Even though the site is called LOLadelphia, I do not post this picture to be humorous or light-hearted. This is an outright disgrace, and it makes me sick to my stomach.
In June of 2010, Sabina Rose O’Donnell, an aspiring model and actress who also worked at PYT located within the Piazza at Schmidt’s was stalked on her way home by a man who would end up raping and murdering her in a vacant lot of Orianna Street slightly north of where it crosses Girard on the cusp of Northern Liberties.
Following O’Donnell’s death, her family painted the walls surrounding the vacant lot, planted a garden, and put up a sign asking people to be respectful of the space and keep their trash out of it. It’s a pretty simple request, really. Yet it’s one that wasn’t honored as evidenced by the filthy mattress and other crap seen strewn about on the ground.
Philadelphia is so dirty that a lot of people have no trouble dumping their trash anywhere, but a solemn memorial like this to be treated the same way as so many other places is an insult to the O’Donnell Family, the memory of Sabina Rose O’Donnell, and makes the entire neighborhood of Northern Liberties look bad for not making sure this garden area was kept clean.
If I organized a group of people to help clean this lot, would you be interested? If so, please let me know via reply or ask, and maybe we can get something together. It really upsets me that our city has people that would be so callous as to treat a living memorial in such a way, and maybe we can make this wrong right.
