About a week after I moved to Harrisburg, I decided to take a long walk through downtown and Midtown to get a feel for my new city.
From my house on Front Street, I hiked up 2nd Street then looped around to 3rd, past the Capitol, across Forster, up past the Broad Street Market and home again.
After my journey, I had an uneasy feeling that can be best be summarized by the following: “What is the deal with this place?”
I had been to Harrisburg before, but had never looked at it or thought about it from the perspective as a resident, as someone who planned to stay and make it his home.
But it wasn’t so much the unrestored buildings that I passed that bothered me, or the trash in the streets, or the ugliness and perilous vibe of Forster Street. I was most unnerved by the sense of desolation, the fact that I was the only person on the street for much of my walk.
“It’s like a neutron bomb went off,” I told a friend who lives in Washington, D.C., where I had come from. “There are all these buildings, but no people.”
Granted, it was a cold January day, but it also was the center of a city, right near the Capitol building, a place that should have been busy in the middle of the afternoon. But it wasn’t, and the surreal, eerie sense of isolation I felt only grew as I headed back to Midtown.
Five years later, the situation has improved somewhat. I see more people about, even during the past nasty winter, helped by the opening of several terrific businesses and the renovation of a few historic buildings.
That said, when someone asks me what Harrisburg most needs, my answer is quick and unwavering: Harrisburg needs people.
Empty Spaces
That’s why I found the recent discussion about gentrification to be so puzzling. Harrisburg has many problems, from crime to infrastructure woes to service delivery challenges. Population displacement is not among them.
Look around almost any neighborhood. What do you see? Empty lots, places where houses and buildings used to be. There are empty lots downtown used for parking; empty lots in Midtown used for nothing; empty lots all over Allison Hill and Southside. There’s a large, empty lot right outside my office window.
Fifty years ago, people went in and out of buildings on these lots each day, all day long. Take a look at page 16 of last month’s issue, and you’ll see a century-old aerial view of the neighborhood around the Broad Street Market, commercial and residential buildings packed into every inch of space, places where people resided, shopped and socialized—lived their lives.
What’s there today? Two large, empty fields, a parking lot, some low-density housing. In some cases, ghosts of the past remain, historic buildings struggling to find new purpose.
Throughout the city, buildings are underutilized. Some are empty; others exist as shadows of what they once were; a number are tumbling down. Harrisburg is a city built for 100,000 people. It has half that population today.
These lots, abandoned buildings and barely habitable structures are just waiting for someone to want them. The day there is demand, developers will rush in, seizing them from the city’s army of slumlords and negligent owners and giving them new purpose and function. Harrisburg has a long, long way to go before so much land is redeveloped that displacement is a serious issue.
Amazing Renaissance
About 15 years ago, former Washington Mayor Anthony Williams declared a goal to increase his city’s population by 100,000 people. Like many American cities, D.C. had long suffered the ravages of disinvestment and blight and, as a consequence, had lost a large percentage of its population, though never proportionally as much as Harrisburg.
At the time, Washington’s alternative newspaper, The City Paper, in its usual snarky way, poked fun at Williams’ grand ambition by creating (if memory serves) what it called a “Tony-O-Meter.”
Each week, it documented some event (a crime, a subway breakdown, a dumb thing a City Council member said, etc.) and then made up a number to sarcastically show how many people the city had gained or lost as a result. Williams’ image was plastered to the face of this meter, with a pointer fluttering over it to represent the weekly fictional changes in the populace.
But you know what? The city achieved exactly what Williams sought to do. Washington has increased its population from about 550,000 at its low point in the mid-1990s to about 650,000 today. And those additional people have brought money and investment that has led to an amazing urban renaissance.
Harrisburg reminds me a lot of Washington back in the 1990s, during Williams’ day. Back then, D.C., like Harrisburg today, was just emerging from an historic financial crisis, with fresh leadership that refused to be deterred by cynics, armchair critics or by those who perversely wanted to keep the city down so they could continue to profit from its misery.
Harrisburg can plant the seeds of its own revival. But, to make it happen, we need to attract, not be afraid of, people and the investment and change they’ll bring. We have to be welcoming, a place where people will want to live, work and visit. We need to focus on making Harrisburg better and more prosperous, not become complacent or cynical or, even worse, distracted by phony controversies that get us nowhere.
