The exodus left Philadelphia reeling in problems: lost tax revenue, crime, infrastructure decay, and citizen apathy all took different, and cumulative, tolls on the city that had been the first in the nation to require buildings to be built of brick, to lay out grand public parks, and to encourage every homeowner to tend a garden.

It took the cumulative efforts of civic and governmental groups to begin to mend the torn fabric of the city. The New Kensington Community Development Corporation began to make inroads to solving their problems at about the same time as the City Planning Commission, the Office of Housing and Community Development, and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society decided something had to be done.

Mayor John F. Street remembers that when he took office, there were 30.000 to 40,000 abandoned buildings in the city, some of which hadn't been cleaned in 25 years.

"In my first term we cleaned every vacant lot in the city twice. Every single one," he says. Then the city entered into contracts with neighborhood groups to keep the lots clean and get them growing.

While gardens made waste places bloom, in many places unsightly walls visually overpowered greenspace. Enter Jane Golden, a former California muralist, who was hired during the 1980's by Wilson Goode's city administration. Her job: work with talented graffiti artists to see if they couldn't come up with something to replace the gaudy letters that covered every blank bit of wall in town.

Golden feared that all the city really wanted was a clean-up program. She had her eye on something greater and in a short time found her vision heartily supported by city hall.

"I think it's special because the mural program is part of city government," Golden said. "People who wouldn't have access to art now have access to art. I don't buy into the notion that art belongs solely behind the walls of galleries and museums.

"I realized that graffiti writers have extraordinary talent," Golden said. "They've been stealing magazine art, they've been sneaking into museums, they love abstract expressionism and they love mural-making. They like painting large and they don't mind working outside in the weather."

Her first job was to become a wall-hunter. Walls would be the canvases that would bring art to every citizen. And when she began to work with neighborhood groups and community organizations, her program took off like a shot.

"It was wonderful to go from one tiny mural to suddenly two-story and three-story murals, and then it was like a renaissance happening throughout Philadelphia."

The way Golden saw it, fixing potholes, fencing vacant lots, rehabilitating housing, and enforcing laws were important, but they missed the heart of community revitalization.

"It's the ability to touch people's hearts and souls," she says, "and I think art can do that. Art has a profound impact on people. So when you talk about neighborhood and community rejuvenation, I don't know who you can leave art out. We all have an intuitive desire and need to have beauty in our lives."

Golden's program also reaches out to potential artists "hiding" in schools, prisons, detention centers, and shelters. There are after school and summer programs now that attract 1,000 children who don't receive art education.

Such outreach is important, she says, to include people who have fallen through the cracks, but who articulate themselves primarily through art. All of these programs have added another 120 to 130 indoor and outdoor murals to city buildings each year.

Since the program started, 2,500 murals have sprung up around Philadelphia; amazing examples of the creative mind at work. Golden believes that kind of success exemplifies the powerful catalyst that art can become in healing the wounds of a city.