No Parking

January 29, 2014 | by Lawrance Binda

The proposed interior design of the Alter Ego Brewing Co. brewhouse, in back of Midtown Cinema.

“It’s Just Too Big!”

So read the signs that, over the course of a few days, suddenly sprang up on dozens of small, rectangular front yards about a decade ago on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., where I owned a rowhouse.

One afternoon, as I walked down the street, deeper into the neighborhood, I saw the first sign and wondered, “What exactly is too big?” Then I saw several more and thought, “What are these people protesting?”

Soon afterwards, a friend filled me in that some of her neighbors (she lived closer to the source of the “problem”) were objecting to a plan to convert a huge, old building, the former Capitol Hill Hospital, into condominiums. Their main gripe: parking. The project provided off-street parking as required by city statute, but the neighbors thought that the one-spot-per-unit allocation wasn’t enough.

“What if they have visitors?” I remember one resident remarking in a story in the Hill Rag, the neighborhood newspaper.

Long story short: the protesters won. They successfully delayed the project until the developer went bankrupt. Street parking didn’t change. But neither did the old hospital, which gobbled up an entire city block and remained almost completely empty, a hulking, ghostly building that created an eerie, isolated, dangerous vibe for blocks around.

I think of that story sometimes when parking issues arise, as they often do, in Harrisburg. Like back in D.C., parking often pits residents who want to see their neighborhood develop, become denser and have more amenities against those who are worried that their street parking will vanish.

Both sides have valid points. Like most people, I want to park directly in front of my house, but I also want the cafe, the movie theater, the restaurants–all the things that make city life worthwhile.

Last night, I attended a community meeting held by the owners of Alter Ego Brewing Co., who are proposing to build a brewhouse in the building at the rear of Midtown Cinema at the corner of Reily and Green streets. The meeting was well-attended, attracting about 50 neighbors, most in support, but some airing legitimate concerns about noise, traffic, odors and the serving of alcohol.

Before long, the discussion became largely about parking, a topic that continued today on TheBurg’s Facebook page. Some neighbors, as well as some out-of-city patrons, are very concerned about parking, even though the Cinema has off-street parking for 49 vehicles, far more than required by the city, even with the addition of the brewery.

In the course of the evolution of a city, a time arrives when a decision must be made about priorities. Is it in the best collective interest of Harrisburg (or Midtown or Engleton) to see the continued development of the commercial district around N. 3rd and Reily streets? Or is it better to keep development at bay so that residents can continue to park in front of their houses?

In the end, I suspect that the parking issue will follow a similar course here as it did in D.C. Yes, the neighbors won the battle against the hospital conversion, but only because the developer already was financially fragile and couldn’t hold out any longer. However, they lost almost every other time.

They complained about parking as the H Street and Pennsylvania Avenue commercial districts were revived and built up, a process that has only accelerated since I left. They lost badly as the Barracks Row corridor went from a seedy strip of check-cashing joints and liquor stores to a booming restaurant district.

All along, they asked, “But where am I gonna park?” along with the related question–“Who’s gonna come here because there’s no parking?”

Turns out–a lot of people.

As the core, then the outskirts, of Capitol Hill improved, people flocked in, as did restaurants, cafes, bars and stores. The lack of parking may have deterred some, but, in the aggregate, the places to eat, drink and shop brought in far more people than were lost to tougher parking.

Sure, some upset residents departed for the suburbs, where they got their private driveways, strip malls and acres of surface lots. But the area’s redevelopment and amenities enticed others to move in, making the area a safer, more vibrant place to live, while dramatically raising property values.

D.C., of course, is fortunate to have a reliable subway, and I can only fantasize that Harrisburg, some day, will have a trolley or light rail system, which could revolutionize life in this city. But, today, Capitol Hill has far more visitors coming via every means of transportation–subway, car, foot, even bus.

In the not-so-distant past, you could walk down Barrack’s Row day or night without encountering another soul, other, perhaps, than someone bumming change off you. Today, the wide sidewalks are full of people; the streets with cars; the restaurants and cafes with patrons. And there’s no more parking today than there was 15 years ago.

In contrast, the old, large Capitol Hill Hospital today remains an under-utilized medical building (a long-term care facility) that adds little to the surrounding residential neighborhood. Every once in awhile, residents may hear an ambulance siren, but, for the most part, the entire city block seems lifeless each day, a bit dodgy at night.

So, around Capitol Hill Hospital, the protesting neighbors won. On Barrack’s Row, they lost. But, looking back now, it sure doesn’t appear that way.

The Lives of Others

January 24, 2014 | by Paul Barker

When Julia Tilley knocked on the door of a client’s apartment, in the lower story of a duplex near South 13^th Street, in Allison Hill, it seemed for a moment that there might be no one home.

If so, it would be somewhat awkward. On the porch with Tilley, holding laundry baskets and a bag of detergents, were four volunteers who were eager to serve. They had just left the nearby First Church of the Brethren, where they’d eaten breakfast with some 200 other volunteers, at tables plastered with inspirational quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr. They’d even heard a welcome speech by Rob Teplitz, the freshman state senator from Dauphin County, who offered another King quote to help kick things off: “Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve.”

Tilley, a licensed clinical social worker, lives Uptown with her husband, Ron Tilley, a church chaplain and the program director for Brethren Community Ministries. When they first moved into their home, there were crack dealers and shootings in their neighborhood. But they felt it was important to live in the community they served, and they stuck it out. “Now there’s an Italian bakery on our block,” Tilley said.

This past Monday, the First Church of the Brethren served as the launch-off point for Harrisburg’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, a combined effort of six local non-profits that drew volunteers from across the region to help with various projects throughout the day. They would pick up litter, clean out a shed, participate in a youth poetry workshop and help prepare meals. Tilley’s morning, though, had a narrower focus. In a few short hours, she hoped to make some progress with a family living in poverty a few blocks away.

The family had come to the Tilleys’ attention last year, when a neighbor applied on behalf of their Aunt Donna (her name, like other names in the family, has been changed) for the ministry’s emergency food service. At the time, Donna lived with her husband, who was terminally ill. She couldn’t make it to the church herself—partly because she doesn’t “like people to see” her, partly because she was debilitated by tumors in her arms and legs—so Ron Tilley began delivering food to her home. Over time, they became friends. When her sister and niece became sick, they moved in with her, as did her niece’s daughter, who was pregnant with her third child. “They try to keep an eye out for each other,” Ron told me.

Tilley stood on the porch, waiting. She looked around: she was fairly sure she was at the right place, but Ron usually made the visits. Then one of the volunteers strode forward and gave the door a loud rap. “It’s early,” he said, shrugging. The volunteers chuckled.

A few seconds passed, and then the knob turned and Donna’s sister, Brenda, swung open the door. A tall white woman with short, uncombed gray hair and lavender pajamas, she greeted the volunteers one at a time as they entered. The group piled up in the living room, unsure where to go. The lights were off, and dark curtains had been stapled to the window frames. Brenda flipped a switch, and an exposed bulb fixed to the wall cast a faint glow over the room, illuminating a couch heaped with clothing, a mattress, and a hardcover Bible on the floor.

Donna sat at a table in the kitchen, towards the back of the house. When the group shuffled in, a pet Chihuahua started yapping, and a kitten leapt up onto a shelf and ate from a bowl. Though the front room had been a bit cold, this room pulsed with heat. The oven door was open, and the coils on the stove were orange—a way of making up for the landlord’s refusal to turn on the furnace.

“Is this only a one-time thing, the laundry?” Donna said. “I have a bottle of Clorox, never been opened, if you want that.”

Donna, like her sister, is broad and tall, with short hair and skin that hangs slackly from her arms, mottled in several places with dark bruises. As the volunteers loaded dirty laundry into their baskets, she told them about her tumors. The one in her arm had come back, she said, and had gotten so bad she could no longer hold a fork. There were others in her back, and a lump behind her knee. “It’s getting to where I can’t put my pants on by myself.” She blinked hard, then locked eyes with the volunteer nearest to her. “I know when I go I’m going to heaven, because I believe. And God will only give you as much pain as you can bear.”

Tilley escorted the volunteers outside and saw them into their cars. Then she turned back to the house, stooping to pick up an unwound wire hanger and throw it behind a trash can, and went inside.

Brenda’s daughter, Denise, was waiting in the living room. She wore black pajamas and pink flip-flops, and had dark hair tied in a ponytail and jet-black eyes. She was suffering from stage-four brain cancer, though she showed no outward signs of pain. “There’s a couple things I wanted to talk to you about,” she said.

“Sure,” Tilley said. She took off her coat and sat in a chair. Denise lit a cigarette and sat on the couch, a few feet away.

“My daughter just got infected with chlamydia,” she began. Her daughter, Annie, 19 years old, was due in the spring. Denise removed a calendar of appointments, which she kept in a slender pink notebook, from a nearby dresser. She didn’t especially want to discuss the pregnancy or the illness, which she seemed to have under control. (She always accompanies her daughter to the doctor, she said, “to make sure she tells them everything.”) What she really wanted was help providing her daughter with some structure. She hoped Tilley could recommend a church program where Annie could volunteer. “She needs God in her life,” she said.

The other thing Denise wanted to discuss was housing. The apartment was really her Aunt Donna’s, and the close living quarters were beginning to be a strain. She had found a lead on a new apartment, but she wanted help broaching the subject with her aunt and mother. She was also anxious about calling potential landlords. “I’m not good at talking to people,” she said.

Tilley listened, now and then entering a date in her phone. She offered the occasional sound of sympathy, but otherwise made few comments. “I follow the client model of social work,” she told me later. “We take the view that, ultimately, these are adults who need to make their own decisions. But I can try to point out contradictions, or show them options they didn’t know existed.” In place of directives, she will offer suggestions, ask questions and, where she can, weigh in with a bit of perspective. At one point, while Denise was talking about her daughter, Tilley volunteered, “Our brains don’t finish growing until we’re in our mid-20s.”

“25, yeah,” Denise said.

“So we make some interesting decisions in our teens and early 20s.”

Tilley and Denise returned to the kitchen, passing Donna, who lay on her side under a blanket in a middle room. “Can I get you something to drink?” Denise asked. She filled a glass of water and handed it to Tilley.

Denise had written the address and the phone number for the potential new apartment on the back of an envelope. Tilley took out her phone. “Let’s call and leave a message,” she said. “Can I tell them to call—”

“You!” Brenda and Denise said in unison.

“Me?” Tilley said. “Why me?”

“Please,” Denise said. “I don’t know how to talk to people.”

Most people who have spent some amount of time in a modern American city have a set of images they associate with urban poverty. They’ve seen decaying properties, or seedy corner stores, or streets and yards piled with garbage. They may have observed signs of poor health, or wound up in line at a grocery store behind someone on public assistance. Individually, each of these images reflects a problem that, on the surface, appears eminently solvable: pick up the trash, go to a doctor, get a job.

But combine them all under one roof, and these problems can become intractable. Tilley, after we had left, pointed out that the family had revisited the same issues “over and over and over”: for the person in the middle, facing everything at once, each problem swirls into the next. Ron Tilley calls this “swimming in the chaos of poverty.” “It’s tough to know exactly what to tackle first,” he said.

In earlier visits, the Tilleys had prioritized medical care. Donna hadn’t been to a doctor for years; now she was receiving treatment for the cancer she had long suspected was there. With regular visits to the doctor established, they hoped to move on to housing. Unfortunately, despite a negligent landlord and peeling paint, Donna was reluctant to move. “She’s scared about not being able to find a place she can afford, and she has anxiety issues,” Ron told me. “So we’re trying to get her used to the idea of moving.”

Tilley called the number for the rental, leaving an email where she could be reached, and led the family through a conversation about what sort of rent they could afford. It was progress, even if it was minimal progress. Then, with more than an hour until the laundry arrived, Tilley did something she often doesn’t have time for with clients—she talked to them about nothing in particular, as if they were old friends. They took out their phones and shared pictures: Tilley’s son (“Aw! He looks like his dad,” Brenda said), Annie’s daughter, a drawing Annie had done in permanent marker, of a sun beaming over the water.

This conversation may have been as valuable as any technical assistance Tilley could give. At one point, Donna, sitting by the window, began reflecting on the people she’d lost. “I blame myself for a lot of deaths,” she said. Some years ago, her nephew had committed suicide; Donna had found him hanging from an electrical cord in his bedroom. “I blame myself for my nephew, because I could have cut him down. I blame myself for my son, because if I’d had more money, maybe he wouldn’t have had his drug problem. I blame myself for my husband, because if I hadn’t left him for the shelter, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten so sick.”

She was crying. A tear broke free and rolled down her cheek. Her cigarette burned over the ashtray.

“You’re hard on yourself,” Tilley said.

Donna nodded.

“You’re forgiving of other people, but you’re hard on yourself.”

“We do try to create a pathway to prosperity,” Ron Tilley told me later. “You can provide a map, but they’ve got to take their own steps on the pathway.” Given the enormity of even a single family’s challenges, I wondered how he saw his ministry’s role: as an advisor? a friend? When I asked him, he thought for a moment, and then he said, “We’re trying to provide her with hope so she doesn’t give up.”

To learn more about Brethren Community Ministries, follow them on Facebook or Twitter (@bcmPEACE) or visit www.bcm-pa.org.

Change of Plans

January 17, 2014 | by Lawrance Binda

That was fast.

Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse was sworn into office just 12 days ago, but already we’re witnessing a dismantling of the structure put into place by the state to guide the city to financial recovery and help ensure more professional governance.

On Tuesday, Papenfuse announced that he is asking City Council to defund the position of chief operating officer and, yesterday, the state petitioned the Commonwealth Court to eliminate the state-imposed receivership. Assuming these requests are granted, Harrisburg will be back organizationally to a strong mayor who controls most of the levers of city government.

Whether you judge this to be a welcome development depends upon two key factors.

First of all, do you believe that Harrisburg continues to need the strong hand of the receiver and the professional management (at least in theory) of a COO?

The state created the receivership to formulate and implement a financial recovery plan for the city, to force that solution on feuding parts of the city government and to fortify the Thompson administration with additional expertise and oversight.

Over the course of two-plus years, the receiver accomplished these goals, although a few elements of the Harrisburg Strong plan, notably a new labor agreement with the firefighters’ union, are unfinished. The city will remain under Act 47, which means that a coordinator appointed by the state Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) will continue to have some influence over city operations.

As for the COO position, it was one of the key reforms of city government proposed by David Unkovic, the city’s first receiver, and, until recently, seemingly supported by the second, William Lynch. It was designed to professionalize how government operated on a daily basis, helping to ensure that the city was not again brought low by the political and personal agendas and limitations of its powerful mayors.

Many municipalities, in fact, are run daily by a professional city manager, and, under the reform, Harrisburg, though structured differently, would largely have followed that model.

On Tuesday, in his budget address to City Council, Papenfuse characterized the change more as a reclassification than an elimination. The COO, he said, would morph into the position of business administrator—with a $30,500 pay cut.

However, this is no reclassification. If defunded by City Council, the COO job is gone, and Harrisburg will revert to its strong-mayor form of government. The business administrator will serve as the mayor’s right-hand man (or woman), important but clearly beneath the mayor in the hierarchy. The huge pay cut emphasizes this point, with the business administrator’s salary tellingly just a whisker ($500 a year) below the mayor’s.

These changes are quite an achievement for Papenfuse, so early on in his administration. If both the receiver and the COO go away, he will have effectively re-consolidated the power of the office of the mayor. He also will have clarified the city’s hierarchy of authority, which has been muddied for more than two years, first by the creation of the receiver then by the addition of the COO.

Evidently, Lynch and others at DCED have enough confidence in Papenfuse that they no longer deem either office necessary. On Tuesday, Papenfuse told council that Lynch supports ending Harrisburg’s COO experiment, which, admittedly was no great success under two short-lived, if very well paid, administrators.

And that brings me to the second way of judging these developments.

Ultimately, how you view the re-creation of the powerful mayor’s office depends upon how you view Papenfuse. If you believe he can handle the office effectively and responsibly, you might be happy that he has consolidated power so quickly. If not, then you probably aren’t.

So far, I like what I’ve seen from the administration. Papenfuse’s appointments have been solid, and I support his decisions to work closely with council and to make government more accessible and friendly. His early moves have been pragmatic, not dogmatic or personal.

That said: it’s very early. I would be reluctant to reach any conclusions until at least six months have passed—and that’s why these recent moves give me pause.

I expected the receivership, which was extended just in November, to end well before its two-year term, but not just weeks into it. I expected the COO job to go unfilled for some time, until the administration got its bearings and the flow of government settled.

As a resident, I would have felt more comfortable had the receiver allowed more time, so that the new administration could settle in and show itself capable of governing well. As it stands, these changes appear rushed. I understand that the re-opening of the budget was viewed as an opportune time to make adjustments, but the resulting changes are huge. A more gradual evolution in the city’s power structure may have better served the still-wary, skeptical residents of this city.

Harrisburg Receivership to End

January 16, 2014 | by Lawrance Binda

The state today submitted a petition to end Harrisburg’s 26-month-old receivership, stating that “critical components” of the city’s financial recovery plan had been completed.

If approved by the Commonwealth Court, the receivership would conclude on March 1, concurrent with the end of the state-declared “fiscal emergency” for the city. At that time, an Act 47 coordinator would replace the receiver to oversee and help guide implementation of the rest of the Harrisburg Strong Plan.

Just last November, the receiver’s term was extended for two years.

“The receiver is no longer vital and necessary to successful implementation of the remaining components of the Harrisburg Strong Plan in the absence of a fiscal emergency, and the remaining components of the plan can be successfully implemented by a coordinator appointed by the secretary (of DCED),” according to the petition by C. Alan Walker, secretary of the state Department of Community and Economic Development.

While most of the plan has been implemented—including the sale of the incinerator and the long-term lease of the city’s parking assets—a few parts remain unresolved, such as a new labor agreement with the city’s firefighters’ union.

The state imposed receivership on Harrisburg in November 2011 after the city could not reach an agreement to resolve its financial crisis. Bond lawyer David Unkovic served several months in the post, drafting the initial recovery plan.

After Unkovic resigned, Air Force Maj. Gen. William Lynch took over as receiver, overseeing the creation of the final recovery plan and its implementation to date.

Read the entire petition from Walker to Judge Bonnie Brigance Leadbetter: ReceivershipPetition.

Brewhouse Planned for Midtown

January 14, 2014 | by Lawrance Binda

Alter Ego Brewing Co. hopes to call this Midtown Harrisburg building its home.

If all goes right, a new brewery will debut in the heart of Midtown Harrisburg in September or October.

Alter Ego Brewing Co. hopes to open a brewhouse in long-vacant space at the corner of Susquehanna and Boyd streets, at the rear of Midtown Cinema. The 3,500-square-foot brick building would house a beer-making operation, in addition to a tasting room with a limited menu featuring small plates, paninis and finger foods, said Brandalynn Armstrong, who operates Alter Ego with her husband, Theo.

While hopeful, the Armstrongs know they have numerous steps to take before they can open, including securing a liquor license and probable land use approvals. The building also requires a complete renovation, which is expected to begin in late spring, assuming all approvals are granted in a timely manner.

As a first step, the couple has scheduled a community meeting on Jan. 28 at 7 p.m. at Midtown Cinema. Brandalynn Armstrong said that they want to introduce themselves, answer any questions and seek community support for their business. They consider it vital that the community feel comfortable with their proposal before they proceed.

“We want to be a good neighbor and an active member of the community,” she said. “We think it’s a good fit for Harrisburg and that Harrisburg is a good fit for us.”

In addition to offering Alter Ego beers and a limited menu, the Armstrongs will feature local Pennsylvania wines and art gallery space. No liquor will be served.

The building is owned by Lift Development LLC, which includes two partners of GreenWorks Development. A couple of years ago, the county tried to relocate the former Midtown magisterial district justice’s office and courtroom to the building, but an agreement could not be reached.

The community meeting to discuss Alter Ego’s proposed brewery and brewhouse will take place at 7 p.m. on Jan. 28 at Midtown Cinema, 250 Reily St., Harrisburg.

To learn more, please read our August 2013 feature about the Armstrongs and Alter Ego Brewing or visit their website.

This story has been updated to include the latest estimate of the project’s timing.

Papenfuse Releases Transition Report

January 10, 2014 | by Admin

The Papenfuse administration today released its transition report, which offered analyses and recommendations on improving the operations of city government.

The final report was prepared by Robert Melville, who served as facilitator for some of the transition team meetings and provided guidance to the transition chairs. Karl Singleton and Joyce Davis served as co-chairs of the transition process.

More than 70 people were involved in the transition teams and included community activists, leaders of nonprofit organizations, educators, business people, political leaders and youth, said the administration. The teams spent several weeks following the November general election engaged in meetings, compiling information and organizing notes for the final report.

Read the report here: Transition report- Final

Inspiration Reconsidered

January 10, 2014 | by Lawrance Binda

“Can’t I get the job done and inspire you at the same time?”

So asked then-long-shot-candidate Eric Papenfuse in a text message to me, shortly after he announced his intention to run for mayor of Harrisburg. He was responding to a column in the March 2013 issue of TheBurg, in which I had written that I would settle for basic competence from my next mayor, as opposed to some type of inspiration.

Since then, Papenfuse and I have revisited that topic several times, including in an extensive Q&A in the current issue of TheBurg, as well as in several casual conversations. I set the bar at competence; he raises it with both competence and inspiration.

Therefore, I was pleased, if a little surprised, at the stone-cold pragmatism he’s demonstrated during his first week in office.

It started right at the beginning, during his swearing-in on Monday. His address focused not on grand ideas, theoretical concepts, dreams or history, but on repairing the bedraggled municipal building. After brief, plain-spoken remarks, he led reporters on a tour of City Hall’s dirt, disrepair and dank, hoping to use the assembled media and rolling cameras to put out a public call for private funds.

I’ve written that I see a mayor, primarily, as an administrator tasked with delivering a core group of critical services to the people–the residents–who are paying for them. And nothing is more fundamental to that mission than providing a decent environment for workers who must deliver those services. That said: even I was surprised by the smallness of the small ball. That’s not intended as criticism, but as an acknowledgement that reform and advancement of city government must start at the bottom, building up from there.

Papenfuse’s cabinet appointments similarly showed attention to the practical realities of governing and delivering services. We already knew that the well-connected and respected Joyce Davis would serve as communications director. He then named Neil Grover, a founder of Debt Watch Harrisburg and special counsel to City Council, as city solicitor. Former Councilman Bruce Weber will serve as budget and finance director, and Aaron Johnson, Papenfuse’s former rival for mayor, will lead the Public Works Department.

Taken together, the appointments serve another important and practical function. These department heads all have ties to City Council, which should help Papenfuse with Harrisburg’s often-contentious legislative body. He seems to understand the reality that he cannot dictate, that, in order to get anything done, he needs the support of council members. That may sound obvious, but it’s a lesson that both mayors Reed and Thompson never seemed to learn, to their–and the city’s–great detriment.

When I was a young reporter in New Jersey, I covered our area’s local legislative delegation. At the time, a long-time state assemblyman was appointed to the Senate following a vacancy. When I learned of the appointment, I called him and asked what his priorities would be as a state senator. I suppose that I expected the articulation of some great goal or, lacking that, at least a few talking points out of the Republican playbook (less government, lower taxes). Instead, he told me that he wanted to make sure that the grass was cut regularly along state highways, that he was always bothered by the overgrowth and weeds in the medians and at the sides of the roads as he motored along to Trenton. So, he’d make that his first order of business.

Standing in Harrisburg’s City Hall the other day, I remembered that story. Given my past conversations with Papenfuse, I was expecting his inaugural speech to be gilded with soaring rhetoric, grand ideas, lofty goals–words and phrases designed to inspire. Instead, he wanted to patch some ceilings and repair some walls.

I was OK with that. Harrisburg badly needs to fix itself, and the municipal building seems like a fine place to start. As the week wore on, I began to see an administration playing the long game, not issuing edicts from on high but courting council and the public, laying down a foundation for actions to come. I also saw a focus on basic municipal services, as well as action on a few other practical, first-order items (a help desk instead of a security check, no metal detectors, no security detail, a meeting with Attorney General Kathleen Kane).

Perhaps, in weeks or months, Papenfuse will unpack the inspiration that I’m sure he still considers important. But, personally, I found this first week encouraging. As a resident, I want the grass cut, the potholes fixed, the roads striped, the trash collected. That’s what I want from my local government, and that requires several necessary conditions: a motivated workforce, good managers and a healthy relationship with City Council.

Form and Function

January 6, 2014 | by Paul Barker

The atrium Monday morning at city hall.

“The idea was to create an indoor civic space, similar to an outdoor civic space, like the plaza outside.”

So said Martin Murray, formerly of Murray Associates, the architecture firm that designed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., City Government Center—or, as Harrisburg residents know it, city hall.

Murray, who retired in 2003, was describing the sunny atrium beyond the center’s brick façade, which earlier that day had witnessed the inauguration of Mayor Eric Papenfuse, along with the swearing-in of other newly elected officials.

The atrium rises through several floors of overlooking balconies to a transparent ceiling, which usually floods the interior with natural light. While the building was being constructed, in 1981, the soon-to-be Mayor Stephen Reed, then on the campaign trail, criticized the atrium as a waste of space. “But once he was elected,” Murray said, “he made great use of it.” Now the atrium is home to potted plants, a rotating art exhibit, and innumerable press conferences.

It was also, until very recently, home to a metal detector that may or may not have impeded the impression of an open space. But Papenfuse, in advance of the inauguration, had ordered its removal. “I felt it sent the wrong message and set the wrong tone,” he said. On Monday morning, in place of the plastic baskets for phones and keys, the welcome desk held an array of free pocket-sized booklets titled “Where To Go When You Need Help.”

As with each piece of architectural design, each political gesture has a form and a function. There’s the question of what it does, and there’s the question of how it looks. Inaugurations, of course, are ripe for such gestures, and the Papenfuse team had prepared many—from the ejected detector to the absence of an inaugural speech to the choice, applauded by many observers, to forgo an inaugural ball. Whatever his mayoralty will actually mean, it’s clear enough how he wants it to be interpreted: as a harbinger of frugality, openness, and getting down to work.

The most complicated of these gestures came after the ceremony, when Papenfuse and his communications director, Joyce Davis, accompanied members of the press on a tour of the center’s most dilapidated corners. A press release had described the mayor’s team being “alarmed” at the “evident lack of maintenance, the unkempt appearance of the offices and the inattention to proper record-keeping” throughout the building. In lieu of donations to an inaugural ball, Papenfuse was asking for members of the community to chip in to help fund a facelift for city hall.

On Monday, in the company of Police Chief Thomas Carter, Captains Annette Oates and Colin Cleary, and Public Works Director Kevin Hagerich, they led reporters on something of an inverted Potemkin tour. Floor by floor, the group pointed out select scenes of decay, as if to prove that things really were as bad as the press release said they were.

The worst offenders were in the Public Safety Building, across a second-story footbridge from the mayor’s office and home to the city engineer and police department. On the lower level, water damage was destroying the acoustic ceiling; several tiles had rotted apart, or were missing altogether. A police investigator pointed a flashlight at one of the holes, as if identifying the site of a break-in (“You’re paying an officer’s salary to these guys, and they wind up having to do custodial work,” Hagerich said).

Papenfuse seemed particularly appalled by the police break room, a fusty, dimly lit corner on the other side of a doorway scrawled with the words “2014 TRAFFIC CITATION: $37.50.” “I would personally be embarrassed to have an apartment that I would rent that would look like this,” he said. “It’s unacceptable.” It was about as close to indignant as Papenfuse got on the whole tour, though it was hard to see what, exactly, he had fixated on. The room held an antediluvian fridge and vending machine, but otherwise appeared perfectly functional.

In fact, the question of how extensive the damage was nagged at this reporter throughout the tour. Certainly, city hall was dingy. But was it unusually dingy? At one point, the group paused in a parking lot below city hall that was shadowy and gloomy—like every below-ground parking lot I’ve ever been in. In the police break room, various people remarked on how dirty the floor was. Was that evidence of neglect? Or was it a result of the very recent snowstorm, which caused people to track salt and dirt inside?

The gesture, given that it was calculated, could not have been hoped simply to show that cities without money fall to pieces. We knew that already, and anyway, that’s hardly the stuff of good press releases. Nor was it only about the need for city hall to be more welcoming, or to keep better records, though I believe Papenfuse is sincere in both those ambitions.

No, I suspect the Papenfuse team wanted a kind of inaugural twofer: an official, forward-looking statement on plans for a cleanup, and an implicit backwards shot at the former custodian of city hall. At the end of the tour, Papenfuse remarked that at least his office would not need renovations. He was referring, indirectly, to Mayor Linda Thompson’s well-publicized makeover of the office early in her term. The remark was part of the inaugural symbolism: a signal that Papenfuse’s new beginning meant something else’s end.

“If I had been doing things,” he said, sitting in the mayor’s chair, “my own office would have been the last to be repaired.”

Snow Day

January 3, 2014 | by Paul Barker

A walk in the snow literature.

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland,” observes Gabriel Conroy, in the mysterious and tender final paragraph of James Joyce’s story “The Dead.”

Gabriel has returned from a party to his hotel room, overcome with desire for his wife, Gretta, only to find that she is preoccupied with thoughts of a boy she once loved. Haunted by ghosts of the past, and feeling inadequate beside the image of young passion—the boy succumbed to an illness after standing outside Gretta’s window in the rain—Gabriel turns in bed to the window. There he sees the snow, “thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones”:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I think of this passage anytime there’s a snowstorm. Though it may be a hazard or a nuisance for some, others of us, I suspect, will always be drawn to the window to swoon over falling snow.

When we do, what are our minds apprehending, exactly? Is it the sense, hinted at by Joyce, of being connected to all the people and places touched by the same storm? Or is it the snowfall’s ghostly peace and purity—just uncommon enough in our calendar that, like a religious holiday, it prompts us to reflect on ultimate things?

My mother has a conviction that more people die in winter than in any other season. While I don’t think that’s statistically supported, it happens to be true that, over the past several years of my life, death has been particularly prominent in winter, taking some people close to me, others more tangentially connected. It may be that, in a time of year when family and friends tend to gather, we feel the new absences more profoundly. Or perhaps the explanation is astrophysical: amid shorter days, more darkness means more ghosts?

If winter is a season of loss, then snow is a fitting embodiment of it, making the known world suddenly unfamiliar. The British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, unsurpassed in his projections of feeling onto landscapes and the weather, once used snowfall as a metaphor for the infinitesimal slide from vitality to age. In the poem “A Light Snow-Fall after Frost,” he deftly portrays two figures on a snowy road, one with a “ruddy beard,” the other with “whitening hairs.” The question—when does the one become the other?—is all but asked in the concluding stanza:

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though
But half an hour ago
The road was brown, and now is starkly white,
A watcher would have failed defining quite
When it transformed it so.

Other writers have lighted on this image of accruing snow. The Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, in her poem “Snow,” recalls taking her brother sledding as a child to escape an unnamed tragedy at home. She describes dragging him up a snow bank, letting him go, and shouting after him, “as if we were having fun.” Then, suddenly, she leaps to the present day, offering a stunning reflection:

That was the deepest
I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it
when I stare at paper or into silences
between human beings. The drifting
accumulation. A father goes months
without speaking to his son.

But it isn’t only loss or coldness that accumulates in falling snow. It may also be peace, or innocence, as in the poem “The Snow Fairy,” by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay. In what later becomes an image of ephemeral love, McKay records “Snow-fairies falling, falling from the sky”:

As though in heaven there was revolt and riot,
And they, frail things had taken panic flight
Down to the calm earth seeking peace and quiet.

I wonder if, when we pause to admire the snowfall, we hear echoes of these and other writers—not the poems and stories themselves, which may be unfamiliar, but some essential property or properties each writer has caught a piece of.

I suppose it’s also possible to make too much of snow. As I write this, I can see through my window a torn-up patch of yesterday’s deposit, framed by salt stains on one side, black sludge on the other. Not much there to swoon home about.

Maybe you’re the sort of person who can’t wait for the snow to melt and for spring to come. Even then, the poets have you. Consider this last piece, “First Sight,” by the great British poet Philip Larkin, about lambs born in the “vast unwelcome” of snowy winter:

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

What’s Left Behind: Artist focuses his lens on the once-beautiful, once useful, now disposed.

December 31, 2013 | by John Duffy

As an art-obsessed teenager Matthew Christopher despised photography.

“I thought it was bullshit,” said the Harrisburg-area native. “I thought it was cheating: point and click. I didn’t understand the intricacies.”

His perspective changed when, as an employee at a Philadelphia-area mental hospital, he visited a shuttered state institution, one of those Victorian-age solutions that, by the mid-20^th century, were seen as despicably archaic, little more than warehouses for the unwanted.

“I was immediately interested in the philosophical implications of how we as a country have dealt with mental health,” he said. “What is the difference between incarceration and hospitalization? Who defines sanity?”

It later became the subject of Christopher’s MFA thesis and the beginnings of a body of work that would take on all manner of decaying or disused structures: factories, houses, hotels, theaters, resorts, schools, churches, prisons. Some 3,000 images are collected on his website, abandonedamerica.us

He also has shown his work locally. In recent years, he has mounted exhibits at the Yellow Wall Gallery at Midtown Scholar Bookstore, the Gallery at Walnut Place and McKissick & Associates, all in Harrisburg, as well as at galleries in Lancaster, Lebanon and Perry counties.

Sweat & Dreams

Like few other societies, America, since the Industrial Revolution, has gotten good at building things by the sweat and dreams of one generation, only to let them crumble by the next. Built either on imperial-age colonialism or post-war exuberance, the America of the millennial age is dotted with these wrecks as never before.

And to Christopher, they say something profound about our national character. Often what economists call “creative destruction” and sociologists term “de-urbanization,” Christopher sees as merely hubris. His catalog is dubbed “an autopsy of the American dream.”

“I look at our society as a big party of people who go out to dinner, eating and drinking as much as they can, and then realizing they don’t have enough to pay the tab,” he said. “They assume someone else was covering them.”

The study of this process is nothing new. James Howard Kunstler’s groundbreaking study of urban landscapes, “Geography of Nowhere,” is 20 years old, and people were chronicling the decay of a deindustrialized America in numerous forms even before that.

But, in Christopher’s images, layers of dust seem too delicate to be real, limping floor joists roll like waves, wallpaper flakes seem like snow. There is a tragic beauty in the decay that few others have been able to render. And, while almost none of Christopher’s work shows actual human presence, almost every one leads the viewer toward thinking of who once lived, loved, toiled, learned, worshipped or battled madness in these buildings.

Such places are left with uncertain futures and wait again to be useful, or in most cases, to simply be erased. “People are very attached to places even years after they no longer live or work there,” he said. “To many, letting a factory or a school fall into disrepair, in a way, invalidates the time they spent there, the work they did.”

Troubling Currents

Christopher has become not only an expert on the artistic schema of decay, but the mechanics as well. Looking at a crumbling wall, there is a clear difference between ordinary structural failure and the work of scrap hunters. He’s been on this quest so long that, most of the time, he admits to being immersed in the technical aspects of his work on location, and less so in the emotional. “Some places just reek of despair, though.”

Churches and schools are probably the most difficult, he says. “Churches are unlike any other building in that the whole purpose is to be art, to be beautiful, to awe people into thinking of divine things, of this plane and that which is holy.”

As mainline urban churches fall out of use due to the demographic tide of suburbanization, some are bought up by small Pentecostal or evangelical upstarts. Many are not. “Considering what they were built for, there is a troubling symbolism in that.”

Schools are the civic equivalent of churches: vessels of hope and aspiration. “The idea of the American dream has always included that, with hard work and ingenuity, you can rise above your caste,” he said. “That’s always been facilitated in large part by our educational system. When schools go, then you’re knocking out the rungs of that ladder.”

Even when old, decaying schools are replaced by bright, new ones, there are often troubling currents, as in once case in Philadelphia recently. “They were demolishing the old building and there was a pile of textbooks in the courtyard…two stories high. The kicker is that they were in good condition. And we hear about how so many schools don’t have supplies?”

Disposable consumption has a cost, and only now are we beginning to tally the bill, his work implies.

All of Christopher’s photos, even the most minutely detailed ones, hint at similar narratives. “If you’re working just from an artistic standpoint, you are going to be missing out on most of the story, and, if you shoot solely as a documentarian, then your pictures won’t be interesting.”

Christopher looks for the transcendental, timelessness, a permanence to things that goes beyond the temporality of the subject itself.

Take a pair of shoes, for example. “You leave them by your bed. When you come back they are still there. That’s something we filter out because it’s quite normal.”

Now imagine an identical pair of shoes next to a bed in a farmhouse shuttered and ignored for 30 years. “Immediately, you start asking questions. Who did these shoes belong to? Where did they go? Why were they left here?” All of a sudden, a simple pair of shoes is telling a story.

Christopher’s work has, at times, mistakenly been lumped into the “ruin porn” discussion, an accusation leveled at some who gravitate toward dying rustbelt cities like Youngstown, Detroit, or Braddock, Pa., to shoot the wreckage in a fashion that residents often see as exploitative. Christopher has weighed in on that debate but has now grown weary of it.

Surely, a photograph of neglect and decay can be an indictment, and that is indeed a subtext of his work, the artist admits. But even exploitative art can begin a discussion, and it’s a discussion that needs to begin, he adds. “And an image is about the only thing that can grab anyone’s attention anymore.”

Learn more about Matthew Christopher, see more images of his work and learn about his exhibits at abandonedamerica.us.

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