All Things Local: Our commitment to Harrisburg runs deep.

February 27, 2015 | by Jonathan Casey

As a business owner in Harrisburg, I believe that supporting our local community is vitally important, which also aligns with my company’s core values. I feel that some of the best ways to do this are supporting other local small businesses and supporting local charities.

I like to say that I vote every day when I choose where to spend my money. I purposefully seek out local business when shopping for everything from business vendors to a place to eat. And Harrisburg certainly has a lot of variety. It is not always the easiest thing to do, but I feel it is critical that I personally contribute to the local economy whenever possible though both my business and my own dollars.

According to the U.S. Small Business Association, small business owners are the largest employers nationally. They employ more than half of the private workforce and have created almost two-thirds of our country’s net new jobs over the past 15 years. When you support small business in your community, you are supporting local employment.

Patronizing local businesses also helps grow the area tax base and local revenue. If a business is based in Harrisburg, that business is supporting the local Harrisburg tax rolls. Locally owned companies tend to spend money in their own market, which puts the revenue back into the local economy.

Another advantage of shopping local is that the environmental impact is reduced. Local businesses usually make more local purchases, which reduces transportation pollution and contributes less to sprawl, congestion and habitat loss.

When shopping in Harrisburg, or any other city center for that matter, product diversity is evident. When each local business selects products based on its own interests and the needs of a local market, a more diverse range of products is available to the customer. In an increasingly homogenized world, locally owned small businesses create a uniqueness to each city that gives that area a distinct advantage over the strip malls and big box chains prevalent in the suburbs.

Do we really need another big box store, unused office complex, or half-empty strip mall contributing to the suburban sprawl? There are plenty of opportunities in our wonderful city and, if you are a regular reader of TheBurg, you know that Harrisburg is headed in the right direction.

Local businesses are also much more likely to give back to the community. My company donates more to the United Way of the Capital Region than all other auto groups in the area combined. We were proud to be a part of the last campaign that ended up raising a record $12,020,175. Thanks to 13 local companies that cover 100 percent of administrative costs, every dollar raised during this campaign went to the United Way of the Capital Region and every dollar stayed in the capital region. Fewer than 10 United Way organizations have this type of program.

If you’re familiar with local history, you may know that most area car dealerships used to be located in Harrisburg. Cameron Street and Paxton Street were known for having a large selection of car dealerships. There are only a few remaining. Our company has chosen to stay because we feel that our particular location in the city gives us a lot more visibility than a suburban location. We also receive quite a few unsolicited appreciations from people for the large American flag that we fly at our location at 13^th and Paxton streets. Due to its visibility, it has become a landmark over the years for many locals, as well as for people who drive through I-83 on a regular basis. I have actually seen the flag in a few pictures of Harrisburg’s skyline.

Harrisburg has had its ups and downs in the last few years, but I firmly believe that our city’s future will be brighter than its past. My hope is that our local companies and even the big box chains consider the city for their next retail storefront or office. Even in tough times, Harrisburg has been a great place to conduct our business, and I don’t see why that would change as our city continues to move in the right direction.

I am proud that my company is a community publisher of TheBurg. Harrisburg is a city with a rich history, a culturally diverse population, and generous community focused companies. Sounds like a great place to do business to me!

Jonathan Casey is the general manager for Sutliff Chevrolet Volkswagen, a community publisher for TheBurg.

The Ring of Spring: Who’s calling? Why, it’s your garden.

February 27, 2015 | by Erica Shaffer

It is taking hold of us now. An invisible, primal, internal force.

I need to get dirty.

I need to be outside.

I need to plant.

Funny how there are so many of us responding to the same stimulus. A 50-degree day is all it takes. We wake from our winter slumber energetically charged, the phenomenon known as “Spring Fever.”

So what to do with all this energy? Most of us run around all scattered and, in June, we look back and think, “What just happened?” I have discovered making a list of chores is a great way to get stuff done without being quite as distracted.

Paying attention to your tools is a great thing to do now before the chaos arrives. Working with good tools makes tasks easier and more pleasant. Pruning tools should be sharpened and lubricant sprayed in the moving parts. Use a Speedy Sharp, file or sharpening stone to return a nice cutting edge. Clean any caked soil off of shovels. Bright pink duct tape wrapped around handles helps when tools decide to play hide and seek.

A nice stroll through the garden with eyes wide open will remind you of all the tasks you didn’t get to last autumn. With notebook in hand, jot down directives. I never did finish the brick edging I was installing…nor did my compost get fully moved.

Mulch & Prune

Of course, there will be the added spring checklist—cutting down ornamental grasses, removing all the leaves that blew in after we were done raking, etc. A nice fresh edge on the landscape bed lines also keeps mulch out of lawn.

Mulching note: Mulch should never be more than 2 to 3 inches deep, especially around our trees. Mulch rings around trees that look like volcanos are very bad for growth. They prevent water from reaching the surface roots, cause roots to grow up into the “cone” thus creating more drought stress, cause roots to circle and strangle trunks while seeking water, and cause the bark to rot around the crown.

A proper mulch ring at the base of a tree should look like a large plate, with the high spot around the perimeter of the circle. Trees grow 80 percent faster with a proper mulch ring laid.

Not everything should be pruned! Many a flower bud gets trimmed off in early spring from overzealous clipping. Most hydrangeas and azaleas should not be pruned in early spring. Many clematis will also be stripped of future blooms when pruned at the wrong time. Summer blooming spirea, butterfly bushes and abelia respond well to a deep haircut.

If you aren’t sure, call your local experts—before you trim. If you aren’t sure what shrubs you have, trim little pieces off and bring them in for proper identification.

Rinse & Rant

Adding plants to the landscape is another wonderful job on the task list. Maybe some plants have become overgrown or aren’t very happy/healthy. Notice if it is a sunny or shady area. Decide what the perfect mature size should be. Is the area very dry or very wet? All these details add up to successfully choosing a plant.

The early bird gets the birdhouse! Check your birdhouses for old nests and clean them out. Give the birdbaths and birdfeeders a good scrubbing. Bleach, used at the disinfection ratio, works great for cleaning. Rinse well with clear water when done. Clean up all the shells collecting under the feeder and discard.

My writings don’t feel complete to me until I rant a lawn rant. The lawn and weed killer commercials are being paraded already in front of our wide eyes. “Commercial” also translates to “manipulation.” We have come to associate (be manipulated to) the perfect green lawn with the perfect neighborhood and the perfectly caring neighbor.

Personally, I don’t think spreading chemicals all over my property equates to being a good neighbor. Personally, I don’t wage war against dandelions. Personally, I don’t need a grass-only lawn to prove my belonging to my neighborhood. I keep a meadow. I take a pH and soil nutrient test every few years. I use this information to apply the proper amount of lime and fertilizer. I never ever kill “weeds” in my meadow with chemicals.

The number of visiting butterflies, bees and pollinators reinforce my decision to go natural. If you live in a newer development where the topsoil was stripped away leaving subsoil, you are really in for a struggle. Grass likes good soil. Repeated applications of chemicals are not going to give you better soil. Choose organic fertilizers to start the long process of rebuilding your soil. Do your soil tests, make choices for the soil to get the reward of better grass growth. Be informed, don’t be a sheep.

Happy Spring! May the fun begin!

Erica Shaffer is the nursery manager at Highland Gardens, 423 S. 18^th St., Camp Hill. www.highlandgardens.org.

The Rebuilders: A Q&A with Vern McKissick

February 27, 2015 | by Lawrance Binda

Vern McKissick

This month, TheBurg introduces “The Rebuilders,” an occasional series of interviews with people who have contributed to the reconstruction of the city.

Our first interview is with Vern McKissick, founder of McKissick Associates Architects. McKissick has designed several important buildings in Harrisburg, including the National Civil War Museum and, more recently, the Capitol View Commerce Center. We sat down to talk in the building where he works and lives at 317 N. Front St. The complete interview follows.

TheBurg: Tell me a bit about your background.

My wife and I moved here in ’93. Interestingly enough, we tried to buy this building. I was with an architecture firm that was two doors up the street. They had purchased the old Lawrie and Green. Lawrie and Green locally had done the State Museum, the YWCA, the courthouse, Strawberry Square, you name it.

So, it was kind of intriguing. We were in the State College area, moved down. When we decided to move, we expected to be dead in six months.

TheBurg: Why was that?

My earliest memories—my father was a school superintendent and, in those days, before computers, they would have them all come down here every month or two months for meetings at the Department of Ed. And, sometimes, we’d come down with my mother, and one of my earliest memories was being hunkered down on what I now know to be 2^nd Street outside of what was then the Harris Savings Bank while the cops were leaning over the back of the car during a bank robbery. So, this was my sense of Harrisburg (laughs). This was in the ‘70s. So, I thought, well, OK, we’ll go down there and be dead in six months.

TheBurg: A lot of people still think that, and I continually write about how ridiculous this is.

That’s like my mother-in-law because when we first moved down, our home sale fell through at the last minute in Boalsburg. They wanted me down here at the office, so we took the caretaker’s place two doors up the street for about five months downtown. And her mother was convinced we would be dead. She begged me not to do this. So, that was my introduction to Front Street.

TheBurg: You didn’t die, as it turned out.

Apparently not.

We tried to buy this building. It was abandoned at the time. The homeless were living in it. It was placarded for demolition. We tried to buy it, and they turned down our offer. So, we went up to Bellevue Park and bought a place up there and lived there for awhile.

TheBurg: You tried to buy it as your home?

Yes, we tried to buy it as our home back then. My office was two doors up the street, so I watched it. And I saw the fires that happened here and all the things. So, it was kind of disappointing for years and years and, finally, in ’99, [former Lieut. Gov.] Mark Singel bought this place and started renovating it. So, when we had a chance in 2003, we met him, we said, “Hey, I’ll finish it. Let me take it over from you.” But it took us years to get here.

We’ve been on Front Street . . . my office was there when we started the new practice. We were with Hayes Large Architects. I was one of five partners. We were eight offices and 180 people and an airplane and all the rest of that jazz—very high corporate, tightly wound kind of a place. We wanted to do something different.

My wife is an architect by training. We met at Penn State. She left the firm. When she wanted to become a partner, they said, “Oh, well you shouldn’t be a wife or kin.” So, she stated a small graphics company and ended up morphing into a commitment where she was the initial webmaster for MapQuest down in Lancaster. So, when MapQuest in ’99, when AOL bought them out for $1 billion, we cashed the stock options and said, “You know, I really don’t need all this headache. Let’s do something on our own.” So, we walked down the street and leased an office in a historic building of St. Stephen’s. So, we’re back down on Front Street. My mother-in-law still expected us to be dead in six months. I’ve had 20 years on Front Street at this point.

It’s the greatest place to be in the world. There’s no place better I’ve been—the view and the park and the activities and the fireworks. And I can walk to a hardware store, and I can walk to the bank, and I walk to my accountant. It’s just bizarre. It’s like a small town, but it isn’t. So, we see a lot of things being down here. I probably have one of the most prolific numbers on 9-1-1. Other people just look past it, but I call. They say, “Oh, it’s you again. What is it this time?” But we have a responsibility, and I try to live up to it.”

But we’ve never had a problem in all the years. You just live smart. You don’t do stupid stuff—stagger around drunk at 2 in the morning. I don’t care if you’re in State College or Boston, you’re going to have a problem.

I’ve become a real big booster on Harrisburg. Once you get off the beltway and see that there’s actually an old city underneath, it’s got a lot of charm and a lot of potential. We’re both from small towns. So, we found that actually Harrisburg, once you get into it, is a lot like that. There’s only—there’s a small group of very active people, and you can get to know who they are. And it’s very transient because people do come into the area, it’s not like going to Pittsburgh, where, if you’re not a Mellon or a five-generation family, you can’t get involved or do things.

We do a lot of work out of the area because there’s just not much happening in Harrisburg per se. We’re out in Johnstown and Erie and Pittsburgh, and we have an office and home down in Winston-Salem, N.C., which is interesting for us because it’s the same size metropolitan area. It had the same kind of challenge because RJR shut down. But their response to it is a $1 billion in infrastructure improvement, and they now have a biotechnology center, a medical school downtown, 10,000 new residents and loft apartments that have been converted from the old warehouses and things. And it’s just interesting to see how two different communities dealt with adversity. If the state left [Harrisburg] tomorrow, I don’t know what we’d do. I just can’t imagine anyone having the vision to do anything with it. But, along the way, I had the chance to do the Civil War Museum with [former mayor] Steve Reed, back in the day, and that was very interesting. View from the inside-out.

TheBurg: I bet it was.

We reopened Pennsylvania Place when it was abandoned. We worked with that one. We did St. Stephen’s, converted the old parking garage into the first LEED-rated religious school in the country, which is kind of neat, taking an 1845 mansion and a 1922 parking garage and saying we’ll make a school out of it. There have been some challenges. But, like I say, we mostly work in small towns: Wellsboro and Williamsport and Sunbury and Milton and Selinsgrove and Bedford.

TheBurg: What was your first significant project in Harrisburg?

Our first significant project in the city was the Civil War Museum. We moved here in ’93, still did a lot of work in New York and Virginia. But that was interesting. It was a design competition, and we were short-listed as one of three, and Steve Reed had very definite ideas on what he thought the solution should be.

TheBurg: That’s not surprising.

It was his solution, and, basically, it was a small building down by the amphitheater. We came up with some illuminated, like kind of tents. It looked like an encampment type of thing. I didn’t like it. So, we had a model about half the size of this table. I said, “You know, I’m going to win this thing.” So, we built the model so that the top lifted up. It was the whole Reservoir Park. At the time, there was a circle at the top of the hill, where everyone used to go to drain their motor oil. People were upset because we took away the drains where they had drained their oil into. It was a great mix with the reservoirs being up there.

When we got down, I said, “Do you have five more minutes?” He said, “Yeah, all right.” I had staged four people in the next room, and I had them come in. They came in and lifted the top of the model off, walked out of the room, brought in a model to put the building on top of the hill, used the circumference of the old drive as the circle for the atrium. Reed took a look at it and said, “That doesn’t match anything I asked you for. I love it.” It goes back to the fact that nobody knows what they want until they see it sometimes.

So, we got to work on that project over the years. It was interesting because when we first started working on it, we had a budget of $6 million. He said, “That’s not big enough. How big do you want it?” He said, “What if I give you another $1 million?” He came back. “That’s still not big enough. What if I gave you $2 more million?” It finally got big enough at like 16. I said, “OK.”

The most amazing thing with that project was the day I had to tell him it was in Susquehanna Township. Everyone in the city had thought, until that time, that Reservoir Park was in the city. Actually, two-thirds of it is in Susquehanna Township. So, Steve got a little worked up and had a bit of a panic attack. We started to look at other sites, like down at where the post office is here. We were moving the museum there. I took it upon myself to call the supervisor of Susquehanna Township and said, “Can I come and meet with you?” I’m not authorized to do this. I went into them and talked and explained what we were doing. At the end of the day, they said, “You know what: as long as you redirect all the water into the city, the storm water into the city, you close all the roads that connect to our township coming out of the park, we’ll waive all of our land development rights and give everything back to the city, and you do whatever you want.”

So, I walked back to Steve Reed and said, “Guess what I just figured out?” He said, “You did what? Oh, I guess we could do that.” But, until then, the project was cancelled. It couldn’t be there because it was in the township. So that was a fun project. Then we documented the construction and did the brochures when it opened. They hadn’t thought about the fact they needed printed material and so on and so forth when they opened. So, we found a printer a week before it was due to open. We picked up the brochures wet from the printer, folded them in the back of car in my tux and her gown, just so there would be something in there when it opened. It went on. We did the business plan. We did all the curatorial stuff. So, I touched everything that was in it.

And I could have told you that two-thirds of the stuff was Western, because he was doing a Western museum until he found out that [former Gov.] Ridge liked Civil War. So, [Reed] just said, “I’ll just take this chunk of my history, which together was 1800 to 1890 or whatever, and I’ll make that a separate museum.”

So, we brought in the folks from the Tennessee State Museum, their director. We brought in grad students in curatorial studies to separate everything out, and we set up this big room at the sewage treatment plant, of all places, about the size of a gymnasium. And we put a rope down the middle, and then we started bringing in all this stuff from all the rooms, all over the city, because all we had was a list. We had no idea what we had. So, you’d open the boxes. By the time we were done, we had pushed the aisle all the way over here, because we had this much Civil War and this much Western stuff. So, it was just an amazing view for me on the inside of all of that.

TheBurg: His original plan was the Wild West Museum?

That was his passion. The Civil War was just a breakout. And one of the frustrating things with the Civil War Museum was—and I appreciate what Eric is trying to do over here—but when the first reaction was, “Well, we’re not getting our money’s worth out of the museum,” the reality was the state paid for the entire museum. Even though it was a $34 million project, the other $17 million was all pledged value of the park. The Parking Authority actually built all the roads and the parking lot. So, there is no cash value to the city in the building. So, the city is not paying. It’s not out anything.

TheBurg: It’s on the hook to maintain the building.

But my sense, mostly they’ve been doing their own maintenance. I mean, the city never really stepped up.

TheBurg: They want to bill the city for some of their maintenance.

And that was the original agreement. What was interesting was we did the financial analysis, and what actually happened was exactly what was predicted. We had to go into the governor’s office, and we presented all the data. We predicted it would be, I think, 119,000 visitors and it would drop to 80 and 69, and it would stabilize to around 43,000 over time. We’ve actually stabilized a couple thousand higher than that, which is exactly what we thought.

The whole thing was designed as an event location. That’s why so much focus was on the ballroom and all the rest of it, because we knew it would never do more than 25 percent of its money from gate receipts.

We had good people [working on the museum]. We had Avi Decter help us with the exhibit design. He had just finished the Holocaust Museum in DC. We brought in Ueland Junker Nicholson out of Philly. They did they Constitution Center as our equipment and our space and museum planners. So, we had good people.

They [the Reed administration] kept talking about, “We have this $3.5 million.” We have this great deal that John Levenda had put together with Coca-Cola, a big sponsorship. And that’s why I was folding brochures on the day it opened, because it turned out it wasn’t $3.5 million in cash. It was $3.5 million with pictures of the Civil War Museum on the side of soda cans. It was equivalent advertising, but it wasn’t the cash that everyone thought we were getting to open. So, they’ve always been missing a chunk of money. It was never there when it opened. I think that’s the single greatest downfall.

TheBurg: That seems to be a very significant misunderstanding.

Yeah. It’s a shame, but I think the building is solid. We built it to last forever. I don’t know if people know it, but it was one of the first uses of underground ice for cooling. We have ice tanks under the outside parking lots. We make ice during the night and melt it during the day. We had the Smithsonian Institution help us design the exhibit spaces.

One of the things they did, though, and I’m getting is off-topic: After I left and went to the new practice, they came back and chopped up the display space. It was designed exactly to Smithsonian standards for rotating exhibits. They chopped up the first floor and put in a little gallery and a coatroom. And now it was no longer large enough to get the rotating exhibits.

My wife and I have been active. We’ve been 20 years in the city. She was on the HARB board for about 14 or 15 years. She was the chair for a number of years. I’m still on the planning commission, now 18 years, I guess. I’m on the steering committee we’re getting our comprehensive plan consultant selected and getting that all moving, after that debacle. So, it’s good to see it circle back and trying to do it right. At least we have a new zoning code. We brought that to completion three different times. With all the good input, we made it the best it could be, given the resources we had available to us. It always got blocked by real estate people in town, and they would lobby against it. The fact that Eric was able to slide it through at the particular time he was, because we were dealing with a 50-year-old zoning code. So, at least, I feel we did something.

We were trying to find a decent compromise. The goal behind a zoning code is both to protect, but also to encourage future development. And one of the big things that I was very involved in with pushing for was for the riverfront zoning to change. This was all SPD before, and it was very restrictive. Now, opening it up a little bit. We don’t want a bunch of McDonald’s up here, because you can look further up Front Street and see what happened before we had a zoning back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But we’re starting to see some investment and some things starting to happen on Front Street.

This building is a challenge. We live here, and it’s our office. It’s 26-feet wide. It’s almost 10,000 square feet, but you can’t rent space above the second floor without an elevator. In the historic mode, every floor staggers. So, we can put an elevator in for $300,000, but there’s just not a return. So, we found the sweet spot. I pay my $26,000 a year in property tax and smile. I kind of expect I should have—the racers at least get their decal on the car—Pennzoil and the like. I’d like to see some city people with my logo on them or something. But it’s worked for us, but it’s a strange existence. People look at us and say, “You do what?” Well, yes, we do.

TheBurg: So, you fought for this new zoning code for all these years, what do you think that brings to the city?

I think it brings a new place to start the discussion. The old one was so outmoded, it didn’t even represent the society that we have today. At least we have a new basis. At the next planning commission meeting, we have five or six adjustments that people have requested already coming in. At least we can evaluate them based on something that’s remotely valuable. The thing for developers: they have to know what the ground rules are. It just didn’t represent anything that anybody could really get their arms around. The biggest challenge we have right now is this whole parking thing because the way it’s been interpreted and the way it works, it actually gives them the ability to supersede the zoning code. If somebody wanted to come into town at this point, like another Pennsylvania National, these guys have to agree to let you do it even if you want to build your own parking lot. That crosses so many lines. I’m not sure it’s legal, and I think there will be some great challenges some day. But, right now, it’s just another nail in the coffin of development in the city, on a major scale. I don’t think it affects the little guy terribly. But it’s just an erosion; it crosses so many lines. I don’t think that dust has settled.

The thing is: with that whole incinerator deal—there’s not been any discussion over what really went wrong, which is that they had a lawyer’s opinion that said you don’t need bonding. And the company failed at what they did and went bankrupt. I’ve never had a public project that I’ve never had bonding required on, even quasi-public, because you want that insurance. Sure, you pay 2 percent or 3 percent more, but, golly, that would have been the best 3 percent the city ever spent back in the day. And it all just came apart from there.

Steve Reed was a genius—he and Milt Lopus—when they came up with the scheme to do the hydro-dam out here, and then get the Sierra Club to fight them in court for 20 years. And, by the way, it was early enough that you could arbitrage the interest, which you can’t do. They changed the laws after that. That spun off all the money he used to start developing the city: the money for City Island and the money this and that. The stuff he did, even the Hilton—that was that little mayor’s special…. That all really wasn’t city money. It was all creative financing because of the hydro-dam that never went through. People miss that kind of genius, and we need that kind of genius if we’re going to dig out of this hole. That punitive: “You guys are from Harrisburg, you should be punished approach to what we’ve been hit with.”

TheBurg: It seems to me that Steve Reed became a bit too confident in his ability to do things.

I think he ran out of energy, became 50 years old. He was 50 years old when the museum opened. It just seemed like, after that, there just wasn’t the drive there had been. If you were here during the ‘90s, before we moved down here, you’d read about Steve Reed atop of the fire truck. He even had an unmarked police car and started doing his own arrests, traffic stops.

TheBurg: He seemed to have no distance anymore between Harrisburg and himself and Harrisburg and taxpayer money and himself.

The methods you can argue with. There was a line, and he was always standing on it. The goal, I think, was desirable. I don’t think we’ve ever found any offshore accounts with Steve Reed’s money in it, not like Chicago or some other places around the country. He just had a vision that he wanted to see manifested.

TheBurg: It’s fine to have a vision, but you have to be able to afford that vision. You just can’t constantly think, “Oh, I’m going to have some money going in from somewhere” and then start scheming over how to bring that money in.

I thought the recovery plan might have made more sense had we had looked at dissolving the school district and assigning different parts of the city to adjacent school districts like Wilmington did. There’s no Wilmington city school district in Delaware because you reach a point where you can’t deliver when you’ve concentrated things. Of course, that was white flight and everything, long before I was born, they built the Brittany White Bridge to Camp Hill, and that was the end of it.

It’s a weird area because I can see out the window, half the population. But because of that, we have one small Wegman’s. We don’t have one big Wegman’s. We have three Home Depots. You have to duplicate everything because the market is so fragmented. We don’t have any of the more upscale things or more variety like a Trader Joe’s, that kind of stuff. I look at Winston-Salem again: same size town, same demographic. But it’s a county system. You see it down south. Once once you get sewer, once you get water and you want fire protection or whatever it is, they annex you. You become part of the city. So, you can’t move far enough out to not be part of the solution. You have to stay engaged. Here, you drive a mile, you’re in your own world, and we’re left to our own devices on the East Shore.

If I walk out my front door, there are 26 municipalities in a five-mile radius, maybe 24 now that Fairview went away. Pennsylvania is just so fractionalized, and I see that everyplace we go, whether it’s Altoona or Johnstown. We’re doing a lot of work up there with school systems. People, you’ve got limited resources. You need to cooperate. And we don’t have that, and I don’t know how to force it.

TheBurg: I don’t know how you do that, because it’s the system is just built that way. Everyone is invested in the status quo, and no one wants to give up what they have.

We see that everywhere we go, all these communities we deal with. It’s frustrating. There’s a great life to be had here, but we have to get out of our own way. I think we’re in a kind of caretaker situation right now with regard to governance. I was never more disappointed to see Council fall back into its old ways, with Eric’s first budget. If he wants a sustainability director, and he can cut three positions and move the money around, why not? What the hell is it going to hurt?

I was in Portland, Ore., spent two weeks there. Trolley cars everywhere and development and people and mixed income levels. You go there, and it’s an architect’s dream. It’s what our zoning codes and all the green design standards and everything—they’re doing it. So, it can be done. If you look at pictures of there in the ‘70s, it was a pretty decrepit place. They had fallen on their face because they lost industry and transportation had changed because they used to barge up the river, and nobody was doing that anymore.

TheBurg: They totally remade themselves.

So, it can be done. I even look at Winston with its problems, Winston-Salem. They lost 18,000 jobs with RJR, which basically ran their town. Then, with the tobacco settlement, they said, “We’ll show you. We’re going to make ourselves efficient enough to be able to pay off that big multi-billion-dollar settlement. How do we do that? We ship everything overseas to produce it.” So they fired all the American people and left a hole in the middle of the city.

TheBurg: I’ve found, in many cases, the council asserts power because it can.

A plan executed is better than no plan at all because you can always adjust the course. But to sit there doing nothing because it might be the wrong thing or might not be as perfect as some other idea.

From a development standpoint, we tried to make developments work for many different projects in this city. Once LERTA went away, we couldn’t make the numbers work. I looked actually at Stokes Millworks. We had that under contract at one point. But I was looking at $48,000 in taxes the first year it was done. Really? So, now I’m down in Chambersburg. We bought the old Central Junior High School down there, 120,000 square feet, and I have a five-year tax abatement. It’s not great, but it’s something. It’s an historic structure, which is where they put their tax abatement. So, they weren’t talking about building new stuff. But, down there, they’ve been tremendous to work with. It’s a world of difference.

TheBurg: What else in Harrisburg have you been involved with?

We did St. Stephen’s, which was one of the first green projects in the area and the region. It won a number of awards. We’ve done some smaller redevelopment things like the AFL headquarters down here next to the Firehouse (restaurant). They cut the budget halfway through, and we had to cancel the new windows. We had them under production. What a shame. The history to that building is just phenomenal. We’ve done things with Volunteers of America. The city was just a very insular culture, and there wasn’t much that happened here. You can look at the list of really what’s happened, other than what WCI has been able to do. Dan Deitchman did some things, but he’s picked up his marbles now and kind of headed to State College. Harrisburg University—we did some very early conception planning for that. We were going to put it in the post office before they decided to go $60 million in the air.

TheBurg: Let’s talk about the Capitol View Commerce Center.

I never thought I’d see that. I’d reached the point where I expected to see demolition.

TheBurg: I didn’t even know it would be savable, since it was exposed to the elements for years.

If you can buy $9 million of the infrastructure for $250,000, it’s an amazingly cheap deal. I looked at it for a number of different folks, but the problem was you had to have a deep-pocketed person to do it, because no bank was going to finance you. And John [Moran] has millions of square feet of logistics space at 80 and 15 in Berwick and that whole zone.

But, yeah, that was one of the more exciting projects for us because it was a chance to remake 3,200 feet of Cameron Street. That was a brownfield, Harrisburg Steel. The things we had to solve to make it work: poor soils, contamination on the site. There was a nasty treatment plant that we had to rebuild it brand new, which we did, down near the stream. We had to blow the old one up, build a new one, do the EPA and all that fun stuff. Then, of course, they shut down anyhow.

When David Dodd first came up with the idea of the project, it was very entrancing because his model was that he had a printing operation that he had started in the city, moved out to Penbrook and grew it up to 100 employees. It was a pretty good business. So, he wanted a facility expanded, too. We designed it with a rooftop play yard for daycare. It was to be provided on site. The main part of the building was actually a building that was designed by John Vartan. He had actually made the pieces before he died. They were sitting out where Giant is on Linglestown Road. That was his pre-casting plant, and he had a big supply store, Vartan Supply. So, when he died, about the time we were doing this, we knew that nobody was picking up the casting yard or anything like that. But he had built this building to go up near where his son built the facility there. It was to fill a whole block. It was a four-story building with two stories of parking underneath.

TheBurg: At 6^th Street?

Yeah. So, the pieces in here were actually for the other building. So, we directed David to talk to him and see if we could pick these up on a whim. At the time, they were worried about what to do with all of this pre-cast because they were going to build Giant and the mall in there. So, he paid pennies on the dollar to get it. So, we designed it around these pre-cast T’s, what had been a building that was to be elsewhere in the city. Then David’s concept, and I think it was still valid: What is Harrisburg missing that every other northeastern city has? Old industrial lofts. There just was no incubator space. Well, there are a few trashy little buildings. And there were more, but they all burned down up in Allison Hill in a huge, like 12-alarm fire back in the late ‘70s. We lost a lot of it. So, the idea was to design space that easily could be incubator, very industrial lofty, which is what the high-rise building was. So, that sat over top of over the first floor, and that first floor, where there’s a little bit of a notch, like a porch, was going to be like retail showrooms, like furniture showrooms, because there are 30,000 cars a day that park there. Lit up at night, looking in those windows, you could sell cars, you could sell furniture, do whatever. All the parking was going to be below grade. That’s how we dealt with flood plain.

Now, it’s a little different than what we had visualized. We got a grant from Chesapeake Bay Foundation to do a riparian buffer along the whole length of the site. We were going to restore the stream edge and all that. There was a lot of good stuff happening. David was just always looking for another way to do it, a cheaper way, and the reality was that the building had an 800-pounds-per-square-foot floor load because of these paper rolls for printing, and they were being stacked stories high. And we had muck on the site down to about 17 feet. So, we played around with all kinds of densification systems. We said: Just put the piles in and be done with it. And, after a year, that’s what he did. Had he gone ahead and not fooled around, the building would have been done before the real estate crunch, and I think it would have been a successful project. He got himself in a hole and then started playing cute games with it.

We originally started with a construction manager, and they somehow had a falling out. So, he decided to take on one fellow who was qualified. That guy came down with cancer and was down at Johns Hopkins. So, they said: I’ve got this good guy who runs my printing line. I’m going to put him in charge. And I’ve got this other great idea: I’m just going to hire workers off of the union bench. I’m not going to have contractors anymore. That’s when he started getting into a whole world of trouble. I was actually sitting in a meeting. We were on site once a month to try to answer some questions, and he was late. The sprinkler guy was there; the window guy was there; the HVAC guy was there. And I was $75,000 in the hole because he hadn’t paid me. He came up with all these excuses, like the city wasn’t processing the paperwork and da-da-da-da-da-da. And one guy started talking, and they all realized they were getting the same story, and the whole job shut down the next day. The lights went on. I was right there when the light bulbs went on.

Then we came back and tried to bring the project back to life. There was a developer, White Acres Equities. He was actually one of the people who was vying at one point to privatize the parking system. It was basically money from Hong Kong. It was Jacob Frydman. So, we redesigned the whole thing as an upscale retail and office complex. So, he had been promised a lease from the state. They had a lease out for a major block of space. We had prepared new renderings and reworked the whole thing. All of a sudden, one day, he calls and says, “We’re done.” I said, “Why’s that?” He said that the county commissioners got involved, and they had the lease yanked and assigned to Forum Place. They were upside-down on Forum Place because they had paid like $30 million for a building they should have paid $5 million for.

So, whenever anybody looks at David Dodd and this project, there were some other hands involved in bringing it to where it was. It wasn’t just him. But that never gets talked about.

TheBurg: How did your firm get involved to be the architect of this?

We actually knew the surveyor. Dodd had said, “I want to maybe put up a metal building to build a printing plant.” This fellow thought maybe he wanted to do something green, and he knew we had done St. Stephen’s. So, the surveyor called and said, “Do you want to sit down and maybe do some sketches? This guy thinks he wants to do something green.” So, we ended up, one thing led to another, and David spun this story with 13 funding sources from HUD, the state, the feds. He had everyone under the sun. It sounded great. He was a hell of a salesman. I just never visualized that that pre-cast that we helped him buy, he was selling back to himself at full value and putting the money in his pocket. We thought the money was being used to cover a shortfall because it was bad soil, the foundations. We knew it was an expensive building, etc., and it all made sense. We actually had gone to open bid to keep it all legal and open. We had done a full-bid package for the pre-cast. It went out. At the time, the pre-cast was running a 24- to 30-month delay. This was gangbusters in 2006. So, we bid it once and didn’t get any bids. We bid it a second time, we got one bid at like $8 million or some, and it should have been $4 million. We knew that David had the chance to buy this pre-cast, and he got a ruling from the city solicitor. He said, well, if you bid it twice and can’t get anybody to supply on it, then you can self-supply. OK, that makes sense. He paid $1 million for all this pre-cast, and it was worth $4 million. This works. Never thought anything about it. Then I find out there ‘s a shoebox in his closet. But I donated $75,000 to make it a prettier intersection. That’s how I look at it. For me, it was frustrating. For a number of years, I was chair of the DGS Selection Committee. I was appointed by Rendell to select architects and designers. I had to go by there. I reached a point that I would drive out of my way. I just couldn’t look at it.

The thing was—they were so close. They had the roof on, but they had the roof membrane laid over the outside with timbers weighing it down because they figured they’d be back the next day to finish. It was one of those things where they had all the doors in but one. The elevator was sitting there in a crate. Most of the building that they hadn’t put up was lying there in boxes. They got so close. But the other thing that screwed them was the bank at the time. The bank got bought and got bought and got bought about the time this went south, and no one was managing the portfolio. As a result, they should have invested about $350,000 to seal the building, the perimeter, finish the membranes. But, because they didn’t, water got inside. We had mold growth through everything.

Even a year after the building was abandoned, we went in with a couple of people who wanted to look at possibly buying it. We walked through it. And I said, “Wow. Nobody’s touched this.” The lights were on. Nobody had turned the light switch off. But, one day, the bank got this brilliant idea. He had all this printing equipment he had purchased and all this paint and barrels of spackle, machines, etc. “We’re going to have an auction.” Let’s bring the community in, and we’re going to get some money back. So, they brought everybody in and had an auction. They raised something, but not much. So, I’m back three months later with another tenant, and, by then, someone had gone through with chainsaws. Whole floors were covered with confetti. That was when they had gone through the building and stripped all the insulation off the copper wire. There was a $500,000 chiller plant sitting up on the roof. They went in and tore off all of the insides, probably got $100 worth of copper. But they broke open walls to take the plumbing piping out. It had been destroyed. I estimate they destroyed $4 to $5 million worth of value. The bank just had to put a night watchman on for what $50,000 a year for two years. That’s what took it to the really abandoned condition. We had the heat pumps installed throughout the building. All the plumbing was installed, thinking it was going to be done in four months.

You want to talk about anatomy of a disaster? The thing just never wanted to happen. First you get started with it, and David does it to himself with fooling around with the foundations, and it slides into a bad economy. Then you get another developer with pockets to join him—Frydman—and the county commissioners get involved and fool around with the state lease that was available. Then it’s still salvageable, and the bank gets this brilliant idea to have an auction. And they say: “Hey, by the way, why doesn’t everybody in town come in and see what you can steal, because this place is wide open?” Then it just sat there and sat there and sat there. So, when John bought it, we had a model. I called him up, and we gave him the model.

They followed our design to a tee. When I saw it, I said, “Wow.” I’m happy because it’s 230,000 square feet of mixed-use, flexible space. He’s bringing jobs into the city, which it was intended to be. But I don’t know he has much tenancy for the upper buildings. His model was to complete the outside and then wait because it worked financially just to get the warehouses up for what he paid for it.

It’s a design from 10 years ago. I was looking at my files, and the design is from November 2004. It’s like you’re seeing something from the past. Ten years is a long time in design.

TheBurg: I was surprised when I found out they could use what had been already constructed. I assumed it would not be savable.

The saving grace for us is that we had those pre-cast T-s, because those same pre-cast T-s are what’s used to build bridges. Bridges sit out in the environment. The Susquehanna River will have eaten the whole city of Harrisburg, and that thing will be standing in the middle in 500 year or 1,000 years, and people will say, “What the hell was that?” It’s just that well anchored and that heavily designed. It’s built. It was just a freak. In normal conditions, it would have been torn down. I’m waiting to see the first helicopter.

TheBurg: Some of these projects, like this one and The Millworks, are dependent upon people with very deep pockets to come in and save these buildings.

It’s like the patrons of old, like the Medicis in Florence.

TheBurg: In some way, they’re making an uneconomic decision. Sure, they hope for a return, but this is almost a decision outside of sheer economics. It needs people who have another mission that’s not always the bottom line.

And, once upon a time, in our communities in Pennsylvania, banks would support it because they were local. But how many banks now are headquartered in Harrisburg? They’re all part of someone else. There’s nobody here. So, who has the local interest? In some small towns, there are still some small local banks, but not many around the state. Those are the people sitting around saying, “You know, it may not make sense to lend money to that department store. You know, I’ll probably break even on it. But at least I’ll have a department store, and the three buildings on either side of it won’t go empty because it’s there.” Those kinds of decision are lacking because we don’t have locally vested people. You have to have someone who is locally motivated. Then the only person left is government.

Meet the Roomie: An unintended consequence of a hot rental market–roommate issues.

February 27, 2015 | by Lori Fortini

It seemed reminiscent of a scene from the 1990s sitcom, “Friends.”

A trio of young, professional women sat in front of me signing a lease for a beautiful, 2,500-square-foot home in Olde Uptown. Stylishly dressed, they joined forces and decided to cohabitate. As we signed the necessary documents, they talked amongst themselves about finding friends to help them move, about who would take which bedroom and about hosting a dinner party since they finally had a “real” dining room.

Each had her own personality, yet I had no doubts they would successfully merge into one residence. You could see that they clicked with one another.

Partly fueled by student loan debt, a tight job market for recent college graduates, and a generational preference to prolong home-buying, the rate of living with roommates has soared. Nationally, 32 percent of working-age adults, aged 23 to 65, live in doubled-up households, up from 25 percent in 2000 and 26 percent in 1990, according to an October 2014 report by the online real estate site, Zillow.

From my vantage point as a rental manager, I have seen this trend grow significantly over the last five years. The income spectrum is broad. Some roommates are making near minimum wage and, out of necessity, are seeking alternatives to substandard housing, while others are intentionally keeping housing costs low to facilitate faster accrual for a down payment on their first house, pay off other debt or afford vacations. For example, one of the tenants I described above admitted that she had the funds to have her own place, but wanted to spend it traveling.

“By sharing living space, I am able to pursue my passion to travel on a whim,” she said.

Roommates are often saving more than just rent. They are able to share ever-rising utility expenses. They can also reduce their furnishing costs. As many renters seek their first independent space, the cost of initial furnishings can prove to be unexpectedly high. At move in, Shannon, one of my tenants, said that two of her roommates were coming straight out of dorm rooms into entry-level jobs.

“Each of us were able to bring our favorite pieces,” she said. “Fortunately, we had similar styles and ended up with a cohesively furnished home.”

Does It Feel Right?

Whatever the motive behind a decision to have roommates, there are several points to consider. First and foremost is safety.

It startles me how often roommates find each other on Craigslist. If this is the search method you choose for procuring a roommate, at least ensure you rent from a landlord who performs a full background check that includes criminal history.

A local resident recently shared that, several years ago before he came to Harrisburg, he found a roommate and did his own background check, only to discover that the roommate had lied about his name and was actually wanted for murder. While most cases are not this extreme, it’s critical to know in advance if the person you’ll be rooming with has a history of run-ins with the law. The nature of the offense will likely be a strong signal of how they’ll behave as a roommate.

How can you avoid situations like this? One obvious way is to start with your own circle of friends. Let friends and family know of your plans and ask for referrals. In my experience, roommates who started from a shared connection such as a friend, colleague, college, place of employment or other commonality had a much greater rate of success.

If you choose to or must find an unknown roommate, set up the first meeting in a neutral, public setting. Don’t just rely on the phone. I recommend treating this as a hybrid date/interview. Ask questions—lots of questions. Success can take two routes in this pairing. Either you are opposites who balance each other, or you share similar ideas and values on what makes a happy home.

This is where you want to be open and honest about expectations. Do you expect to share food? Are you OK with dates coming home? Who will be responsible for which utilities? Are you OK with a roommate who hosts frequent dinner parties? Does the toilet paper roll under or over? You get the idea. Not everyone is a good match, and potentially unsuccessful pairings can usually be discovered in this first meeting.

Classic red flags are vague responses, extremes (agreeing on everything or nothing), asking not to be formally included on a lease or have utilities placed in their name, or unwillingness to discuss certain areas of life, such as where they lived prior or where they are employed. Ultimately, trust your instinct. If something feels off, it probably is, and you’re better off walking away.

Teammates

It’s important to understand that you are legally binding yourself to a roommate in a way that may have negative repercussions for you even if you are a model tenant.

A lease is a contract, and most lease contracts are written so that all parties are responsible for the entire requirements and obligations of the lease both severally (meaning each individual separately) and jointly (meaning everyone together). This means that, if one tenant is unable to perform as dictated by the contract, you will likely still be held individually liable for any and all monetary obligations, such as total unpaid rent, unpaid utility costs and more. In addition, if the landlord were to file eviction or attempt to collect damages due to a roommate’s inability to pay, you will likely be included in the filing.

In terms of accountability, treat it like you’re joining the military or a sports team. If one person screws up with respect to the lease terms, it means that everyone has screwed up and is therefore accountable. And be aware that an unfavorable rental record, even if you were not the cause of the problems, could make it difficult to rent in the future.

On more than one occasion, I have seen well-intentioned tenants choose to allow one roommate to handle all the finances. Roommate A collects a third of the monthly expenses from roommates B and C. However, something comes up, and they borrow against those funds before the deposit is made. In cases like this, all roommates will be held equally and individually responsible, regardless of the injustice of roommate A’s actions. I suggest tenants make these payments individually.

So what happens once the final picture is hung on the wall, but you realize this isn’t working out? You have several options, depending on the specific terms of your lease. Remember, your landlord’s ultimate goal is to collect the rent each month. They may be willing to mediate.

Even if that’s not the case, they will still likely allow you to replace a roommate with another roommate by amending the lease in order to keep consistent rent payments coming in. Keep your landlord informed, but realize that they have little authority to enforce any specific roommate-to-roommate agreements.

A good rule of thumb to follow is, if the problem is the sort of thing you would complain to your mom about when a sibling did it, you probably don’t want to involve the landlord. In the worst-case scenario, you should find a way to make it work until the lease term is ended.

Lori Fortini is operations manager for Harrisburg-based WCI Partners LP.

This Very Old House: Central PA has its share of antebellum buildings. Owning one, however, can be more challenging than charming.

February 27, 2015 | by Susan Ryder

On a dead-end street, blossoming cherry trees flank a small stone cottage, evoking a scene straight from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” A brick path curves to the front door; a spring bubbles up and meanders down the bank beside the residence.

Evan and Sommer Keller have lived in this 1790s home on Fetrow Lane in Fairview Township for 13 years. Known as the Fetrow Farm, it originally served as a distillery, later as an orphanage and as a summer home for a family from New Cumberland.

When asked why they decided to purchase the home, Evan replied, “When we saw it, it was a charming little cottage…it was cool and old and whimsical.”

Not everything about living in a very old home is cool, however. The Kellers said that they had to upgrade the electrical wiring throughout the house and put in a new heating system. This work was made more difficult by the plaster made of horsehair, straw and mud that covered the walls.

And nothing in this home is level, plum or square.

The home had no insulation when the family first moved in. So, until they were able to insulate their home, the Kellers slept with a heating blanket.

Bob and Eileen Young can attest to these challenges. For 38 years, they lived in an 1857 Shipoke house once owned by Civil War Gen. Joseph Knipe. Every door in the home hung askew, and the attic door wouldn’t even close.

“It helps to be young, enthusiastic and able to use a hammer,” Eileen quipped.

Caretaker of History

Indeed, home improvement projects can prove extra challenging in old homes because no building codes existed at the time, so nothing is standard. In his 30 years of renovation experience, Dave Leaman of Harrisburg-based Renovations Company has found that each old house presents its own set of unique trials.

First of all, there’s the aforementioned lack of insulation in ceilings, walls and floors. Then there are the windows and doors that leak heat and the floors and ceilings that sag because of large spans between floor joists.

Also, much of what needs to be repaired or replaced in an old home, such as moldings, trim, doors and windows, doesn’t come stock. That means special orders or unique vendors, which equals money.

Because of the costly nature of owning an old home, Leaman said that people with “big dreams and no money” should enter into a purchase cautiously.

He added that, when considering a contractor, owners should make sure that the firm has experience working on vintage homes. The Youngs concur. Homeowners, they said, should find a contractor that is willing to do the often-laborious work necessary to maintain the historical integrity of the structure.

For those who take the plunge, living in an older home often involves the desire to retain its antiquity.

The Kellers, for instance, left exposed beams in their living room. They removed the horsehair and mud stucco from the brick in the upstairs to reveal beautiful stonework.

They also wanted to refurbish the upstairs flooring, but the downstairs ceiling was attached to the floor. So, they supported the ceiling beams, at great effort; removed the floorboards; re-planed the wide pine boards; epoxied the holes; created new tongue and grooves; and reinstalled the floor.

It took two years.

However, they couldn’t keep all of the house’s aged appeal. Sometimes, practicality had to win out. For instance, they installed drywall throughout the house to run new electrical wires.

After the devastating 1972 flood, the Youngs felt strongly about keeping their Shipoke home’s original floors.

So, instead of taking the easier option of ripping them out, they cleaned them up themselves—with toothbrushes. After a project to move the furnace from the basement to the third floor destroyed some 13-inch molding, they took the extra step to have moldings reproduced by the former Snyder Lumber Mill in Harrisburg,

Eileen Young said that living in an old home made them feel like they were “caretakers of history,” a responsibility that they took seriously.

Extra Effort

Is all of this effort worth it?

Absolutely, according to the Kellers.

“It was a hobby and a joy and a love before we had kids,” said Sommer. “We didn’t go to sports games or shopping. We’d stay up all night and work on the house. We had a blast.”

It’s evident that folks live in these homes because of the special feeling it invokes.

“I love this house every time I visit something new,” said Evan Keller. “It makes you love the things that are old.”

The family has come to appreciate the house’s quirkiness—its soul. For instance, there is something extraordinary about the sound of a rainstorm on a tin roof, the Kellers said.

“When you’re in a rainstorm and hear the rain on the metal roof, you think people have basically been doing this for 200 years,” said Evan.

The Youngs echo those sentiments, saying that an old house is like living in history and that “there is always something to see,” referring to the woodwork and moldings in the home.

These houses feel distinct. The low, sagging ceilings, natural stone and wooden beams bring the past into the present. Homeowners are enveloped in history every time they walk down the uneven walkway and up the tilting steps through the crooked front door.

Water and Air: Harrisburg’s historic Waterworks has found new purpose as a yoga studio—and it’s taking flight.

February 27, 2015 | by Ashleigh Pollart

Photo by Jay Stover Photography.

The Old Waterworks on Front Street long has been considered one of Harrisburg’s most iconic buildings.

In recent years, it was home to an advertising firm and, after that, mostly sat empty, which is how Rachel and Ulysses Wilson discovered it a few months ago. The couple was driving through Harrisburg after looking at another potential site for a new venture—a second location of their Camp Hill-based yoga studio, Om My Yoga.

“The location we were coming from would have been similar,” Rachel started, the stopped quickly. “No, actually, there’s nothing with a similar feel. We looked in all the windows and then thought, ‘This is it! This is the space!’”

Rachel and Ulysses laughed. “By the end of the day, we knew who owned it, but we didn’t know how much it would cost because it wasn’t even listed,” she said.

The space, which is now home to the couple’s new yoga world (the word “studio” just doesn’t do it justice), has incredible arched windows and industrial-looking beams that naturally fit with the aesthetic of the warehouse space. The high ceilings were perfect for Om My Yoga’s Aerial Yoga—a type of yoga that involves incorporating silk hammocks that hang from the ceiling into traditional yoga practice.

Whole New Level

The Waterworks location culminates a years-long story of the couple’s increasing devotion to the practice and business of yoga.

Rachel long had been a fitness instructor, teaching spinning and other exercise classes at a local gym. After she gave birth to their son, she chose to focus her energy on yoga.

She started with private sessions in their home, which soon expanded into classes of five and then into the double digits. This growth inspired them, in 2011, to move into the space in Camp Hill, a studio that quickly expanded to the location next door.

Meanwhile, Ulysses started to gain an interest in acrobatic yoga, a fusion of the stretching and movements of yoga and acrobatics. The couple traveled all over the East Coast to train with acrobats, gymnasts and professional dancers.

“Sometimes, [we were] way out of our league,” Rachel said. “And it’s been good! It’s pushed us to a whole new level. Then we come back here, and we feel we have so much to offer to this city and to this area. We just want people to come and experience it because we’ve spent the time in Miami and New York City training with all these great people, and we’re just excited to share it.”

A Reflection

After about eight weeks of negotiating for the space, the couple and their core team of 12 yoga enthusiasts took the leap into the new project, which involved a lot of scrubbing and cleaning to return the Waterworks to its former beauty.

The original tin and iron and wood detailing now give the space an industrial look, perfect for the Wilson’s preference and needs. The main studio space is open and draws the eye up to the stunning windows, which reflect light off of the Susquehanna.

Rich, colorful details both complement and contrast with the stark interior, bringing Rachel and Ulysses’ vision for the space to life. Furniture and pillows are brightly colored, while lamps are of various motifs, sizes, shapes and colors. Even the restrooms show creativity and whimsy. One is Beatles-themed, while the other has a chalkboard graffiti wall, which, when I was there, had scribbled on it, “Once in a while, blow your own mind.”

The space is a reflection of the couple’s energy, enthusiasm and love for the art of yoga.

“We might be pushing the envelope here in Harrisburg, bringing something like this, but I’m a go big or go home kind of person, and we wanted to bring our vision here and see if it was accepted and inspiring and, so far, everyone that has come has been mind-blown with excitement,” Rachel explained.

If I walked away with anything from our meeting, it was the couple’s zest for life and their passion for their business and what it does for others.

“We like to be active and play and have fun and help people to remember that they don’t have to be so serious all the time and to try something new and have an adventure,” Rachel explained as she stood below a vintage-looking stop sign that appropriately read, “STOP. Enjoy Your Life.”

Om My Yoga now offers double the classes that it had prior to the Harrisburg opening. If you’re not sure if a class is for you, the team offers an open night on Tuesdays starting at 6 p.m. when, for $5, you can experiment with the hammocks and acrobatic yoga in a no-pressure situation.

“For the last two weeks, it’s been people on the hammocks, acro-yoga, hooping, and last week someone brought fire spinning [batons],” Rachel said. “We have a mini circus in here!”

Om My Yoga is located at 614 N. Front St., Harrisburg, and 4407 Carlisle Pike, Camp Hill. For a complete list of Om My Yoga’s classes and other information, visit ommyyoga.com.

Musical Notes: Warming trend–less snow, more sounds.

February 27, 2015 | by Andrew Dyrli Hermeling

I am so sick of winter.

It’s been way too cold, and Punxsutawney Phil’s forecast gets me down. My hunch is that you are as tired of hiding under blankets as I am. Thankfully, March means spring is just around the corner. And while warming weather and buds on trees are worth celebrating on their own, March also features some wonderful music to wake you from your winter hibernation. So, you may need to squint as you emerge from winter’s darkness, but, I assure you, these shows are worth the trip.

HEXBELT w/THE WILD HYMNS, 3/6, 8PM, ABBEY BAR, $5/$7:
Both of these area bands have a rootsy vibe. However, for Hexbelt, this vibe is channeled through high-energy performances that oscillate between punk rock abandon and jam band guitar licks. Equal parts political and personal, their music evokes a range of moods and experiences. The Wild Hymns, on the other hand, are much more subdued, but no less evocative. Ethereal, indie-folk arrangements perfectly complement the soulful voice of lead singer and songwriter Krystle Seitz. This is a show that is sure to satisfy the tastes of a variety of music fans.

STELTH ULVANG w/FLOWER GARDEN, 3/9, 7:30PM, THE MAKESPACE, $5 SUGGESTED DONATION:
Piano driven and high energy, Stelth Ulvang, who has been touring as a member of the Lumineers, breaks down your expectations of what a bluesy songwriter should sound like. With a voice that permanently sits at the cusp of laryngitis, Ulvang’s music perfectly exemplifies the touring life. He can slow it down, as well, but his music never loses that impassioned edge. The result is a deeply personal and raw experience that is still accessible. He will be joined by upbeat Harrisburg locals Flower Garden.

VERNAL EQUINOX CELEBRATION w/MISHA KASHOCK, CLINTON DAUB & JIM AGUZZI, 3/20, 7PM, LITTLE AMPS DOWNTOWN, FREE:
Although this night of percussion and dancing in celebration of the coming of spring may be atypical for “Musical Notes,” it seemed too inviting to pass up. Although it will feature some set performers, it also promises to be interactive, welcoming attendees to join in on the fun. This evening will be especially appropriate for families. Plus, it’s free! So stop on by and really celebrate the end of winter.

Mentionables: George Thorogood & the Destroyers, 3/11, the Forum; Tommy Emmanuel, 3/12, Whitaker Center; Dean Thomas, 3/13, Little Amps Downtown; Kites in Flight, 3/20, Midtown Scholar; Juggling Suns, 3/27, Abbey Bar

3/6
Hexbelt w/The Wild Hymns
Abbey Bar
50 N. Cameron St., Harrisburg
Starts at 8 PM

3/9
Stelth Ulvang w/Flower Garden
The MakeSpace
1916 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg
Starts at 7:30 PM

3/12
Tommy Emmanuel
Whitaker Center
222 Market St., Harrisburg
Starts at 7:30 PM

3/20
Vernal Equinox Celebration
Little Amps Downtown
2nd & State streets, Harrisburg
Starts at 7 PM

3/20
Kites in Flight
Midtown Scholar Bookstore
1302 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg
Starts at 7:30 PM

Intentional and Gorgeous: Oscar-nominated “Timbuktu” touches both the personal and the universal.

February 27, 2015 | by Sammi Leigh Melville

The first shots are jarring, the sound of gunfire breaking through the peaceful scenery as a jeep full of armed men shoot at a fleeing gazelle.

“Tire it! Tire it!” they cry as they shoot near it but not at it. “Don’t kill it, tire it!”

Eventually, their game diverts from live animals to little people-shaped targets made of wood and clay, which collapse as the bullets tear into them.

If you want to (but you won’t), you could stop right here and pick out the message that Director Abderrahmane Sissako had in mind for “Timbuktu,” the West African film that landed itself an Oscar nomination in this year’s foreign language film category.

The film depicts a community—the metaphorical gazelle—that has fallen under the control of jihadists in the early rise of conflict in Mali. These jihadists set right to work fitting people into the religious restrictions laid out by their interpretation of Islam. Patrolling the city with loudspeakers, they ban music, take balls away from kids, tell the women they must wear socks and gloves at all times—imposing draconian rules on the community.

Our protagonists are members of a family who, unlike most of their neighbors, have not fled Timbuktu, despite the imposition of jihadist law. Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) and Satima (Toulou Kiki) live fairly simple lives. They are parents to a 12-year-old daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed) and guardians to an orphaned boy, Issan (Mehdi A.G. Mohamed). They live in a modest tent and have eight cows, which Issan gladly tends. When a nearby fisherman kills Kidane’s favorite cow, Kidane angrily makes a mistake that upturns the entire family’s life.

But “Timbuktu” doesn’t give a one-sided, stereotypical look at jihadism. In fact, right from the start, it divulges a personal side that the media tend to skip over. Though the film makes remittent use of humor to portray the ridiculous antics of the jihadists, they are first and foremost portrayed simply as people.

The antagonist of the story is Abdelkerim (played by Abel Jafri), a leader whose only goal is to fulfill Islamic law. Though the outcomes of many of his decisions seem cruel and cold (such as stoning and flogging as punishments), he gives the outward appearance of a gentle, pious man. He just wants people to follow Islam.

“What do you know about inner strength and good men?” he asks his driver at the beginning of the film. “One has to be a good believer.”

“They are believers,” his driver replies. “This is good enough for me.”

The driver’s words reflect the actions of the surrounding community. This is another point that the film drives home: with restriction comes resistance.

The city of Timbuktu becomes a character itself, its many citizens uniformly rebelling against the grip the jihadists have on their religion and lifestyle. The children cannot own a ball, so they play football without a football. A woman gets 40 lashes for making music, so she sings as she receives her punishment. There is even an early scene in which an imam lectures the jihadists about not truly having their faith in mind.

Every second of this film is intentional and gorgeous. The cinematography, crafted by the same cinematographer of “Blue Is The Warmest Color” (Sofian El Fani), is stunning and continually adds emotional weight to the scenes. And though the majority of the cast has no prior film experience, their performances deftly bring a story of such quintessential humanity to life. It’s a refreshing film to watch in a world so riddled with prejudice and stigma against people unlike ourselves.

“Timbuktu” will be playing at the Midtown Cinema. I highly recommend that you check it out.

Midtown Cinema: March Events

Digital Classic Theatre Series

“The Tempest” w/Christopher Plummer
Sunday, March 1, 4pm & Tuesday, March 3, 7pm

Stratford Festival’s “King Lear”
Sunday, March 8, 4pm & Tuesday, March 10, 7pm

Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost”
Sunday, March 15, 4pm & Tuesday, March 17, 7pm

Classic Film Series

“Battleship Potemkin”
Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film
Sunday, March 8, 6pm

Down in Front!

Improv crew skewers
“Zaat!” (1971) BYOB
Friday, March 13, 9:30ish

Saturday Morning Cartoons

March 14, 9:30-11:30am

Mommy & Me Matinees

Early matinees every second Saturday!
Saturday, March 14

Family Film Series

“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”
Saturday, March 14, noon
Sunday, March 15, 2pm
Tuesday, March 17, 7pm

3^rd in The Burg $3 Movie

“Clue” (1985)
Friday, March 20, 9:30ish BYOB
Costume & Mrs. White Impression Contest

MOVIATE Presents

“Morris County” (a horror film screening)
Sunday, March 22, 7:30pm
Meet filmmaker Matt Garrett

Digital Contemporary Theatre Series

“From Here to Eternity: The Musical”
Sunday, March 29, 4pm & Tuesday, March 31, 7pm

Sense of the City: Playwright Paul Hood gives voice to urban life, his life.

February 27, 2015 | by Lori M. Myers

As a child, playwright Paul Hood dreamed of being a film star.

That dream may not have been too farfetched. Hood is an imposing figure at 6-feet-3-inches tall, with piercing eyes, a reassuring voice, and a smile that could tame a road-rager. But don’t think for a minute that this cool guy is going to let his audiences off the hook when they come to see his plays. Sure, he’ll make you laugh, but he’ll also force you to think deeply, ponder life and question your truths.

“What makes me tick are the mysteries of life,” Hood muses. “I feel like, as a writer, if I figured this all out, I would be bored out of my mind. Some of the questions I have about existence fuel me to explore things in my writing such as love, addictions, failures, the plight of dysfunctional families and relationships, the joys and wonders of simple things.”

Hood admits to his love/hate relationship with life—something he struggles with. Fortunately, he’s able to examine that struggle through his creative outlet of choice—play writing—which allows him to “share my thoughts with the universe.”

“It’s an enjoyably cathartic endeavor,” he says.

Local theater-goers have been witness to those endeavors inside venues such as Open Stage of Harrisburg, Gamut Theatre and Hershey Area Playhouse, among others. Hood has had a flurry of staged works produced in and around the ‘Burg as of late, and upcoming this month is “My Electric Life,” which explores the notion of Internet addiction of three completely different individuals.

Hood’s inspiration for “My Electric Life” came about one summer when he realized how much his own online routine—Facebook, dating sites, general surfing—had turned into a habit that wasn’t allowing him to write, to truly live, to fully connect one-on-one with others.

“I wanted to explore the idea with honesty and humor and not sugarcoat anything about three strangers who have to face one another and open up about why it is they isolate themselves from the world,” Hood says. “I wrote it thinking I’d maybe enter it into the Philly Fringe festival or The Capital Fringe in Washington, D.C., but then I realized I could try it out in Harrisburg first because we have a pretty large theater scene open to hearing new work by local playwrights.

Hood is particularly thrilled about the premiere of “My Electric Life” because it will be his first full production in Harrisburg after almost four years of staged readings, where actors on stage have scripts in hand.

While “My Electric Life” was inspired by Hood’s own Internet habits, most of his other plays that deal with social and mental health issues (along with the absurdities of life) are triggered by the things he sees and hears throughout the city. Plays such as “Other Cat,” “Aldous Remembers” (which had its first reading at Midtown Scholar Bookstore) or Hood’s longer works—such as “I, Journeyman” and “Brighton’s Green Street”—incorporate the rhythm and vibe of urban living.

“I couldn’t see any of my plays taking place in the countryside of Pennsylvania,” he says. “The themes I explore feed off the energy of my surroundings, which has always been city life.”

The city lives and breathes in Hood’s pores even though he originally hailed from Birmingham, Ala., then Youngstown, Ohio, and Middletown, Pa., before his mother unexpectedly moved the family to Harrisburg when Hood was 11 years old. As a youngster, Hood was pretty much a “hermit,” painfully shy, insecure and saddled with a severe learning disability. The “city” loomed large, too large, so movies and comic books were his escapes. He’d spend his summer days inside watching movies and took notice of how things “worked”—character motivations, setting, plotting and dialogue.

“I watched movies clearly to invest myself in the lives of people I thought I wanted to be like when I grew up,” he recalls. “Like all kids in the John Hughes films or the young kids in ‘Goonies’ and ‘E.T.,’ I wanted their lives. I grew up in a dysfunctional family so anything on a screen filled with adventure or comedy was craved.”

Hood’s love of the big screen segued to him becoming a respected local movie critic after he answered an online ad for a local entertainment website called Harrisburg Online. Here, he could combine his two loves—writing and film. He began taking old short stories he’d written and converting them into screenplays that eventually morphed into plays.

“The change for me happened after a room filled with hundreds of people howled with laughter, gasped and listened intently to words I had written,” Hood says. “I was hooked. I had found my true voice as a writer, everything beforehand was practice.”

Hood is a member of Playwrights Alliance of Pennsylvania (PAPA), the region’s playwriting group, with whom he’ll be working on a theme-based play, and one of his short plays will be featured at Oyster Mill Playhouse in Camp Hill this summer. He also hopes to raise funds to get a production of “Brighton’s Green Street” on stage somewhere in the city.

This self-described former “hermit,” this shy, insecure, film-obsessed playwright, has risen above it all, giving voice to city life and to us a piece of his mind. All we have to do is batten the hatches, hang on and hope for the best.

“Playwriting gives me a chance to explore ideas or say things I may be afraid to talk about in person,” Hood says. “The stage is my virtual podium for self-expression, a place where my philosophies and questions can come to life in the form of something enlightening to an audience.”

Paul Hood’s “My Electric Life” will be performed March 27 to 29 and April 10 to 12 at the Harrisburg Improv Theatre, 1633 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg. Visit www.hbgimprov.com.

A Play of Their Own: All-female cast treads the boards in “Women Playing Hamlet.”

February 27, 2015 | by Barbara Trainin Blank

Back in Shakespeare’s time, men and boys played every part, even female roles, as women were not allowed to act on stage.

Turnabout is fair play in “Women Playing Hamlet,” which premieres this month at Harrisburg’s Gamut Classic Theatre. Written by playwright William Missouri Downs, the play tells the story of an actress who auditions for Ophelia in “Hamlet,” only to end up being cast in the title role.

Gamut Theatre Group was selected to participate in a “rolling world premiere” of the play, a debut that includes just three American theaters. The actresses in the local production of Downs’ play, billed as “a comedy about the tragedy of modern life,” find it exciting to participate in a world premiere.

“There is something very freeing about working on material that hasn’t been loaded with preconceived notions of who-plays-what-and-how,” said actress Tara Herweg-Mann.

Honored

The rolling premiere is sponsored by the National New Play Network (NNPN), an alliance of theaters devoted to the development, production and continued life of new works.

Gamut’s participation was serendipitous, said Executive Director Melissa Nicholson.

The theater is a member of the Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA), which provides a forum for theaters primarily involved with the production of the works of Shakespeare.

Patrick Flick, executive director of STA and the literary manager of NNPN, had seen works by Downs in the past. When he heard the playwright had a new work with a Shakespearean theme, he sent out the word to STA members.

“I saw that communication, read the description of the play, and thought it would be perfect for Gamut to produce,” Nicholson said. “We have a talent for playing multiple roles and our women are very strong. Also, our women are sometimes underutilized in our main stage productions due to the amount of female characters available to play in Shakespeare.”

Nicholson responded to Flick’s e-mail that very day.

To produce a rolling premiere, theaters must be NNPN members and demonstrate a dedication to new works. All of the Popcorn Hat Players’ shows are new works written specifically for the company, and Young Acting Company shows recently have been full-length new works by resident playwright Sean Adams.

“In addition,” Nicholson added, “we have produced some new works over the years with a classical theme.”

Theaters that do the rolling premieres have to agree to produce the play within a 12-month period and work collaboratively with the other theaters involved and with NNPN, explained Nan Barnett, NNPN executive director.

“They receive a $21,000 award—divided among the three theaters—to cover production expenses,” she said.

The rolling premieres aim to give “life” to new plays in a way a one-time premiere often cannot—and bring cachet and prestige to the playwrights.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity for playwrights to see their works done in and by three different artistic teams, facilities, actors and audiences,” Barnett said.

After filling out an application and being interviewed by the playwright, Gamut received word in July 2014 that it had been chosen.

“We are very honored,” Nicholson said

Image provided by the Gamut Theatre Group

Idea of Self

The four actresses in “Women Playing Hamlet” will play 20 roles of both genders.

Kathryn Miller plays a variety of parts—including a young actress, a Catholic priest, a male bicycle messenger, a 14-year-old female computer geek, a toothless barfly, a home-shopping network model and a young soap opera starlet.

“Being one of the first to discover the characters and perform them on stage is refreshing and unique,” said Miller.

Amy Burke portrays an unsympathetic humanities professor, the ghost of Hamlet’s father and an acting coach, while Herweg-Mann is the protagonist, Jessica.

Despite Jessica’s training and experience, the idea of playing Hamlet, this “role of roles” in the theatrical canon, is “a bit overwhelming, to say the least,” said Herweg-Mann.

Trying to find herself, the protagonist seeks help from a host of characters, and each interaction brings her closer to finding the answer to the question, “How do you define yourself?” said Downs, the playwright.

He said that he’s captivated by the idea of “self,” a search that brought him to “Hamlet” and the creation of “Women Playing Hamlet.”

“I think more truth can be found in comedy than in tragedy, for the human condition is not a tragedy but a wonderfully absurd free-for-all,” Downs said.

In addition, Hamlet is different from most protagonists in literature.

“Unlike in melodramatic movies, plays and novels, in which the protagonist knows who he is, what he wants, and what he must do to win, he first sets out to define himself to himself,” Downs added. “I’m not sure he succeeds.”

Downs has authored more than 30 plays and teleplays with a variety of themes and styles, but this is only the second time he’s used Shakespeare as inspiration.

Gamut’s actresses are delighted that Downs took the leap to rethink “Hamlet” for an all-female cast and that its premier is right here in Harrisburg.

“I had never experienced before what it is like to be one of the first actresses to play a role,” said Burke.

“Women Playing Hamlet” runs March 13 to 29 at Gamut Classic Theatre, 3^rd Floor of Strawberry Square, Harrisburg. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. General admission tickets are $27. Tickets for seniors and students are $17. For tickets, call 238-4111 or e-mail [email protected].

There will be an opening night post-show discussion with the playwright, director and NNPN’s executive director. On March 14, Gamut will host an Opening Weekend Gala. Guests will have the opportunity to meet and chat with the actors, playwright and director. Gala tickets are $40 a person and $75 a couple, including admission to the performance and wine and hors d’oeuvres at the gala.

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