While an epic siege of Harrisburg failed to materialize, the war still left a profound imprint. Its streets never saw combat, but they did host an enormous transient population of soldiers for four whole years. The social and economic influence of this new presence was felt across the city, but was perhaps best exhibited in the Old 8th Ward. This was a tough, seedy little neighborhood that had sprung up along the canal, supplying its various needs in abundance: there were warehouses and shipping suppliers, there were inns and brothels. According to J. Howard Wert, the boating men nightly sought “practical experience in every form of wickedness the town could ladle up” before continuing down the canal. The Old 8th could ladle a lot, and so it flourished. During the war, the more disreputable of these establishments met with a whole new level of success as literally thousands of bored soldiers roamed the city looking for excitement. The name of the notorious neighborhood quickly became synonymous with sin and debauchery.
However, not everyone in the Old 8th prospered. Shunned and ignored by the city’s more well to do citizens, its crooked streets quickly became the kingdom of the destitute. Here were dirt-poor immigrants, seeking better lives but starting out on rock bottom. Here also were newly freed slaves, trying to make sense of their bewildering new status in a country that had finally recognized them as human beings, but damned this new humanism by sequestering them into impoverished urban prisons plagued with violence and poverty, locked tight with strict segregation laws. Harrisburg had long been, in Wert’s words, “a haven of refuge for a large, colored population, many of them poor, some fugitives from Southern slavery,” as well as the home of a large, mostly impoverished Irish immigrant community. New arrivals from Italy, Greece, and Russia collided with these earlier denizens to turn the Old 8th into a boiler pot of ethnic diversity and economic misery. The end of the war meant decommissioned soldiers returning home and a recession for the Old 8th’s tawdriest businesses, but most survived. Canal workers reassumed their place as the neighborhood’s signature clientele, and the show went on.
For the city as a whole, however, the end of the war meant big changes. No longer a strategically essential supplies depot, Harrisburg began to drift out of cultural significance. Lincoln’s funeral train passed through on Friday, April 21 of 1865, making a brief stop during its 1,654-mile journey to Illinois. There was a public viewing at the House of Representatives. The next day, 40,000 people packed the streets to see his casket brought back down to the railroad. The Pennsylvania soldiers who helped win the war marched out one last time, joining veterans across the nation in parade rest before the tracks. I wonder what they felt, these still-young men made old by the violent hardships of their era, standing straight and splendid in blue, wordlessly saluting a train. They themselves had rode these rails four long years before, answering Lincoln’s call to take up arms and save the union. Now, after that war was over and won, they stood at the rails for him again, to see him born down the same line, disappearing far over the Appalachians to rest at last at some quieter station.
As the century wore on, urban dwellers around the nation became increasingly dissatisfied with the state of their cities. Unpaved streets littered with trash, houses packed upon houses in dense disorder with no regard to aesthetics or sanitation, dirty water, ineffective garbage collection and disposal, wanton industrialization and a complete disappearance of green space were only a few of the problems plaguing cities in the late 19th century. Frederick Law Olmstead, a prominent architect and reformer, responded with his “park and boulevard system.” Cities needed green space if their citizens were to live healthily, he argued. Acres of grass and trees within cities were not only aesthetically appealing, but they also fostered community, helped prevent the spread of disease, increased property values and even aided worker productivity and lowered crime rates. His ideas gained steam as more urban reformers and concerned citizens realized their value, and soon the City Beautiful movement swept cities nationwide.
Harrisburg was in particular need of such a movement. Always something of a rough-and-tumble frontier town, the capital of Pennsylvania looked more like an “industrial village” than a seat of government by the late 19th century. Few streets were paved, and the Susquehanna was clogged with sewage. Mira Lloyd Dock, daughter of a prominent Harrisburg family, caught wind of Olmstead’s ideas and began campaigning to reform the city’s infrastructure. She did not have a particularly difficult time making her case, especially when in 1897 the entire capitol building was gutted by a fire. Pressure from Dock, the Civic Club of Harrisburg – a women’s organization promoting urban reform – and other individuals and organizations soon motivated the city government to adopt an aggressive City Beautiful movement of its own. In 1902, the Harrisburg League for Municipal Improvements proposed a 1.09 million dollar bond for a wide range of civic projects. To publicize the proposal, high school boys ran door-to-door ads, the Civic Club sponsored lectures, and local newspapers ran editorials. It was met with immediate support from the Old 8th Ward and similar neighborhoods, which had the most to gain from the proposed reforms, but wealthier citizens and landowners soon joined the bandwagon, inspired both by humanitarianism, progressivism, and the advantages of higher property values. The bond passed by a two-to-one margin. Three more bonds were passed by 1914, and two decades into the 20th century, Harrisburg was an almost unrecognizably new city.
70 miles of streets were paved. A system of street cleaning was at last introduced. An acre of parkland was established for every 100 citizens, introducing 900 acres of green. Fresh sewers, flood controls, a reasonable garbage collection program and a new water sanitation facility on Hargest’s Island all improved the cleanliness of the city. Concrete steps were built on the slope of the Susquehanna, allowing people to walk, rest, and swim along its newly fresh waters. To replace the old, burnt-out capitol, construction on a lavish new structure began with an expected budget of five to 10 million dollars. Nine years and 12.5 million dollars later, the capital was completed, and President Theodore Roosevelt called it “the most handsome state capitol I have ever seen and I don’t believe that there is a finer on earth.” 4 million dollars of construction costs went to pure graft (including 850 dollar flagpoles), and the architect and chief constructor both received prison terms. Unfortunately, much more was lost in this period of development and change than building expenses. In a cruel twist of events, the City Beautiful Movement eventually paved some of its earliest and most loyal supporters, including the Old 8th Ward. Although the neighborhood had largely cleaned up its act by the 20th century, it was still home to the poor and the underprivileged. Expanded capitol grounds, now verdant and green, abutted the Old 8th’s rotten tenements and shady saloons too closely. While the capitol was the model of the City Beautiful movement’s vision of healthy, modern urban life, the Old 8th remained a black eye. And so the city decided to expand capitol grounds still further, completely enveloping the entire neighborhood. A bill authorizing the destruction of the Old 8th passed the State Legislature in 1911, and 500 properties were promptly acquired and demolished. Almost overnight, a neighborhood rich in history and culture vanished. Its motley residents fanned out through the city looking for new homes. Many crossed the train tracks and settled further South in the Allison Hill, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.
