Posted: Tuesday, 08 July 2008 10:40AM
Raise Some Hell In Wilkes-Barre
Steve Corbett Reporting
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Wilkes-Barre’s much-acclaimed renaissance is in trouble.
No matter what Mayor Tom Leighton and his cheerleaders at the Chamber of Business and Industry say, the city is sinking.
Leighton can build pizza parlors and college kid bars all the way around Public Square and his hometown is still blighted.
That’s the word that real community developers know all too well. A blighted town is a miserable town. And Wilkes-Barre is miserable.
I say that with great despair. I lived in Wilkes-Barre longer than I lived anywhere in my life. Seventeen of my 57 years were spent at two addresses in downtown Wilkes-Barre. I spent eight years in a grand old apartment on South Franklin Street and nine years in a wondrous house loaded with character, stained glass and fine woodwork on South River Street.
The old apartment house loaded with history now sits vacant in the historic district.
A few months ago I stood on the dead grass at the front of the home and peered through the floor-to-ceiling window at a place that once held happiness for me and generations of other city residents.
I felt like crying as I imagined the life that once took place there.
Now the structure is dead.
A few blocks down the street, a home that was built in the years after the Civil War sits amid college housing and other once regal single-family dwellings. Most of the bright flowers we planted there in the 1990s are dead and gone. The once perfect Zen garden in the back now serves as a cluttered parking lot for the people who share the home. The Japanese pine tree that drunken vandals almost killed when they broke off the top, struggles on despite the vicious attempt at destruction.
I’m saddened every time I pass that once majestic house on that once majestic block. And in my mind I’ll always see the young woman’s body lying beneath a white sheet in the street six doors from my home. She died in a drug deal crossfire while her children screamed in the car for their mommy.
My last memories of living in Wilkes-Barre are not good.
I begged city officials for help.
I begged Wilkes University officials for help.
We moved in 2002 after being ignored and betrayed.
Now current city residents still beg for help and still find themselves alone and abandoned by the saviors of the city who tell the world about the wonderful place they have built for residents and visitors to their town.
The delusion confuses me. The neighborhoods will save the city. But the emphasis is on downtown development, which, frankly, is not going all that well. It just isn’t.
No matter what officials announce, they never announce what it takes to salvage a city. They never announce that homes in blocks are being rehabbed and that hundreds of people are moving there. They never announce that block associations are working together with city community planners to reaffirm Wilkes-Barre’s status in Northeastern Pennsylvania. They never announce new jobs that pay good money and benefits in the heart of a city struggling for breath.
Yet they spend great amounts of money to pat themselves on the back and congratulate each other for the renaissance.
Mayor Leighton’s thinking is hallucinatory. What he claims to see simply does not exist. And every starched-shirt ally he has who claims to see the same is doing a similar disservice to the city that truly will die unless help arrives soon.
Solutions exist. Imaginative planners can save the city. But they must acknowledge their past failings and make changes that reflect the lives and the hopes and dreams of people who invest in the city with their lives, not just with their stock portfolios or their membership in the Westmoreland Club of the mind.
To do that, realistic officials must save structures and homes like the two where I lived my life and did my best to take pride in my city for so many years.
I purposely chose not to move back to Wilkes-Barre when I returned to Northeastern Pennsylvania in 2006 after being away for five years. I did, however, purposely return to the coal region (Chamber types, by the way, hate me calling this the coal region).
I came home because my roots are here. I came home because the media culture is still lively here. I came home mostly because I belong here.
You know if you belong. If so, you must apply pressure on those who have let you down.
Raise hell.
It’s good for the neighborhood.
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Corbett
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