The Juice Boys
Some teens plan to spend their summer vacation running a business in a vacant warehouse. --- Every day on his way to Kensington High School, 14-year-old Richard Patchel walks past boarded up buildings and trash-filled lots. He's never thought about them much, until recently. Patchel's studying Kensington's industrial history, how that economy collapsed and left behind blocks of forgotten property. His class recently went to an old warehouse at Front and Palmer Streets that's being turned into a Farmer's Market. "We went to a factory and we seen they were making not a flea market but stores," Patchel said. "We were wondering, we could help fix up neighborhood too...so we thought alright let's just help them out by putting stuff in and making money and helping the community." Patchel's teachers challenged the class to do something about what they've learned. So Patchel and three classmates dreamed up their fledgling business, the Juice Boys. This semester, the team had a crash course on how to build a juice bar. Everything from making a business plan to having a meeting with their future landlord. "What do you guys want to cover?" El Mercado director Elvin Padilla asked the four teens. "I'll follow your lead. I see you have an agenda here." "What we want to cover is the hours and days the Mercado is open," Juice Boy and Kensington High ninth grader Orrin Pietersen responded. El Mercado is a three-year-old Puerto Rican market that is getting ready to move to the larger warehouse. After their visit, the Juice Boys thought the million dollar redevelopment might have room for a couple of teens with blenders. "We figured if people came in for breakfast they might want orange juice with their meal or hawaiian punch or something," Richard Patchel said. Kensington High School teachers Michael Friedman and Michael Rowe say they had no idea their class would lead to a student business. They wrote their vacant land syllabus with Charles Dickens in mind: The students studied the ghost of Kensington's past as a textile giant in the 1900s. Then they did surveys of the dozens of abandoned buildings left as the factories shut down. The students are now meeting the ghost of Kensington's future, looking at what they can do to change their neighborhood. Biology teacher Michael Friedman says they've had to teach students how to look at their blocks differently. "There's a different kind of paradigm of normalness," Friedman said. "You know, you grow up with a abandoned huge factory across the street from you that's just, oh well, and so you don't question it." "If I had 10 thousand dollars, I wouldn't stay in the neighborhood. I would move somewhere cleaner," Patchel said. Patchel doesn't think of his neighborhood as blighted...the word urban planners use when talking about the acres of trashed lots and abandoned factories. Patchel just feels like there's not much he can do about his surroundings except leave. But his family is here and he says in the end, even if he got rich, he'd probably stay. "Or if there was an abandoned house next to mine, I'd probably buy it, knock it down, and make something different there, before they can junk it up and put abandoned cars and stuff in it," Patchel said. This is the spirit that neighborhood activists want to nurture in local kids. Elvin Padilla runs the Norris Square Civic Association and is fixing up the market where the Juice Boys plan to work. He says there's an opportunity here because it can be so hard to get adults involved. "In terms of the the education of kids around here, at the very least the first thing to understand is your own environment. Most of the adults here haven't a clue about the larger forces that affect their own neighborhoods and that's ridiculous. It's great to ground the kids in an understanding of why things are the way they are so they can make some decisions and take actions," Padilla said. The juice boys have tested shake recipes on classmates and learned how to cut fruit for a juicer. Fourteen-year-old Patrick Greene says he's ready to give the business his time this summer vacation and as far into the future as he can imagine. "I think far, but not that far, that we'll be like 25 or something doing this stuff. Because we're just kids right now doing this stuff," Greene said. They're pretty realistic, but still dream. Richard Patchel wants them all to wear uniforms spray painted with their names and logos. Patrick Greene knows how he wants his stand's name to look. Probably in cursive and lights around it on top of the thing where we're at and our shirts in cursive too...and hats too... The Juice Boys plan to open on weekends at the Mercado's new outdoor plaza this June.  whyy.org |