Planet Pawlowski

The front page of yesterday's Morning Call featured a story about how the residents of the Pennrose Senior Housing were coping with the constant noise of the arena construction. The Pennrose highrise sits on 7th Street, adjoining the bank being demolished, and directly across from the arena. The construction projects are scheduled to continue through 2014. The Pennrose building is income restricted housing for senior citizens. Interviewed were Romaine Smith, 69, and Carmen Hernandez, who is 71. Also interviewed was Mayor Pawlowski, whose quote about the inconvenience and noise subtitled the article.

"It's a small price to pay for the new neighborhood they are going to have."

I could write something cute, like I'm not sure how many hockey games Romaine and Carmen will attend, but there's nothing cute about Pawlowski's disconnected answer. What the senior residents of Pennrose lost was their neighborhood and quality of life. Around the corner, among the buildings demolished, was a small grocery store, a pizza parlor, a Family Dollar store, and a pharmacy. Across Hamilton Street, and now closed, was a bargain Chinese restaurant. The senior residents, in the sixty three fixed income Pennrose apartments, have no use for the sports bar or high end bistro's replacing those stores,  which served the necessities of their lives. The Morning Call gave Pawlowski a pass on his insensitivity to these people's reality, I do not.

photocredit: Harry Fisher/The Morning Call/October 24,2012

Ballot Referendum News Conference

The ballot referendum committee will be holding a news conference tomorrow afternoon. Although molovinsky on allentown has received an advanced copy, I will leave reporting of this most important event to our local MSM. Tomorrow evening, at 7:00PM, the committee will be holding a public meeting on the second floor of the Brew Works. Come learn the plans to keep this most important asset in procession of the citizens. Volunteers are needed to gather signatures on election day. Pictured above is the water works in 1901, referred to at that time as Crystal Spring.

Regular or Premium

I would like to apologize for some staff problems at molovinsky on allentown. Yesterday, our aging photographer bulked at the demolition dust downtown, and only snapped a few pictures. Last night, one of our senior reporters misplaced his notes. Since this blog is published at 4:30 am, it's not possible to check sources before press time. This incomplete report has to do with the quality of water. Allentown water currently is comprised from both spring and creek sources. When demand requires that the supply be supplemented by more creek water, more chemicals, specifically chlorine, is necessary. A private water company will be allowed to increase selling water to the bottling companies in Macungie. They in turn will demand the premium spring water; Allentonians will get the regular grade, from the Little Lehigh; Except during heavy rains, when because of sewer runoff, the Lehigh River will be used. Bon Appetit.

Those who prefer to keep getting the premium grade through their Allentown faucets might want to attend the Citizen's Water Meeting tomorrow evening, October 25, on the second floor of the Allentown Brew Works. The meeting starts at 7:00 pm.

Zooming In On Allentown's Past

Today, I assigned our aging staff photographer to document the demolition of the 1st. National Bank building. He only took two photographs, complaining that there was no water spray to control the dust. For a building supposedly encumbered with asbestos, one would think that the pedestrians of Allentown deserved better treatment, but of course the upscale people has yet to arrive. Regular readers have been hearing about Lehigh Structural Steel on this blog. If you click on and enlarge this lower closeup, you can clearly see Lehigh

Structural Steel Allentown stenciled on this main beam. Imagine a time when an Allentown centered bank used steel beams made in Allentown for it's headquarters in center square. We will be lucky if the beams used in the new building are made in the U.S.A.
UPDATE: A Morning Call video shows water being sprayed during the demolition. The spray person may have been on lunch break yesterday when I visited the site.

The Debate Performance

As a supporter of Mitt Romney, I'm pleased with my candidate this morning after last night's debate. I listened to the post event pundits declare Obama the evening's winner; And a fine recital it was. Although the Fact Checkers will argue if Obama's Middle East visit in 09 was an Apology Tour, he never did reach Israel. Has the perception of the United States improved in the last four years? This past weekend Egyptian President Morsi attended services in Cairo, where the cleric prayed that the Jews and their supporters are destroyed. When the words of both candidates last evening are analyzed, separated from the performance, charm and oratory tone, there's a different result. As a country, vision and leadership will serve us better than acting and public speaking.

Allentown's New Public Housing

The announcement was for two hundred upscale apartments at 7th and Linden Streets in Allentown. If ever there were two phrases that don't go together, it is upscale and 7th and Linden. The apartments are to attract new residents into downtown, not the existing demographic. The existing demographic would be presumedly priced out, at $1,200 monthly rent. It wasn't that many years ago that The Morning Call prohibited property managers from using words such as luxury and executive in their advertising. We were told then that such adjectives were exclusionary, and promoted discrimination. Reilly, now tells us "This is the next piece in transforming downtown Allentown into a place where people really can live, work and play." I suppose that those who currently live, work and play there aren't really people, at least not the upscale kind. I'm not an opponent of gentrification, or what the young urbanists call mixed income neighborhoods. I know that Reilly could rent two of these units immediately. I know that over the course of a year that he could rent twenty such units, but two hundred? Until this Neighborhood Improvement Zone(NIZ) was created for Allentown's transformation, public housing was  taxpayers subsidizing the tenant, it's now taxpayers subsidizing the landlord.