The total population of Harrisburg leaped from 53,000 to 71,000 during these years of reform. The Old 8th had hardly been torn down, however, when conflict racked the world with the advent of World War I. The U.S.S. Harrisburg represented the city in that fight, making four voyages to bring American troops to Europe, and then six trips to bring them home after the November 1918 Armistice. However, while the First World War shattered the societies of Europe, the United States entered late in the game, and so it was the Second World War that had the greater impact upon America and its cities. For Harrisburg, war meant business. Full engagement in a global conflict required unprecedented amounts of steel. Pearl Harbor had nudged the sleeping giant of American industry, and Harrisburg was there for its full awakening. It was the war that turned America’s steel industry into Big Steel, and the Pennsylvania railroads churned materials through Harrisburg night and day. By the 1950s, United States Steel chairman Benjamin Fairless was no doubt pleased to point out that America’s steel industry was not only the biggest of its kind in the world, it was bigger than all other such industries in the world combined.Big Steel basked in the majesty of its success for the next thirty years. However, its management also became complacent during this period of hegemony, and its passivity spelled disaster for the industry. American steel kept chugging away with war-era machinery in cities like Harrisburg, safe and untouched by conflict. Meanwhile, the Japanese and Europeans rebuilt their own devastated urban centers – in some cases from the ground up – and built new machinery to match, experimenting with new manufacturing methods, with oxygen furnaces, electric steel and minimills. While the business awareness and creativity of Big Steel returned to sleep after the war, letting its industry run on autopilot, the market for steel slowly became a global one. Unfortunately, Big Steel slept through this realization, and only woke in time for its own spectacular, cataclysmic crash.
At the beginning of the 1980s, 320,000 workers were sent home. The once invincible American steel companies went bottoms-up, mighty corporations declared bankruptcy, plants closed left and right. Soon, 75% of all American steelworkers had lost their jobs. There were a myriad of reasons for this catastrophic failure; Richard Preston cites “greedy labor unions, bungled government policy, inflation, foreign competition – but ultimately it was a failure of management.” The heads of Big Steel came from the best business schools in America; they worked in lavish business suites in the upper floors of tall buildings, and had little in common with the men fifty stories below who actually made the steel melt and the industry move. They were leaders who could inspire their men to do little other than strike. Most damagingly, their education could not replace the experience of adversity and competition. They were native to an era of supremacy: the last innovations in their industry had occurred a generation earlier during a World War, and everything seemed to be working fine since Hitler fell. They never learned how to shrewdly invest money in technology, and it destroyed them.
The fall of Big Steel punctuated a period marked by a nation-wide deterioration of American economy, ideology, and morale. In 1975, Operation Frequent Wind had scrambled to remove foreign nationals and sympathetic Vietnamese civilians from Saigon. Helicopters zipped back and forth between the embattled city and offshore aircraft carriers, finally lifting off the embassy for the last time as the rumble of approaching North Vietnamese tanks became audible. Americans at home watched the full fiasco on TV, struggling to reconcile shameful images with the national faith instilled in them by their parents, the generation that had won the War and brought America to the fore of global politics and economy. Eventually, most found reconciliation elusive, and a generation of Americans lost faith in their government and their society. Angry vets prowled the streets, hippies toked up, Sylvester Stallone filmed Rocky, and the Harrisburg Rail Yards fell largely silent. The city’s steadily declining postwar population soon dove into a death-plummet, losing around 15,000 people in ten years. The plunge leveled off into another more gradual decline in the 80s, but Harrisburg never really recovered.
One major reason people were so eager to leave might have been radioactivity. Three Mile Island is a major nuclear power plant located just a few miles upriver from downtown Harrisburg, and at 4 AM on March 28 1979, the second unit suffered a partial meltdown. The scope of the accident was unclear at first, and the state and local government struggled to determine what exactly had happened and what scale of evacuation would be necessary. They determined the danger was minimal, and no mandatory evacuation was called, but people emptied out anyway. I remember my middle school gym teacher telling me about the accident. He was one of those who stayed, unwilling to leave home and wary of looters. He spent several days “on the couch watching TV with the porch lights on and the shotgun loaded.” When downtown failed to glow and it became clear the radiation had been contained, people quickly filtered back. The scientific community is largely in agreement that the meltdown did little or no human harm, although the areas closest to the plant have the highest radon concentrations in the country, and one recent study has suggested a link to increased lung cancer in the region.
But it seems clear the accident did the most damage culturally. TIME ran a cover story on the accident called Nuclear Nightmare. President Jimmy Carter ordered a full investigation, and the Pennsylvania House of Representatives conducted their own investigation as well. An unsurprising backlash to nuclear power followed the accident, galvanized by sometimes-unlikely lobbyists like Jane Fonda, who had just finished filming a movie decrying the dangers of the nuclear age. Aerosmith, the Clash, Alice Cooper, Midnight Oil and Jimmy Buffett all wrote songs about or referencing the accident, Saturday Night Live did a sketch alluding to it, Isaac Asimov involved it in a science fiction novel. All this attention did little to allay the growing anxieties of a society that had just lost its sons in an unpopular war driven by a suddenly undependable government lead by a President impeached for corruption. The triumphant, trusting society of the 50s had somehow devolved into a tangle of power politics and economic woes wracked with Cold War malaise, where the faith and conviction of the previous generation suddenly seemed as fragile and transparent as glass, where dreams of financial solvency and personal security fell prey to the vicissitudes of global politics and the secretive decisions of the powerful, where the very resources that lit our houses with electricity could also suddenly, silently inflict nuclear winter.
Harrisburg was hit especially hard. It had been in trouble since the war, reeling from “an economic free-fall” and steady population loss. It relied heavily on industries like Big Steel to provide materials in need of transport; this meant work for everyone when business was booming, but when things turned sour, there was little recourse. Since the war, citizens with sufficient money had been drifting to the suburbs in search of a front lawn and a white picket fence. Following new economic woes and the Three-Mile Island Accident, people positively fled the city, resulting in rapidly declining conditions and billions of dollars of loss. In the 80s, Harrisburg came to be regarded as one of the most distressed cities in the nation. This recognition fueled a cycle of urban drain and suburban encroachment, and before long pretty much everyone who had the money to leave had left, and conditions only worsened for those who were stuck inside. The city was reduced to a hotel for state workers and a prison for the poor. Crime soared and property values plummeted. The capitol grounds were kept beautiful and immaculate, but elsewhere the city became increasingly tattered, especially in ghettos like Midtown and Allison Hill.
It was during this era of distress that my current housemates and I were born. Edmund was growing up on the Hill, Arthur in nearby Lebanon, and I moved to Hershey by way of Connecticut in the early nineties. By that point, however, Harrisburg’s downtown area was already changing. Mayor Steven R. Reed, elected in 1982, had realized that aggressive steps were necessary. He declared a large swathe of downtown an “urban renewal area” and worked with the city government and nonprofit organizations to “develop key parcels of real estate.” Reed eventually helped pump 3.4 billion dollars of new investment into downtown. Strawberry Square appeared, Harrisburg’s first enclosed shopping mall. In 1983, 82 luxury apartments replaced the old City Government Center. In 1984, the city registered its first net gains in the number of businesses and private sector jobs after three decades of loss. Reed was instrumental in acquiring a minor league baseball team for the city, the Harrisburg Senators. He then developed a park surrounding their stadium on City Island. In the 90s, Second Street, once a graveyard of empty stores and vacated residences, began hopping with new restaurants, bars, and clubs. In 1995, the city realized its first net population gain. In 1999, the city unveiled the Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts, a 52.7-million dollar facility that was “the first center of its type in the United States where education, science and the performing arts take place under one roof.”
Reed’s accomplishments did not go unnoticed. In December 2006, the City Mayors organization awarded Reed third place in its annual World Mayors competition. He was the only American mayor to rank in the top ten. At his inauguration, they quoted a Harrisburg citizen has saying “Steven Reed has committed his very soul to public service and is a tireless and positive force for change and improvement. Over the year, he has taken our tired, grey city and filled it with life and color and he always gives the impression that he has only just begun. He is a leader and wastes no time in party politics.”
Other citizens were less enthusiastic. His disdain for party politics is permitted by his lack of political opposition, Edmund’s parents – both long-time urban reformers – point out. Steven Reed is Harrisburg’s longest-serving mayor. He is a democrat, but regularly gains support from both parties. He has won six elections, mostly unopposed. He says "the City of Harrisburg has become an example of urban resurgence at a time when many of America's cities continue to undergo further decline and serious economic stress. Harrisburg's renewal has been multi-faceted, touching virtually every area of city governmental and community endeavor." Edmund would argue vociferously that this universality is not in fact the case. Reed has developed Harrisburg by pandering to its suburbs. His “urban renewal” projects are universally focused upon downtown, near the capitol complex and away from where most city citizens live, especially the poor. The projects he has designed are universally geared towards wealthy suburban commuters who come to work in the capital and then leave. During the workday, the population of Harrisburg increases by 72.7% because the attractive new jobs Reed has brought to the city are all filled by people outside the city. And instead of returning home at 5pm, they can now stick around for dinner at a fine restaurant, see a show at the Whitaker Center, and then stroll along City Island before returning home across the river. This sort of activity invests capital in Harrisburg businesses, but only the region of the city where Reed encourages business: downtown, where the business workers and owners mostly aren’t from Harrisburg anyway. Meanwhile, other parts of the city are almost entirely ignored.
Reed has done no “urban development” in Midtown, where violence and drug trafficking continues unabated, or in Allison Hill, where Edmund makes his home and where a decades-old community “Take Back the Night” program no longer functions because the streets are simply too dangerous after dark. The net population growth in 1995 ignores a general decline of greater severity than that of the 1980s; encouraged by Reed’s policies, the suburbs continue to grow in size and power, and the inner city continues to fester. I know, because I moved into Allison Hill last June, and the broken glass strewn across the cul-de-sac at the bottom of our street still hasn’t been cleaned. We would not object so vociferously to Reed’s plan of “urban development” if it were only an opening method focusing on the most economically promising regions in order to jump-start a citywide resuscitation.
However, Reed gives no indication that he will ever turn his attention to places like Midtown and Allison Hill. Indeed, he seems largely to have given up on the rest of Harrisburg. Instead of actually developing our city – helping the neighborhoods where people live and raise their children – he has cordoned off these neighborhoods as strictly as he can, and turned downtown into a combination office space and amusement park for suburbanites. He has encouraged the ghettoification of the city’s living spaces in order to create a model of economic renaissance for the already wealthy, many of whom do not even live in the city. Most of the biggest buildings downtown are super-sized parking garages. Allison Hill has always been separated from the rest of the city by train tracks. The new restaurants largely stop at Midtown. After 1996, when both halves of the People’s Bridge were partially washed away by high floodwaters and an ice floe, only the Eastern Half was repaired. That way, people in Harrisburg can walk to City Island, which lies in the middle, but undesirables from the city proper cannot walk to the suburbs on the West Shore. Instead of fighting crime by cleaning up depressed neighborhoods and encouraging real urban development, Reed chooses largely to police them remotely. Several expensive “gunshot detectors” have recently been installed on street corners in Harrisburg’s most violent areas. These devices can distinguish the sound of gunshot from ordinary urban din, and send an alert to police dispatches in 3-5 seconds. The “acoustic Gunshot Detection System (GDS)… has been proven to… reduce calls for service by as much as 85%,” newspapers gush, ignoring both that the system itself makes automatic “calls for service,” thereby rendering conventional calls both pointless and obsolete, and more importantly, that the system allows heavily armed police to rush into distressed neighborhoods, make arrests, and exit, supposedly catching the bad guy but leaving the community no safer by leaving the root causes that create and perpetuate urban violence unaddressed.
With the hundred-thousand dollars and change that these detectors have cost the city, Reed instead could have pumped money into after-school programs, community patrol forces that stay inside distressed neighborhoods after the police leave, help encourage new businesses in places like Allison Hill, or maybe even clean off that broken glass a the bottom of the street, any one of which would probably do more permanent good than satisfyingly newspaper-friendly but ultimately insubstantial arrests. Instead, inner city misery continues. Property values stay low, the rate of murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults continues at over double the national average, and the median household income continues to grind some $15,000 below the national average. A quarter of the city continues to live under the poverty line, and over a tenth lives below half the poverty line. It’s no wonder then that Harrisburg Public High School’s senior class is almost half the size of its freshman class; the rest of the students, disillusioned with the opportunities they see around them, drop out in favor of the much more palpable rewards of Harrisburg’s burgeoning gang culture. In Harrisburg, neighborhood kids can make far more money selling drugs than trying to find a job not already custom-fit for someone from the West Shore, at least until they run into trouble and get picked up by a gunshot detector.
Harrisburg still needs help, but it is less likely to get it than in the 80s, when it was still being considered one of the most distressed cities in the nation. It is still distressed, but its injuries are set away in the ghettos and the neighborhoods, avoided as much as possible, policed as minimally as necessary, and generally ignored. The cultural inheritors of the Old 8th Ward do not need to be paved for new capital grounds; they’re too far across the train tracks. The Susquehanna River, typifying the mobility that has always granted Harrisburg its purpose and its character, also serves to separate the communities that are truly on the move from those that have simply gotten stuck. Trains still cross the bridges that link the gaps, but people, by and large, do not.
In the days following the shooting, the character of the slain comes to light. The Patriot runs another article; he was a “loyal man,” his friends said. He loved to fish. He had been down on his luck, and had been mixed up with the wrong crowd for a while, but was getting back on his feet, before the wrong crowd pulled him back down. I have come to feel very close to Harrisburg. I hope people realize the unique potential that lies in its neglected corners. I hope more people move to Allison Hill, and write about it, and live there, and raise their children there, and resuscitate the Take Back the Night movement, and don’t leave at the end of the workday. This will take a great deal of time, however, and I am not confident that midstaters will have the vision or the care to give Harrisburg the attention it deserves. More likely, Harrisburg will remain a city of bridges a while longer, a city where wide veins of river, rail, and highway separate the place from its identity and the reality from its potential. This loyal man, in his silence, reminds me that I cannot be a part of that effort at this point in my life. The bridges of Harrisburg, along with the rivers and rails, move people through as well as separate them. They are intersections and crossroads, and the city’s main claim to fame is still moving people between places of greater significance. It’s no place to get back on your feet. At the end of the summer, I too will cross a bridge, and like hunters and trappers, canal workers and railroad men, soldiers and presidents, state bureaucrats and city workers before me, I will leave.
Material on the rise and fall of the steel industry comes from:
Preston, Richard. American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991.
Material on health implications of the Three Mile Island meltdown comes from:
Field, William R. Three Mile Island epidemiologic radiation dose assessment revisited: 25 years after the accident. . Radiation Protection Dosimetry Volume 113, No. 2 (2005): 214-217.
Material on gunshot detectors comes from:
Barrett, Sophie. Secures® Gunshot Detection System Selected for Deployment in Harrisburg, PA. E.E. Times Online. 12.54 March 27 2007:
Material on Harrisburg Public Schools comes from the Local School Directory online at:
Material on the World Mayor Competition comes from:
Vom Hove, Tann. John So, Lord Mayor of Melbourne wins the 2006 World Mayor Award. Worldmayor.com. 2006:
Material on the Old 8th Ward comes from Harrisburg’s Old 8th Ward online at:
Other material from the Harrisburg Patriot News, city-data.com, and of course, every amateur researcher’s best friend, wikipedia.org.
