“Why can’t we . . .?”
When people tell me they’ve just returned to Harrisburg from a trip, they often approach me with one type of question. They’ve gone to D.C. or New England or—God help us—Europe, and they want to know:
Why can’t we have the charming houses and shops of Georgetown?
Why can’t we have a great public transit system like Boston?
Why can’t we have the clean streets and rock-solid infrastructure of Munich or Geneva or Amsterdam?
I have that thought too. I sometimes have it even when I’m just down the road in Lancaster, a small, midstate city like Harrisburg, but one that has had much greater success in reviving its fortunes.
Recently, that thought hit me hard when I was in Baltimore, a city that, in some ways, reminds me of a supersized version of Harrisburg. Baltimore is also a water town that suffers to this day from post-industrial decline. It has made some forward strides, but much of the city remains poor, troubled and gritty.
Baltimore has made the most progress reviving residential areas near the Inner Harbor. Walking around Fells Point, I remembered when that neighborhood was just beginning its comeback, a renaissance that now has spread to surrounding blocks. Today, who can walk around the winding, colonial-era cobblestone streets, hard against the harbor, and not be charmed by the restored brick houses, narrow sidewalks and 200-year-old taverns?
Imagine this: Fells Point was nearly smashed into extinction. In the 1960s, an elevated highway plan almost destroyed the neighborhood until a revolt by residents killed the project. Today, it’s the very preservation of those old houses, shops and streets that has allowed Fells Point to become a beachhead in the re-population and revival of the city.
Other American cities, of course, have followed a similar pattern. Manhattan was almost cut into ribbons by three highways that were planned, east to west, through the borough. In D.C., the “inner loop” expressway nearly doomed chunks of Capitol Hill and other neighborhoods. Like in Baltimore, the people there, already angered by other road projects and misguided attempts at “urban renewal,” which leveled large parts of their historic cities, finally fought back. Then the rebuilding began.
Which circles me back to Harrisburg.
Harrisburg’s history follows a similar path, but we’re very late to the game of preservation and revival. Yes, we had the post-war disasters of highway construction, including the widening of Forster Street, which may have harmed the city more than any other single project. We also experienced the leveling of historic buildings and blocks, which has given us eyesores as varied as the Town House and state Archives buildings, among many others.
But Harrisburg suffered an additional wave of destruction, well after most other cities had wised up to the importance of preserving their historic legacies. During the 1980s and ‘90s, the razing continued so that, today, Harrisburg’s largely Victorian-era downtown has been broken up into a confusing mess of architectural styles, too-big buildings and surface parking lots and garages.
But now we finally may have learned our lesson.
The announcement last month that Gamut Theatre had purchased and will transform the historic First Church of God into its new home was a singular event in the history of this city. The church’s congregation had become too small to support the circa-1854 building. So up stepped Gamut, which had been looking for a place to buy (almost moving to the suburbs in the process) after renting in Strawberry Square for 20 years.
Gamut’s purchase builds upon a trend that has been rapidly gaining steam in this city. Just in the past few years, the buildings that have been saved, renovated and often repurposed read like a who’s who of historic structures from historian Ken Frew’s seminal study of city architecture, “Building Harrisburg.”
Riverview Manor. The Governor’s Hotel. The Kunkel building. The Furlow building. The Gannett Fleming building. The Glass Factory. William Seel building. Tracy Mansion. As I write this, Brickbox Enterprises is finishing up its conversion of the Barto building to the LUX condominiums; WCI Partners is repurposing the once-deteriorating Moffitt Mansion on Front Street into a new home for WebpageFX; GreenWorks is turning the old Keystone Bank building into a new home for the Susquehanna Art Museum.
Coming soon: the renovation of the Stokes Millworks building into a farm-to-table restaurant and, we’ve just learned, the repurposing of another building into a home for Alter Ego Brewing Co., both due to open next year.
These conversions give the lie to the Reed-era claim that Harrisburg had to destroy itself to save itself. It’s been said that Steve Reed never met a bond deal he didn’t like. I would add that he rarely met a demolition permit he didn’t like. The losses of historically important buildings during his lengthy administration are their own type of tragedy.
Urban renewal in places as varied as Pittsburgh, Washington and Kansas City worked only when these cities embraced their history and stopped flattening it. People want to visit, dine, shop and spend their money in places that are visually appealing, charming and walkable. They may even want to live in them. They tend to avoid cities and neighborhoods that are, for lack of a better word, ugly—whose historic charm has been stripped away, replaced by urban highways and by hulking, cold, unwelcoming buildings too large for their 200-year-old streets.
Certainly, it’s not all roses in Baltimore, which has lost many historic buildings due to misguided urban renewal and road projects there, particularly in and near the central business district. Perhaps that’s why, while historic Fells Point was bustling during my recent visit, downtown was, as it typically is on weekends, a virtual ghost town—empty, almost eerily quiet, unpleasant to be in and walk around.
To its fortune, Baltimore is big enough to absorb and partially recover from past mistakes. While some areas may have been ravaged, the city has other colonial and Victorian neighborhoods that, still largely intact, can act as anchors for future growth.
Tiny Harrisburg does not have that luxury. The state already has gobbled up several historic downtown and near-downtown areas, and road and building projects have consumed much of the rest. As a result, the city has just a few downtown streets that retain their Victorian-era allure. Midtown has more of a legacy to build on, but it also has lost much of its historic character, with too many blocks fallen to empty lots, bland housing complexes and general dilapidation.
The half-full side of this issue is that Harrisburg seems finally to have reached a point where other cities were 30 years ago. The mindset appears to have changed from a preferred option of leveling historic buildings to one of wanting to save and re-use them.
Concern for the city’s history finally seems to have migrated from a few preservationist “nuts” into mainstream thinking by developers, officials and residents. Perhaps that’s because the city government no longer has the capacity or money to lead large-scale re-development projects. Maybe it’s because people have become more conscientious of preservation or are at least willing to consider the idea that renovated and re-purposed buildings can continue to serve a function and be good for business.
Whatever the reason, it’s a welcome development. Harrisburg has lost so much that its downtown may never have the charm of renovated areas of downtown Lancaster or York, much less the appeal of desirable neighborhoods in larger cities. However, it retains enough of its legacy that, with a little fixing, scrubbing and streetscaping, the city could be a far more desirable place to visit and live in. And that’s good and that’s timely because, in this country, urban living is where the arc of history is bending.
