Molovinsky On Philadelphia

Molovinsky On Allentown has rented temporary space in Philadelphia to help in predicting Allentown's future.  I use my father's old meat truck route all the way down Broad Street to get to the new office,  which is high over the city near Rittenhouse Square.  Although J. B. Reilly hopes for a taste of the sophistication which surrounds Rittenhouse,  I think that he better not hold his breath.  The area between Broad and Rittenhouse is full of beautiful classic buildings,  unlike Allentown, where the older buildings have been demolished to make way for new plain mid-rises of architectural meagerness.

However, lets get back to the meat truck route. North Broad Street is a litter filled desolation of urban decay.  Apparently gentrification doesn't spread like wildfire.  I'm afraid that J. B. will have to learn how to clone the few millennials he supposedly attracted to the Stratas.

In conclusion, I give Reillyville a slight chance of success in terms of any energy resembling the Rittenhouse area of Philadelphia. Fortunately for him it's our tax money funding his NIZ.  For Allentown beyond Linden and Walnut Streets, my best recommendation would be a trash can every ten feet.  Maybe some of the litter will accidentally land in them.

The Liberal Dilemma In Allentown

In 2005 when I ran for mayor, I stated that Allentown was a poverty magnet, and unless certain policies were changed there would be consequences. I spoke of a normal income bell curve, and its importance for a healthy community. At the time I was accused by a few of employing code for racism. The reality of the situation was that as a landlord I was being approached all day by people moving here with no work history, looking for apartments. They were being staked to move-in money by no less than three organizations.

Move ahead 13 years, and this weekend I read on facebook a piece by a well known local liberal, lamenting the over presence of the low-income in Allentown. He was complaining about quality of life issues, and the daunting challenges facing the Allentown School District as a result. His recommendation is a code war on center city apartments, essentially those occupied by the low income. He figures that if enough of them are torn down, Allentown's problems will also disappear.

 I was suggesting in 2005 that we tell the welcome wagons to stop handing out money. He is now suggesting that we essentially chase people away. I won't pass moral judgement on his plan, as was done to mine. However, I will say this...  My plan at the time would have worked, his will not. You cannot undo the transformation that changed Allentown from quaint to intercity urban... there is a new Allentown.

If this gentleman, who lives in the Old Allentown Preservation District has his way, we'll be condemning hundreds of buildings at great expense. Such experiments in urban renewal and social engineering have a proven history of failure. It would be much cheaper for us to buy him a new house elsewhere. He's away every winter anyway.

photo above: In the early 1970's, Allentown demolished the entire low-income neighborhood between Wire and Union Streets

The Morning Call Compromised

Hell broke out last night between myself and Bill White of the Morning Call.  In his blog post about The New York Daily News, he once again couldn't refrain himself for complimenting the Call on maintaining their journalistic standards.  I wasn't having it. We had the following exchange on his facebook page.

I wrote:
  the Morning Call hasn't done one honest story about the NIZ. Although I concede doing so wouldn't change the paper's economic reality, at least you would be doing the journalism that you purport in your piece.

 White replies:
 The Morning Call has done a great job reporting on the NIZ. You don't like it because you preferred downtown the way it was before all this started.

 With Bill White being the professional journalist, and me being the lowly blogger, Bill couldn't resist describing their coverage as great, and dismissing my point as coming from a malcontent. I decided to spell out the Morning Call compromises loud and clear.

My reply to White:
 "I don't like it" because the paper promotes Reilly's apartments like it's news. " I don't like it" because the paper never discussed why the Morning Call building was included in the NIZ, when it is on the other side of Linden Street. "I don't like it" because the Morning Call never reported that the Hospital has ghost offices on the top floor of the arena, so that the state taxes from their highest paid employees can be used for Reilly's debt service, a story I broke and you ignored.


photo above: molovinsky at a Morning Call function, before being outlawed for candor

A New Allentown Park Director

This post is meant as an open letter to Ray O'Connell.  In 2005, Allentown combined the park and recreation departments.  This merger in itself wasn't a bad idea,  but the implementation was flawed.  The first combined director was hired by Francis Dougherty, as were the next two.  Each of these hires had the same background, a graduate degree in recreation.  The first hire came from Lewisburg, and he eventually purchased every item manufactured by a Lewisburg company, Playworld.  Before he left for another position,  he planned an enormous water park for Cedar Beach, stretching up to Hamilton Blvd.  Parking for this monstrosity would have taken up the remainder of the park.  Not having a background in parks,  he turned to the eager Wildlands Conservancy for advice and cooperation.  By the time his replacement arrived,  the Wildlands was so entrenched that they dictated that Allentown remove its small ornamental dam at Robin Hood, and totally obscure the stream banks with Weed Walls. The recent former director assumed the same protocols of her predecessors.

As someone who is familiar with the current park department, I know that the next director need not have the same background.  On the contrary,  he/she shouldn't.  There are managers in place for all the existing recreational components.  The new director should be a competent administrator,  who cares about providing Allentown's children with recreation, but also has an appreciation of the beauty and serenity that the parks can provide all citizens of Allentown,  irregardless of their activity level.

The four remaining swimming pools should be kept in operating condition, and fully staffed. The parcels purchased by Pawlowski, if not offered for sale,  should not be developed until which time the park department catches up with deferred maintenance.  Frankly, that will take at least a decade.

Allentown had an iconic designation park system which adorned picture post cards for decades.  It is time to put away the Playworld plastic catalog and restore the gems in our park system.

a picture post card from Allentown park system's past

Son Of A Butcher

When I was a boy my father and his brother operated two meat markets, one in Allentown, the other in Easton. Once a week my father would drive to Philadelphia to pick up sides of beef for the markets. For me it was a big adventure when he would take me along on the trip.  Before dawn we would drive to the Allentown market on Union Street, near the Lehigh River, and pick up his truck.  Basin Street would take us to S. 4th, for the slow ride up South Mountain.  Route 309 would take us down to Philly,  one stoplight at a time.

The meat district was along the River, on Delaware Avenue,  now flaked by Route 95 and Penn's Landing.  The extra wide brick street in the 1950's, complete with train tracks, had numerous packing houses on both sides. My father would walk through cavernous coolers,  marking his choices with wooden skewers.  After he settled up in the office,  the sides of beef were loaded into the truck. The next stop was the ice house, where blocks of dry ice were put into hanging baskets to keep the meat cold for the return trip.

He then headed back north up 611, along the Delaware to Easton.  The Easton market on S. 4th Street, and the adjoining buildings, were demolished decades ago for new insurance agency building. The side alley has been widened into Pine Street.  Next was the William Penn Highway to Bethlehem, and then on to Allentown to unload the rest of the meat.

Rocky and Paulie in the meat cooler

Morning Call Owner Taking Deposits

If I have succeeded in drawing you in with this teaser headline,  allow me to explain.  Today's local paper had two story titles which drew my attention.  One said that the owner of the newest apartments in Allentown was taking deposits, and the other said that the paper's publisher was moving on to another assignment, with The New York Daily News.  In my mind both of these stories are interwoven.

Needless to say that the newest apartment owner is J.B. Reilly.  Before my life as a blogger, I was a property manager in Allentown.  Myself and my counterparts had to spend $thousands advertising our apartments with the Morning Call.  However, we were not the current landlord of the Morning Call building, as is Reilly.

Although we have never met,  over the last few years Robert York and I developed a rapport of sorts.  I would complain to him about editorial policy,  mainly repressing my submissions about sacred cows and cronyism.  He in turn would express concern about what he felt were unfair complaints about the paper on this blog.

Neither of our replacements have been announced.

Alan Jennings' Missed Opportunity

This weekend Alan Jennings has an editorial in the paper about affordable housing, and landlording in Allentown. One would hardly know that the other week when I appeared on Jennings' radio show, Lehigh Valley Discourse,  he brushed by my experience as a city center landlord.  Instead,  Alan wanted to complain about Trump, never mind that we have our own issues here in the valley.  In light of  his editorial this week,  it may have been a lost opportunity.  I say may have been, because Alan wouldn't have agreed with my take on the problem,  and never has since 2005.

In 2005, when I ran as an independent candidate for mayor, I said that Allentown was becoming a poverty magnet.  As a landlord I saw how many people were being staked to move-in money by various social agencies in the valley. Thousands and thousands of people moved here whose career is exploiting Social Security Disability,  the job market was never a factor for them.  Those with that career are transient, with low and skipped rent deciding which town they move to, and for how long they stay.  That was a very politically incorrect observation at the time,  and is still a very sensitive issue.  However,  what isn't debatable is that Allentown has become a much poorer city in the last 15 years.   In a sense, Alan is in the poverty business.  Needless to say he still has social engineering recommendations, now about what should be done in 2018, to better the situation.  I could dissect them point by point, but let me instead make just one observation.  In reality there is no lack of affordable housing in Allentown, or there would not be so many low income people moving here. I do not believe that enlarging and making that segment of the rental market more attractive benefits Allentown in the long term.

Alan Jennings To Train Sharecroppers

Those of you who listened to the podcast of my interview with Alan Jennings know that toward the end of the interview I confessed to snickering about his organization's plan ( Community Action Committer of Lehigh Valley) to take over the farmer training at the Lehigh County owned Seed Farm.  Those who follow this blog know that I oppose Farmland Preservation,  because it is a ridiculous disconnect with the reality of food production in 2018.  It is however politically correct for urban liberals to think that if as much farmland as possible stays available,  there will be an endless banquet of environmental bliss, with organic food no less.  Alan sees it as an extension of food for the poor, sort of another ladder step in the food pantry mission. Low income food issues are because of money, not food production shortfalls. These liberals of course are ignorant of the long hours and hard work which goes into farming. They are also ignorant of the economic reality of competing with large scale agriculture.

Now, unless Alan wants to gift each of his graduates with a farm at our expense,  they will either be a farm hand, or at best a sharecropper.  What is really scary about Alan's plan is that it has the endorsement of the Republican controlled Lehigh County Commission.  They are apparently so vote craven, that they go along with such nonsense.

The only practical program assisting farming is Clean And Green.  Unfortunately, the Morning Call ran an expose on the program featuring photographs of large expensive houses,  surrounded by farmland. While the program limits tax reduction to only the land actively farmed,  the photographs give the impression that the tax breaks are going to people who don't need it.  I suppose the liberal paper thinks that those involved in agriculture are supposed to live in shacks.  Worse yet, the paper thinks that their story is a masterpiece, has has been running it on their website for months.

photocredit: Dorothea Lange, Son of Sharecropper, 1937