One evening in March 1986, Mike Trephan was at the reception for his own wedding, at Catalano’s bar and lounge in Wormleysburg, when he got a call from then-Mayor Steve Reed.
“He says, ‘Michael, the river’s coming up,’” Trephan recalled. “‘You’ve got to move—’” Trephan knew what Reed was talking about: the hull of what was to become the Pride of the Susquehanna riverboat, a hulking metal frame that was perched on a City Island beach, unmoored. For the past year, Trephan and a group of local businessmen had been working to build an old-fashioned passenger boat to augment the city’s riverfront attractions. Trephan, who had recollections of taking a ferry to City Island as a child, called it “an old memory becoming a new dream.” He got off the phone and, along with his wife, headed for the island.
Rising waters had imperiled the project once already. Months before the wedding, the river had torn the boat from where it was docked on the west shore, wedging it against a pier of the Market Street Bridge. The disaster prompted a Patriot-News reporter to liken the riverboat to the Titanic—a display of hubris that was doomed to failure. But the hull was rescued and relocated to the island, and Trephan, after coaxing more positive coverage from the paper, kept the project and its capital campaign alive. On his wedding night, he got to the boat before the swelling river did. “And who shows up and helped us? Mayor Reed,” Trephan said. “We were all dressed up, but we got the boat tied up. I think he’s the one that brought ropes over, if I’m not mistaken.” The boat stayed anchored to the island.
The riverboat was just one piece of City Island’s transformation under Reed. For nearly a century, the island had been a recreational site for city dwellers, following the 1890 construction of the Walnut Street Bridge. According to Eric V. Fasick’s “Harrisburg and the Susquehanna River,” a collection of images of the river published earlier this year, the newly granted access led the city to develop bathing beaches, playgrounds and baseball diamonds there. By the time Reed took office, however, in 1981, the island had fallen out of use and acquired a reputation for prostitution and cruising. Trephan called it “disheveled,” though, he hastened to add, it “wasn’t as bad as people say it was. It just wasn’t developed.”
All that changed under Reed. In 2010, giving an interview for a local history project, Reed recounted his search for an enterprise that would have a “catalytic effect on changing the image and perception of the city.” “You needed something that had universal appeal,” he said. Waterfront investments, he went on, were “almost no-brainer types of developments. Once you do them, people will come. You build it, they will come.”
Trephan got involved after talking to the mayor during Kipona, the city’s riverfront festival over Labor Day weekend. Trephan had charted helicopters for the festival, and, as he and the mayor observed the long line of people waiting for a ride, Reed asked about other ways to improve the riverfront. Trephan ventured a suggestion for a ferry. That idea blossomed into the campaign for the riverboat, which Trephan spearheaded, along with other acquisitions—a railroad circuit and steam train, purchased from a bankrupt Vermont millionaire; an antique carousel. The crowning achievement was the construction of a new ballpark and the acquisition of a minor-league franchise.
Trephan, now in his seventies, looks back on the redevelopment of City Island as an emblem of Reed’s vision and follow-through. “He was a doer,” he said. “People knew that if he said he’d get something done, he would.” More than that, though, he recalls it as a story of political and geographical unity. The mayor “didn’t give a shit what your political party was,” he said. In the case of the Pride of the Susquehanna, he “probably got that done with 80 percent Republican help.” Trephan wanted the boat to be a project of both shores, and, when it came time to incorporate a nonprofit to manage it, he lobbied for the name to include “Harrisburg Area,” as opposed to just “Harrisburg.” (In a history of the riverboat, which Trephan put together in 2007, he wrote that it “might have been the first time that the east and west shores ever came together on a community project.”)
The renaissance on the island has largely endured. The Senators still play ball in the stadium, now dubbed Metro Bank Park. The Pride of the Susquehanna is paddling into its 27th year. But in recent months, both the private sector and local officials have begun looking to improve its offerings. Much as it did in 1986, when its mayor showed up to save a stranded boat, the city is considering what sort of businesses can flourish there, and how the government should help.
Last November, a group of land-use experts met over two days in downtown Harrisburg to contemplate City Island’s future. The Urban Land Institute, a global nonprofit, had convened them to tackle a question: was the island was being used to its full potential?
Urban Land Institute panels are meant to provide planning advice, as the institute puts it, “in an atmosphere free of politics or preconceptions.” Susan Baltake, the executive director of its Philadelphia council, which oversaw the City Island panel, told me the institute “gives cover to elected officials, who don’t want to be the ones telling constituents what to do.” The panel, which included lawyers, engineers, designers and real estate and construction professionals, among others, toured the island and interviewed 51 “stakeholders” representing the various constituencies with interests there. The result was a report that George Asimos, a local real estate attorney for the law firm Saul Ewing, and the panel’s co-chair, said he hoped would be “an informed, open-minded, no-agenda catalyst for action.”
The report affirmed the island’s present recreational use, while highlighting its immense potential. It called for a form of centralized management and urged the city to develop a long-term master plan. Among other ideas, it recommended pursuing additional programming at the island’s sports facilities and exploring winter activities and a year-round restaurant. It strongly urged the city to work with the City Islanders, a professional soccer team, to improve their stadium, which is underwhelming, despite the view of the Harrisburg skyline from its bleachers. The report also included a few of what Asimos called “blue-sky ideas,” including a “Museum of the Susquehanna” to celebrate the river’s ecology.
“City Island is a well-loved place,” Asimos told me. “It is unique and tremendous in its location, and in the fact that you can walk and drive to it.” But, he noted, the island’s amenities are “not planned in a uniform way.” The island didn’t have a consistent signage system, and the natural resources were integrated haphazardly. “It’s crying out for a unified master plan,” he said. Brad Jones, the president of the downtown development nonprofit Harristown, which led the request for the Urban Land Institute study, said the panel learned that vendors shared more or less the same wish list. They wanted the island to be “clean, safe and beautiful,” and they would like “maybe a little more marketing.”
Where does city government fit into these objectives? In 1984, before the rapid development of the island under Reed, the city petitioned the Urban Land Institute for a similar report. This time, the request came not from the city but from Harristown, with the backing of the Dauphin County commissioners and the regional tourism bureau. The difference is small, but it may say something about a divergence in priorities. Since Mayor Eric Papenfuse took office, he has clashed with these entities over spending on development and tourism. Though he was interviewed for the report, he took little interest in it. “I don’t think it told us anything we didn’t already know,” he told me, describing it as “one of those things the county likes to spend money on.” (Dauphin County paid $15,000 for the study.)
More to the point, Papenfuse has begun his own examination of the island, focusing less on potential for future development and more on the status quo. The city recently engaged a contract lawyer to go through the city’s permits with island vendors. The Urban Land Institute report recommended giving vendors longer permits, to encourage investment—yet the city recently notified vendors that their permits would be extended provisionally, for one year only. Jackie Parker, director of the city’s Department of Community and Economic Development, which encompasses the parks division, said she expected ultimately to renew them. But, she added, “We’re taking a look, because they’ve been on the books for a very long time, so we felt, and so did the vendors, that there were some things in there that they’d like to discuss and, you know, make some changes.”
Opening the permits may simply be about ironing out wrinkles; most of them date back a decade or more. But it may also reflect a deeper reconsideration of the vendor-city relationship. Under some permits, the city pays the vendor’s electric bill. Many contain a profit-sharing provision—if the vendor earns above a certain figure in a given year, a percentage of those profits goes to the city. But the city has rarely, and perhaps never, collected money under the provision. (One city official suggested such profit-sharing was never meant to be enforced, but rather was a way of making permits for private use of city-owned land more politically palatable.) Vendors, meanwhile, have found the one-year term puzzling. “As a business owner, how do you take a one-year permit to the bank to get a loan?” one vendor asked me.
These concerns are especially prevalent in the case of the asset that dominates the island—the minor-league baseball stadium. The city renovated the ballpark in 2007, matching an $18 million state grant with $18 million in borrowed money. (Around the same time, Reed sold the Senators to a private investor for $13 million, representing quite a coup, as the city had paid less than $7 million for the team a decade before.) Reed claimed that, under the deal, the city should expect ongoing revenues from the ballpark of $500,000 per year. In fact, the city now loses money on the stadium, largely because annual debt payments on it exceed the year’s rent and tax revenues by around $200,000. One city official described the arrangement as a “naked put—the city has all the downside.”
More worrying to Papenfuse, the stadium permit requires the city to pay for facility upgrades, potentially at very high cost to taxpayers. “You have a major scoreboard outage, you have an elevator go down, and you could suddenly have a million dollars in a year that the city’s on the hook for,” he told me. The Senators are supposed to pay the city a portion of parking revenues and stadium naming rights, but the city hasn’t received the money for about a year now, because it’s been siphoned off to pay for repairs. Papenfuse has been meeting with Mark Butler, a local businessman who bought the team earlier this year, and said he feels optimistic about the negotiations. He called the team “good partners” and pointed to its nearly $400,000 annual lease payment, which he acknowledged was costly. “From their perspective, they have the highest lease payments of any team in the league,” he said. “But from our perspective it doesn’t work, and the city can’t fill the gap.” (Butler did not respond to requests for an interview.)
The Urban Land Institute aspires to apolitical advice, but it is difficult to sever political considerations from the use of public land. Asimos, though he said the mayor’s task force didn’t come up during the panel, said the “fact that City Island is still costly to the city” did. In the fall, absent a renegotiated ballpark permit, Papenfuse will go before City Council and ask members to budget for the stadium’s capital repairs—and thus balance the city’s island subsidy against other spending priorities. I asked him what his long-term goal was for the island. “I’m not sure we can achieve it, but the goal is to get it to be—it doesn’t need to make any money for the city, but it shouldn’t be a financial liability to the city,” he said. “And right now, it’s a huge financial liability, with a sort of question mark for how high it can go.”
On a Thursday in early May, around noon, three men in red T-shirts and matching pants left a small, gray shed on the island, near the Walnut Street Bridge, and climbed into a Department of Corrections van. An escort drove them past the stadium towards the beach at the northern end. There, behind the putting greens of a miniature golf course, they spread out at a picnic table for lunch.
Jeff Palkovic opened Water Golf in 1990, making him one of the island’s longest-running attractions. A few years ago, when the city was nearly bankrupt, Mike Trephan organized Palkovic and several other businessmen into a loose committee to help take care of the city’s parks, including the island. A fellow board member of Trephan’s worked in corrections, and she connected the group with a community work program at the Camp Hill prison. Since then, Palkovic said, he has spent hundreds of hours working with the prisoners to maintain the island—cutting back overgrowth, painting facilities, even clearing a walking trail on the west shore.
These efforts raise the question of what the proper relationship is between city government and private businesses, particularly private businesses that rely for their livelihood on public land. The island is a city park, and it falls to the city to maintain the public areas. When the city can’t afford the maintenance, how far should businesses go to keep up appearances on their own? Trephan, who approached former Mayor Linda Thompson with the offer to help early in her term, said she initially seemed suspicious of his motives. Trephan told her he wanted to help because the parks were “what our forefathers left us, and it’s up to us to keep them going.” “All of a sudden, she completely changed her demeanor,” he recalled. “I only had 10 minutes with her—we sat there for an hour, hour-and-a-half talking.” After their meeting, he said, Thompson “helped me anywhere she could.”
Vendors have more recently taken the initiative in marketing and promoting the island. For the past year, they have held monthly meetings to discuss issues ranging from the island’s appearance to branding, signage and security. They meet either on the riverboat or at a ballpark conference room and are typically joined by the city’s parks and recreation director, at least for part of the time. Jackie Parker compared it to a downtown merchant’s association—“they really are starting to work together as a group, which is cool,” she told me. But the businesses also seem to want to ensure their insights and experience are respected. “I want to work as partners with the city,” Steve Oliphant, who owns Susquehanna Outfitters, which rents watercraft and offers river tours, told me. At the same time, he added, the parks administrators were newcomers, while most of the vendors had been on the island for 10 years or more. “They should be coming to the businesses that exist and working as partners. We want to help, too. Have input. Not feel like decisions are made in our absence, and they’ll tell us how that works out.”
“I think the city and the mayor are so overwhelmed with trying to fix things,” Palkovic told me. “There’s a hundred things to do and they can do 10 things.” Still, he reminisced about an earlier era of cohesion, when the island, under aggressive city management, seemed to pick up momentum. Each new vendor drew visitors to the island, and, as a result, everyone’s business improved. Tina Manoogian-King, the longstanding parks and recreation director under Reed, “ran it with an ironclad fist,” he said. “But you know what? You knew what to expect and you knew it was gonna be really, really good.” She was especially ardent about vendors cleaning up trash. To this day, after fireworks displays on the island, Palkovic goes around with a blower to clean up fallen debris. “And I have no problem with that,” he said. “Because I want the island looking good, so when you come, you’re impressed.”
Speaking to vendors and city officials, I wondered how much Papenfuse’s approach to the island was informed by his views on Reed’s legacy. His approach to the National Civil War Museum set one kind of precedent. When he asked the county to cut its funding, he described the museum as a financial waste that should never have been constructed. What Reed saw as a worthy investment, Papenfuse now saw as a crippling obligation. I asked him—did he feel the same way about the stadium and the Senators? “I think it’s distinct,” he told me. “Because there’s no question the Senators bring a benefit, and that perhaps at one time you could make an argument that a city or municipality could subsidize a sports team.” When it came to City Island, it wasn’t that he didn’t see the value of the investment. It was that he believed he had a more pressing obligation to the bottom line. “When we have debt that we absolutely have to pay, and we’re hundreds of thousands of dollars short on a yearly basis,” he said, “we don’t have the luxury of looking at the soft economic impact of that. We have to come up with real numbers.”
Last month, on a nearly perfect spring night, I went to a Senators game. I was early, and while I waited for my wife and our friends, I stood near the gates and watched a crowd stream in from the parking lots and over the bridge. The first time I’d seen the Senators play, before I moved here, I found the experience charming—the kids’ contests between innings, the ads for local businesses on the Jumbotron, the lights strung up on the Walnut Street Bridge. Now, though, it struck me as an emblem of a much more complex legacy.
I thought of something Mike Trephan told me. We’d been talking about the uniqueness of Harrisburg’s riverfront, and the beauty of the island, but had gotten sidetracked on his estimation of the Reed years. He was aware of the incinerator and related borrowings that, late in Reed’s tenure, wrecked the city’s finances. He would entertain the suggestion of bad governance, but he didn’t doubt for a second the mayor’s motives. “Everything he did, he did for the city,” Trephan said. He paused a moment, then set these thoughts aside. “Ah, it’s a great place, City Island,” he said, as if it was all that mattered.
