In 2005, a respected designer unveiled a plan to replace three historic mansions on the riverfront with an unprecedented luxury development. Eight years later, after vigorous public debate, the mansions are still standing, though badly overgrown, and the owner has filed for bankruptcy. Next March, they will go to public auction, and their fate will be in the hands of the highest bidder—unless a last-minute buyer can be found.
A Kind of Limbo
In November of 2004, Mary Knackstedt, an author and interior designer, bought a pair of mansions overlooking the Susquehanna, on Front Street just north of Division.
The mansions, built in the late 1920s as single-family homes, had been subdivided in later years and leased to businesses. Knackstedt’s own enterprise, Knackstedt, Inc., was headquartered at a third mansion on the corner, which she had owned since the 1980s. With her purchase, Knackstedt achieved something of a developer’s dream: possession of an entire city block.
Mary Knackstedt
In Academy Manor, the neighborhood where the mansions reside, Knackstedt was a friendly presence, if rarely seen. She was instrumental in the restoration of tree-lined Riverfront Park, which runs along the shoreline from Shipoke all the way north to the city line. She was also a longstanding supporter of Historic Harrisburg Association, a non-profit devoted to preserving the city’s historic buildings. It therefore surprised her neighbors when, in 2005, she announced plans to demolish the mansions and replace them with luxury condominiums.
The mansions, like many of the buildings in Academy Manor, have connections to notable figures in Harrisburg history. (Perhaps the best-known is Mary Sachs, who operated a women’s clothing store on N. 3rd Street.) But despite their legacies, the buildings had little to protect them from demolition. The neighborhood was not a historic district, and restrictions governing new construction were tied to individual properties and could be amended. The preservation of existing homes, as well as of Academy Manor’s general aesthetic—stately, rustic, well-landscaped—was mostly a matter of neighborly goodwill.
In 2005, as Knackstedt pushed forward with plans for the apartments, a coalition of neighbors formed to oppose her. Rallying around the slogan “Save Our Mansions,” they picketed the sidewalk outside the properties. The protest, like the slogan, had a genteel quality; at one point Knackstedt sent out someone with cookies and tea. Nonetheless, the neighbors’ opposition was earnest. They built a scale model of the block, to show a “before and after” of Knackstedt’s intended construction, which they unveiled before City Council. Helen Porter, a neighbor who was present at the meeting, said that when the mansions were removed and the condominiums put in, members of council audibly gasped. “It made everyone else’s houses look like matchsticks,” she told me.
Architectural renderings of Knackstedt’s failed condominium proposal along North Front St., just north of Division.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2005, the neighbors sent letters of opposition to City Council and testified about her proposal at various hearings.
“We all knew Mary and respected her business acumen,” said Andy Giorgione, a resident of Academy Manor and an attorney at Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney. “We said, ‘We’ll work with you, just scale it back.’ But she just wasn’t willing to compromise.” In late 2005, after concerted lobbying by the community, City Council passed a resolution denying Knackstedt’s plan.
Since then, the mansions have sat in a kind of limbo. Knackstedt maintains the corner house, but the other two are unoccupied and falling to ruin. In 2011, she filed for bankruptcy, which will force her to sell the houses by the end of this year, or else let them go to public auction in March. John Campbell, president of Historic Harrisburg, is hopeful that this will encourage Knackstedt to sell them to someone capable of preserving all three.
“These properties represent what many cities have gotten right: the preservation of their waterfronts and the architecture that defines it,” he told me.
But they have also deteriorated to such an extent that the costs of repair may prohibit preservation. When I called Kevin Fry, the current realtor for the properties, he declined to give a tour, saying that the trio of homes is not what’s on offer. “It’s essentially a $2½ million land buy,” he said.
We Warned Her
Harrisburg finds itself in a political moment when blight and development—the contrasting outcomes at stake in the Knackstedt saga—are at the front of the public mind.
The mansions are unique to the extent that true blight, the kind that afflicts parts of Camp Curtin, say, or parts of Allison Hill, is unlikely. No one is much worried that a couple of decaying mansions will drag an affluent neighborhood into the gutter. But Knackstedt’s failed development bid is instructive, because it demonstrates the mix of political and economic forces that can determine whether a project flourishes or falters. New developments stake a claim on the actual shape of the city’s future. The story of Knackstedt’s mansions poses the questions raised by redevelopment across Harrisburg: questions about how the city should look and how much it should cost to look that way, as well as who should pay.
Knackstedt first approached former Mayor Stephen Reed with the idea for a development in the spring of 2004. On May 17, in a memo to Daniel Leppo, the deputy director for planning, Reed indicated his support for her proposal and alerted Leppo that an official plan would be submitted in the near future. Citing the “obvious health implications” of recurring mold in her property, as well as the need for additional space for her “growing business purposes,” the memo supports the demolition of the corner mansion and its replacement with a structure “that utilizes essentially the same architectural style and essentially the same exterior appearance.” The memo also asks that an exception be made to a height restriction in the zoning code, which limited all structures to 35 feet. Among a list of reasons for such an exception is the claim that there “is a clear and compelling demand for luxury condominium space in this city.”
Leppo, who left the Planning Commission in 2009 and now works for Community Action Association, a statewide anti-poverty program, told me that the initial proposal was greeted without controversy. But between the date of the memo and the first plans and permits meeting, he said, Knackstedt’s proposal had morphed considerably. She had acquired the two neighboring mansions, and her plan “was now something that didn’t look like any of them.” Instead of one structure with additional floors, Knackstedt planned to construct a single building, four stories tall, that would span the entire block and contain 32 high-end apartments. It would also demolish three mansions instead of just one. Leppo strongly urged Knackstedt to reconsider. “We warned her this wasn’t going to be viewed well by the neighborhood,” he said.
Tide of Opinion
If Knackstedt had been able to choose among neighborhoods to contend with, she would probably have picked somewhere other than Academy Manor, whose residents include a number of attorneys, developers and high-ranking politicians. In addition to sending letters, the neighbors began to scrutinize the city’s zoning laws. They determined that Knackstedt’s proposal violated a section of the municipal planning code, or MPC, which required a developer to exhaust all possible locations for a large-scale building like the one planned before building in a community of single-dwelling homes.
Don Paul Shearer, a veteran real estate appraiser who was Knackstedt’s advisor and spokesman for the project, contested the claim that her proposal in any way violated the MPC. In September of 2005, he wrote a long letter to members of City Council, insisting that her development was a permitted use under the code and alluding to “many misrepresentations and false statements” by Leppo and the city Law Bureau. But, at the same time, he was attending the planning meetings, and he watched the tide of opinion turn against Knackstedt.
“Eric Papenfuse got up and made a speech, saying that all Mary was interested in was money,” Shearer said. “Another guy, he looked like Jesus Christ, with the beard and everything—I’ll never forget it, he stood up and said, ‘God will strike you dead if you tear these buildings down.’”
Shearer, for his part, thought the building’s size was excessive. “She laid this plan on us at a meeting, and I said, ‘Jesus God.’” But he nonetheless fought for the city’s approval and met with Reed and lawyers from the Law Bureau to try to push things forward.
If Reed had ever supported the project, by the time of the neighborhood protests, he had changed his mind. “Reed was suddenly saying, ‘I have no choice. It doesn’t meet the zoning requirements,’” Shearer told me. Without support from the mayor, and with the threat of a strong legal case from the neighbors, the project began to look doomed.
Around this time, the Patriot-News printed a cartoon by Steve Wetzel spoofing the likely failure of Knackstedt’s plans. In it, a figure representing Knackstedt holds up a pair of galoshes, directing an assistant to bring them to “guest services” for the “virtual sight, sound and smell basement.” The assistant, meanwhile, installs a sign for “Mary K’s National Museums of Flood & Water Damage.” The cartoon ran in May of 2005, while Knackstedt was still petitioning City Council to delay its final decision on her plan. As political cartoons go, it was fairly obscure. It was also remarkably prescient.
To Pieces
I visited the mansions one morning early in May, on a warm day when the branches of trees along the river were heavy with pink and white flowers. The buildings, set back from the street behind lawns that are extensively overgrown, are almost invisible from a certain angle, entirely subsumed in green. But the one on the corner, home to Knackstedt, Inc., is still relatively well-kept, its front door framed by stately white columns and a maroon canvas canopy.
Knackstedt greeted me at the door. I was on my way to work and was carrying a sack lunch in a plastic grocery bag, which she locked eyes on after giving me a once-over. “Were you shopping?” she asked. Her follow-up question, as she led me down the hall to her dining room table, was more to the point. “What is your aim, exactly?”
Knackstedt was dressed in somber colors, and she wore her gray hair in a tidy bun. She spoke softly and precisely, and her eyes would occasionally widen with a look of alarm.
She grew up in Penbrook, and later lived in Bellevue Park, a historic landscaped neighborhood on the eastern edge of Harrisburg. For years, she worked with her father, producing fine furniture and restoring antiques. She went on to study interior architecture, focusing on proxemics, a field in anthropology that examines how an individual’s sense of personal space is affected by external factors.
“It’s about how environments affect human behavior,” she told me. “For instance, do you know how to put your husband on edge when he comes home from work?” I did not. “Decorate everything with beige. A person wants to be able to distinguish edges and colors. When they can’t, it creates a level of tension.” She applied proxemics concepts to interior design, and one of her early successes, the interior of a home for orphaned boys in Hershey, garnered attention in the local press.
If Knackstedt is defensive, it’s in part because her project, which the community tended to cast as a rich woman’s vainglorious whim, to her represented a piece of innovative design thoughtfully integrated with its environs. The development plan included an underground parking garage, which meant no cars would be visible at street level. Every unit would have a view of the river, and all entrances would be at the rear of the building, to keep a private park in front clear of activity. The apartments were flood-proofed, and they would be factory built, which would guarantee quality and provide for a 20-year warranty. She spoke of eliminating toxic materials in their construction, and of a designer’s “moral responsibility” to her clients. “I’m a designer,” she said. “That’s all I want to be. I’m not a developer. I wasn’t looking at it from a financial perspective. I was doing what I believe is right, based on the knowledge base that I have.”
In addition to her belief in the building’s design, she also thought the project could be a vital contribution to a nascent urban renaissance. “Harrisburg is in the position to be a wonderful city,” she said.
She considered the city’s needs and concluded that an influx of higher-income, skilled professionals would be critical to any revival. Her development would attract the sort of residents who could “bring the city to a higher level.” When she presented her plan, she included a note projecting more than $1 million in tax revenue per year once all of her units were filled. “When you do something like this,” she said, “everything in its radius will rise in value.”
Whether the apartments would have sold, and whether the city would have profited, is now impossible to say. What is clear is that after City Council denied the plan, Knackstedt’s entire project fell to pieces. Joe Bedard, a realtor at NAI CIR who recently worked unsuccessfully on the sale of the mansions, said that just about every possible factor worked against Knackstedt.
“The market going south was terrible timing, and the neighborhood intervention was well-orchestrated and successful,” he said. “On top of that, the city pulled the tax abatement program.” Tax abatement aims to spur development by forgiving some portion of the taxes on high-end housing, reducing costs for developers and enticing potential homebuyers. When the city’s abatement policy expired in 2010, Knackstedt’s projected carry cost—the cost of holding the property before sale, as improvements are made—became additionally forbidding.
The result, as far as Knackstedt’s personal finances are concerned, has been disastrous. Before this venture, she told me, her credit rating was pristine. “I don’t owe an earthly dollar to anyone beyond this project,” she said. But once the development plan collapsed, the mortgages on the mansions began to overwhelm her. She also started neglecting her legal fees. In April, 2009, as her suit against the city dragged on, her lawyers, Hoffmeyer and Semmelman, petitioned to be withdrawn as counsel. Their motion cited a substantial unpaid debt that Knackstedt had made no arrangements to settle. It also described eight months of unanswered mail in which they had asked her intentions on how to proceed. In 2011, with her bank threatening foreclosure, Knackstedt declared bankruptcy to protect the properties. “I really have made an incredible sacrifice,” she said.
Before I left, I took a tour of the mansions with the groundskeeper, an elderly, amiable man named Jack. The middle property, in the Tudor Revival style, with a distinctive slate-and-mortar exterior, was by far the most overgrown. A vivid green bush or tree sprawled across the front walk. Around the back, in the center of a leaf-strewn patio, the bedstone of a mill peeked out of the weeds. Inside, bits of crumbling plaster lay scattered in piles, acquiring mold. A tendril of ivy had found a gap in a window and was growing into the kitchen.
“It’s a shame about these,” Jack said. We paused in the foyer. The front door, whose red paint and wrought-iron fixtures exude a certain majesty from the yard, had been painted over in white on the indoor side. On the landing of the main staircase, sunlight poured in through a tall bay window, illuminating an odd extant object on the sill. It was a vase of fake flowers, cloaked with a thin film of dust, but otherwise undecayed.
No Simple Facts
One of the things that bedevils city planners is that there is frequently no consensus on what ought to be done. Every development involves competing interests, and fundamental questions can yield a variety of answers, depending on whom you ask. What makes a project right for a city? When is a property historic, and once it’s historic, what makes it worth preserving? When is a proposal in violation of code, and when is it merely bending the rules in pursuit of a greater good?
In matters of real estate, there are no simple facts. Everything is subject to spin. An artist’s rendering of the proposed condominiums still hangs from the wall of Knackstedt’s dining room. The apartments are in the background, obscured by trees, and a manicured park fills up more than half of the picture. Glancing at the sketch, one could get the impression that what is primarily being planned is not a building but a pleasure garden. By the same token, the neighbors’ scale model—the one that elicited gasps from City Council—put every emphasis on the building’s enormous size. (Shearer reported that at the meeting, after the model was unveiled, he walked up to one of the neighbors. “I said, ‘Good job, you little skunks,’” he told me, and laughed.)
The dispute even extends to the proper way to refer to the buildings. For advocates of preservation, they’re historic mansions, but the term in Reed’s memo is “period structure.” Historic Harrisburg’s website calls them “landmarks,” while, for Knackstedt, they’re old, but “not old considering Harrisburg.” For Shearer, they aren’t even technically mansions, according to the real estate definition, though this is a quibble that Leppo dismisses. “For Harrisburg, they’re mansions,” he said.
Officially, what scuttled Knackstedt’s proposal was its violation of a relatively obscure line of municipal code. But codes are open to interpretation, and the city has overlooked technical objections in the past for projects that attracted general support. Other properties on Front Street have been re-purposed for commercial use, even though they sit in residential areas. As Leppo explained to me, the MPC—which was drafted to govern all of Pennsylvania, a largely rural state—tends to be flexibly interpreted in cities, whose governments are much more amenable to mixed-use neighborhoods. In this light, Knackstedt’s real failure was not violating code so much as failing to violate it in a way that the city could come to view favorably.
In any case, once it became clear that City Council opposed her plan, Knackstedt began to fire back with legal objections of her own. In 2005 and 2006, she filed two lawsuits, one against the city and one against the individual members of council, claiming they had wrongfully rejected her proposal. The cases hinged on a technicality. She claimed that she never received written notice of the city’s decision and petitioned the court to interpret this as tacit approval, citing a relevant passage in city law. City Council denied this, saying they gave Knackstedt notice by e-mail and that, furthermore, e-mail was the form of correspondence that an assistant of Knackstedt’s explicitly requested. Knackstedt, in turn, denied these claims. The case languished without resolution for years, until the fall of 2011, when Knackstedt’s bankruptcy filing stayed the proceedings.
As Shearer sees it, Knackstedt fell victim to a change in political fortunes. “People acknowledged she’d been treated unfairly,” he said. At times, Knackstedt seems to believe this, too. She regards the loss of the support of Reed as a crucial factor. “If the mayor was behind a project, you went ahead,” she told me. “If not, no. You didn’t go against him.” Shearer affirmed this, and said that, throughout the proceedings, she clung to the 2004 memo as evidence that her project had once been approved. (This appears to be true to the present day; Knackstedt presented me with a copy on the day we met.)
It’s true that Reed had a reputation for ensuring that the projects he favored got done. But there is something absurd in the notion that a two-page memo about a project that had not yet been fully conceived should serve as an unqualified green light for future plans. Perhaps Knackstedt felt that the support of the mayor would obviate the need for the consent of her neighbors. She certainly seems to have believed that her project was right for Harrisburg and that it was only a matter of time until others came along. “She had a vision that in many places would have been welcome,” Leppo told me. “I don’t know that she ever quite got why the neighbors were opposed.”
“How far do we go for what we believe?” Knackstedt asked me at her dining room table as our conversation was coming to a close. “It’s hard for me to take my background out of what I think should happen.” Knackstedt is an accomplished designer, with a long list of completed projects that have been well-received. But the principles of design are not like the principles of science, though they may have scientific support. Design is also about preference and taste, and there is seldom a single right answer about what should be done. Given that she had angered many of her neighbors, ruined her credit and let two historic buildings succumb to mold and weeds, I asked whether, looking back, she had any regrets.
“In some respects, yes,” she replied. “I’m sorry in the respect of putting so much of an investment in something that has not succeeded.” She spoke calmly, pausing to consider her words. “Most of my projects have succeeded.”
