“Why are you hesitating?” Lessa Helm said. She was speaking to her husband, Kerry, who had just pulled back the thin plywood panel that stood between the intermittent traffic of N. 6th Street and the historic, crumbling Jackson Rooming House, which they had bought the previous Friday for one dollar.
Lessa, who has neck-length wavy gray hair and a tanned face, wore jeans and a Chincoteague Island sweatshirt. She kept one eye on a granddaughter who roamed the vacant lot next door, intent on ditching her flip-flops in the tall weeds. Kerry, on lunch break from the Department of Education, where he works on the state English language and literature assessments, wore a red, button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves and sunglasses perched on his brushed-back golden hair.
Why was Kerry hesitating? This wasn’t the Helms’ first experience of a rundown old building. Their current home, on the 1700-block of N. 3rd Street, had been gutted when they bought it back in 2009. They’d since converted it to 3rd Street Studio, an art gallery with inviting window dressing, erratic hours and an apartment on the second floor. Before they renovated their first home, in Virginia, it had been shuttered for 13 years. “We generally like older places,” Kerry says—places where you could “leave your mark.” When Kerry decided the old home needed a hallway, he picked up a sledgehammer and, presto, a hallway there was.
Plus, as far as the Jackson house was concerned, the Helms had already waited plenty. The building, a four-story brick structure with a distinctive corner cupola and an elegantly curved roof, has been catching Kerry’s eye for years. “It looks like a haunted house,” he said. “It’s just cool.”
The Jackson Rooming House is named for its former owner, German Jackson, who was once a bellhop at the Penn Harris Hotel and who remains a local legend. His house offered room and board to prominent blacks in the era of segregation; the adjoining Jackson House burger joint also bears his name. In 2012, the Historic Harrisburg Association placed two properties on the block on its list of “preservation priorities.” One was the so-called “Swallow Mansion” on the corner, once the parsonage of the abolitionist preacher Silas Comfort Swallow and, later, the black-owned Curtis Funeral Home. The Jackson Rooming House was the other.
The rooming house and the restaurant building were attached as one parcel. In his will, Jackson referred to the latter as “my store room.” Last spring, the owner of the restaurant, Dave Kegris, who inherited the property from Jackson, announced he was looking for someone to take the rooming house off his hands. “If someone wants it, they can come and get it,” Kegris said, for a story in this magazine. Not long afterward, Kerry Helm got in touch with Kegris. “He thought it was a great building and wanted to see somebody restore it,” Kerry recalled.
As it turned out, getting hold of the property would involve more than a simple sale. Splitting the parcel required action from the planning bureau, the county and city planning commissions, as well as City Council. The process was further complicated by delays, such that the Helms ultimately didn’t close on the property until Sept. 12, more than a year after they read about its precarious fate in TheBurg.
A few days later, on a sunny, windy morning, Kerry stood in the foyer of his newly purchased rooming house, peering into the dark interior. Lessa, coming up beside him, at last saw why her husband was stalling. “Oh my gosh,” she said.
Inside was what remained of the Jackson Rooming House—two stories’ worth of split timber and plaster, lying in a heap in the middle of the floor. A couple of antiquated light fixtures hung innocently from the ceiling. Above, a beam of light shone through an empty window frame, illuminating an old chest that was stranded, tantalizingly, on a few shards of floorboard. Along the right-hand wall, a dark wooden staircase climbed up from the foyer’s tile floor, strewn with debris. It looked like a giant wrecking ball had been dropped from the third story.
“It was better than this when we started the process,” Kerry said equably. But Lessa was less forgiving.
“You know what?” she said. “It is all because the city took so long.”
…
Over the summer of 2013, the Helms started procuring the documents they would need to formally subdivide the Jackson properties. From Melham Associates, an engineering firm on N. Front Street, Kerry obtained a site survey, which he submitted to the planning bureau on Nov. 7. At the time, all three floors in the house were intact, but with winter approaching, Kerry sought to move quickly. “I hope to be able to cover the roof before any heavy snow or ice occur,” he wrote the city planner, Geoffrey Knight, in an email, “since much damage has already been done over the years and it is causing significant issues inside the building.”
When Knight started working for the city, in December 2012, he was the only person in a bureau that once employed five people. The city has recently hired a second planner, but, at the time of the Helms’ application, his office was overwhelmed. “It was an issue of, we’ve got a million things going on in the planning bureau at any one time,” he said.
Kerry didn’t hear back for several months. Finally, in March, he reached Knight, who said he hadn’t yet looked at the drawings. On March 20, Kerry sent an email to the mayor, Eric Papenfuse. “I am not writing to complain,” he began. Recent activity around vacant buildings and blight—in February, Papenfuse had defended the arrest of a local preacher whose abandoned church had collapsed in south Harrisburg—had caught his attention. He worried about the damage caused by the long winter and was eager to expedite the process. “It could be that if it continues to sit vacant for much longer it will become virtually impossible to restore,” he wrote.
Three days later, Knight emailed him to apologize for the delay. He appended a description of the “process for filing a Subdivision Plan.” It entailed submitting a short application along with 15 copies of the site plans. “I wish we could have gotten the application sooner,” Kerry wrote back. Unable to gather the documents for the planning commission’s April hearing, he set his sights on May.
At the May hearing, on a Wednesday evening, Knight presented his bureau’s report on the application. It included a lengthy description of the building, identifying its architectural style as “Second Empire” and singling out such elements as the roof cupola, an entryway transom and an ornate brick chimney. Helm asked for a copy of the report, which he found “very detailed.” “You did a great job Wednesday,” he told Knight in a subsequent email.
Knight’s report recommended approval of the subdivision plan, noting the historic nature of the house and the Helms’ intent to rehabilitate it. In the meantime, though, the house had deteriorated. On May 11, Mother’s Day, Kerry entered it for the first time since the previous October to discover the third floor had partially collapsed. Where he had once been able to access the roof through a third-story window, the floor beneath it was now gone and the second floor landing was blocked by debris.
There was also another administrative kerfuffle to come. As part of the subdivision process, the planning bureau required four 2-by-3-foot copies of the drawings for final signatures, which Kerry delivered—only to learn in July that the city had lost them. “They were distributed to several Bureaus to help with the review of the application,” Knight wrote Kerry. “[U]nfortunately, I have not been able to locate them.”
“That’s when I freaked out and called the mayor’s office,” Kerry said. Two days later, Knight wrote again, saying he’d found three of the copies and the signatures could proceed. (Knight attributed the misplacement of the plans to a lack of “secretarial support,” along with the volume of paperwork that enters his office. There were “only so many horizontal spaces in the bureau,” he told me.)
A month and a half later, Kerry stood outside his new property, a thick carpet of ivy shimmering on its north-facing wall. “I’ve got nothing against Geoff,” he reflected. An employee of the state, he is no stranger to bureaucratic delays. In any case, all the red tape may have saved his life; if the floors were going to come down, at least they did it when no one was around.
“I think it’s an awesome project,” Knight told me, adding that it helped to signal an “improving market” in Fox Ridge, the neighborhood behind the properties. Looking over the building, the Helms had a quieter assessment. “It’s got history,” Kerry said. “It looks the way it looks.” Considering the extent of the damage, he worried they might wind up having to knock it down. But he still hoped to follow through on their original plan—restoring it into a home they could live in.
If that didn’t work, at least they’d made one mark on its future, by getting it onto a separate deed. “We don’t really own anything,” Kerry mused. “We have it while we’re here, and then we move on.”
