Over the past few years, my out-of-town friends and family have let me know whenever they’ve heard or read something about Harrisburg. It happens often and, when it does, I immediately brace myself, prepared to bat down questions having to do with:
Financial crisis. Even my casual news-following friends have read all about the lowlights of Harrisburg’s fiscal ignominy.
Scumbags. I don’t know why a silly, flip remark from the mayor of Harrisburg garnered international attention, but it did.
Wild West artifacts. An Old West museum in Harrisburg, Pa.? In Harrisburg? Really? This one took A LOT of explaining.
Mostly, their questions have been sincere (Hey, what’s the deal with that incinerator?), with a few bad jokes tossed in (So, you really burned through your money, huh?). Ha-ha.
When I visited friends and family over the holidays, I received several questions about our latest contribution to the national conversation: the poor, shattered New Year’s Eve strawberry. Evidently, National Public Radio and a few other news outlets thought their audiences would enjoy a good, seasonal chuckle at our expense.
I was asked how it broke, to which I could just say that they hauled it a few stories up the Harrisburg Hilton—then ker-plop. And then I was asked, “why a strawberry?” with folks eager to learn some interesting historical link between Harrisburg and that wonderful springtime fruit. When I responded that, well, there’s this alley called Strawberry Street with an enclosed mall called Strawberry Square built over it, they seemed not impressed at all.
But, ah, then I saw my opportunity.
“This is how I look at it,” I said. “It’s a new year, with new leadership for the city, so I see the shattered strawberry as a symbolic break from the past.”
A stretch?
Maybe, but I’m reasonably confident that Harrisburg is about to change considerably, and I’m hopeful that this change will be for the better. I don’t expect Harrisburg to turn overnight into a paradise (or even Pittsburgh), but I think that it can become what I might call a “normal city” relatively quickly.
So, what is a normal city?
A normal city is a place that lives within its means, can pay its bills and isn’t always dodging creditors.
A normal city is a place with conscientious, caring leadership, where residents don’t nervously await the mayor’s next miscue, intemperate remark or conflict.
A normal city is a place that provides solid, if not always spectacular, basic municipal services.
A normal city is a place where people like to be and don’t worry excessively about their safety.
A normal city is a place with enough stability that people feel confident planning for the future and doing business.
In “City Contented, City Discontented,” an excellent collection of columns about Harrisburg, journalist Paul Beers tells of Steve Reed’s first months as mayor. Already, he wrote, both the promise and the peril of Reed’s leadership were evident. He was ambitious, smart and had some creative ideas, but he also was imperious, overly confident and pugnacious, showing early signs of his ends-justify-the-means approach to governance.
Similarly, former Mayor Linda Thompson set the tone for her mayoralty early on. Within six months, she had shown herself to be domineering and confrontational, often personalizing issues to the detriment of good governance. While she showed some capacity to improve over her term, the basic tenor of her leadership never changed.
Therefore, to know whether Mayor Eric Papenfuse can make Harrisburg function as a “normal city”—or what to expect from him—we should pay close attention to his first six months in office. By mid-year, we should have a decent idea of his leadership style, his priorities, his capabilities, his strengths and his weaknesses.
In many places, normalcy would be judged as a low bar to aim for. However, in Harrisburg, it would represent an improvement, an end to years of uninterrupted crisis. Stability and predictability need to return to life here, a clear break from the recent past, as symbolized (if accidentally) by our broken strawberry. After that, we can start thinking greater thoughts.
Lawrance Binda is editor-in-chief of TheBurg.
