Vern McKissick
This month, TheBurg introduces “The Rebuilders,” an occasional series of interviews with people who have contributed to the reconstruction of the city.
Our first interview is with Vern McKissick, founder of McKissick Associates Architects. McKissick has designed several important buildings in Harrisburg, including the National Civil War Museum and, more recently, the Capitol View Commerce Center. We sat down to talk in the building where he works and lives at 317 N. Front St. The complete interview follows.
TheBurg: Tell me a bit about your background.
My wife and I moved here in ’93. Interestingly enough, we tried to buy this building. I was with an architecture firm that was two doors up the street. They had purchased the old Lawrie and Green. Lawrie and Green locally had done the State Museum, the YWCA, the courthouse, Strawberry Square, you name it.
So, it was kind of intriguing. We were in the State College area, moved down. When we decided to move, we expected to be dead in six months.
TheBurg: Why was that?
My earliest memories—my father was a school superintendent and, in those days, before computers, they would have them all come down here every month or two months for meetings at the Department of Ed. And, sometimes, we’d come down with my mother, and one of my earliest memories was being hunkered down on what I now know to be 2nd Street outside of what was then the Harris Savings Bank while the cops were leaning over the back of the car during a bank robbery. So, this was my sense of Harrisburg (laughs). This was in the ‘70s. So, I thought, well, OK, we’ll go down there and be dead in six months.
TheBurg: A lot of people still think that, and I continually write about how ridiculous this is.
That’s like my mother-in-law because when we first moved down, our home sale fell through at the last minute in Boalsburg. They wanted me down here at the office, so we took the caretaker’s place two doors up the street for about five months downtown. And her mother was convinced we would be dead. She begged me not to do this. So, that was my introduction to Front Street.
TheBurg: You didn’t die, as it turned out.
Apparently not.
We tried to buy this building. It was abandoned at the time. The homeless were living in it. It was placarded for demolition. We tried to buy it, and they turned down our offer. So, we went up to Bellevue Park and bought a place up there and lived there for awhile.
TheBurg: You tried to buy it as your home?
Yes, we tried to buy it as our home back then. My office was two doors up the street, so I watched it. And I saw the fires that happened here and all the things. So, it was kind of disappointing for years and years and, finally, in ’99, [former Lieut. Gov.] Mark Singel bought this place and started renovating it. So, when we had a chance in 2003, we met him, we said, “Hey, I’ll finish it. Let me take it over from you.” But it took us years to get here.
We’ve been on Front Street . . . my office was there when we started the new practice. We were with Hayes Large Architects. I was one of five partners. We were eight offices and 180 people and an airplane and all the rest of that jazz—very high corporate, tightly wound kind of a place. We wanted to do something different.
My wife is an architect by training. We met at Penn State. She left the firm. When she wanted to become a partner, they said, “Oh, well you shouldn’t be a wife or kin.” So, she stated a small graphics company and ended up morphing into a commitment where she was the initial webmaster for MapQuest down in Lancaster. So, when MapQuest in ’99, when AOL bought them out for $1 billion, we cashed the stock options and said, “You know, I really don’t need all this headache. Let’s do something on our own.” So, we walked down the street and leased an office in a historic building of St. Stephen’s. So, we’re back down on Front Street. My mother-in-law still expected us to be dead in six months. I’ve had 20 years on Front Street at this point.
It’s the greatest place to be in the world. There’s no place better I’ve been—the view and the park and the activities and the fireworks. And I can walk to a hardware store, and I can walk to the bank, and I walk to my accountant. It’s just bizarre. It’s like a small town, but it isn’t. So, we see a lot of things being down here. I probably have one of the most prolific numbers on 9-1-1. Other people just look past it, but I call. They say, “Oh, it’s you again. What is it this time?” But we have a responsibility, and I try to live up to it.”
But we’ve never had a problem in all the years. You just live smart. You don’t do stupid stuff—stagger around drunk at 2 in the morning. I don’t care if you’re in State College or Boston, you’re going to have a problem.
I’ve become a real big booster on Harrisburg. Once you get off the beltway and see that there’s actually an old city underneath, it’s got a lot of charm and a lot of potential. We’re both from small towns. So, we found that actually Harrisburg, once you get into it, is a lot like that. There’s only—there’s a small group of very active people, and you can get to know who they are. And it’s very transient because people do come into the area, it’s not like going to Pittsburgh, where, if you’re not a Mellon or a five-generation family, you can’t get involved or do things.
We do a lot of work out of the area because there’s just not much happening in Harrisburg per se. We’re out in Johnstown and Erie and Pittsburgh, and we have an office and home down in Winston-Salem, N.C., which is interesting for us because it’s the same size metropolitan area. It had the same kind of challenge because RJR shut down. But their response to it is a $1 billion in infrastructure improvement, and they now have a biotechnology center, a medical school downtown, 10,000 new residents and loft apartments that have been converted from the old warehouses and things. And it’s just interesting to see how two different communities dealt with adversity. If the state left [Harrisburg] tomorrow, I don’t know what we’d do. I just can’t imagine anyone having the vision to do anything with it. But, along the way, I had the chance to do the Civil War Museum with [former mayor] Steve Reed, back in the day, and that was very interesting. View from the inside-out.
TheBurg: I bet it was.
We reopened Pennsylvania Place when it was abandoned. We worked with that one. We did St. Stephen’s, converted the old parking garage into the first LEED-rated religious school in the country, which is kind of neat, taking an 1845 mansion and a 1922 parking garage and saying we’ll make a school out of it. There have been some challenges. But, like I say, we mostly work in small towns: Wellsboro and Williamsport and Sunbury and Milton and Selinsgrove and Bedford.
TheBurg: What was your first significant project in Harrisburg?
Our first significant project in the city was the Civil War Museum. We moved here in ’93, still did a lot of work in New York and Virginia. But that was interesting. It was a design competition, and we were short-listed as one of three, and Steve Reed had very definite ideas on what he thought the solution should be.
TheBurg: That’s not surprising.
It was his solution, and, basically, it was a small building down by the amphitheater. We came up with some illuminated, like kind of tents. It looked like an encampment type of thing. I didn’t like it. So, we had a model about half the size of this table. I said, “You know, I’m going to win this thing.” So, we built the model so that the top lifted up. It was the whole Reservoir Park. At the time, there was a circle at the top of the hill, where everyone used to go to drain their motor oil. People were upset because we took away the drains where they had drained their oil into. It was a great mix with the reservoirs being up there.
When we got down, I said, “Do you have five more minutes?” He said, “Yeah, all right.” I had staged four people in the next room, and I had them come in. They came in and lifted the top of the model off, walked out of the room, brought in a model to put the building on top of the hill, used the circumference of the old drive as the circle for the atrium. Reed took a look at it and said, “That doesn’t match anything I asked you for. I love it.” It goes back to the fact that nobody knows what they want until they see it sometimes.
So, we got to work on that project over the years. It was interesting because when we first started working on it, we had a budget of $6 million. He said, “That’s not big enough. How big do you want it?” He said, “What if I give you another $1 million?” He came back. “That’s still not big enough. What if I gave you $2 more million?” It finally got big enough at like 16. I said, “OK.”
The most amazing thing with that project was the day I had to tell him it was in Susquehanna Township. Everyone in the city had thought, until that time, that Reservoir Park was in the city. Actually, two-thirds of it is in Susquehanna Township. So, Steve got a little worked up and had a bit of a panic attack. We started to look at other sites, like down at where the post office is here. We were moving the museum there. I took it upon myself to call the supervisor of Susquehanna Township and said, “Can I come and meet with you?” I’m not authorized to do this. I went into them and talked and explained what we were doing. At the end of the day, they said, “You know what: as long as you redirect all the water into the city, the storm water into the city, you close all the roads that connect to our township coming out of the park, we’ll waive all of our land development rights and give everything back to the city, and you do whatever you want.”
So, I walked back to Steve Reed and said, “Guess what I just figured out?” He said, “You did what? Oh, I guess we could do that.” But, until then, the project was cancelled. It couldn’t be there because it was in the township. So that was a fun project. Then we documented the construction and did the brochures when it opened. They hadn’t thought about the fact they needed printed material and so on and so forth when they opened. So, we found a printer a week before it was due to open. We picked up the brochures wet from the printer, folded them in the back of car in my tux and her gown, just so there would be something in there when it opened. It went on. We did the business plan. We did all the curatorial stuff. So, I touched everything that was in it.
And I could have told you that two-thirds of the stuff was Western, because he was doing a Western museum until he found out that [former Gov.] Ridge liked Civil War. So, [Reed] just said, “I’ll just take this chunk of my history, which together was 1800 to 1890 or whatever, and I’ll make that a separate museum.”
So, we brought in the folks from the Tennessee State Museum, their director. We brought in grad students in curatorial studies to separate everything out, and we set up this big room at the sewage treatment plant, of all places, about the size of a gymnasium. And we put a rope down the middle, and then we started bringing in all this stuff from all the rooms, all over the city, because all we had was a list. We had no idea what we had. So, you’d open the boxes. By the time we were done, we had pushed the aisle all the way over here, because we had this much Civil War and this much Western stuff. So, it was just an amazing view for me on the inside of all of that.
TheBurg: His original plan was the Wild West Museum?
That was his passion. The Civil War was just a breakout. And one of the frustrating things with the Civil War Museum was—and I appreciate what Eric is trying to do over here—but when the first reaction was, “Well, we’re not getting our money’s worth out of the museum,” the reality was the state paid for the entire museum. Even though it was a $34 million project, the other $17 million was all pledged value of the park. The Parking Authority actually built all the roads and the parking lot. So, there is no cash value to the city in the building. So, the city is not paying. It’s not out anything.
TheBurg: It’s on the hook to maintain the building.
But my sense, mostly they’ve been doing their own maintenance. I mean, the city never really stepped up.
TheBurg: They want to bill the city for some of their maintenance.
And that was the original agreement. What was interesting was we did the financial analysis, and what actually happened was exactly what was predicted. We had to go into the governor’s office, and we presented all the data. We predicted it would be, I think, 119,000 visitors and it would drop to 80 and 69, and it would stabilize to around 43,000 over time. We’ve actually stabilized a couple thousand higher than that, which is exactly what we thought.
The whole thing was designed as an event location. That’s why so much focus was on the ballroom and all the rest of it, because we knew it would never do more than 25 percent of its money from gate receipts.
We had good people [working on the museum]. We had Avi Decter help us with the exhibit design. He had just finished the Holocaust Museum in DC. We brought in Ueland Junker Nicholson out of Philly. They did they Constitution Center as our equipment and our space and museum planners. So, we had good people.
They [the Reed administration] kept talking about, “We have this $3.5 million.” We have this great deal that John Levenda had put together with Coca-Cola, a big sponsorship. And that’s why I was folding brochures on the day it opened, because it turned out it wasn’t $3.5 million in cash. It was $3.5 million with pictures of the Civil War Museum on the side of soda cans. It was equivalent advertising, but it wasn’t the cash that everyone thought we were getting to open. So, they’ve always been missing a chunk of money. It was never there when it opened. I think that’s the single greatest downfall.
TheBurg: That seems to be a very significant misunderstanding.
Yeah. It’s a shame, but I think the building is solid. We built it to last forever. I don’t know if people know it, but it was one of the first uses of underground ice for cooling. We have ice tanks under the outside parking lots. We make ice during the night and melt it during the day. We had the Smithsonian Institution help us design the exhibit spaces.
One of the things they did, though, and I’m getting is off-topic: After I left and went to the new practice, they came back and chopped up the display space. It was designed exactly to Smithsonian standards for rotating exhibits. They chopped up the first floor and put in a little gallery and a coatroom. And now it was no longer large enough to get the rotating exhibits.
My wife and I have been active. We’ve been 20 years in the city. She was on the HARB board for about 14 or 15 years. She was the chair for a number of years. I’m still on the planning commission, now 18 years, I guess. I’m on the steering committee we’re getting our comprehensive plan consultant selected and getting that all moving, after that debacle. So, it’s good to see it circle back and trying to do it right. At least we have a new zoning code. We brought that to completion three different times. With all the good input, we made it the best it could be, given the resources we had available to us. It always got blocked by real estate people in town, and they would lobby against it. The fact that Eric was able to slide it through at the particular time he was, because we were dealing with a 50-year-old zoning code. So, at least, I feel we did something.
We were trying to find a decent compromise. The goal behind a zoning code is both to protect, but also to encourage future development. And one of the big things that I was very involved in with pushing for was for the riverfront zoning to change. This was all SPD before, and it was very restrictive. Now, opening it up a little bit. We don’t want a bunch of McDonald’s up here, because you can look further up Front Street and see what happened before we had a zoning back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But we’re starting to see some investment and some things starting to happen on Front Street.
This building is a challenge. We live here, and it’s our office. It’s 26-feet wide. It’s almost 10,000 square feet, but you can’t rent space above the second floor without an elevator. In the historic mode, every floor staggers. So, we can put an elevator in for $300,000, but there’s just not a return. So, we found the sweet spot. I pay my $26,000 a year in property tax and smile. I kind of expect I should have—the racers at least get their decal on the car—Pennzoil and the like. I’d like to see some city people with my logo on them or something. But it’s worked for us, but it’s a strange existence. People look at us and say, “You do what?” Well, yes, we do.
TheBurg: So, you fought for this new zoning code for all these years, what do you think that brings to the city?
I think it brings a new place to start the discussion. The old one was so outmoded, it didn’t even represent the society that we have today. At least we have a new basis. At the next planning commission meeting, we have five or six adjustments that people have requested already coming in. At least we can evaluate them based on something that’s remotely valuable. The thing for developers: they have to know what the ground rules are. It just didn’t represent anything that anybody could really get their arms around. The biggest challenge we have right now is this whole parking thing because the way it’s been interpreted and the way it works, it actually gives them the ability to supersede the zoning code. If somebody wanted to come into town at this point, like another Pennsylvania National, these guys have to agree to let you do it even if you want to build your own parking lot. That crosses so many lines. I’m not sure it’s legal, and I think there will be some great challenges some day. But, right now, it’s just another nail in the coffin of development in the city, on a major scale. I don’t think it affects the little guy terribly. But it’s just an erosion; it crosses so many lines. I don’t think that dust has settled.
The thing is: with that whole incinerator deal—there’s not been any discussion over what really went wrong, which is that they had a lawyer’s opinion that said you don’t need bonding. And the company failed at what they did and went bankrupt. I’ve never had a public project that I’ve never had bonding required on, even quasi-public, because you want that insurance. Sure, you pay 2 percent or 3 percent more, but, golly, that would have been the best 3 percent the city ever spent back in the day. And it all just came apart from there.
Steve Reed was a genius—he and Milt Lopus—when they came up with the scheme to do the hydro-dam out here, and then get the Sierra Club to fight them in court for 20 years. And, by the way, it was early enough that you could arbitrage the interest, which you can’t do. They changed the laws after that. That spun off all the money he used to start developing the city: the money for City Island and the money this and that. The stuff he did, even the Hilton—that was that little mayor’s special…. That all really wasn’t city money. It was all creative financing because of the hydro-dam that never went through. People miss that kind of genius, and we need that kind of genius if we’re going to dig out of this hole. That punitive: “You guys are from Harrisburg, you should be punished approach to what we’ve been hit with.”
TheBurg: It seems to me that Steve Reed became a bit too confident in his ability to do things.
I think he ran out of energy, became 50 years old. He was 50 years old when the museum opened. It just seemed like, after that, there just wasn’t the drive there had been. If you were here during the ‘90s, before we moved down here, you’d read about Steve Reed atop of the fire truck. He even had an unmarked police car and started doing his own arrests, traffic stops.
TheBurg: He seemed to have no distance anymore between Harrisburg and himself and Harrisburg and taxpayer money and himself.
The methods you can argue with. There was a line, and he was always standing on it. The goal, I think, was desirable. I don’t think we’ve ever found any offshore accounts with Steve Reed’s money in it, not like Chicago or some other places around the country. He just had a vision that he wanted to see manifested.
TheBurg: It’s fine to have a vision, but you have to be able to afford that vision. You just can’t constantly think, “Oh, I’m going to have some money going in from somewhere” and then start scheming over how to bring that money in.
I thought the recovery plan might have made more sense had we had looked at dissolving the school district and assigning different parts of the city to adjacent school districts like Wilmington did. There’s no Wilmington city school district in Delaware because you reach a point where you can’t deliver when you’ve concentrated things. Of course, that was white flight and everything, long before I was born, they built the Brittany White Bridge to Camp Hill, and that was the end of it.
It’s a weird area because I can see out the window, half the population. But because of that, we have one small Wegman’s. We don’t have one big Wegman’s. We have three Home Depots. You have to duplicate everything because the market is so fragmented. We don’t have any of the more upscale things or more variety like a Trader Joe’s, that kind of stuff. I look at Winston-Salem again: same size town, same demographic. But it’s a county system. You see it down south. Once once you get sewer, once you get water and you want fire protection or whatever it is, they annex you. You become part of the city. So, you can’t move far enough out to not be part of the solution. You have to stay engaged. Here, you drive a mile, you’re in your own world, and we’re left to our own devices on the East Shore.
If I walk out my front door, there are 26 municipalities in a five-mile radius, maybe 24 now that Fairview went away. Pennsylvania is just so fractionalized, and I see that everyplace we go, whether it’s Altoona or Johnstown. We’re doing a lot of work up there with school systems. People, you’ve got limited resources. You need to cooperate. And we don’t have that, and I don’t know how to force it.
TheBurg: I don’t know how you do that, because it’s the system is just built that way. Everyone is invested in the status quo, and no one wants to give up what they have.
We see that everywhere we go, all these communities we deal with. It’s frustrating. There’s a great life to be had here, but we have to get out of our own way. I think we’re in a kind of caretaker situation right now with regard to governance. I was never more disappointed to see Council fall back into its old ways, with Eric’s first budget. If he wants a sustainability director, and he can cut three positions and move the money around, why not? What the hell is it going to hurt?
I was in Portland, Ore., spent two weeks there. Trolley cars everywhere and development and people and mixed income levels. You go there, and it’s an architect’s dream. It’s what our zoning codes and all the green design standards and everything—they’re doing it. So, it can be done. If you look at pictures of there in the ‘70s, it was a pretty decrepit place. They had fallen on their face because they lost industry and transportation had changed because they used to barge up the river, and nobody was doing that anymore.
TheBurg: They totally remade themselves.
So, it can be done. I even look at Winston with its problems, Winston-Salem. They lost 18,000 jobs with RJR, which basically ran their town. Then, with the tobacco settlement, they said, “We’ll show you. We’re going to make ourselves efficient enough to be able to pay off that big multi-billion-dollar settlement. How do we do that? We ship everything overseas to produce it.” So they fired all the American people and left a hole in the middle of the city.
TheBurg: I’ve found, in many cases, the council asserts power because it can.
A plan executed is better than no plan at all because you can always adjust the course. But to sit there doing nothing because it might be the wrong thing or might not be as perfect as some other idea.
From a development standpoint, we tried to make developments work for many different projects in this city. Once LERTA went away, we couldn’t make the numbers work. I looked actually at Stokes Millworks. We had that under contract at one point. But I was looking at $48,000 in taxes the first year it was done. Really? So, now I’m down in Chambersburg. We bought the old Central Junior High School down there, 120,000 square feet, and I have a five-year tax abatement. It’s not great, but it’s something. It’s an historic structure, which is where they put their tax abatement. So, they weren’t talking about building new stuff. But, down there, they’ve been tremendous to work with. It’s a world of difference.
TheBurg: What else in Harrisburg have you been involved with?
We did St. Stephen’s, which was one of the first green projects in the area and the region. It won a number of awards. We’ve done some smaller redevelopment things like the AFL headquarters down here next to the Firehouse (restaurant). They cut the budget halfway through, and we had to cancel the new windows. We had them under production. What a shame. The history to that building is just phenomenal. We’ve done things with Volunteers of America. The city was just a very insular culture, and there wasn’t much that happened here. You can look at the list of really what’s happened, other than what WCI has been able to do. Dan Deitchman did some things, but he’s picked up his marbles now and kind of headed to State College. Harrisburg University—we did some very early conception planning for that. We were going to put it in the post office before they decided to go $60 million in the air.
TheBurg: Let’s talk about the Capitol View Commerce Center.
I never thought I’d see that. I’d reached the point where I expected to see demolition.
TheBurg: I didn’t even know it would be savable, since it was exposed to the elements for years.
If you can buy $9 million of the infrastructure for $250,000, it’s an amazingly cheap deal. I looked at it for a number of different folks, but the problem was you had to have a deep-pocketed person to do it, because no bank was going to finance you. And John [Moran] has millions of square feet of logistics space at 80 and 15 in Berwick and that whole zone.
But, yeah, that was one of the more exciting projects for us because it was a chance to remake 3,200 feet of Cameron Street. That was a brownfield, Harrisburg Steel. The things we had to solve to make it work: poor soils, contamination on the site. There was a nasty treatment plant that we had to rebuild it brand new, which we did, down near the stream. We had to blow the old one up, build a new one, do the EPA and all that fun stuff. Then, of course, they shut down anyhow.
When David Dodd first came up with the idea of the project, it was very entrancing because his model was that he had a printing operation that he had started in the city, moved out to Penbrook and grew it up to 100 employees. It was a pretty good business. So, he wanted a facility expanded, too. We designed it with a rooftop play yard for daycare. It was to be provided on site. The main part of the building was actually a building that was designed by John Vartan. He had actually made the pieces before he died. They were sitting out where Giant is on Linglestown Road. That was his pre-casting plant, and he had a big supply store, Vartan Supply. So, when he died, about the time we were doing this, we knew that nobody was picking up the casting yard or anything like that. But he had built this building to go up near where his son built the facility there. It was to fill a whole block. It was a four-story building with two stories of parking underneath.
TheBurg: At 6th Street?
Yeah. So, the pieces in here were actually for the other building. So, we directed David to talk to him and see if we could pick these up on a whim. At the time, they were worried about what to do with all of this pre-cast because they were going to build Giant and the mall in there. So, he paid pennies on the dollar to get it. So, we designed it around these pre-cast T’s, what had been a building that was to be elsewhere in the city. Then David’s concept, and I think it was still valid: What is Harrisburg missing that every other northeastern city has? Old industrial lofts. There just was no incubator space. Well, there are a few trashy little buildings. And there were more, but they all burned down up in Allison Hill in a huge, like 12-alarm fire back in the late ‘70s. We lost a lot of it. So, the idea was to design space that easily could be incubator, very industrial lofty, which is what the high-rise building was. So, that sat over top of over the first floor, and that first floor, where there’s a little bit of a notch, like a porch, was going to be like retail showrooms, like furniture showrooms, because there are 30,000 cars a day that park there. Lit up at night, looking in those windows, you could sell cars, you could sell furniture, do whatever. All the parking was going to be below grade. That’s how we dealt with flood plain.
Now, it’s a little different than what we had visualized. We got a grant from Chesapeake Bay Foundation to do a riparian buffer along the whole length of the site. We were going to restore the stream edge and all that. There was a lot of good stuff happening. David was just always looking for another way to do it, a cheaper way, and the reality was that the building had an 800-pounds-per-square-foot floor load because of these paper rolls for printing, and they were being stacked stories high. And we had muck on the site down to about 17 feet. So, we played around with all kinds of densification systems. We said: Just put the piles in and be done with it. And, after a year, that’s what he did. Had he gone ahead and not fooled around, the building would have been done before the real estate crunch, and I think it would have been a successful project. He got himself in a hole and then started playing cute games with it.
We originally started with a construction manager, and they somehow had a falling out. So, he decided to take on one fellow who was qualified. That guy came down with cancer and was down at Johns Hopkins. So, they said: I’ve got this good guy who runs my printing line. I’m going to put him in charge. And I’ve got this other great idea: I’m just going to hire workers off of the union bench. I’m not going to have contractors anymore. That’s when he started getting into a whole world of trouble. I was actually sitting in a meeting. We were on site once a month to try to answer some questions, and he was late. The sprinkler guy was there; the window guy was there; the HVAC guy was there. And I was $75,000 in the hole because he hadn’t paid me. He came up with all these excuses, like the city wasn’t processing the paperwork and da-da-da-da-da-da. And one guy started talking, and they all realized they were getting the same story, and the whole job shut down the next day. The lights went on. I was right there when the light bulbs went on.
Then we came back and tried to bring the project back to life. There was a developer, White Acres Equities. He was actually one of the people who was vying at one point to privatize the parking system. It was basically money from Hong Kong. It was Jacob Frydman. So, we redesigned the whole thing as an upscale retail and office complex. So, he had been promised a lease from the state. They had a lease out for a major block of space. We had prepared new renderings and reworked the whole thing. All of a sudden, one day, he calls and says, “We’re done.” I said, “Why’s that?” He said that the county commissioners got involved, and they had the lease yanked and assigned to Forum Place. They were upside-down on Forum Place because they had paid like $30 million for a building they should have paid $5 million for.
So, whenever anybody looks at David Dodd and this project, there were some other hands involved in bringing it to where it was. It wasn’t just him. But that never gets talked about.
TheBurg: How did your firm get involved to be the architect of this?
We actually knew the surveyor. Dodd had said, “I want to maybe put up a metal building to build a printing plant.” This fellow thought maybe he wanted to do something green, and he knew we had done St. Stephen’s. So, the surveyor called and said, “Do you want to sit down and maybe do some sketches? This guy thinks he wants to do something green.” So, we ended up, one thing led to another, and David spun this story with 13 funding sources from HUD, the state, the feds. He had everyone under the sun. It sounded great. He was a hell of a salesman. I just never visualized that that pre-cast that we helped him buy, he was selling back to himself at full value and putting the money in his pocket. We thought the money was being used to cover a shortfall because it was bad soil, the foundations. We knew it was an expensive building, etc., and it all made sense. We actually had gone to open bid to keep it all legal and open. We had done a full-bid package for the pre-cast. It went out. At the time, the pre-cast was running a 24- to 30-month delay. This was gangbusters in 2006. So, we bid it once and didn’t get any bids. We bid it a second time, we got one bid at like $8 million or some, and it should have been $4 million. We knew that David had the chance to buy this pre-cast, and he got a ruling from the city solicitor. He said, well, if you bid it twice and can’t get anybody to supply on it, then you can self-supply. OK, that makes sense. He paid $1 million for all this pre-cast, and it was worth $4 million. This works. Never thought anything about it. Then I find out there ‘s a shoebox in his closet. But I donated $75,000 to make it a prettier intersection. That’s how I look at it. For me, it was frustrating. For a number of years, I was chair of the DGS Selection Committee. I was appointed by Rendell to select architects and designers. I had to go by there. I reached a point that I would drive out of my way. I just couldn’t look at it.
The thing was—they were so close. They had the roof on, but they had the roof membrane laid over the outside with timbers weighing it down because they figured they’d be back the next day to finish. It was one of those things where they had all the doors in but one. The elevator was sitting there in a crate. Most of the building that they hadn’t put up was lying there in boxes. They got so close. But the other thing that screwed them was the bank at the time. The bank got bought and got bought and got bought about the time this went south, and no one was managing the portfolio. As a result, they should have invested about $350,000 to seal the building, the perimeter, finish the membranes. But, because they didn’t, water got inside. We had mold growth through everything.
Even a year after the building was abandoned, we went in with a couple of people who wanted to look at possibly buying it. We walked through it. And I said, “Wow. Nobody’s touched this.” The lights were on. Nobody had turned the light switch off. But, one day, the bank got this brilliant idea. He had all this printing equipment he had purchased and all this paint and barrels of spackle, machines, etc. “We’re going to have an auction.” Let’s bring the community in, and we’re going to get some money back. So, they brought everybody in and had an auction. They raised something, but not much. So, I’m back three months later with another tenant, and, by then, someone had gone through with chainsaws. Whole floors were covered with confetti. That was when they had gone through the building and stripped all the insulation off the copper wire. There was a $500,000 chiller plant sitting up on the roof. They went in and tore off all of the insides, probably got $100 worth of copper. But they broke open walls to take the plumbing piping out. It had been destroyed. I estimate they destroyed $4 to $5 million worth of value. The bank just had to put a night watchman on for what $50,000 a year for two years. That’s what took it to the really abandoned condition. We had the heat pumps installed throughout the building. All the plumbing was installed, thinking it was going to be done in four months.
You want to talk about anatomy of a disaster? The thing just never wanted to happen. First you get started with it, and David does it to himself with fooling around with the foundations, and it slides into a bad economy. Then you get another developer with pockets to join him—Frydman—and the county commissioners get involved and fool around with the state lease that was available. Then it’s still salvageable, and the bank gets this brilliant idea to have an auction. And they say: “Hey, by the way, why doesn’t everybody in town come in and see what you can steal, because this place is wide open?” Then it just sat there and sat there and sat there. So, when John bought it, we had a model. I called him up, and we gave him the model.
They followed our design to a tee. When I saw it, I said, “Wow.” I’m happy because it’s 230,000 square feet of mixed-use, flexible space. He’s bringing jobs into the city, which it was intended to be. But I don’t know he has much tenancy for the upper buildings. His model was to complete the outside and then wait because it worked financially just to get the warehouses up for what he paid for it.
It’s a design from 10 years ago. I was looking at my files, and the design is from November 2004. It’s like you’re seeing something from the past. Ten years is a long time in design.
TheBurg: I was surprised when I found out they could use what had been already constructed. I assumed it would not be savable.
The saving grace for us is that we had those pre-cast T-s, because those same pre-cast T-s are what’s used to build bridges. Bridges sit out in the environment. The Susquehanna River will have eaten the whole city of Harrisburg, and that thing will be standing in the middle in 500 year or 1,000 years, and people will say, “What the hell was that?” It’s just that well anchored and that heavily designed. It’s built. It was just a freak. In normal conditions, it would have been torn down. I’m waiting to see the first helicopter.
TheBurg: Some of these projects, like this one and The Millworks, are dependent upon people with very deep pockets to come in and save these buildings.
It’s like the patrons of old, like the Medicis in Florence.
TheBurg: In some way, they’re making an uneconomic decision. Sure, they hope for a return, but this is almost a decision outside of sheer economics. It needs people who have another mission that’s not always the bottom line.
And, once upon a time, in our communities in Pennsylvania, banks would support it because they were local. But how many banks now are headquartered in Harrisburg? They’re all part of someone else. There’s nobody here. So, who has the local interest? In some small towns, there are still some small local banks, but not many around the state. Those are the people sitting around saying, “You know, it may not make sense to lend money to that department store. You know, I’ll probably break even on it. But at least I’ll have a department store, and the three buildings on either side of it won’t go empty because it’s there.” Those kinds of decision are lacking because we don’t have locally vested people. You have to have someone who is locally motivated. Then the only person left is government.
