Tag Archives: Ken Frew

Up by the Riverside: A close-knit community celebrates 100 years as part of Harrisburg.

May 31, 2017 | by M. Diane McCormick

Riverside Fire House, 1923.

You know the neighborhoods of Harrisburg. South Allison Hill. Midtown. Olde Uptown. Bellevue Park. Downtown. Riverside.

Back up there. What the heck is Riverside?

For those of us who live here, Riverside is our little secret. But since September marks the centennial of Riverside’s annexation into the city of Harrisburg, maybe it’s time to stake our claim as a distinct neighborhood with a unique quality of life. No, it’s not “walkable” to coffee shops and cinemas, but there are trees and backyards, parking and birdsong, quick commutes to downtown and quick getaways to highways.

First, to answer your question, Riverside is the last chunk of city land along the 2nd Street corridor. Imagine holding a Hershey chocolate bar in your hand and breaking off the far left squares. That’s Riverside, from Division Street to just north of Vaughn Street (call it Italian Lake to the Jewish Community Center) and from Front Street to 7th Street (Susquehanna River to the railroad tracks).

“Riverside, before it was annexed, was known as a hamlet,” Howard Parker told me. “I’ve always wanted to live in a hamlet.”

New Age

We were meeting at the Olde Uptown Little Amps (like I said, we got no coffee shops). Parker, a New Jersey native who moved east and has lived in Riverside since 1980, is a history buff and president of the Riverside United Neighbors community group.

Archival records of that 1917 annexation, the year America entered the “Great War,” show that change never happens in Harrisburg without controversy and the occasional threat of fisticuffs. Riverside was still its hamlet self, home to 500 or 600 people who’d been attracted to the Susquehanna Township development since its launch in 1905 with promises of “sewer, water, light and river view.”

“One car-fare takes you from Riverside to any part of city, Steelton, Paxtang, Reservoir, Progress, Penbrook and Rockville,” pledged an ad from developer Lewis M. Neiffer.

Harrisburg had “briefly flirted with an industrial period in the 1890s,” said Historical Society of Dauphin County Librarian Ken Frew, but the ornate Beaux Arts Capitol built in 1906 ushered in a new age.

“Once the (original) Capitol burned down, and they built a new one, the whole tenor of Harrisburg changed,” said Frew. “It became a white-collar city.”

Those government workers found a bucolic escape in their Riverside homes.

“They were people who didn’t want to be down in the city,” said Frew. “They were a little more independent. They liked living up there, but they missed the city services.”

Parker confirmed that Riverside’s street paving was “not really fantastic,” and some residents were dissatisfied with schools that one resident of the day called “miserable.”

In September 1916, about 60 percent of Riverside homeowners petitioned for annexation by Harrisburg. This would be the city’s 12th annexation of adjoining lands, but money concerns intervened. Would annexation mean that “outlay on the part of the city will be far greater than the revenues derived from the Riverside section,” as the Harrisburg Daily Independent speculated? Sewer, lighting and fire hydrant upgrades would all cost money.

Despite the costs, the Harrisburg Telegraph considered the deal’s apparent collapse ill-advised.

“It was assumed that at no distant day the suburb would be taken over by the city and now, when it comes knocking at our doors, having fulfilled the requirements of the municipality and being one of the most desirable residential districts in all the country roundabout, we turn our neighbor away,” the Telegraph editorialized.

“One of the most desirable residential districts in all the country roundabout”? My Riverside? Sweet.

Wordy Battle

Back to 1917.

The Telegraph accurately predicted eventual annexation. This being Harrisburg, a backroom deal or two might have given this creature life. The plan’s sudden revival prompted a letter to the Telegraph editor signed “ONE OF THE EXPLOITED,” insisting that the so-called majority clamoring for annexation was actually a minority poised to gain, possibly through the city’s purchase of the hamlet’s sewers.

“There always has been, and never so violently as at present, a strongly voiced antagonism to annexation . . .,” complained “Exploited.” “It is a question of searching for the individuals who aim to profit at the community’s expense.”

By now, annexation was big news. City Council’s 3-1 vote to approve annexation shared banner headline space with news from the Great War in the Aug. 27, 1917, Evening News: “Riverside is Added to Harrisburg; Italians Capture 90 Square Miles.”

But then a Sept. 1 banner headline proclaimed “Riverside Citizens Oppose Annexation” (above a photo captioned “Uncle Sam Cocks His Big Guns for the Boches”). The fight to block codification of a City Council vote seen as “railroaded” seemed to be on, until the city solicitor announced that the ordinance had been signed into law, making it irreversible. With the painful news, some argued for withdrawing their opposition. Others wanted to keep up the fight.

And then things got heated. Professor George Hill, a teacher and annexation supporter, argued that “bugaboos” like the higher taxes feared by opponents might never materialize. A certain W.H. Bishop seemed to think that Professor Hill was calling Mr. Bishop and his fellow opponents “bugaboos.” A “wordy battle” ensued.

“Come out here in the hall and settle it,” Professor Hill suggested to Mr. Bishop. Mr. Bishop declined the offer but “politely went on with his criticism.”

Howard Parker shook his head as he shared news accounts of the near-altercation. “This is so frickin’ Harrisburg,” he said. “It just is.”

Wild Waste

In September 1917, the hamlet of Riverside joined the city of Harrisburg, and life went on.

A school that started as a one-room schoolhouse in 1905 grew into a modern school “heated by a furnace in the basement!” recalled one student. A fire company formed in 1915 and built its firehouse, long a community center, in 1923.

“It is situated in a northern part of the city in a district in which there are fine homes, hence they are always willing to do all they can for the welfare of the community,” the company boasted.

Corner drug stores served cherry cokes. There were barbershops and salons, churches and markets. The Riverside Baseball Team gathered for a team picture in 1921.

The “wild, wild waste” known as Italian Park, where gypsies encamped every year, became Italian Lake in 1919, beginning a string of up-and-down years for a park where residents today walk their dogs, admire azalea blooms in the spring, and jog up and down the hillside. By 2013, Riverside School had come down, making way for Chisuk Emuna’s beautiful synagogue, now a polling place and R.U.N. meeting spot.

The city’s northward march culminated in completion of the imposing, now vacant William Penn High School in 1926. The last anyone heard of plans for the school, a developer was considering its use for senior-living apartments. In the eyes of developers, classrooms make perfect apartments, said Harrisburg School Board Vice President James Thompson. But they found no uses for the auditorium, gym and the campus’ separate career school building.

“People will come in and look at it and try to make the numbers work,” Thompson said. “I’m always the optimist. Somebody will find the right use for it, but the building needs work.”

Plus, developers hungrily eye the acreage and sports fields on the William Penn campus, but the district “would like to preserve the land,” Thompson said. “I think we owe it to the community and to the neighborhood to preserve the land for current and future recreational needs.”

Life Changes

Keeping pace with the rest of the city, Riverside’s 2017 home sales have been brisk, said RE/MAX realtor Ray Davis. “Riverside” isn’t a name that prospective homebuyers instantly recognize, but just as in 1905, the neighborhood offers “a natural progression” in city dwelling, he said.

“You have buyers in Midtown who eventually want a yard, want the parking,” said Davis. “That causes them to move up because their needs change. The parking and the yard for the dog or the kids become a little more important than the walkability of downtown. Life changes.”

Another thought struck Davis, a realtor for 20-plus years. In many other city neighborhoods, houses are similar, and so, for instance, a young adult or middle-ager with durable knees can manage Midtown’s three-story rowhomes. Riverside, though, is “one of the few neighborhoods where you have some single-level homes. You have Cape Cods. You have two stories and three stories. You have some large homes. You have smaller homes.”

Diversity is a hallmark of all city neighborhoods, he continued, but Riverside’s is “a different kind of diversity.”

“The housing inventory there is really diverse, which I think adds to the diversity of the people who live there,” he said. “You have price, size, style. It’s as assorted as the people.”

That’s my Riverside. Curious? Cross Division Street and come explore for yourself. Just be sure to bring your own coffee.

To learn more about the Riverside neighborhood, visit the Riverside United Neighbors website at www.riversideunitedneighbors.com.

Author: M. Diane McCormick

River Dance: There was a time when Harrisburg tripped the barge fantastic.

April 29, 2016 | by Olivia Cunningham

It’s May, which means that the Harrisburg riverfront again comes alive with walkers, bicyclists and runners, with summer festivals not too far behind.

The waterfront, though, was once a hub of nightlife, as well. A century ago, local entrepreneur George K. Riest launched his first dance boat, testing whether city residents wished to mingle and dance on the river. They did, in large numbers.

What began as a boat equipped with a small dance floor soon expanded to a former coal barge outfitted with a band shell at one end, a nightclub at the other and a dance floor in the middle. A 1940 article in the Harrisburg Sunday Courier reported that the boat, which launched every year on Memorial Day, carried thousands of dancers up and down the Susquehanna during summer months.

According to anecdotes and newspaper archives, the boat was docked at the foot of Locust or Market streets. For a dime, revelers could dance the night away. The dance barge would go up to either Harris or Reily streets, a distance of about a mile, and float back. When the water was low, it instead would moor off of City Island. Smaller boats might drift closer to better hear the music, which would be provided by one of the fashionable orchestras in the area, led by the likes of Dan Gregory, Kay Kyser, Ted Brownagle or Red McCarthy.

Kansas City musician Andy Kirk described the experience of performing on the barge in his 1989 book “Twenty Years on Wheels.”

“On one of our dates, we were afloat,” he wrote. “We played on a barge, Reese’s [sic] Houseboat, on the Susquehanna River. We’d start at 8 o’clock in the evening, move out into midstream, then return at 9:30. We played at the pier before shoving off, and after coming to port while passengers came on and got off.”

Harrisburg danced on the river for several decades. Riest operated the barge until 1934. The USO took it over during World War II and ran a “floating club” at the foot of Locust Street each night, the Courier reported.

Riest, an avid riverman who sponsored the Kipona boat races for 25 years, died in 1940 at the age of 46.

“He was best known as the proprietor of the string of boathouses that remained docked along the riverfront off Locust Street throughout the summer months and for the operation until 1934 of a popular river dance boat,” The Evening News reported in his obituary. “The greater part of his life was spent on the river, and he was one of the originators of recreation on the Susquehanna.”

The boat is remembered fondly, if infrequently. The Dauphin County Historical Society’s records consist of a slim manila folder with five sheets of typing paper, and most memories are anecdotal.

Rabbi Carl Choper first heard about the dance barge from a 100-year-old woman in the course of his work as a chaplain at the Jewish Home of Greater Harrisburg.

“She started telling me about life for young people in the 1920s in Harrisburg,” Choper said.

She told him that the youth of the city would gather in Riverfront Park or at the three local dance halls: the Madrid, the Casino and the Coliseum.

At least one romance was kindled aboard the barge. Ken Frew, a historian at the Historical Society of Dauphin County, said his parents first noticed each other across the dance floor. His father was playing trumpet in the Dan Gregory band, and his mother was out dancing with her girlfriends. Later, they were introduced at one of the dance halls downtown.

Fae Morrison, 88, remembered only photos and her husband’s stories of playing the piano on the dance boat with his band, Al Morrison Music.

“I was a little girl at the time, and I knew there was a boat, but I wasn’t allowed to go. I was too young,” said Morrison, who said she was 10 or 12 at the time the boat was popular. She and Al, whom she describes as “one of Harrisburg’s favorites,” were married in the 1950s.

According to historian Erik Fasick’s recent book “Harrisburg and the Susquehanna River,” the barges also sometimes held events for children, including trips to the beaches on City Island and “kiddie hour dances.”

The early 20th century was a period of growth and development for Harrisburg’s riverfront, and Riest’s business sense served him well. The boat’s popularity coincided with city efforts to improve the steps at the foot of Locust Street and the walkways near the river, the Sunday Courier said.

The Susquehanna is still a focal point of recreation in Harrisburg. These days, however, sports—both individual and professional—hold sway over nightlife, making it difficult to believe that, for decades, an old coal barge carried happy dancers up and down the river.

Chasing Paper: When it comes to unearthing what happened, documents usually trump memories.

December 30, 2014 | by Paul Barker

A few months ago, I heard a kind of wild story.

I was talking to Keith Myers, a maintenance supervisor with the Harrisburg Housing Authority, in the parking lot between the Jackson Lick apartment towers and the public swimming pool that bears the same name.

Myers, a garrulous Harrisburg old-timer, was dishing out every anecdote he could think of about the pool, the subject of an article I was working on at the time. At some point, he coughed up a memory of an annual tradition under former Mayor Steve Reed, which involved the city dumping hundreds of striped bass in the pool for a kids’ fishing competition at the close of each summer.

Myers wasn’t sure when the tradition ended, but he thought it was only a few years ago. By that point, I’d been reporting on the city long enough to know that people’s recollections of the Reed years could be a bit hazy. I’ll occasionally come across old Reed memos which, if it weren’t for a date in the upper corner and some giveaway proper nouns, could have been written at any time since 1982. The courtly, typewritten prose, the mayor-for-life swagger, is present in every year.

But hundreds of fish in a public pool? If it had happened only a few years ago, I was sure I’d have heard about it already. I wanted the anecdote in my piece, but I didn’t trust Myers’ recall. Instead, I had to undertake my favorite task in reporting. I had to go find a record.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s James Steele and Donald Barlett are supposed to have talked about an investigative reporter’s “documents state of mind.” Unless you believe that officials will tell you the truth simply because you ask nicely, you had better know how to find a piece of paper that can substantiate (or challenge) their claims.

For example, there was a puzzling story last month about a few mounds of backfill that had been dumped on a vacant lot. The city said it was storing them there, which would seem to imply permission from the presumed landowner, the Harrisburg Redevelopment Authority. But the HRA director thought the land was owned by an L. J. Walker. A search through online property records cleared things up quickly. The lot comprised four parcels, with the mounds strewn across them, like a miniature mountain range. Walker did own one parcel—but HRA owned the other three.

From the vantage point of someone looking to tell a story, court documents are often the most valuable records. Civil complaints will methodically lay out the who, what, when and where of each local travesty—though you should always keep in mind whose interest the claims are serving. I tend to rely on court records for their attachments more than the complaints themselves.

Last fall, working on a story about the eviction of a nuisance business by an out-of-town landlord, I obtained a copy of the eviction complaint from the district court. It contained several interesting items, including a letter from neighbors fed up with the store and some time-stamped emails and notices tracing the landlord’s (rather sluggish) decision to evict. Later, when the landlord tried to distance himself from the story, I relied on business filings at two state departments to confirm he was bluffing: the “general partner” he said controlled the building was a Nevada corporation, registered under his name.

Building records are another treasure trove, although you have to tread carefully. The county has two online property records databases, and they don’t always agree. They also use different search functions. Your best bet, once you have a name, is the website of the county Recorder of Deeds, where you can pull up facsimiles of the original deeds and mortgages. These are authoritative when it comes to dates and names, although they only go back to 1979.

You can get older records at the courthouse, but for the really old stuff, I tend to seek expert advice. One source for which I am always grateful is the Dauphin County Historical Society, and particularly its librarian, Ken Frew. Membership in the society is very affordable ($35 a year) and grants access to invaluable resources. Earlier this year, I was one of several reporters following the story of a church collapse in south Harrisburg. The county database said the church had been built in 1900, but a visit to Frew quickly set me straight—lots of old buildings were supposedly “built” in that year, because past county assessors, lacking actual records, would simply write “1900” as a best guess.

Frew patiently led me through some old maps and newspapers, which suggested the building had been around since the 1870s. We never did find an exact date, but if the only product of a day’s record-mining is to substitute informed ignorance for uninformed certitude, it will have been worth the while.

An obsession with records can make a man aware of the paper he leaves behind. I once asked the city to send me its list of dog licenses. Not realizing dog names would be a part of it, I was amused to learn that counted among the local canine population are a William Wallace, a Cookie, a Cutter, a Merlin, a Zeus Ellington, and an Oliver Fernando.

One key to an effective use of records is to remember what they can never do as well as people, which is tell a story. My search for the pool fish wound up being brief—it only took a few tries with key words in Google to produce a city press release from 2006. The release had some useful figures, but the real gold was the name of the local fishing club that had co-sponsored the event. I found a phone number and eventually wound up speaking with the club’s president, who was able to provide me with firsthand recollections. Sometimes what you really want is a quote on the record, but you often need a record to get it.

TheBurg Podcast, Sept. 26, 2014

September 26, 2014 | by Admin

Welcome to TheBurg Podcast, a weekly roundup of news in and around Harrisburg.

Sept. 26, 2014: The Broad Street Market, which marks the 150th anniversary of its opening on Nov. 1, was the subject of a tense exchange this week in city council chambers. In this podcast, senior writer Paul Barker interviews Ken Frew, the author of “Building Harrisburg: The Architects and Builders, 1719-1941.” Ken’s piece about the history of the Broad Street Market, “Market Milestone,” will appear in the October issue of TheBurg.

The Great Divide: Forster Street: a road that splits Harrisburg.

February 22, 2012 | by Lawrance Binda and Peter Durantine

In 1891, Harrisburg’s Mulberry Street Bridge opened, linking Allison Hill with downtown and the rest of the city. The bridge was hailed as a unifier, pulling people closer to each other.

When another bridge, the M. Harvey Taylor Memorial Bridge opened in 1951, requiring tree-lined Forster Street to be widened into a highway, there was no such accolade. Even today, there is dismay with what happened to Forster Street, which now has four through lanes and multiple turning lanes.

“It cut the heart out of the city,” said Ken Frew, city historian and librarian for the Dauphin County Historical Society.

The decline of Forster Street began in the 1940s, when state and local governments began pushing for another span across the Susquehanna.

Originally, the bridge was to be built farther uptown, but Harrisburg political boss Harvey Taylor wanted his namesake bridge in a more prominent location, closer to the Capitol and downtown, according to Jackson Taylor, author of the historical novel set in Harrisburg, “The Blue Orchard.”

So, in the early 1950s, a long line of houses, shops and other buildings was leveled, from Riverfront Park to N. 7th Street.

While benefiting suburban developers and commuters, the widening did damage to the city itself. It made a once-quaint, residential Forster Street into an asphalt wasteland–a congested, noisy street that no one wanted to live on any longer. Soon, the street took on the look of desolation and even danger.

To save as many buildings as possible on the south side of the street, sidewalks were narrowed, making walking in some areas nearly impossible. And then entire swaths of houses were razed for parking lots, while billboards sprung up.

The ugly, harsh state buildings that rose near the Capitol, several built in the stark concrete “brutalist” style common in the 1950s through the ’70s, furthered Forster’s transformation from quaint to forbidding.

Then there was the effect on Midtown.

Before the Forster Street expansion, downtown and Midtown flowed together as an integrated urban community. Afterwards, the residential portion of downtown, accessible to the Capitol and the business district, remained vibrant, while Midtown began to fall apart.

“I think that was one of the most divisive things things that ever happened to this city,” said Frew.

In the early ’90s, there were various city improvement groups that looked at ways to re-connect Midtown to downtown, with ideas such as building pedestrian walkways under and over Forster Street.

“How do we bridge the divide?” said David Morrison, president of Historic Harrisburg Association, who has long been involved in city improvement efforts.

No idea, through, seemed satisfactory. Meanwhile, a renaissance of sorts brought a flourish of new restaurants downtown, particularly along N. 2nd Street, further deepening the divide between Midtown and downtown, Morrison said.

Morrison and Frew are not alone in their assessment. Many, if not most, of the city’s residents and visitors share a critical opinion of Forster Street.

In 1998, Harrisburg Young Professionals, working with PennDOT, took the first steps to try to improve the road. It adopted Forster, planting trees and landscaping the median strip, an effort that continues today.

Bradley Jones, an HYP member at the time who helped initiate the tree-planting, said the sense among the membership was that something needed to be done to make the street less “a harsh sort of roadway barrier between Midtown and downtown.”

The HYP efforts have helped, as Forster, softened up by plantings and regular maintenance, is more pleasant today.

“Now when you come into the city, it’s an attractive boulevard,” said Jones, vice president of community development for Harristown Enterprises.

Landscaping, though, can only do so much. It can’t eliminate the cars whizzing by at high speed that make the street difficult to cross or the abandoned, industrial feel that permeates the entire stretch of road.

Today, there is no plan for Forster Street other than to maintain its surface and HYP’s landscaping. The roadway continues to interrupt the flow of the city.

At the time of the Harvey Taylor/Forster Street project, local and state officials praised it for connecting downtown with the West Shore, allowing commuter traffic fast, easy access to and from the Capitol complex.

However, it had the unintended consequence of dividing the city itself, a division that many believe Harrisburg has never recovered from.

Tag Archives: Ken Frew

Up by the Riverside: A close-knit community celebrates 100 years as part of Harrisburg.

You May Also Like

Long-time Art Association of Harrisburg leader to retire; board names local gallery owner as new president

Summer concerts return to Market Square, with special focus for America 250

Italian Lake concerts to return to Harrisburg for the summer

Denim Coffee to open third downtown Harrisburg location next week

River Dance: There was a time when Harrisburg tripped the barge fantastic.

You May Also Like

Long-time Art Association of Harrisburg leader to retire; board names local gallery owner as new president

Harrisburg Arts District adds new map destinations ahead of summer

Summer concerts return to Market Square, with special focus for America 250

Italian Lake concerts to return to Harrisburg for the summer

Chasing Paper: When it comes to unearthing what happened, documents usually trump memories.

You May Also Like

Long-time Art Association of Harrisburg leader to retire; board names local gallery owner as new president

Harrisburg Arts District adds new map destinations ahead of summer

Summer concerts return to Market Square, with special focus for America 250

Italian Lake concerts to return to Harrisburg for the summer

TheBurg Podcast, Sept. 26, 2014

You May Also Like

Weekend Roundup with Sara Bozich

Bob’s Art Blog: May June Begin?

Burg View: Green Shoots Downtown

Weekend Roundup with Sara Bozich

The Great Divide: Forster Street: a road that splits Harrisburg.

You May Also Like

Long-time Art Association of Harrisburg leader to retire; board names local gallery owner as new president

Summer concerts return to Market Square, with special focus for America 250

Italian Lake concerts to return to Harrisburg for the summer

Denim Coffee to open third downtown Harrisburg location next week