In 1891, Harrisburg’s Mulberry Street Bridge opened, linking Allison Hill with downtown and the rest of the city. The bridge was hailed as a unifier, pulling people closer to each other.
When another bridge, the M. Harvey Taylor Memorial Bridge opened in 1951, requiring tree-lined Forster Street to be widened into a highway, there was no such accolade. Even today, there is dismay with what happened to Forster Street, which now has four through lanes and multiple turning lanes.
“It cut the heart out of the city,” said Ken Frew, city historian and librarian for the Dauphin County Historical Society.
The decline of Forster Street began in the 1940s, when state and local governments began pushing for another span across the Susquehanna.
Originally, the bridge was to be built farther uptown, but Harrisburg political boss Harvey Taylor wanted his namesake bridge in a more prominent location, closer to the Capitol and downtown, according to Jackson Taylor, author of the historical novel set in Harrisburg, “The Blue Orchard.”
So, in the early 1950s, a long line of houses, shops and other buildings was leveled, from Riverfront Park to N. 7th Street.
While benefiting suburban developers and commuters, the widening did damage to the city itself. It made a once-quaint, residential Forster Street into an asphalt wasteland–a congested, noisy street that no one wanted to live on any longer. Soon, the street took on the look of desolation and even danger.
To save as many buildings as possible on the south side of the street, sidewalks were narrowed, making walking in some areas nearly impossible. And then entire swaths of houses were razed for parking lots, while billboards sprung up.
The ugly, harsh state buildings that rose near the Capitol, several built in the stark concrete “brutalist” style common in the 1950s through the ’70s, furthered Forster’s transformation from quaint to forbidding.
Then there was the effect on Midtown.
Before the Forster Street expansion, downtown and Midtown flowed together as an integrated urban community. Afterwards, the residential portion of downtown, accessible to the Capitol and the business district, remained vibrant, while Midtown began to fall apart.
“I think that was one of the most divisive things things that ever happened to this city,” said Frew.
In the early ’90s, there were various city improvement groups that looked at ways to re-connect Midtown to downtown, with ideas such as building pedestrian walkways under and over Forster Street.
“How do we bridge the divide?” said David Morrison, president of Historic Harrisburg Association, who has long been involved in city improvement efforts.
No idea, through, seemed satisfactory. Meanwhile, a renaissance of sorts brought a flourish of new restaurants downtown, particularly along N. 2nd Street, further deepening the divide between Midtown and downtown, Morrison said.
Morrison and Frew are not alone in their assessment. Many, if not most, of the city’s residents and visitors share a critical opinion of Forster Street.
In 1998, Harrisburg Young Professionals, working with PennDOT, took the first steps to try to improve the road. It adopted Forster, planting trees and landscaping the median strip, an effort that continues today.
Bradley Jones, an HYP member at the time who helped initiate the tree-planting, said the sense among the membership was that something needed to be done to make the street less “a harsh sort of roadway barrier between Midtown and downtown.”
The HYP efforts have helped, as Forster, softened up by plantings and regular maintenance, is more pleasant today.
“Now when you come into the city, it’s an attractive boulevard,” said Jones, vice president of community development for Harristown Enterprises.
Landscaping, though, can only do so much. It can’t eliminate the cars whizzing by at high speed that make the street difficult to cross or the abandoned, industrial feel that permeates the entire stretch of road.
Today, there is no plan for Forster Street other than to maintain its surface and HYP’s landscaping. The roadway continues to interrupt the flow of the city.
At the time of the Harvey Taylor/Forster Street project, local and state officials praised it for connecting downtown with the West Shore, allowing commuter traffic fast, easy access to and from the Capitol complex.
However, it had the unintended consequence of dividing the city itself, a division that many believe Harrisburg has never recovered from.
