Last month, Harrisburg made an announcement that took many people by surprise. Next year, said the Papenfuse administration, Front Street will go from three lanes to two lanes, plus a bicycle lane.
The Front Street project long had been on the 2015 schedule for PennDOT, which periodically repaves the state road. But the redesign, which stretches from Division to Herr streets—that was something different.
“We think this is a terrific step that will make Harrisburg a more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly place to live,” said Mayor Eric Papenfuse, who had pressed the state to expand the project beyond just a repaving job.
“Step” might be the right word. If the city has its way, the Front Street project will be the first of a multi-year effort that could fundamentally change the way cars and pedestrians get around Harrisburg—and could change the nature of the city itself.
A City Shredded
The way that people and cars relate to and interact with the city of Harrisburg was once much different.
For the most part, Harrisburg was built with a 19th-century urban design, which emphasized collections of neighborhoods. Street architecture complemented that design, allowing people to live, shop, go to school and work within high-density, walkable neighborhoods that, when stitched together, made up the fabric of the city.
This integrated structure was shredded after World War II. With the fall of heavy industry, people began migrating out. Government on every level deepened the urban decline, funding massive highway and bridge programs that allowed people to quickly leave their city jobs for cheap land and new houses in the suburbs.
Though it may seem strange today, Harrisburg was complicit in its own demise. City officials went right along with the program as federal and state governments pushed road projects that plowed through stable, long-established neighborhoods.
In 1956—just months after its plan was unveiled—the city converted Front Street from a slow-moving, two-lane, two-way local road to a noisy, three-lane urban highway. Its northbound counterpart—wide, tree-lined N. 2nd Street—simultaneously suffered a similar fate. Both roads intersected with Forster Street, which, just a couple of years earlier, had gone from a sleepy, leafy neighborhood road to a six-lane asphalt canyon that cut off Midtown from downtown.
The fate of Harrisburg was sealed. Who wanted to live in a city that had become a collection of deafening traffic islands, circled daily by streams of speeding commuters?
Larger Point
On the day that the Front Street news broke, Papenfuse sat in a large chair in his office in city hall, facing a couple of TV news cameras, his eyes darting among several reporters gathered before his desk.
He first expressed sympathy at the passing of former police Capt. Elijah Massey, who had died the day before. He then segued into the day’s good news—the reconstruction, beginning early next year, of Front Street.
He said he was unhappy with the first news reports, which he felt focused too much on the addition of the bike lane, missing the larger point. So, then what was that?
Though he didn’t put it in exactly these terms, he wanted reporters to understand that he hoped to undo the damage of Harrisburg’s past—the 1950s past—at least as much as he could.
Like a general plotting his way to victory, he said the first battle had been won.
For a two-mile stretch in Uptown and Midtown, Front Street would go from three lanes to two. Harrisburg would get its first dedicated bicycle lane on the park side of the street. New curbs, a shoulder on the other side and pedestrian crosswalks would slow down traffic, improve safety and re-integrate the street with the city.
In short, after 60 years, he wanted to yank Front Street from the people who didn’t live in Harrisburg and return it to the people who did.
He then set out his next goals. The city, he said, planned to use state funds to improve ugly, imposing Forster Street, making it less dangerous to pedestrians and facilitating vehicle access to N. 7th Street, which already has been widened to encourage northbound commuters.
That done, N. 2nd Street needed to be reintegrated into the city, returned to the people as a welcoming neighborhood road. The state, he said, had begun to examine redesigning N. 2nd, between Forster and Division streets, transforming it back to two-way, with a northbound bike lane, a study confirmed by PennDOT spokesman Greg Penny.
Finally, about three years out, the state will help bring back to life the abandoned, CAT-owned Cumberland Valley Railroad Bridge as a pedestrian and bike crossing that would connect the area around Harrisburg Hospital to the West Shore. Funding is already available for that project, Papenfuse said.
Penny also confirmed this, adding that he expected a portion of the bridge to be used by CAT as a dedicated transit route. That project should go out for bid in late 2016, he said.
Since the Front Street announcement, reaction has fallen along predictable lines. Suburban commuters seem to hate the idea, believing it might inconvenience them, while those who live and, especially, bike in the city seem to like it.
“I’m pretty excited by this,” said Front Street resident Ashley Merris, who hopes for a safer street after witnessing two horrific car crashes directly in front of her house over just the past three months. “This might be a very good thing.”
And so the pendulum swings back. Once, Harrisburg politicians gutted their own city to benefit the suburbs. Some are now trying to reverse the damage, attempting to return this urban center to its people.
