Allentown Afterthoughts

There’s a reason the President decided to kick off his “Main Street Tour” in Allentown, PA. ¹ It’s the same reason that Obama’s speechwriters opted to include an “Allentown” shout-out in the State of the Union. To a national audience, “Allentown” is synonymous with blue-collar grit. Rust belt authenticity.

The reason is simple: Billy Joel.²

That’s why the GOP leader Newt Gingrich led off his early December column with,

After a smoke-and-mirrors “jobs summit” in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, President Barack Obama headed out into the real world today, to Allentown, Pa., to talk more about jobs — and good for him.

The italics are mine.

The irony is that, within the Lehigh Valley, “Allentown” carries a very different meaning. It is a symbol for “poor, Latino and crime-ridden.” From Hess’s to Hell, in the typical suburban view.

Both images of the city—the President’s and the suburbanites—are wrong.

One of the things that drove me back into blogging was the inanity of the crime-in-Allentown debate. One side downplays the problem: it’s about perception; it’s all the Morning Call’s fault. The other  side calls out the PR tactic, but in the process grossly exaggerates an already grossly exaggerated crime picture.

The fact is, center city Allentown has a crime problem. It also has a perception of crime problem. Both of these statements are true. The actual crime problem is real, and yet it pales in comparison to the picture that suburbanites and even city residents carry around in their heads. So center city residents suffer twice: from the real crime, and from the lower home values, school funding, retail viability that the irrational fear of rampant crime brings with it.

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What was it that the Call’s publisher and bloodletter-in-chief Tim Kennedy said the other night at DeSales?

”What has changed is how we tell the story,” Kennedy said, highlighting how online video and online tools such as Twitter are increasingly used to report news. ”But the basic core of what we do really hasn’t changed.”

With a newsroom less than half its former size, the basic core has changed a lot. As in: a reality TV star who’s named his abs winning major webpage real estate.

As I said before, I think the city’s efforts to block or delay the Morning Call’s access to records is bad politics and bad on the merits.

Two weeks ago, Bernie O’Hare of Lehigh Valley Ramblings defended Dennis Pearson, the East Allentown community leader, from a vicious Bill White slam in the Morning Call. Complaining that “Dennis is getting batted around like a piñata,” O’Hare wrote:

What I find most offensive about Bill’s recent column is that its effect is to discourage any private citizen from taking an interest in local government. As newspapermen like Bill become less numerous, the Dennis Pearsons of this world will often be the only people left to keep an eye on local government excesses.

O’Hare was right to condemn Bill White’s callous takedown of Pearson.

That was then. This is now. Today O’Hare re-posts an equally nasty rant from Scott Armstrong, which mercilessly skewers Ernie Atiyeh, a center city Allentown civic leader. O’Hare’s headline? “Armstrong: A-town Community Groups Elect Pawlowski Toadie.” No disclaimer, no distancing from the Armstrong comments. Instead Armstrong is introduced as “My Favorite Allentown conservative.”

Armstrong proceeds to label Atiyeh “the city’s biggest stooge”–”this lackey” whose “specialty” is “kissing the butt of anyone and everyone in a position of power in Allentown.”

I know Atiyeh well. He is a good man, an unpaid volunteer who donates hundreds of hours a year to helping out his struggling center city neighborhood. Anyone who has talked to him more than five minutes would realize that O’Hare’s slanderous headline (”Pawlowski Toadie”) is absurd. As president of the 4 C’s neighborhood group and chair of the Seventh Street Development Committee, among many other volunteer roles, he is often critical of the Pawlowski administration.

I expect this kind of rant from Scott Armstrong, who is articulate and intelligent but also deeply bitter. He’s wrong most of the time, and he’s more and more often resorting to unrestrained invective.

I am more disappointed by O’Hare. He plucked Armstrong’s comments from the Allentown Commentator message board, lending them his far larger platform. He offered them up with no distancing language. My own guess is that the idea of a “Pawlowski toadie” was too tempting to O’Hare to pass up–even if the Pawlowski potshot, in this case, landed on a good man who volunteers as a civic leader.

What was it that O’Hare wrote two weeks ago about Pearson, the other pilloried Allentown volunteer?

What I find most offensive about Bill’s recent column is that its effect is to discourage any private citizen from taking an interest in local government. As newspapermen like Bill become less numerous, the Dennis Pearsons of this world will often be the only people left to keep an eye on local government excesses.

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LV InSite’s take on the newish Nana’s Cafe on Hamilton, between 7th and 8th:

Run by Nana and her daughter, Nana’s Cafe has quickly become a favorite place of mine to lunch. She literally makes the BEST turkey club sandwiches, stuffed with plenty of meat, shredded lettuce, crunchy bacon (no tomato for me) and served with a yummy dill pickle on the side. Totally worth the $4.99 she charges for it.

InSite is right: it’s damn good.

Scott Brown is to Scott Ott as Martha Coakley is to Don Cunningham. Lehigh County exec Cunningham, of course, barely squeezed out a victory. Yes, distinct  local conditions and campaign dynamics, but the main difference: three months.

The MA loss is obviously devastating. Far more distressing news, at least for the long-term viability of our democracy: today’s Supreme Court decision to grant corporations (and unions) a license to spend without limits. The decision is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which was intended to foster robust public debate—and not to enable Washington on $10 million a day. Scalia claims to be an originalist, but clearly James Madison and co. did not intend for the corporation to count as an individual. The legal status of a corporation as a fictitious person dates, for one thing, from the mid 19th century.

MA or the Supreme Court? Today’s news out of Washington is far more troubling. It’s a political obscenity.

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Jarabacoa City, the Dominican restaurant at 8th and Linden badly damaged in a horrific car accident last August, has re-opened.

Betty Cauler on ongoing cuts at the Call:

I heard some news about further cutbacks at The Morning Call. HR has laid off or let go of six positions in the pressroom in the last year. Sources also say there is now only one press run at night instead of two, which they say limits production. If there’s a problem with the press, a shutdown means the papers will be late getting to the street, leading to more subscribers canceling the paper. It’s a vicious cycle.

via Lehigh Valley Ramblings

Andrew Kleiner’s Remember has a great post up on last night’s parks public meeting:

It is my belief that this plan will in fact have beneficial economic consequences for the city of Allentown. It will do so by changing the face of our city. It will make us “greener”. It will bring our community together in a way that General Harry Trexler himself envisioned and called for. The trails will be a genuine destination that will introduce people to the greatest city park system in the state of Pennsylvania.

I’m excited about the trails plan too. Molovinsky is a critic, but his honorable crusade for the parks’ WPA legacy might even get a boost from the trail work and all the public interest it is likely to kick up.

A smart city deficit analysis from councilman Michael Donovan–his specialty.