In 1975, Fred Lamke, the son of a Harrisburg police officer and graduate of John Harris High, graduated from Point Park University in Pittsburgh with a journalism degree and returned to the city to look for a job.
“It was the kind of economy just like we just had,” he recalled, in an interview in 2013. He had an offer to work as a reporter for a local radio station, at $110 per week—or to drive a beer truck for more than double that amount. “So I took the job in the beer business,” he said. He spent a few years in the industry, later working as a manager and a salesman, before eventually buying a tavern off Paxton Street with his family.
One day, Lamke, who had minored in business, approached his father with an idea. “I said to my father, ‘You know what Harrisburg doesn’t have? Harrisburg doesn’t have any horse-drawn conveyance.’ He said, ‘Were you drinking?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, I was drinking.’ He said, ‘Well, go sober up.’” But Lamke continued to nurse the idea, convinced it could work in the city. He eventually befriended an Amish man at a carriage auction who agreed to give him driving lessons. After a year and a half of training, he bought a horse and a vis-à-vis, a style of carriage in which passengers sit facing each other on opposite benches. In May 1984, Lamke registered the Harrisburg Carriage Company with the state corporations bureau.
Over the next few years, the business grew. By the summer of 1991, according to an article in the Patriot-News, the company had five horses and three carriages. That April, it had also moved to a new home—a carriage house newly constructed on City Island, which Lamke shared with the police department’s mounted patrol. In the several years prior, then-Mayor Stephen Reed had made the revitalization of the island, which he once described as a “long unused and blighted 63-acre land mass,” a major priority. A visitor pamphlet from the early 1990s highlighted the many facets of the island’s revival: a riverboat, a miniature golf course, a nature walk, the Senators baseball team. Among the photos was a shot of the carriage house at sunset, a crisply painted white carriage in the foreground being drawn by a sleek brown horse.
The company is the city’s only horse-drawn carriage service, and three decades after its founding, it remains something of a Harrisburg institution. It maintains an active Facebook page, where it posts photos of the occasional customer, most often a bride and groom or a couple who just got engaged on the ride. In September, one of Lamke’s carriages bore the coffin of Elijah Massey, a retired city police captain, in his funeral procession. “Fabulous people and lovely horses,” one person wrote in a five-star review. “Harrisburg is a beautiful location for a ride along the river.”
Yet the company’s relationship with the city, especially in recent years, has been far from ideal. Last month, in response to inquiries by TheBurg, the city furnished several records relating to the company. Together, they reveal a history of complacency and neglect dating back at least seven years. Lamke’s operating permit expired in 2008, making Mayor Eric Papenfuse’s administration the third in a row that has failed, at least so far, to renegotiate or renew it. The terms of the permit are generous—for the use of the carriage house, a nearby “corral and staging area” and multiple personal parking spaces, all of which were constructed and maintained at city expense, the Harrisburg Carriage Company pays a monthly fee of $100. (As a point of reference, the monthly rate for a single City Island parking space is $125.) Nonetheless, in 2010, after Mayor Linda Thompson took office, Lamke stopped paying this fee; he is currently more than $6,000 in arrears.
Part of the problem is a willful confusion of government and business functions. Lamke has been a city employee for nearly as long as he has provided carriage rides—he started working as Harrisburg’s animal control officer in 1985. He appears to use the carriage house as a remote office; both of the city’s animal-control trucks are frequently parked outside, whether or not he’s on duty. The city dissolved its mounted patrol unit in 2008, and since then Lamke has had exclusive use of a property that was once shared with a public entity. Papenfuse, contrasting Lamke’s permit with those of other City Island vendors, described it as “singularly problematic.” You “shouldn’t have a city employee renting from the city. Shouldn’t have a city employee in contract with the city for a private enterprise,” he told me. “That’s wrong.”
Last month, TheBurg reported on efforts to revitalize City Island. This year, the Papenfuse administration has reopened vendors’ permits, raising questions about the proper relationship between businesses and a government that wants to encourage them. The Harrisburg Carriage Company offers a case-in-point of how that relationship can go awry.
Among the records produced by the city were two letters addressed to Lamke from 2013, the last year of the Thompson administration. The first was dated Jan. 22 and signed by Brenda Alton, Thompson’s parks director. In the letter, Alton wrote she was “making a personal effort to inform myself about the businesses on City Island.” She noted Lamke’s expired permit term and the delinquent payments, but didn’t make any demands, aside from gently requesting a meeting. The second letter was signed by the city solicitor and dated in June. It described Lamke as “in default” and included language about the city’s right to evict. It’s not clear whether this second letter was ever sent; the version the city provided appears to be a draft.
“That one did not get resolved,” Alton, who left the city in early 2014, told me. “I worked with the police department, tried to get information, tried to work with Fred Lamke. I just couldn’t figure out what the relationship was.” Alton said that, in an effort to be “fiscally responsible on behalf of my department and the citizens,” she had tried to go through all of the island permits and ensure they were up-to-date. In many cases, she found the written permits unclear and gradually learned that several of the vendors had “verbal agreements” with the prior administration. She said that, in most cases, she was able to resolve her questions, but in the case of the carriage company it was “difficult to get the answers I needed.”
To some extent, the city may also have been falling short of its own obligations. The carriage house has badly deteriorated from the gleaming facility in the pamphlet from the ‘90s—the paint is peeling and dingy, vegetation sprouts from the gutters, and there’s a substantial hole in the roof, patched with plastic bags and moldering plywood. Inside, thick cobwebs hang from the rafters. It’s not obvious from the permit who should be held responsible. On the one hand, the permit refers to the company’s duty to repair any damage it causes, but on the other, it’s explicit that the house is city property and that it has been constructed at the city’s “sole expense.” Additionally, the city has neglected the fenced-in paddock the company uses for the horses’ exercise. Jenise Mattern, who volunteers at the stables six days a week, said a missing section of fence, drainage ditches leading from the ballpark and unchecked weeds have made the paddock unsuitable for the horses. “The city doesn’t keep up with it,” she said. The horses “need to get out for their health.”
This has also raised concerns about the safety and well-being of the horses. In May, I got an email from Annie Leguennec, an area resident who was worried the horses were being confined “inside their stable day and night.” A few days later, she posted complaints on the company’s Facebook page, challenging it over whether the horses received adequate time outdoors. The company, which currently keeps a total of eight horses, replied that it exercises them both in the City Island paddock and at a farm in North Annville. “For the safety of the horses, we only use the paddock on the island when there aren’t many people around,” the company wrote. (Aside from general animal cruelty provisions, there are no state laws regulating commercial providers of horse-drawn carriage services. A spokesman for the state public utility commission, which regulated the industry until 1990, said Lamke was issued a certificate in 1984 that was subsequently cancelled in 1989, after Lamke “was found guilty of failing to file his annual reports.”)
In June, after failing to reach him through visits to the carriage house and through Facebook, I reached Lamke by phone. It was around 8:30 in the evening, and he asked me to call him back in the morning, when he could give me his “full attention.” The next morning, he told me he “really can’t talk about anything.” “I’m just not permitted to talk,” he said, citing “longstanding city protocol.” I told him my questions concerned his private business, not his work as a city employee. He demurred, saying he could get fired for talking. (Joyce Davis, the city’s communications director, said there was no such prohibition; when I mentioned Lamke’s claims to Papenfuse, he said simply, “That’s not true.”)
When I first asked Papenfuse about the Harrisburg Carriage Company, he said he’d had conversations with Lamke as part of a “comprehensive review” of all the permits on the island. He described the expired permit and delinquent payments as a “bad situation” that his administration had inherited, though he also said, with regards to the city, “I don’t think we’ve lived up to our responsibilities, either.” He added that he saw the “concept of carriage rides” as a “good thing for Harrisburg.” “I think the city has some interest in hopefully preserving that,” he said. “I think once it’s gone, it’s going to be unlikely it will ever come back.” He also said he was still collecting information and asked me to follow up.
Several days later, I asked him about the company again. This time, Papenfuse said the city was on the brink of sending a letter—Lamke would be asked to fully repay his delinquent fees within 30 days or else cease operations on the island. The city would devote the proceeds to restoring the carriage house, he said, with the understanding that it needed to receive timely rent in order to keep up with maintenance on its end. Meanwhile, Lamke, like the other vendors, would be given a one-year permit renewal until new terms could be negotiated. Neil Grover, the city solicitor, referred to these permits as “holding the status quo” while the city examined the island’s economics and plans for future development.
When I spoke to Alton about the island, she expressed regret that she hadn’t been able to make more progress there. “I always thought City Island could be more and could be bringing in more revenue,” she told me. She blamed herself, saying she never seemed to have enough time, but she also thought the vendors bore some responsibility. “Everybody seemed to want their piece of the pie, but they failed to remember it was the city’s property, that some revenue needed to come back to the city.” She said she believed the island could be an attraction like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, if it just had the right development. “But we never had the opportunity to look forward,” she said. “We were always putting out fires.”
