The atrium Monday morning at city hall.
“The idea was to create an indoor civic space, similar to an outdoor civic space, like the plaza outside.”
So said Martin Murray, formerly of Murray Associates, the architecture firm that designed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., City Government Center—or, as Harrisburg residents know it, city hall.
Murray, who retired in 2003, was describing the sunny atrium beyond the center’s brick façade, which earlier that day had witnessed the inauguration of Mayor Eric Papenfuse, along with the swearing-in of other newly elected officials.
The atrium rises through several floors of overlooking balconies to a transparent ceiling, which usually floods the interior with natural light. While the building was being constructed, in 1981, the soon-to-be Mayor Stephen Reed, then on the campaign trail, criticized the atrium as a waste of space. “But once he was elected,” Murray said, “he made great use of it.” Now the atrium is home to potted plants, a rotating art exhibit, and innumerable press conferences.
It was also, until very recently, home to a metal detector that may or may not have impeded the impression of an open space. But Papenfuse, in advance of the inauguration, had ordered its removal. “I felt it sent the wrong message and set the wrong tone,” he said. On Monday morning, in place of the plastic baskets for phones and keys, the welcome desk held an array of free pocket-sized booklets titled “Where To Go When You Need Help.”
As with each piece of architectural design, each political gesture has a form and a function. There’s the question of what it does, and there’s the question of how it looks. Inaugurations, of course, are ripe for such gestures, and the Papenfuse team had prepared many—from the ejected detector to the absence of an inaugural speech to the choice, applauded by many observers, to forgo an inaugural ball. Whatever his mayoralty will actually mean, it’s clear enough how he wants it to be interpreted: as a harbinger of frugality, openness, and getting down to work.
The most complicated of these gestures came after the ceremony, when Papenfuse and his communications director, Joyce Davis, accompanied members of the press on a tour of the center’s most dilapidated corners. A press release had described the mayor’s team being “alarmed” at the “evident lack of maintenance, the unkempt appearance of the offices and the inattention to proper record-keeping” throughout the building. In lieu of donations to an inaugural ball, Papenfuse was asking for members of the community to chip in to help fund a facelift for city hall.
On Monday, in the company of Police Chief Thomas Carter, Captains Annette Oates and Colin Cleary, and Public Works Director Kevin Hagerich, they led reporters on something of an inverted Potemkin tour. Floor by floor, the group pointed out select scenes of decay, as if to prove that things really were as bad as the press release said they were.
The worst offenders were in the Public Safety Building, across a second-story footbridge from the mayor’s office and home to the city engineer and police department. On the lower level, water damage was destroying the acoustic ceiling; several tiles had rotted apart, or were missing altogether. A police investigator pointed a flashlight at one of the holes, as if identifying the site of a break-in (“You’re paying an officer’s salary to these guys, and they wind up having to do custodial work,” Hagerich said).
Papenfuse seemed particularly appalled by the police break room, a fusty, dimly lit corner on the other side of a doorway scrawled with the words “2014 TRAFFIC CITATION: $37.50.” “I would personally be embarrassed to have an apartment that I would rent that would look like this,” he said. “It’s unacceptable.” It was about as close to indignant as Papenfuse got on the whole tour, though it was hard to see what, exactly, he had fixated on. The room held an antediluvian fridge and vending machine, but otherwise appeared perfectly functional.
In fact, the question of how extensive the damage was nagged at this reporter throughout the tour. Certainly, city hall was dingy. But was it unusually dingy? At one point, the group paused in a parking lot below city hall that was shadowy and gloomy—like every below-ground parking lot I’ve ever been in. In the police break room, various people remarked on how dirty the floor was. Was that evidence of neglect? Or was it a result of the very recent snowstorm, which caused people to track salt and dirt inside?
The gesture, given that it was calculated, could not have been hoped simply to show that cities without money fall to pieces. We knew that already, and anyway, that’s hardly the stuff of good press releases. Nor was it only about the need for city hall to be more welcoming, or to keep better records, though I believe Papenfuse is sincere in both those ambitions.
No, I suspect the Papenfuse team wanted a kind of inaugural twofer: an official, forward-looking statement on plans for a cleanup, and an implicit backwards shot at the former custodian of city hall. At the end of the tour, Papenfuse remarked that at least his office would not need renovations. He was referring, indirectly, to Mayor Linda Thompson’s well-publicized makeover of the office early in her term. The remark was part of the inaugural symbolism: a signal that Papenfuse’s new beginning meant something else’s end.
“If I had been doing things,” he said, sitting in the mayor’s chair, “my own office would have been the last to be repaired.”
