The trick-or-treat rush commences on Green Street in Harrisburg.
They came in waves down Green Street.
Farmers. Cowboys. Superheroes. Princesses. Lots of princesses. There was a Super Mario and a ninja turtle and an ebola patient whom I mistook for a surgeon, dressed as he was in surgical robes and a mask.
This was my first year living on Harrisburg’s trick-or-treat flyway, the path that many of the city’s children take after their mandated first stop, the Governor’s Residence, two blocks away.
I had been warned by neighbors that I was in for an onslaught, so my wife and I stockpiled enough candy–five or six bags–to meet what we expected to be the heavy demand. After all, how many kids could possibly show up during a two-hour trick-or-treat window?
A half-hour in, I realized that we were radically underprepared. With the candy bowl quickly emptying, I dashed up to Rite Aid on Maclay Street for reinforcements, then did so again a short time later. And we still ran out before the night was over.
We went through almost 500 pieces of candy, which, at one candy each (we were pretty strict about that), equals–well, this is math that even I can do.
But here’s the important thing. Nearly 500 kids, and they were, almost without fail, polite and well-mannered. Most were escorted by adults, who seemed even more gracious than the children. If a kid didn’t say “thank you,” he invariably was nudged by a parent.
“What do you say?” said a patient mother or father.
“Thank you,” responded a shy, little voice.
Yes, this is Harrisburg. This is what Harrisburg really is like. It’s a place of mostly decent people who work hard, raise their kids and try to be kind to others.
Or, to take the contrary approach, here’s what it is not.
It’s not a war zone, a place where lawmakers should fear for their lives or that is “dangerous for anybody,” which is the impression one might get if their only exposure is from PennLive over just the past few weeks.
Yesterday, on the same day that hundreds of appreciative, well-behaved children made the trek up and down Green Street, PennLive released the results of a word cloud poll in which it asked readers to describe Harrisburg. The results were overwhelmingly negative, with terms such as “cesspool,” “Detroit” and “doomed” among the most commonly cited.
“Clearly, many readers are down on the capital city,” wrote reporter Chris Mautner.
So, how did this happen? How did Harrisburg, in the minds of many newspaper readers, become synonymous with “delusional,” “corrupt” and “sad?”
OK, so here’s how it happened.
Yesterday, city resident Beth Johns, exasperated by PennLive’s relentless negative coverage of Harrisburg, sent us an email. She said that, after reading the results of PennLive’s word cloud, she decided to conduct an experiment. Using a website that makes word clouds, she created several of her own.
The first, presented below, is a word cloud of PennLive’s last 30 headlines (as of midday yesterday) under its Harrisburg tab.
As can be seen, the prominent words were almost all negative, including police, death, shot, murder, missing and robbery.
Johns then ran a similar experiment for the suburbs, pulling the last 30 headlines under the “West Shore” tab. Here’s that result:
Outside of geographic terms and people’s names, the most popular words were largely neutral or positive, including school, area, residents, program, hunters, homes, project and pet.
Lastly, Johns decided to run the same experiment using the last 20 news headlines from TheBurg, to see what the contrast might be. Here’s that result.
Sure, there’s some negative stuff. If you click on the image, you can see small words that say “shooting” and “robbery.” But most of the words, like the words from the West Shore cloud, are neutral to positive.
So, does life in Harrisburg consist mostly of murder, death, shot and robbery, while, on the West Shore, it’s all school, homes, projects and pets? Or are there greater similarities than differences?
At TheBurg, we try to represent life as it is actually lived here. Yes, there’s more concern here about crime, as there is in almost every American city compared to its suburbs. There are more people, far greater density and more poverty. However, for the most part, people here–their concerns, their activities, their aspirations–are not very different from the folks who live on the West Shore.
They want good things for themselves and their families. They want decent jobs and safe lives. They want their elected officials to act responsibly and their city to be an attractive, more prosperous place.
They don’t want people believing things that aren’t true, that Harrisburg and, by implication, the people who live here, are some type of cartoon of crime and dysfunction.
For the people who believe what they read in the newspaper or online, I welcome them to Green Street for next Halloween. Or, even sooner, to the Broad Street Market on Saturday. And to Italian Lake and to downtown restaurants and to Reservoir Park and to the city’s many vibrant urban neighborhoods.
There, they will meet the people of the city, not the cardboard cutouts fed to them. The people of Harrisburg are not looking for charitable descriptions. We know we have problems, just as we know we have strengths. We only want to be represented as we actually are, our city depicted as it really is.
