Winter Housecleaning

The Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, the city's urban-renewal agency, has a commendable if uncontrollable passion for keeping Philadelphia tidy. When a Licenses and Inspection Department worker recently spied some trash in the backyard of one of the agency's properties, a cleanup order was promptly issued by the authority.

The litter was in the backyard of a dilapidated ten-room house that three college students rent from the authority for $75 a month. The sanitation crew assigned to the rubbish removal somehow got their instructions mixed up and, in a burst of zeal, cleaned out the inside of the house instead of the grounds. When the students returned last week after the Christmas holidays, they discovered the loss of all their furniture, an expensive camera, three stereo sets, records, books, a guitar, a tape recorder, term papers, research notes and pages of unpublished poetry. What remained untouched was the offending trash in the backyard.

The students--Steve Oden and Lester Perks, seniors at the University of Pennsylvania, and Carl O'Donnell of Philadelphia Community College--are now trying to get reimbursed for the losses, which they estimate at $13,000. The authority is being helpful in its own way. It returned a large pile of torn mattresses, damaged furniture and waterlogged rugs from the city dump. There is no trace of the stereo sets, camera and other valuables that the boys had carefully locked in a separate room of the house.

A spokesman for the authority insists that its crew took nothing of value from the house. The boys claim that they have witnesses who saw the crew removing the valuables the day after the last of the students left. The authority says the place must have been burglarized, but does admit its crew cleaned out the rest of the goods in the house.

It was not Philadelphia's first case of misdirected energy, notes the students' lawyer. Last year, a city agency tore down the historic home of Declaration of Independence Signer Dr. Benjamin Rush when they were supposed to raze a building a mile away.

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