Endangered Site's Tour

On Saturday afternoon, at 1:00pm, I will lead the endangered WPA Site's Tour. The dam shown above, will not be on the tour this year. It has joined several other previous gifts by the WPA to the City of Allentown, which have been either discarded or destroyed. The tour takes less than an hour, and is a leisurely stroll along the creek, starting and ending at the Robin Hood Bridge parking lot.

The Park's Poor Priorities

About five years ago I started advocating for the WPA structures throughout the Allentown park system. Three years ago I organized a group which surveyed the structures in all the parks. At that time, I published a picture of the top wall at the Union Terrace Stairwell, on St. Elmo Street, which showed one stone missing. In the last two years, as you can see from the current picture, several more stones came loose, and mortar is missing from entire stone cap of the structure. In these past five years not one cent has been spent on the stoneworks. Two expensive patterned concrete walkways have just been completed on Trexler Blvd, leading from the west end to Cedar Park. The new park director, John Mikowychok, informs me that about $30 thousand has been allocated to repairs on the Fountain Park Stairwell. Unfortunately, over half the funds will be used for a consulting engineer. Needless to say, the park would be better off with all the money used for a stone mason. No disrespect to the engineer, but these structures are way beyond his paygrade; Just fix the things like they were.

This Saturday at 1:00pm, I will lead a tour of the WPA Structures in Lehigh Parkway. This is a repeat of last year's tour. I hope some city officials take the opportunity to join us and learn about these irreplaceable structures, with which they have been entrusted.

J. Molovinsky, Part 3, Wenz Company

This past weekend there was an auction at the former Wenz Company monument factory in the 1900 block of Hamilton Street. This facility has played several parts in Allentown's history, besides having produced thousands of tombstones. Enormous blocks of granite still remain from when it was the last stop on the Quarry Barber railroad branch line. Sculptures remain from the Phil Berman era, when artists used the Wenz equipment for monumental art. lastly, there are hundreds and hundreds of old tombstones, which were replaced over the decades, in local cemeteries with replacement markers. As mentioned in Part 1 of this post series, part of an old tombstone led me to discover my great grandmother's grave on Fountain Hill. That sculpture was made at Wenz, and Jennie Molovinsky's original stone also lies at Wenz's.

My grandfather came to Allentown as a young man in 1893. After working and saving for a number of years, he brought his parents over from the Old Country. The former synagogue on 2nd. Street had just acquired their cemetery off Fullerton Avenue when his mother died. Jewish tradition dictated that a man was the first burial in a new cemetery, so she was buried in an old Jewish Cemetery, on Fountain Hill. Several years later her husband, my great grandfather, was killed while being robbed on Basin Street. He is buried on Fullerton Avenue.

J. Molovinsky Part 2, Mt. Sinai

Jews have been buried in a small section of Fairview Cemetery, called Mt. Sinai, for over 138 years. Although the markings on several stones have worn away, Hannah Dreifuss was buried there in 1868. The September 10th Chronicle in 1875 reported that two members of the Jewish faith, prominent Hamilton Street merchants, Joshua Schnurman and Simon Feldman, purchased a section from Fairview Cemetery and applied for a charter for Mt. Sinai Cemetery, thus creating the first Jewish Institution in Allentown.
Fairview Cemetery itself was not formally laid-out until 1870, when the renowned architectural firm Lathan of Buffalo was hired to create the premiere resting place in the Lehigh Valley. The giants of Allentown would be buried there, among them Harry Trexler, the Leh's, and the Mack's of truck fame.
The History Lehigh County, published in 1914, notes Mt. Sinai contained 29 graves. Among them was Julia Wolf, who died in 1907. Her husband Morris served with the local regiment in the Civil War, and lived to be 98 years old. Feldman and Schnurman were among the earliest Jews in Allentown, immigrants from Germany who practiced the modern "Reformed" Judaism. These gentlemen and their extended family members would go on to form the "Young Ladies and Men's Hebrew Society" in 1883, a predecessor to the Keneseth Israel Congregation organized in 1903. Mt. Sinai remained the resting place for Reformed Jews till 1928, when Keneseth Israel established its own cemetery. Burials continued at Mt. Sinai through the 1940's as spouses and passing family members joined those previously departed in family plots. Today there are 78 graves. In July of 2006, thirty years after the previous burial in 1976, Joseph Levine was laid to rest at the age of 103.  The cemetery is not affiliated with any synagogue.

Editor's notes: The above is reprinted from 2009.  My search to find the grave of M. Azrilian led me to Mt. Sinai.  At the time,  the entire Fairview Cemetery and Mt. Sinai were in terrible shape.  Numerous posts on this blog led to story on the situation by The Morning Call.  Subsequently, I organized a meeting between the cemetery operator and the public.

Jennie Molovinsky, Part 1

I was at a party where the host recently acquired a lawn sculpture. Unknown to him, a section of it was comprised of an old Jewish tombstone, of a wife and mother, M. Azrilian, who died at the age of 25 in 1918. It's a beautiful carving of a branchless tree trunk, symbolizing a life ended prematurely.
I became concerned as to where this stone had come from. Who would know if their great-grandmother's stone was taken? I had no idea even where my great-grandmother was buried. I searched for this young woman's grave. Finally, Rabbi Juda from Bethlehem directed me to the old Agudath Achim Cemetery in Fountain Hill. There I found the woman, M. Azrilian, with a new grave marker. Next to her I discovered Jennie Molovinsky, my great-grandmother.

My thanks to Rabbi Juda and M. Azrilian (1893-1918)

I  wrote the above paragraph in July of 1997.  In searching for M. Azrilian, I first became aware of Mt. Sinai, the small Jewish portion of Fairview Cemetery on Lehigh Street in Allentown. Early posts on this blog deal with my advocacy for that cemetery, and the history of the Mt. Sinai portion.  When Jennie died in 1913, the former Agudath Achim Synagogue on 2nd Street in Allentown had just consecrated their new cemetery on Fullerton Avenue. Jewish tradition requires that the first burial be a man, so Jennie was buried in the old cemetery, on Fountain Hill.

A Thorny Issue With Old Allentown

Although I'm friendly with a number of people who live in Old Allentown, I must once again take their Association to task. Their current press release: Please come out and help us beautify our neighborhood and meet your neighbors... The Old Allentown Preservation Association is planting roses bushes along the Union and West End Cemetery's fence on Chew St. from 10th St. to 12th St...We have cleared a 3 foot rose bed along the whole Chew St. fence and will be planting 142 3 gallon roses along the fence. Partially funded by a grant from the City of Allentown and by the United Way. The last thing that cemetery needs is more plantings to take care of. It's been well over a decade since that cemetery has been properly maintained. Even as the group prepared a bed for the rose bushes, large sections of the cemetery, and the area around the tombstones, have yet to be mowed this year. I made this observation on Facebook today, and a member replied, There are plans in the works to assist with dealing with weeds and mowing the grass. OAPA has not finalized them yet. OAPA has been in existence for 30 years, the cemetery, in the middle of the district, has been in distress for 20 years. Time for you folks to finalize those plans.

UPDATE: Perhaps the true intention of the roses is to be a sight barrier between Old Allentown and the reality of the cemetery's neglect.

The Forever Bridge

As the recently departed city engineer, Richard Young, was giving his blessings to the Wildlands Conservancy phonies to demolish the Robin Hood Dam, supposedly for ecology, the Cedar Creek, just south of the Taking Forever New Union Street Bridge, was disastrously eroding it's banks. In the destruction, caused by the coffer dams and resulting creek rerouting for bridge construction, the trees are dying and the pedestrian bridge has been virtually destroyed. This bridge served the parking lot and children of Hamilton Park for decades. Another casualty of the Taking Forever Bridge, is that both the Union Terrace baseball fields are out of commission. Save for this blog, where has the Park and Engineering oversight been hiding?

The $10 Million Dollar Man

There is an interesting letter to the editor in today's paper, where the writer regurgitates the image that Madison Avenue put in his head about Tom Wolf. The writer thinks that Wolf is a folksy guy, as portrayed in the television commercials. I don't know much about the real Tom Wolf, but neither does he. I do know that he's no outsider, having served under Rendell. I suspect that he didn't come back to his family business to save the worker's jobs, but because he stopped receiving payments on a note that he was holding. The letter writer speculates that this marvelous guy went from last to first place because he's such a champion of the people. I marvel about how oblivious people are to the influence of a good commercial.