Map Of Prussia

Near neighbors attack college plans; seek donations to support a lawsuit

As she discussed the college’s revamped master plan, going through each difference between the plan on the table and the plan I had seen in 2009 in the same conference room, she was excited and proud of the work the negotiating group had done. The nine members of the group invested thousands of hours, meeting, walking the sites, looking at data and considering options.

When I asked why the college would agree to this process, which included delaying its application for an Institutional Development District three times, her answer was simple and understandable.

“We want to be good neighbors,” she said. “And no one wants to end up in litigation.”

At a meeting on Monday night at St. Paul’s Church on Chestnut Hill Avenue, a group of near neighbors frustrated Vale’s hopes, announcing plans to sue the college for violating deed restrictions placed on the SugarLoaf property. If the college does not withdraw its application for an IDD for SugarLoaf and its main campus on Germantown Avenue off Roger Drive, the neighbors said they will have no choice but to file a lawsuit.

“The day the city passes the (IDD) ordinance, we will be filing litigation,” said Stacy Mogul, one of the near neighbors who has been part of the negotiating group. “Once they get the IDD it’s all over. They are pushing the neighbors into litigation.”

Mogul said the neighbors, who represent the Northwest-Wissahickon Conservancy and the North Chestnut Hill Neighbors Inc. have retained lawyers and asked the audience at St. Paul’s to consider donating towards the cost of litigation.

“A small group of us have been carrying the water,” Mogul said. “We are hoping at some point tonight you consider making a contribution.”

A crowd of approximately 100 listened to Mogul, a lawyer and Hillcrest Avenue resident who speaks calmly and clearly, effectively underlining the sacrifice of time and resources he has given to negotiations and his profound concern for the college’s proposal. He emphasized that the neighbors want a “reasonable, rational” resolution.

He was joined at the front of the room by Susan Snyder, an architect, and her husband George Thomas, an urban planner and historian, who live in the 9500 block of Germantown Avenue, and Robert Shusterman, an attorney who is well-known in Chestnut Hill from his involvement with the Woodmere Art Museum controversy over its expansion plans, and who lives at the intersection of Bells Mills Road and Germantown Avenue, diagonally across from the SugarLoaf campus.

510 - "War is the National Industry of Prussia" | Strange Maps ...

This map, distributed in France in the last year of the First World War, uses a trope common to a lot of cartographic propaganda: the enemy as an octopus, a tentacular monstrosity strangling its neighbours. 

This late-stage war octopus is housed inside the pre-war borders of Imperial Germany, but it is associated with Prussia. This most powerful, most militarised of German states was the driving force behind German Unification in 1871 (enabled, incidentally, by a war with France).

The motto on top of the map reads: In 1788, Mirabeau aggression. The brightest red in Germany, not coincidentally the colour of blood, is reserved for the original core of the Prussian state, in two separate territorial blocks: East Prussia and a block comprising Pomerania and Brandenburg.