On a Saturday afternoon in early October, the beer garden at 6730 Germantown Avenue will smell faintly of hay. Tired Hands Mt. Airy Biergarten, better known for its farmhouse ales and its string-lit outdoor tables, is hosting a screening of a new documentary about the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, the North Philadelphia nonprofit that teaches kids to ride, groom, and care for horses in the middle of the city. There will be pony rides, raffles, and food trucks. It is a fundraiser, but it is also something closer to a family reunion with a projector.
The club's story begins long before the nonprofit paperwork. Ellis "El-Dog" Ferrell grew up on his grandmother's farm in Tallahassee, Florida, where he rode bulls before westerns at a local movie theater turned his attention to horses. By the late 1940s he was riding on the streets of North Philadelphia, renting horses in Fairmount Park. In 1980 he opened a stable at 31st and Master Street with five horses, and in 2004 he moved the operation to Fletcher Street, giving the club the name it carries today. Black horsemen and horsewomen had been keeping horses in that corner of Strawberry Mansion, on the edge of Fairmount Park, for generations before him; Ferrell's contribution was to build an organization around it, one with a mission and a mailing address.
That mission has always been about more than riding. "Horse riding is not only therapeutic and instills discipline, but it enables a sense of empowerment to the disenfranchised," Ferrell says on the club's website. The documentary makes the point more bluntly. In the trailer, a club member says, "80% of the kids we get are on their last chances. Sometimes the horse becomes your last chance." Darrin Ferrell, Ellis's son, now runs the day-to-day programming and teaches life skills through horsemanship. "I really believe the culture transforms these kids into different people," he says. His father still shows up at the stables every day. His great-grandson, also named Ellis, appears in the film and is matter-of-fact about the experience: "Being on TV, that's pretty okay. That's pretty good."
Yaasir Elyamani, a program participant, describes a quieter kind of transformation. "When I first came, I was quiet. I didn't really speak much," he says, adding that the club "brought my confidence up a lot." That is the sort of outcome the club has been chasing since its founding, and it has drawn a surprising amount of outside attention along the way. The Fletcher Street riders were documented in Martha Camarillo's 2006 photography book "Fletcher Street," in French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa's 2017 Barnes Foundation exhibition "Urban Riders," and most famously in the 2020 Netflix film "Concrete Cowboy," starring Idris Elba and Caleb McLaughlin, which was shot on location at the club and cast real riders alongside actors. The film's plot, in which the city threatens to close the stables, was not much of a stretch.
For years the club's future has been genuinely uncertain. The pasture lots across from the Fletcher Street stables, used daily for grazing and pony rides, never belonged to the club; they were slated for redevelopment into affordable senior housing under the Philadelphia Housing Authority's Susquehanna Housing project. Chain-link fencing went up in 2020, and the club spent years in negotiations over where its horses would go. In November 2023, a solution arrived: a new stable in East Fairmount Park. The club kept its original Fletcher Street stables too, because it has more animals than the new barn can hold.
The work continues. In March, the club held an event called "A Space to Be You," bringing in a grief counselor, a dance therapist, a poet, and restorative justice practitioners to give kids tools for emotional health. "We want to teach kids how to emotionally regulate their feelings, that they have people here in the community that care for them," said Nasreen Naidoo, the club's chief executive. The current fundraising push is aimed at the move into the new barn and stables in Fairmount Park. "It's just so wonderful how people have come together from around the city to help make this possible," Naidoo said. "It has been beautiful to watch all of this unfold."
The documentary gets two Philadelphia screenings. The first is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Saturday, September 26, with a Q&A and food inspired by the Fletcher Street community. The second is the Mt. Airy event on October 3, from 4 to 7 p.m., where the setting is deliberately less formal: a neighborhood beer garden, a few blocks from the stables' North Philadelphia home, with ponies for the kids and raffle tickets for the adults. The club takes anybody who wants to join. That has been the policy since 2004, and it is the reason a documentary about a riding club is really a documentary about second chances, and about a city that keeps almost losing one of its oldest living traditions.