life in a city of bridges (pt. 2)

Material on Cornel West and Ralph Ellison is from:
West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

life in a city of bridges (pt. 1)

last line, obscured by concrete: "these rivers must be crossed"

Some places are walkable from our location on Allison Hill, and most are bikeable. When we want food supplies, we can either go to the Corner Grocery, or, in the other direction, to a large Vietnamese grocery store on Cameron Street where a boy told me he had the power to turn into a snake at will. He was sitting on the beige tiles by the noodles, doing his homework, and asked his mother how to spell “activity.” She moved her lips indecisively, emitting some non-committal m-sounds, and then looked around for backup, and there I was, white and presumably fully fluent in English. I knelt down and dictated the letters as he scrawled them in magic marker on a purple sheet of construction paper. Then, as if in thanks, he promptly informed me of his unusual abilities in the sort of matter-of-fact declamation employed by six-year olds around the world. Yeah, I have special powers, he said. I can turn into a big, yellow-spotted snake. And when I’m a snake, I know karate.

Despite the proximity and colorfulness of local stores, we most often pile in to a car and head to Giant’s, where the apples are redder and the prices are lower. Generally, Arthur and I go together and leave Edmund to fend for himself. He prefers it that way; he uses his own ingredients and cooks his own dishes and encourages us to do the same. “It really works much better if we all just do our own thing.” He usually hits the stove first, frequently conjuring delicious, achingly tantalizing aromas that waft through the house, summoning us hungrily down to flit impatiently around the kitchen until he finishes. Then there’s the changing of the guards. Edmund clears out, dish in hand, to eat and to watch an episode of Oz or Lost, and Arthur and I stomp in, cracking rude jokes, tossing the garlic and dropping the onions.

Sometimes, however, paths align, especially when we all need groceries. Then it’s a straight shot to Giant’s for the whole group.

We leave our house, set the alarm, lock the door, and argue over the vehicle for the day. We decide on Arthur’s car; it’s small, but it’ll burn less fuel than my parents’ SUV. We walk up our broken little street to meet the machine. Harrisburg is reeling from a heat wave, and Mrs. Rodriguez is on her front porch, rocking back and forth and waving a fan with a firm grip. We pause to greet her; she smiles widely back at us, her brown face crinkling into kind, dry folds. We struggle to understand her through her toothless, heavily accented vowels. Edmund has of course known her by far the longest and understands her the best. They discuss the latest on the hedgehogs. There is a family of the furry pests living on the wooded slope behind our houses. They emerge by night to chew up the vegetables Mrs. Rodriguez still grows in her tiny back yard, and Edmund is trying to catch them. The bit of chivalry in this project charms me, but I could be imagining it. He succeeded in trapping one a few days ago, but it was small. “Naw duh bi’ mawmmuh,” drawls Knight Edmund’s lady fair, nodding, rocking. “Stiw haffuh cachah bi’ mawmmuh.” But she seems content with this progress.

As a young woman, Mrs. Rodriguez fled Puerto Rico and an abusive husband with her six children, raising them all in the Bronx before moving to Harrisburg thirty-odd years ago. Now her children are all grown. Some have moved away, some have stayed in central Pennsylvania, and each pursues a different career. She lives alone but enjoys frequent visits from her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. From the relatively little I’ve seen of her, it’s clear that she shares the ineffable serenity of many women in her generation, lives spent facing down adversity and mostly winning, working, moving, grinding through setback and oppression with little pause for reflection, trusting themselves and teaching their children to do the same. Now the hardest years are behind her, and she spends her time swinging on her front porch, greeting her neighbors and tending her vegetables, fanning herself through the heat and tolerating the hedgehogs.

She recognizes Arthur from his presence at Edmund’s birthday parties in elementary school, and meets me with the same measured, genial tranquility with which she seems to regard everything from her high, creaking seat. Neighborhood solidarity against the furry intruders established, we wave our goodbyes and continue on to the car.

We wait at the stop sign for the man who lives at the end of the street to cross. I still haven’t met him; he’s black and middle-aged, and looks out of it. “He’s been here forever,” Edmund explains, “he’s weird.” The man turns and waves to us as he steps onto the curb, and promptly collides head-on with the stop sign. I see his glasses squirm up and then back down his face as he negotiates his cheek off the metal pole. He removes them, holds his forehead and stumbles away, leaving me to wonder if they’re broken or just bent.

We drive up Mulberry, away from the bridge and deeper into Allison Hill, past its V with Derry and then right onto 13th Street to catch the ramp onto 322. The familiar scenes of the neighborhood drift past through the windows. There’s a crowd in front of the Corner Grocery as always. A young man in baggy jeans and a basketball jersey is gesticulating wildly, probably for the benefit of three or four women, most of whom share some resemblance to the inflatable trampoline we set up in the driveway for my nephews, only with some of the air let out. His bill of his brightly colored baseball hat bobs up and down as he ducks and bounces. On the edges of the crowd, a particularly flabby white woman in shorts and a wife-beater seems unsure what to do with her feet. Further down, a middle-aged man with a hard looking face and a muscle shirt dances in front of a house with a tiny, hopping puppy. A compact old Asian lady steps out the door carrying plastic bags in either hands, and sets them down to lock up, her squat body slowly rotating on an invisible hinge. Her face is inscrutable, like the mask of some lost native tribe behind glass in an art museum. A few stoops away, a group of women are sitting about, talking, fanning themselves. A young couple walks past. She’s stunningly beautiful, strutting in denim shorts that seem more like twistable caps gripping her thighs than clothing. The man is thinly mustachioed, Hispanic, beady eyes set within a long thin face ending in a wicked curve of a mouth. Thin, grim lips. His bare arms look like the blades of a Saracen.

Driving through the Hill is quickly becoming a routine, but it’s still loaded with subtext. For Arthur and me, it remains a cultural experience. The people who crowd these streets are in many ways from a very different country than us. We can talk to Mrs. Rodriguez about the hedgehogs, but it’s hard to know how to interact with the man who runs into stop signs. On these streets, there are those who stagger down the sidewalk, spitting thickly into the gutter, and there are those who parade with a militant dignity, head held high and eyes immutably fixed before them as you pass. Neither stops to talk or even really notice, and I’m not sure what I’d have to say to them if I did. There is always a crowd of young people at the door to the Corner Grocery, and I’m always wildly uncomfortable with my self-consciousness as I pass through them to pick up a cold cut of chicken.

A large aspect of the division, of course, is racial. Harrisburg is too small a city for its poor people to self-segregate, so Allison Hill is a potpourri of colors and tongues, although its public face is probably black. The wider city is 55% black, has a healthy Hispanic population and a small but significant community of more recent Korean immigrants. The Hill largely reflects these numbers, although white people are a smaller minority, black people are much more predominant, and almost all of the Hispanics or Koreans live here, in Midtown, or in similar neighborhoods to the South and East. The racial tensions frequently implicit or relegated to border streets in larger cities are everywhere and every day. Nevertheless, The neighborhood is still considered from the outside as a “black neighborhood,” and while this characterization is misleading and mostly harmful, it can also be a helpful device if we assume a more nuanced idea of blackness. Ralph Ellison, writing on assertions of black identity as a means for demarcating the extent of social status and Americanism, observed that
“…White Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of Black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the ‘outsider.’”
Nevertheless, “whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.” True Americanism, in other words, inherently involves an element of the outsider, of the other. In this sense, Allison Hill is certainly a “black” neighborhood; it is just the community that “white” America would use as a foil for its own Americanism, and, according to Ellison, is also therefore a most quintessentially American place.

This close-packed diversity – and poverty – make the Hill the clear cultural inheritor of the Old 8th Ward. As the scenes roll by, I try to imagine them a hundred years ago. In some places, it isn’t a terrible stretch; almost all the houses on our own street are at least a century old, and still retain the original floor plans. There’s even little protrusions in the walls where the fuel would run out to light the kerosene lamps. Nevertheless, the comparison doesn’t really work. In my imagination, the Old 8th is seedy but alive, dangerous but exciting, full of desperate and colorful visiting characters, shot through with a nervous electric energy. Where is that crackling vitality today? There are certainly still characters here, but the ones who would arrive, tear the house down, and leave the next morning are gone. The heroes of Allison Hill are instead marked by their stationary rootedness. They grew up in the neighborhood, lived in it and worked in it, and not infrequently died before their time in it. They do not so much revel in the energy of their environment as churn under its weight, hoping some day to get out. They are sometimes depraved with the poison of their streets, sometimes militantly noble in their resistance, and most often, just trying to get by despite the odds. Exciting danger is replaced by just plain danger, and the fear it engenders replaces a raucous nightlife with empty, shadow-crossed streets. Similarly, the breed of despair that increasingly pervades the neighborhood seems a more recent addition. It is what Cornel West calls a new sort of nihilism, “a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructing disposition toward the world.” The Old 8th Ward surely had its fair share of misery, but it could not compare in cold numbers to modern Allison Hill’s violence and crime, or, in my own analysis, to the modern urban center’s sense of ennui. As West notes, right up until the 1970s black Americans – the most populous residents of the Hill and similar neighborhoods – had the lowest suicide rate in the United States. “Now young black people lead the nation in suicides…. What went wrong?”

At the heart of the Old 8th was, of course, the canal. Allison Hill is higher up and further south. The site of the old canal runs by the train tracks. Many of these rails have in turn been lifted, and the gash that runs between the Capital complex and Allison Hill is largely empty. Cameron Street boasts a number of mechanics, the Vietnamese grocery store (which has a terrifyingly sketchy club on its second floor), and a number of small businesses including the Appalachian Brewing Company, where Arthur and me frequently retreat for beer and wings. There is the post office, there is the train station, and then there are storage spaces, and then there are parking lots, and then there are barren lots, zoning unclear, nature dubious. They’re overgrown with weeds and shaded by the Mulberry Street Bridge. There are no houses, no shops, but cars sometimes still park there, and when they do, you pretend not to see them. In the middle of it all, the old canal sits fetid and still, and the water does not move.

Harrisburg is a city robbed of its movement. Settled by the Indians for the running water of the Susquehanna, founded by white men as a rough-and-tumble outpost on the frontier of their known world, as long as Harrisburg retained an element of the frontier, it was alive. Even after the frontier moved North and West, Harrisburg remained in motion, sending people, supplies, and vitality from the big urban centers to the edge of things and back. The river, the canal, the railroads, the highways; these were the blood of the city, and as they ran, they brought life to the streets, and the heart of the city beat. Now, there is no frontier. The long, coursing motions of border expansions and westward migration have birthed, and been necessarily, inevitably consumed by the tick-tock cycles of the modern workday. The natural, inexorable flow of the river has been rendered pointless by the narrow bridges that allow people to cross it, back and forth, back and forth. The wide, proud channels of commerce and travel have been replaced by suburban grids and endless exit/entrance ramps to nausea. And when its residents fail to lock into even this weak simulacrum of true movement, they, like the canal, simply sit still. They get stuck, they get clogged up in Allison Hill, they find themselves at the bottom of a cul-de-sac with broken glass.

Meanwhile, the powerful cultural battlements that fended off nihilism for generations are increasingly threatened. Their new, more devious enemies are economic pressures and mass culture. West writes, “the recent market-driven shattering of black civil society – black families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, mosques – leaves more and more black people vulnerable to daily lives endured with little sense of self and fragile existential moorings.” While West is using a conventionally racial definition for blackness, I think his words also apply in Ellison’s more inclusive terms. The social mechanisms that once led the oppressed to band together and overcome are muted and fragmented by a nationally driven impetus to acquire pleasure. Success, the market mentality reads, means acquiring things. It means bling. It means showing off your house on MTV’s Cribs. It means paving anyone who gets in your way, and increasingly viewing even your friends and loved ones as devices towards furthering your own pursuit as pleasure. It is not a frontier, it is a grid; it is not movement outwards, it is a stultifying inner system of exit and entrance ramps. It does not serve to ennoble and move the human spirit, it seeks to get it stuck.

However, they tell me Harrisburg is on the rebound. Jobs downtown are up 75%. The mall at Strawberry Square is booming. There are gunshot detectors on the streetlights.

harrisburg (pt. 3)

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.