Posted: Monday, 11 January 2010 10:53AM
College Drunks Kill Neighborhoods
Steve Corbett Reporting
Monday, January 11, 2010
Facing the television news camera on Sunday, Wilkes-Barre Mayor Tom Leighton put on a pious look and started spinning the latest downtown abuse that threatens any real hope of true downtown renewal.
“An isolated incident,” he said of the allegation that a 22-year-old Kings College student urinated on the Nativity scene set up on the city’s Public Square.
Let’s hope Leighton’s tenure as mayor is also an isolated incident that never leads to re-election or higher office.
The man just doesn’t understand. He never did and he never will. But he’s not alone.
For many years, city officials have acquiesced to college officials who talk a good game but never really crack down on the Kings and Wilkes student insurgents who attack the quality of life for decent people who call the city home.
I was once one of those people.
For 17 years I called the city home.
And for 17 years college students laid siege to my life and those of my neighbors as the drunken young terrorists disrespected, vandalized and pillaged their way through once dignified streets that once housed good, solid neighborhoods.
I am not exaggerating in any way.
Students once set a fire near the dormitory next door to my house. I physically restrained a wild, drunken college student who tried to pull a young woman from a moving car. Theft and vandalism commonly occurred. Drunken students vomited in public. Drunken students urinated in public.
I once called police after seeing four young women squatting to urinate near the porch of the house next door that once housed one of Wilkes-Barre’s finest families.
Another time a group of drunken Wilkes students stood outside their South River Street apartment house and threw Nazi salutes at young Jewish students who lived across the street.
I regularly called police who usually arrived and sometimes took reports.
But, despite promises from college officials that they would help me and my neighbors, the student presence continued to destroy the neighborhood. Time and again I took my own time and met with Wilkes officials. Time and again they made and broke promises.
The destruction of a fine neighborhood helped me decide to leave town. And when I returned after five years in California, I decided to live in Scranton.
I do not recommend that anyone live in a college neighborhood in Wilkes-Barre. You will invest your money and your life and you will suffer for the investment. But to hear Leighton and other apologists for the college madness, you’d think all was well.
Leighton is purposely downplaying the terrible impact that the colleges have on the neighborhoods and the quality of life for people who truly deserve better. Despite the good that Kings and Wilkes do for downtown Wilkes-Barre, the bad outweighs their positive contributions for people who live there.
The harm is often irreversible.
Thanks to Wilkes University, my old neighborhood is likely beyond repair.
And now we have an incident that Leighton calls “an isolated incident.”
Leighton spoke of the continuing “partnership” between city officials and the college community. With drunken marauders on the loose no community exists. And the real, long-lasting and historic community that Leighton is paid to serve comes up short year after year, decade after decade.
Scranton is no better with the destruction done by University of Scranton students there.
But the events of early Sunday morning in Wilkes-Barre illuminate as well as any incident the damage that comes with a drunken out-of-control student population roaming the streets and destroying what proud, law-abiding people have worked so hard for generations to put together.
The future of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton depends on the future of neighborhoods. More than business prosperity or college pep rallies, the quality of life in the neighborhoods will decide what happens in the decades to come.
City officials must exert more vision that the wide-eyed glee they exhibit when yet another college bar announces a grand opening in a downtown corridor. College officials must once again understand that they are dealing with students and not customers.
The old days were better for these old cities. Nowadays, though, a new breed of college madman and madwoman use and abuse our towns for their own benefit.
The lesson of the day is sad, yet so very, very simple.
When it comes to drunken Kings, Wilkes and Scranton students, nothing is sacred.
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Corbett
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