As Allentown Turns

Early this morning I was imagining J. B. Reilly's reaction to Don Cunningham's column identifying the boroughs surrounding Allentown as the new haunt of the millennials.  He wrote about a packed old tavern in Hellertown  serving craft beers, with a food truck instead of a kitchen.  While J. B.'s spending $millions of our tax dollars building designer palaces in center city Allentown,  Donny says that the target audience is starting to hang in places like Emmaus.

Hopefully, J.B. will forgive both Donny for writing the article, and his tenant, The Morning Call, for publishing the piece.  The Call is between publisher/editors right now,  with Robert York having been transferred to the Daily News by Tronc, the current outside media giant owning the paper.

Before York left,  he told me that my agenda seems to be taking the paper to task. While I had always fancied this blog as the intersection of local politics and history,  I'm willing to also accept York's description of this site as an additional mission.

A Morning Call Omission

I've been wrestling with something over a week now,  but Bill White made the answer much easier yesterday.  In his column he writes about the contributions of Wally Ely, both to the valley in general and to him in particular.  He mentions that Ely's last contribution to the paper concerned the Philly's,  his favorite team.  Actually, that was the last contribution they used,  but not his only recent piece.  His previous piece, submitted to the paper only weeks before, was a protest against the weed walls in the Allentown park system.

Ely was too much of a gentleman to make a big deal out of the paper ignoring his submission, but he was passionate enough about the topic to contact me about it...I even alluded to it in a previous post,  but didn't identify him.  Likewise, because he passed away,  I wasn't planning on using his name.  However, since White has chosen to enumerate Ely's contributions,  I decided to come forward.

If White really wants to pay tribute to Mr. Ely,  they should print his letter about the park system.

Wildlands Conservancy Responsible For Fish Kill

In their indiscriminate haste to remove all dams in the Lehigh Valley, the Wildlands Conservancy is responsible for the massive fish kill this week at the Fish Hatchery. When General Trexler had the trout nursery built, they also built, just upstream,  a small dam, to insure and regulate a water supply for the nursery. Last fall the Wildlands gleefully demolished that dam, removing an important component of the trout nursery. Although the heavy storm Monday night occurred hundreds of times in the last century, this time the dam wasn't there to regulate the fast moving water. Over 1,400 fish were flooded out of the holding pools and died. Last summer, I watched the Wildlands Conservancy give a power point presentation to Allentown City Council on dam removals. When I invited City Council to Lehigh Parkway to defend the Robin Hood Dam, the Conservancy crashed my event, and asked the council members instead to come with them to the trout nursery dam, to see their wonderful plans. I hope yesterday that the Conservancy had the decency to help pick up the dead fish.

The lesson here is that not all dams are without purpose.

The Morning Call article on mcall Tuesday afternoon contained a paragraph describing how the fish hatchery workers believe that the dam removal factored into the fish kill. That paragraph was edited out of both the hard and soft copy editions Tuesday evening.  I have no doubt that that the deletion was done to shield The Wildlands Conservancy.

Reggie Rickard an Allentown resident who has been volunteering at the hatchery for 45 years said the fish kill is probably the worst in the hatchery's recent history. Initially, he estimated as many as 2,000 may have been killed, but the final tally was about 1,400.

Fish have been lost in other heavy rains storms, but Rickard said this was a major fish kill. He and other volunteers who joined city workers in collecting and counting the corpses Tuesday believe the death rate may have been exacerbated by recent upstream dam removals on small streams.

photo:April Bartholomew/The Morning Call/July15,2014

ADDENDUM: Above I have combined and reprinted two posts from July of 2014. The fish hatchery again experienced a massive fish kill in this recent storm of August 2018. The former fish hatchery dam, and its removal in connection to the fish kills, has been removed from the Morning Call archives and the memory of its news reporters. However, this blog knows the truth, and so will my readers.

Tony Phillips Reemerges

Yesterday on facebook a Hispanic woman commented that she was glad to hear that Tony Phillips was involved with the local NAACP.  Another Hispanic woman responded that although she was here for over a decade, she never heard of him... they're both correct.  Tony is a former Allentown policeman who then served on city council.  In 2009 he ran against Pawlowski for mayor,  as a black Republican no less.  Tony has always been his own man. After that election he dropped out of Allentown politics to work as an educator in the Philadelphia area.

In the NAACP demand letter about the South Whitehall shooting,  Phillips is described as the vice president of the local chapter.  Although I stand by my criticism of the demand letter,  I'm glad to see Tony reengaging in Allentown.  We worked together on a few issues back in the day, and I hope we can do so again in the future.

photo shows Tony outside my SPEAK OUT meeting in 2009. 

Local NAACP Letter Inappropriate

The local branch of the NAACP has, in my opinion, misspoken with demands concerning the South Whitehall Police Department.  Their demand letter was published even before District Attorney Jim Martin released his determination on the recent Dorney Park shooting.  The letter demanded that the police department fire the officer and hire minority officers .  It further demanded that Martin recuse himself from the case.

As it turns out Martin did determine that the shooting was unjustified, and charged the officer with manslaughter.  Besides knowing that I would not have wanted to be in the officer's shoes that fateful afternoon on Hamilton Blvd,  at this point I'll leave judgement to a jury.  

Even as a blogger who is not afraid of being politically incorrect,  I realize that this blog post will rub many people the wrong way.  I appreciate that the local NAACP fights against local prejudice, but in this instance I find them acting as the bully.  The outcome of the confrontation was indeed tragic, but the police were reacting to pleas for help from motorists being terrorized by someone apparently out of control. I see no local police pattern that mistreats minorities.

Allentown's New Park

A reader wondered back channel about yesterday's post on Allentown's trail plans.  He was perplexed about why Emily Opilo would write such a story, especially quoting no less than two people who are no longer with the city for dubious reasons.  The article mentioned that the Wildlands Conservancy donated $50K to further the project along.  It may well be a strategic investment by the Conservancy.  After volunteering to help South Whitehall develop their park masterplan,  the Wildlands was awarded the contract to build a trail along the Jordan through the township.  This is a $multi-million dollar project, and the Wildands Conservancy takes 15% off the top for their administrative fees.  By the time Allentown would have the financing lined up,  the Wildlands could claim that they have experience in trail building.

I have complained on this blog before about the newspaper qenching  my op-ed on Wehr's Dam to protect the Wildlands.  Sacred cows are not new to the valley.  With the Morning Call in business limbo, expect it to be more kitten like than ever.  Although the recently departed publisher denied it, I believe that Bill White is making the editorial decisions.  They couldn't possibly be paying him to just write another column about eating his way through another festival.

photo: the Basin Street parcel, purchased by Pawlowski and being developed by Ray O'Connell as Allentown's newest park.

Pawlowski's Bicycle Scam

Emily Opilo is my favorite Morning Call reporter, but she added up 2 and 2 and got 5 in her recent article about the bicycle path.  In that article she quotes Fran Dougherty as saying the two park purchases from Abe Atiyeh were a unique opportunity for Allentown.  She also interviewed Lindsay Taylor, who advocated for the trail plan.  Although she does mention that there are some brownfield issues, she has no idea how extensive they are,  and how unnecessary those useless  parcels are. There is no redeeming feature or purpose, what-so-ever, for the Basin Street parcel.  Before I dissect the parcels,  lets examine the cheerleaders.  Fran Dougherty is facing a prison sentence for his service to Pawlowski's corrupt administration.  Lindsay Taylor has been dismissed by O'Connell for reasons unknown.  At the very least she also served Pawlowski shenanigans. She was on board for the recent Cedar Beach stunts,  including Pawlowski knowingly opening a leaking pool before last year's election.

Basin and Union Street is near no residential neighborhood at all, and has housed numerous heavy industry over the years.  The ground is saturated with arsenic from thousands of railroad ties alone, much less whatever dripped from endless railcars for over 100 years. It was  the busiest train crossing in the Lehigh Valley.  The fertilizer plant on the parcel west of Schreiber's Bridge was a hell hole.

No offense to the spandex cycling crowd, but those portions of the trail plan were just a ruse to justify another Pawlowski deal.  The notion of providing Allentown a way to ride bikes to work is utter nonsense.  

Grants or no grants,  Allentown and its park system will be better served by selling those parcels and starting to operate the city with integrity, instead of taxpayer funded justifications for previous poor policy.