The idea goes like this.
A student begins her pre-K education in a building midway down the 1400-block of N. 3rd Street in Midtown Harrisburg. Three schools and 20 years later, she’s moved just a few yards down the road after graduating with an associate’s degree from HACC.
She has experienced an entire lifecycle of education within half of a city block.
Doug Neidich, CEO of GreenWorks Development, has dubbed this strip of 3rd Street “Education Row,” a vision he’s closer to realizing after his purchase a few months back of the building that last housed Midtown Paint & Hardware. Following a total renovation, the 9,000-square-foot edifice is slated to become the newest home of U-GRO Learning Center.
“Students would be able to go from one building to the next as they get older,” said Neidich. “It will take them 18 years to go about 30 feet.”
Age-wise, Education Row is taking shape in reverse.
In 2006, GreenWorks bought the century-old Evangelical Press Building at 1500 N. 3rd and converted it to Midtown 2, part of HACC’s expanding presence in the neighborhood.
Across Reily Street, GreenWorks next built Campus Square, which Commonwealth Connections Academy, a K-12 public cyber charter school, has called home for the past two years.
U-GRO would extend the student population further up the block once its preschool and daycare sets up shop at 1408 N. 3rd.
“The priority of GreenWorks over the last few years has been focused almost exclusively on education,” said Neidich. “If you do education well, everything else will follow.”
It Will Come Back
If any street demonstrates both the promise and the heartbreak of Harrisburg, it may well be the 1400-block of N. 3rd Street.
In its heyday, 60 or 70 years back, the block was an integral part of a thriving Midtown community. You could shop, get flowers, have a beer, eat a meal and deposit a check all within the few hundred feet between Calder and Reily streets.
Anchoring the block was the imposing, circa-1910 West End Republican Club building, a sturdy, if whimsical, stone-and-brick structure. Through the heavy, paneled front door, a grand center staircase swept upwards to two spacious levels, a proper testament to a city both increasingly prosperous and highly political.
What happened next is a familiar story in Harrisburg—it all fell apart. As people and their money left the city, the block turned seedy and became dominated by dilapidated properties, boarded-up buildings and rundown bars where men, some visibly intoxicated, loitered.
The Republican Club moved, and its old headquarters had its guts ripped out. The grand staircase was destroyed to open up the first floor for a retail store. To reach the upper floors, one had to climb a rickety ladder and enter through a cavity in the ceiling. Not that anyone went up there. The 6,000 square feet of space upstairs sat mostly unused and, today, old political posters and magazines from the 1960s can be found where they were dropped some 50 years ago.
The exterior hasn’t fared well either. Decades ago, a modern “skin” was bolted on to the front of the building, blocking the original façade. Today, the strange arched design appears dingy, even campy, someone’s terrible idea of modernist, jet-age retrofit that makes little sense on a block dominated by brick, Victorian-era buildings.
Neidich’s plan is to rip off the false front, restore the original façade and completely renovate the building for U-GRO. He hopes to get started on the $2.5 million project in mid-2015, with U-GRO moving in the following spring.
In addition, he plans to tear down two small, dilapidated buildings next door that GreenWorks already owns, constructing a two-level, indoor/outdoor play area in their place.
“Surprisingly, the (main) building is in very good shape,” Neidich said. “It will come back very well.”
Kids from All Over
Neidich founded GreenWorks a decade ago after selling an electronics manufacturing business he had started. His idea was to use the proceeds of the sale to help build an integrated urban community in Harrisburg, and he chose N. 3rd and Reily streets as the center of his effort.
At the time, the historic Evangelical Press Building was empty and, last used as state office space, was slowly falling apart. Neidich bought the 130,000-square-foot building for $3 million and embarked on a $14 million renovation so that HACC could expand its nascent Midtown campus.
A couple of years later, GreenWorks purchased a gas station and auto repair shop across the street and constructed the 73,000-square-foot Campus Square building. When the HACC administration moved into the four-story building, some thought the college’s future lay in Midtown.
HACC, however, soon suffered financial setbacks, as well as turmoil within its leadership. After John “Ski” Sygielski became president in 2011, the administration moved back to the main Wildwood campus, leaving Campus Square in need of an anchor tenant.
In contrast, Commonwealth Connections Academy was looking to expand in the area, said Maurice Flurie, CEO of the cyber charter school. It took some space in the building in late 2012 and has been increasing its presence since. Today, its teaching center occupies several floors, and it even has its administrative offices there.
“The central location is very important to us,” said Flurie. “We have kids here from the West Shore, from Steelton, Harrisburg, etc. We want to be a solution for a broad range of kids in the capital region, not just in the city.”
Like Neidich, Flurie sees a future when children will begin an education at U-GRO before stepping over to Commonwealth Connections and then across Reily Street to HACC.
“U-GRO is the important pre-K part of this,” he said.
Coherent Structure
“Education Row” also has given a new dimension to the redevelopment of this part of Midtown.
For several years, it appeared that HACC would gobble up much of the land around N. 3rd and Reily, with other businesses opening to serve the expanding student population. Up the block, it was hoped that redevelopment associated with the new federal courthouse would bleed down Reily Street.
HACC, though, has reduced its Midtown footprint, and the courthouse appears to be on long-term hold. The new plan by GreenWorks shifts the focus back to the central commercial area of N. 3rd Street, which should further benefit by the opening this month of the new Susquehanna Art Museum—a cultural institution with its own educational mission—across the street.
With the old Republican Club/hardware store rehabbed, only a few unrestored properties will remain on the block, most notably two small bars and the former Volunteers of America retail store and apartments. That’s out of more than a dozen properties that, a decade ago, were almost all in poor shape.
Neidich indicated that he has plans for the remaining dilapidated properties along the street, though he would not say specifically what those plans were.
“GreenWorks is an initiative to help the revitalization of the city,” he said. “So, we’ve thought hard about what has to happen to put the most concrete, coherent structure together.”
