place to live in the late 1950s and '60s, people recall. "It was close-knit with a lack of crime," said Majeedah Rashid, executive vice president of the Nicetown Community Development Corp. "It was lovely, clean," remembered Jesse Daniels, who moved to Nicetown on Juniata Street about 40 years ago, when he was 16. "Neighbors could keep their doors open. There were no abandoned buildings. It was a decent place to raise children." Residents saw a fitting correspondence between the name of their community and the lives they lived, even though the name is derived from John Neisse, a Frenchman and a contemporary of William Penn's. What kept Nicetown vibrant were jobs - specifically factory and warehouse jobs that were plentiful when America was a country of manufacturers. Residents even now can rattle off the litany of companies that offered living wages and decent lives, then moved on: Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Midvale Steel, and, most recently, Tastykake. At one time in the 1960s, the now-shuttered Budd Co. facility sprawled over 85 acres of Nicetown and employed 6,000 in its automobile parts plant, historians said. Now, dead factories litter the landscape like wrecked ships marooned by permanent low tide. There is, said Suttles, a bitter, mocking quality to the omnipresence of empty buildings whose jobs went elsewhere. "It just breaks my heart," she said. As in many poor Philadelphia neighborhoods, white people moved out of Nicetown, African Americans moved in, jobs left, and the local economy collapsed - all between the 1960s and '80s. Drugs and their by-product, random violence, found purchase in a place that began leaking hope.

"Alternative fuel enthusiasts have a new place to fill up. The first biodiesel fuel pump in Utah opened Thursday at Dal Soglio Sinclair, 7398 S. 700 West, in Midvale. The station now sells diesel fuel that is a 2 percent biodiesel blend (B2), along with conventional unleaded gasoline. The B2 blend costs $1.94 per gallon, which compares favorably to the average cost of diesel in the Salt Lake City-Ogden area, about $1.97 per gallon." http://www.ewire.com/display.cfm/Wire_ID/2299