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In 2020, I took a temporary back-office job with the Census Bureau*, which had rented a floor of an office building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to conduct its local operations. As we were wrapping up operations in the fall, I noticed workers moving various items onto the ground floor of our building. I didn’t know what was being stored there until I saw some of the stuff marked as Stephen Reed’s estate.
Harrisburg’s problems have drawn renewed attention after a recent Unherd column linking them to the worst-kept secret in Pennsylvania politics: Gov. Josh Shapiro’s presidential ambitions. However, it’s impossible to understand them without knowing Stephen Reed, the city’s mayor from 1982 to 2010. When Reed took office, Harrisburg was in the same rough shape as most other cities in the Northeast and Midwest. The population dropped by over ten percent every decade from 1950 to 1980, from a high of about 89,000 to about 53,000. Businesses had fled the downtown, creating a crime-ridden area that people from the surrounding suburbs and the rural regions avoided. At first, Reed seemed to have a magic touch. He brought a major hotel project downtown and redeveloped the city’s riverfront, which brought back business, most prominently a “restaurant row” a few blocks from the state Capitol. The population decline slowed and began to reverse.
After the turn of the millennium, Reed’s fortunes began to change. Reed’s first big idea of the 2000s was a Civil War museum in an under-utilized park away from the city’s center. The museum opened and drew visitors, though it chronically lost money, and had some justification: Harrisburg was a key railroad junction and Union supply center during the war and was Robert E. Lee’s target during the Gettysburg campaign. Reed’s other idea, a museum of Wild West memorabilia, did not, to put it as charitably as possible, seem like a natural fit for central Pennsylvania. This fed a perception among Harrisburg voters that Reed was overly focused on the downtown and showy projects at the expense of day-to-day life in the city, and Reed lost the 2009 Democratic primary to Linda Thompson, the city council president. Not coincidentally, Thompson was the city’s first black (and first female) mayor. Reed fell into legal trouble, while the local media speculated that he had a hoarding problem; he died early in 2020 at the age of seventy.
Thompson quickly ran into problems of her own and was voted out after one term in favor of bookstore owner Eric Papenfuse. Under Papenfuse, the city seemed to be stabilizing, as it emerged from a municipal bankruptcy with the population stabilized and the better aspects of Reed’s legacy intact. When Covid hit, the city struggled to overcome business restrictions, and much of the state government workforce switched to working from home. Papenfuse was voted out in 2021 and replaced with Wanda Williams, who, like Thompson, is black and had been president of the city council. Harrisburg has continued to struggle with crime and nepotism in the city government.
Will any of this affect Josh Shapiro’s ambitions? A struggling capital city is not a good look for any governor, but a more active approach to Harrisburg runs the risk of offending key Democratic constituencies. Shapiro has begun ordering state employees back to the office, but public-sector unions have been reluctant to part with work-from-home plans. More broadly, Shapiro risks having to choose between Harrisburg’s affluent white good-government liberals (like Papenfuse and city treasurer Dan Miller) and its predominantly black new establishment (represented by Williams and Thompson), two key constituencies in a presidential primary.
Harrisburg has potential. In addition to being the capital of the fifth-most-populous state in the Union, it’s at the junction of several interstate highways and a few hours’ drive from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New York, and Washington. It’s in a fast-growing area (particularly by Northeastern standards), close to the tourist hotbeds of Hershey, Lancaster, and Gettysburg, and with the Blue Mountain and Susquehanna River, it has scenery most cities of its size would envy. The city just has to get out of its own way first.
*I was not responsible for counting anybody in Texas or Florida, so don’t blame this on me.
Discussion (6)
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Very interesting. What sort of stuff from Reed’s estate was stored?
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Then there was the incinerator story, I don't recall the final disposition of that deal. Another Steve Reed story I have actually involved me. I was working 3rd shift as a printing systems technician for Xerox. I was going to a call at Penn National Insurance across the street from the hotel when Steve walked across the street right in front of my car. About 2:30am.
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Mr. Papenfuse, the short-tempered bookstore owner who fell into a bit of politics for a time.
Are you sure that wasn't Dickens?
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I drive thru Harrisburg a couple times a year. and not thru the nice sections. The lovely row houses facing the Susquehanna and the newer parts of downtown are not on the north-south highway routes. Nothing has changed along much of that route for decades. I thought that there would be some improvement by now,
I took a small detour one summer thru Wormleysburg (a suburb across the river) on Market Street to see if there were any plaques or memorials about the Confederate cavalry raid there around the time of the Gettysburg campaign. I don't think the Confederates ever crossed the Susquehanna up there but I could be wrong.
That area has marvelous relics of the age of rail. The longest rail bridge at Rockville, the world's largest switchyard at Enola. Harrisburg would have been a good place for a serious museum rather than the Old West.
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Obviously Reed was trying to get investors from Wyoming and Texas.
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