Illustration by Rich Hauck
Is Harrisburg really one of America’s “top-10” greenest cities?
According to National Geographic, it is. The stalwart nature magazine recently named Harrisburg as a top city in the nation for the amount of green space in its limits.
On a grass/dirt/tree basis, Harrisburg does do pretty well. The city is a mere 12 square miles, and tucked within it are several large, gorgeous parks: Riverfront Park, City Island, Italian Lake, Wildwood and Reservoir parks. Four square miles is water, similarly beautiful, with an abundance of wildlife and flora spreading across the Susquehanna River and over to Wildwood and Italian lakes.
I don’t wish to diminish this natural splendor or take away from the City Beautiful visionaries, 100 years gone, who are largely responsible for our bounty.
However, on a daily basis, Harrisburg doesn’t feel particularly green. In fact, it often seems quite the opposite—with block after block of asphalt and concrete, cars and hardscape.
This is because, while the city is abundantly green in total acreage, much of that natural wonder is confined to its edges, particularly near and along the river.
So, one can walk east, away from Riverfront Park, and encounter nothing but sidewalks, streets and curbs until, if you aim correctly, you might run into Reservoir Park a half-hour later. But you also might get stopped cold, since the lower part of the city and Allison Hill are mostly cut off from each other by the hard steel of railroad tracks and the imposing car canyon of Cameron Street.
Also, while Harrisburg’s parks are green, its streets are not. Its tree canopy is thin, its traffic-choked roads are forbidding and too many areas, particularly near Cameron Street, are loud, blighted and unpleasant.
So, we have a lot of work to do. But the good news is that the wheels are in motion for a much greener city.
As reported in TheBurg in April, Harrisburg is engaged in a multi-year effort to restore its tree canopy. Moreover, groups like Friends of Midtown, the Capital Area Greenbelt Association, Capital Region Water and others have long-term projects to help soften the landscape. Road improvements, such as the current 3rd Street corridor project and the proposal to turn 2nd Street back to a two-way flow, contain greening and traffic-calming components, which should make Harrisburg more livable and less auto-addled.
The most promising development is also the most ambitious.
In March, the state released the Paxton Creek Restoration Master Plan, which envisions a restored, more natural creek, banks and bed. That plan would free the waterway from its century-old, concrete tomb, turning much of the immediate area into parkland. This would add a vital strip of green to the center of the city, breaking up the harsh urban landscape and helping to tie together the city’s two opposing sections, now sliced apart by Cameron Street. The plan also would remove 133 acres from the 100-year floodplain, making the blighted brownfields in and around Market Street developable again.
Also in March, TheBurg reported that the Capital Region Economic Development Corp. (CREDC) had purchased 21.3 acres of industrial brownfields off of Cameron that once housed the sprawling Harrisburg Steel Co. Under the Paxton Creek Plan, that land will become part of the future Paxton Creek Park, a plan that the city is enthusiastically embracing.
According to the state, this plan will take four to five years of preliminary work before construction can even begin. But that would be a game-changer for a greener, more livable and more unified Harrisburg.
I feel a little guilty about the National Geographic ranking. I can imagine some wide-eyed eco-tourist coming here this summer, that beautiful Nat Geo picture of a lazy Susquehanna swimming in his head. Then he hits the light at Cameron and Market, stares at the trucks, traffic and post-industrial blight, and thinks to himself, “Am I in the right place?”
So, maybe, on paper, we’ve earned the title of green city, but, on the ground, we still have a long way to go. I just wish I could tell that disillusioned visitor that, yes, someday we will own that honor.
We finally will complete the painful, decades-long transition from smoke-belching, steel-making powerhouse to a small, clean capital city that complements its river, lakes and parks. It is fitting that the most radical evidence may be a free-flowing Paxton Creek, set off by a meandering strip of green, located in the hard heart of the city’s industrial past.
Lawrance Binda is editor-in-chief of TheBurg.
