Plan Philly
BY JAKE BLUMGART
The Victorian redbrick Tacony Music Hall is an icon of this working class riverfront community in the lower Northeast. The stately bulk of the building is breathtaking, standing out from its plainspoken neighbors on Longshore Avenue. It’s the kind of building that causes newcomers to the neighborhood to stop and gaze upward in awe.
Over the decades, the Tacony Music Hall has housed retail, a library, literary society, and community organizations, and its assembly hall hosted performances and public events. It has, of late, been a real estate office and home to Tacony Community Development Corporation. Now in its third century of existence this historically-designated structure is slated for a unique new use.
If all goes according to plan, the Tacony Music Hall will be Philadelphia’s first sex positive community center.
There are a lot of rumors swirling around the neighborhood about what that means exactly. Will it be a nightclub? A swingers’ venue, like the Saints and Sinners venue that Councilman Bobby Henon helped shut down in Holmesburg last year?
Tacony Music Hall (file)
Tacony Music Hall (file)
“All you hear is rumors, nothing concrete,” says Joseph Sannutti, president of the Tacony Civic Association. On vacation in Texas, Sannutti hasn’t been appraised of the latest community meetings on the subject, but he said that’s what he’d been hearing before he headed south.
“We were told it was going to be a lesbian, gay, transgender club—that’s their business,” says Sannutti. “But we also heard it’s going to be a nightclub, where they sell booze and stuff. We are completely against that all together.”
The new plans for the music hall have been quietly coming together for the past few months. Now with a ZBA hearing scheduled and the community abuzz, PlanPhilly sat down with Deborah Rose Hinchey, one of the principal organizers behind the project, to talk about the future of the Tacony Music Hall.
“I had a neighbor come up to me at the space the other day and ask if we are a sex club,” says Hinchey. “I didn’t anticipate the rumors. I realized we had to get into the neighborhood and explain that we are not a swingers club or a sex club.”
Hinchey and her team aren’t planning an LGBTQ community center either, although she said the model for the new organization is based on spaces like the William Way Center in the Gayborhood.
The Tacony Music Hall will serve as a space for those who subscribe to the philosophy of sex positivity. It’s an expansive umbrella that encompasses a lot of preferences and practices, which Hinchey described as inclusive of everything from polyamory, or the practice of engaging openly in concurrent sexual relationships, to bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism (BDSM). The key organizing tenet is that sex of pretty much any kind is good and healthy as long as it’s consensual.
The community center slated for the Tacony Music Hall will hold movie nights, offer classes in different relationship practices, and parties that cater to a variety of alternative sexual communities.
Sannutti and the Tacony Civic need not worry about crazed late night dance parties though. Hinchey said alcohol and drugs would be explicitly banned from the space.
“A lot of these communities currently operate largely in bars and illegal warehouses,” says Hinchey. “Because of the stigma attached to them, these communities have largely been forced into the shadows and the shadows are dangerous.”
Hinchey and her compatriots want to open up a space, dubbed the Philadelphia Music Hall, for people to explore sexuality outside of mainstream society in a safe and consensual fashion. They believe that booze or drugs of any kind would imperil that mission.
“Consent is a problem when alcohol is involved–any intoxicant really blurs the line,” says Hinchey. “We want people to make educated, consensual, and risk aware decisions. Not allowing intoxicants in a space infinitely improves the safety of that space.”
Not only do intoxicants complicate consent, but they also discourage the participation of sober individuals and expose these marginalized communities to interference from the state.
In addition to a ban on the sale or ingestion of intoxicants, no one under the age of 18 can enter the Philadelphia Music Hall. Participants must review the organization’s rules and regulations—such as no touching anyone without their explicit approval—and sign a waiver agreeing before entering.
The sex positive community center will only occupy the top two floors of the three-story building, with the first floor available for rent to other businesses. Currently a daycare and the Tacony CDC operate on the ground floor. …