The Future of Downtown Harrisburg

Daubenspeck — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:51:12 +0000

In 1943, Winston Churchill had to make a decision. He could choose to rebuild the House of Commons and recoup the dignity of his people, or raze the ground where the building fell and keep the countrymen down.

He chose the former. And now Eric Papenfuse of Harrisburg, PA is taking a cue from old Winston.

On the day his used bookshop, the Midtown Scholar, officially closed on Reily Street, Eric invited me over for a tour of the new construction site at Fissel’s Antique Department Store—one of the oldest buildings in the city, across from the Broad Street Market– where he plans to open the first coffeeshop, bookstore, and public venue in midtown Harrisburg by the end of 2008.

For a man with such a big plan, Eric is surprisingly cordial. He shakes my hand and talks effusively on our way up to the second floor veranda of Fissel’s—the open space which will become outdoor seating for an upstairs café. On my tape recorder, there is a moment of silence as we both revel in the view of the capital building, which, stepping out on this particular day, is offset by the dramatic mis-en-scene of a stormy, late afternoon sky.

In lieu of the majestic cityscape, though, Eric assures me of the damage underneath. ” It is the entrepreneurial class which is going to begin to question, agitate, and push for more than mediocrity,” he says. “The independent entrepreneur is definitely a less controllable agent, and so small business has been purposely avoided in this area for years. It’s a sad but true phenomenon.”

Since 1981, when Harrisburg was marked as the second most distressed city in the nation, a $3 billion investment helped turn things around, into what the Washington Post recently called a “lively” and “exciting” locale. But the largely subsidized, top-down, city sponsored—and not individual-led–development is how residents of Harrisburg have come to identify. And it shapes who they are.

“Look,” Eric said, pointing down at the unembellished front doors of Broad Street Market, in front of which two hooded adolescent boys stand, holding plastic bags and drinking from gigantic Styrofoam cups. From our parallax view, there is no one else on the block but an older woman pushing a babyless stroller up the street. A lone plastic bag floats out of nowhere, blowing in circles, as if strategically released by a film crew.

“How can the Broad Street Market not have a sign with its hours?” Eric asks. “How can the Broad Street Market not have a kiosk, which announces local things in the neighborhood?”

The Broad Street Market is by all accounts a prime example of the underutilized, relatively mismanaged buildings that have long inhibited economic development and population growth in Midtown.

In the 1840s, the Broad Street Market—then known as Market Square—was the centerpiece of Harrisburg city. Vendors came from the surrounding counties to sell their goods, and because the market was centrally located in town, it was also a site for civic events. Residents gathered for political rallies, firemen’s musters, and election night bonfires. They came to see and hear the great heroes of the day. The square was an impetus for neighborhood rapport.

Today, unless you know to look for it, Broad Street Market is highly invisible. It is never crowded, not even on weekends, and the lot is usually deserted. The hours of operation are not clearly posted, and it is not open when people are off work. While revitalization money from the state does exist, it is spiritedly invested in the Civil War Museum and Whitaker Center.

“Were some of those tourism dollars spent on the Broad Street Market, you could have far more people coming on a daily basis,” he says. “But the city keeps thinking about having people drop in and leave, not about having people come, park, stay, and develop a view. So the Civil War Museum, for example, where was it built? It was built way up in Reservoir Park. This is the same mentality as what happens on restaurant row. It’s a sort of getting people to come in, use the city, but not really expecting them to want to stay and linger, and talk and develop.”

It sounds obvious and critical that devoting more money to the community development of downtown would increase pedestrian traffic and improve the interpersonal relationships of the neighborhood, not only bridging the racial divide, but the economic, gender, and age-based ones as well. But the revitalization project in Midtown is no darling of government subsidies. Papenfuse and crew are currently operating fully from their own funds.

“You could say the reason midtown has been deserted for twenty years is because of limited resources, or that the budget is tight. That’s fine, that’s true. I’m not discounting it,” he says. “But they do have the money and resources for the Civil War Museum, and they put that money into that, and other certain things. What I’m saying is they’re putting it into the wrong things.”

+++

Like tourists, Eric and I wander around the neighborhood of North Third Street for almost an hour, peering into windows of abandoned shops and musing about the community that existed decades before economic or flood and hurricane-related malodor created a meltdown. Though the walk through midtown is a different, less scenic route than the footpath that carries you along Front Street, the architecture and narrow streets possess a unique, old-timey charm that is unmatched by the view of the purling green waters of the Susquehanna Riverfront. It possesses different hope, it seems.

When our tour of the neighborhood finally takes us back to the door of Fissel’s, the sky looks grim but acts nicely as a shared antagonist. Eric has plenty more to say to me, but it is getting late, and the interruptions from his cell phone have become more frequent. We shake hands and part ways, and as I stand idly on the sidewalk, looking out into the street, a voice from behind emerges–“excuse me”–and a man on a bike passes, ringing a scanty bell. My gaze follows him southbound, landing on a forlorn parking lot overrun with weeds and adorned in graffiti.

A few ghost towns manage a second life. Midtown Harrisburg is not exactly dead, but it’s in a sort of coma. If it can support the renovation project by reacting to retail in a positive way, it may officially shed its harum-scarum past and become a place where people are not just likely to visit, but to stay.

Mistake? Hell Yes.

Daubenspeck — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:50:02 +0000

To be “bright and young” is to be upsetting, to cause upset in those around you, and in general to be annoying. Like this sign I have to see, every single day, when I get off the F train, on the front of the New Museum.

Daubenspeck — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 07:50:15 +0000

Catherine P. Doverspike

Daubenspeck — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 07:48:31 +0000

Catherine Procious Doverspike was a real girl. She learned to make people like her at age 7 by playing emotive songs on the piano, and when she got tired of the piano she learned to make people like her in other ways. She learned to laugh so that other people would laugh too and feel resilient. She got older and laughed less and went to parties at industrial art spaces in Brooklyn where she ate pineapple and licked her fingers and said interesting, critical things about the irregular grid art on the walls. She cut her hair then and wore Oxford shirts more often and moved to Pennsylvania, where everyone was the same as in New York except more of the women were gay and no one put family second.

memoirs of intelligence.

Daubenspeck — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 17:20:37 +0000

I was that shiksa in the library always reading Camus

And you,

you were watching Ayn Rand on YouTube

all through the spring, wearing only a bathrobe and

because of your swollen ankle,

just one shoe.

I clamored around taking care of

The noisome sink dishes

And made you countless breakfasts

In that messy bachelor pad

as if you were incontinent

Arriving back at my flat

I discovered the basil plant, dead.

And you had gone out with your friends,

To smoke a joint in the garden

near Charles Dickens’s house.

I saw you.

Really I hated London insufferably.

But I became intelligent there

And intelligence means to hate things insufferably,

To know what one is

And also to love things

beyond reason.

The Occassional Foray

The Future of Downtown Harrisburg

Mistake? Hell Yes.

Catherine P. Doverspike

memoirs of intelligence.