Allentown Afterthoughts

The Tribune Co., parent of the Call, can’t even manage bankruptcy, in the wake of the disastrous and highly leveraged takeover by Sam Zell in three years ago:

The Tribune Co.’s plan to emerge from bankruptcy has unraveled in the wake of an independent report concluding that talks leading up to the company’s 2007 leveraged buyout bordered on fraud, attorneys said Friday.

The report released last month by a court-appointed examiner forced Tribune and its creditors to rethink a settlement agreement that formed the basis of its reorganization plan.

The Call on the opening of Sangria, the Mediterranean restaurant opening at 9th and Hamilton:

At a preview for invited guests Thursday, Meireles unveiled the restaurant’s 6,000 square-foot space, with its hardwood floors, orange and brown color palate and floor-to-ceiling windows that give diners a view of the hustle and bustle outside. The restaurant offers valet parking and seats 350, which includes outdoor seating for 150 people.

My fingers are tightly crossed.

Michael Drabenstott of Beyond Scrapple mentions that a new Vietnamese place is opening in the Farmer’s Market. He’s also anticipating Sangria (opening next week):

Additionally, tonight I have the privilege to check out Sangria, the new restaurant at 9th and Hamilton in the Butz building in downtown Allentown. I don’t know what to expect: there’s no website on the invitation to preview the menu, no Twitter presence or Facebook page, very little publicity. I did sneak a peak at the interior on Monday. It design looks striking and modern. Looking forward to checking it out. Allentown needs another nice restaurant downtown to complement Bay Leaf, Robata and Made in Brazil. With the BrewWorks doing well and Island in the Sun (Jamaican) moving in 1/2 block to the West, the city is developing a nice core of diverse restaurants.

The Chen Arts Group blog on Gregory Coates upcoming show, opening Monday.

The paintings, drawings and sculpture of world-traveled artist Gregory Coates (who makes his home in Allentown) will be featured in a show at Cedar Crest College titled Honne Tatemae.

Andrew Kleiner of Remember on the “visible effects (dead grass, ruts, soil compaction…) of excessive mowing” at Little Lehigh Park. A good example of the changed tone at Remember over the last six months, as Kleiner has become disillusioned with the city’s park system. He’s right to be angry about things like missing Riparian buffers, but my own view is that the parks are for human use first. Ecological health is an important second (and not incompatible) priority.

Rush Lower Macungie zoning deal with Jaindl hits a (quarry-sized) pothole:

Lower Macungie Township commissioners broke the law with “hurried and secretive” zoning changes that bolster David Jaindl’s plan to develop hundreds of acres of farmland, a group of township residents have alleged in Lehigh County Court.

Both WFMZ and the Call report on the mixed (and therefore disappointing) results of recently announced ASD test scores. But only WFMZ decided that the ASD’s finalist status in the federal Race to the Top program was worth reporting. Too much good news for the Call or merely skeleton-staff under-reporting? Who knows.

The new superintendent plans to break the big middle schools and high schools—where test results were worse–into smaller academies. I continue to hear very good things about the guy. He is quoted in the Call story referring, at least obliquely, to the elephant in the room: uneven school funding.

Zahorchak said Allentown and other districts must continue “gentle but relentless” pressure for a more stable and fair stream of funding to achieve increasingly tough testing standards. The Valley shed more than 150 teaching jobs this spring.

I was wondering how long it would take for the Call to cover Mayor Pawlowski’s apparent failure to get permits for work on his own house. The story has been around the local blogosphere–broken by LV Rambling’s Bernie O’Hare back on July 23–for weeks, and I was counting the days before the decimated daily would print a piece on it.

The story finally appeared today, and only because the city’s Republican boss repeated the charge. This is the equivalent of story-laundering, and it’s too bad: the Call transformed a story about facts into a he-said, she-said partisan tussle. By waiting to peg the story to the GOP’s Bob Romancheck, the paper practically begged Pawlowski to dismiss it as “political nonsense.” No one would accuse the reporter, Jarrett Renshaw, of going soft on the Pawlowski administration, so it’s my hunch that editors up the chain sat on the story, until it could be safely published as someone else’s charge–the journalistic equivalent of ventriloquism.

Regardless of Romancheck, regardless of O’Hare, this isn’t a partisan story. Yes, O’Hare has been unfair to Pawlowski in the past, and clearly took a dislike for the mayor a long time ago. But all of that doesn’t matter, since the facts that O’Hare uncovered are damning in themselves. Shooting (or, in the Call’s case, speaking through) the messenger misses the point.

I initially defended the mayor. When O’Hare’s charges were in effect confirmed by the mayor’s rush permit acquisition, I was completely deflated. We haven’t heard from the mayor yet, but I don’t see how the failure to get permits can be explained away. “Political nonsense” certainly isn’t good enough.

Why does this matter so much? It matters because the mayor has pushed hard on systematic inspections, code enforcement, the pre-sales inspection and the like. These are good policies. As mayor, he should have gone out of his way to follow the law that he expects the rest of us–for good reason–to follow too. It’s his obligation to exceed the letter of the law (or ordinance), since he’s asking the city’s residents to abide as well.

I don’t care if Romancheck, a Republican, is the one to say it. He’s right. There should be an Ethics Board hearing. This isn’t about politics.

WFMZ on the imminent Cosmopolitan opening, across from Symphony Hall in the old Sal’s Spaghetti House footprint. (Disclosure: my wife’s agency had owned the Sal’s building, and has worked with the Cosmopolitan developers.)

Lehigh Valley Lexicon on the resurrected Cannon’s bar at 9th and Liberty. It’s been hard for those of us who loved the original faux-dive hipster/neighborhood bar with the city’s best bar food, but LV Lexicon is right. The new Cannon’s, on its own merits, is a clean, well-lighted place for drinks:

Our group of six happened to be there on a Tuesday night, which is open mic night. Some truly talented acoustic guitar players performed their own tunes and familiar covers. Plus, a rockin’ duo brought the bar to life with song and foot-stomping when they pulled out their banjo and washboard. What a hoot! The country in the city…and all the cityfolk got into it.