Former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed leaving court the morning of his arraignment.
Not long after Stephen Reed left office in 2010, after 28 years as Harrisburg’s mayor, he disappeared almost completely from the public eye.
There were exceptions to his relative silence—that April, he sat for a three-and-a-half-hour interview for a history project marking the city’s sesquicentennial—but as the months passed, and the city descended into fiscal crisis, he became known as a recluse who rebuffed interview requests and made few public appearances.
Yet this portrait, according to friends and neighbors, is incomplete. They say that, though he left the political stage, Reed maintained an active civic life, giving generously of his time and insights to neighborhood projects and local charities.
In the wake of the sweeping corruption charges he now faces, their accounts help form a more complex picture of Reed, a local titan once dubbed “mayor for life,” as someone others knew as a devout Catholic, generous neighbor and active volunteer.
“He’s not a recluse by any nature,” said Jon Castelli, a fellow member with Reed of a local council of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization devoted to charity. “He’s been very active. He comes to all our functions.”
Reed has been a dues-paying member of the group’s cathedral council, attached to St. Patrick’s downtown, for years, though he got more involved after leaving office, Castelli said. He is a knight of the fourth degree, which entails a level of special devotion and a focus on patriotic programs, like collection drives for veterans.
Castelli and other members said Reed has regularly participated in council meetings and charitable projects, including working at pancake breakfasts, packing gift boxes for soldiers and staying overnight at a city homeless shelter as a volunteer.
For the past several years, Reed has also been a dedicated member of Midtown Square Action Council, a neighborhood organization in historic Midtown, which includes the Cumberland Street home he has owned since 1975.
“He’s been a really good member,” said Janetta Brenner, a neighbor and fellow member of the group. “Because he has an incredible memory. Whatever resource we were looking for, he knew where to find it.”
Brenner recalled Reed was instrumental in helping secure grant funding for streetlight banners, and noted that he always came to the turkey dinner the neighborhood holds each winter at the Green Street Salvation Army.
“When he spoke, he sounded like a resolution,” said Kurt Knaus, a member of both the neighborhood group and the cathedral council. “But at the end of the day, he had a real interest in helping the groups, which were focused on helping the city or local residents.”
Such remarks show a side of the former mayor almost entirely absent from the extensive grand jury report released on July 14, the same morning Reed was arraigned at a municipal court on 17 criminal charges.
The report, though it noted Reed “did much that was good for the city of Harrisburg and its residents,” ultimately told the story of a politician who exploited his “near absolute control” over city institutions to spend heedlessly on personal interests.
It portrayed Reed as an iron-fisted ruler, who allegedly bribed City Council members and, on one occasion, abruptly fired an engineer who offered a disagreeable opinion. And it invoked state corruption laws in its critique of a governing style that a county judge, in an opinion two decades prior, had once called “Machiavellian.”
This picture is far from the Reed they saw at meetings, his neighbors say. “You’d have never known there was a mayor or former mayor in the building,” Knaus said. “He never tried to dominate. Where he could offer value, he did.”
“We hope it’s not true, but of course that will be for the courts to determine,” Castelli said of the charges, noting the council had not discussed them.
Whether or not Reed sensed the extent of the state’s investigation, the charges may have surprised him. His supporters on Wednesday launched a website to solicit funds for his legal defense, calling the allegations against him “outrageous” and a “travesty,” PennLive reported.
Brenner, who said she thinks Reed made mistakes, but never with bad intentions, recalled his presence at one of the neighborhood group’s committees meetings on a Monday night in July.
“He had wonderful ideas, ways to raise money, ways to do this,” she said. “It seemed like he was going to run with some of them.”
He was charged the next morning. Before the next meeting, he’d resigned.
