The Blog Continues

Since Pawlowski's sentencing, I have been crowing somewhat about this blog. Over the past decade I have taken city hall to task over more issues than I can remember.  While my advocacy for the traditional park system is a constant,  I also defended the former merchants of Hamilton Street.  During that period I held some public meetings,  which activated some people, who still attend city council meetings to this day.

During this past week of crowing,  I have also taken the Morning Call to task for their bias on numerous issues.  In addition to being a cheerleader for Pawlowski until the FBI raid,  their coverage of the NIZ is nothing but a virtual promotion for the private interests involved.

A new antagonist, using a pseudonym, popped up in recent comments.  Bob wrote, It is entirely reasonable to ask why you didn't call the FBI if you knew this to be true. You won't answer the question, so I'll speculate: you didn't because you had suspicions, but no proof. So perhaps the corruption wasn't as clear back then as your recent posts have implied. Either that, or you were strangely unwilling to support law enforcement in making Allentown a better place.  At first I thought that Bob was an apologist for the Pawlowski regime, while my current hunch is that he's affiliated with the Morning Call.

To imply that a citizen journalist mis-served the community by not contacting authorities on various issues is taking kill the messenger to a new low.  My bad news for Bob is that this blog will continue to scrutinize Allentown, and the institutions which are suppose to serve it.

blogger addressing city council on one issue or another

When Kahane Came To Allentown

He told the Jews gathered in Allentown that their leaders were spineless, that's how the controversial rabbi spoke. When Meir Kahane came to town in the summer of 1990, none of the Jewish institutions would give him space to speak. Before emigrating to Israel, he had formed the Jewish Defense League in NYC in 1968. He lectured that turning the other cheek was a Christian concept, and that the minimum take away from the Holocaust was that American Jews should own a gun, and know how to use it. His views in Israel about nationalism on the West Bank were much more controversial, and he was jailed there for incitement.  His speech in Allentown was one of his last. He was assassinated later that year during a speech in NYC. 

above reprinted from April 15, 2014

ADDENDUM: October 29, 2018

Although the synagogue shooting is on my mind, I'm not advocating for  Jewish self defense. Likewise, I do not feel that the Vote, Vote, Vote chants at the Pittsburg vigil Saturday night are the appropriate response... Anti-semitism and racial bigotry are not the by-product of current politics, but rather historical flaws in our human condition. We must somehow learn and effectively teach prejudice reduction.

Morning Call Sleeps In Wheelhouse

In yesterday's post I bashed Bill White of The Morning Call.  I don't think it's fair that I keep bashing him,  so today I take aim at their other columnist,  Paul Muschick.  Paul thinks that the need for big money in campaigns for governor and senator led Pawlowski astray,  and previously campaigning just as a mayor, he was innocent as fallen snow.

He risked the fine public service career he built over decades in Allentown to squeeze people for money he needed to run for higher office.

The FBI needed a starting point and an ending point for their investigation, or it would still be on-going.  When Pawlowski's first appointed park director ordered every item in the PlayWorld catalog for the destination playground,  perhaps that should have been scrutinized. Only when the same director wanted to build a destination water park that would have extended all the way up to Hamilton Blvd.,  did city council finally blink.

No Paul, ethics are ethics... You either have them, or you don't.  This blog has reported inequalities in city hall for years before the FBI investigations. Pawlowski always used city contracts as plums to be traded.

As Scott Armstrong and others have pointed out,  the Morning Call only started reporting on the corruption after the FBI raided city hall.  While spending a decade asleep at the wheelhouse,  they now subscribe to McMahon's premise that Pawlowski was a moral person, driven to aberrant behavior by circumstances beyond his control.  McMahon is Pawlowski's defense attorney, charged with saying whatever necessary to get his client out of jail.  The Morning Call is a newspaper, charged with providing citizens of Allentown with the truth.

When the Morning Call building was included in the NIZ zone, although across the street from that zone,  they became officially compromised.

Readers in the Lehigh Valley seeking some glimmers of truth have been limited to this blog and O'Hare's Ramblings.

Bill White's Whitewash

Bill White was so impressed with his column on Wednesday, that he had it placed on the paper's front page.  His premise was that there are two Ed Pawlowskis... one who championed for the minority community, and the other who let his political ambition get the better of him.  In reality there was only one Ed Pawlowski.

Pawlowski courted the minority communities in the last election because the more informed white community knew by then that he was corrupt.  Meanwhile, some hispanics and blacks were flattered that he was stopping in their beauty salons and attending their birthday parties.  Some who testified on Pawlowski's behalf at the sentencing hearing needed a translator. Although, they can't speak or understand English, they still knew that Pawlowski was a saint?  Last fall I reported on Pawlowski's election strategy on this blog.

Of course all of that is too politically incorrect for Bill White and the newspaper,  thus we now read about Pawlowski's compassion for minorities.

As a commenter on yesterday's post noted, it would be more beneficial to the community if the paper realized that their own shortcomings enabled the Pawlowski era of corruption.

The Morning Call's Mayor

On Tuesday, when Ed Pawlowski was remanded to prison, it marked 13 years since the Morning Call endorsed Pawlowski for mayor.  Before their formal endorsement,  their reporter distorted public opinion in Pawlowski's favor.  When Pawlowski gave a press conference heralding a house for sale on Liberty Street, Daryl Nerl, their election reporter, wrote a glowing article.  The next week when I documented that in reality the house was remodeled at public expense three times with two defaults,  the paper didn't print one word.  That pattern continued for the next decade,  with Pawlowski getting credit for other people's accomplishments, and being excused for his faults.

On Tuesday, the paper was still crediting Pawlowski for the revitalization of center city.  First of all he wasn't responsible, and secondly, it's still a dead zone.

The same reporter, although no longer on staff, was writing copy for Pawlowski's campaign manager  Mike Fleck, when the FBI raided city hall.

He remains good friends with Bill White, and was assigned freelance assignments at the paper so far this month on October 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16, and 17th.   Don't expect much change at The Morning Call.

Morning Call photo of Pawlowski misleading council, with this blogger over his left shoulder listening to his distortions

A Pawlowski Story

I have as much, if not more institutional knowledge of Ed Pawlowski as anybody, including the paper.  Although not widely remembered,  I ran as the third person on the ticket in 2005, against Pawlowski for his first term.  The Morning Call repressed my campaign.  As an independent, my chances regardless were very slim...However,  I did have an important message, which was also repressed.  This post is written through that prism.

The Morning Call, and especially the reporter assigned to the election in 2005, were in love with Ed.  The Republican candidate,  Bill Heydt, got less than fair coverage, and I got none.  As a landlord, I knew that thousands of people at the public trough were moving to Allentown and being sponsored by competing social agencies.  I sounded the alarm that we were operating a poverty magnet,  but nobody cared to report that harsh truth.  Today, 13 years later, Pawlowski was sentenced,  and we are now a poor city.

While Pawlowski had defenders until the end, his character was flawed from the beginning.  In 2009, while I was conducing a series of SPEAK OUT meetings,  Pawlowski told the press that I was a slumlord. Although, I never had any violations in 35 years, and Pawlowski knew that I operated in an exemplary fashion,  he knowingly made the false accusation.

A couple years later, he repeated that false accusation outside council chambers to several people, in my presence.  I asked him how he would like it if I called him a corrupt politician?  Although I have never called him corrupt,  the legal system has now made that determination.

Although, this is first person experience with Pawlowski's flawed character,  my experience was not unique.  I understand that many people consider landlords expendable low hanging fruit, but as a blogger over the last decade, a number of people have told me how Pawlowski attempted to debase them.  Those testifying on his behalf today, for the most part, are people who by appointment or career, benefitted from him.  I noticed the total absence of leading business and local real estate people most familiar with him,  who apparently declined to testify on his behalf.

photo by molovinsky

ADDENDUM: Pawlowski was sentenced this afternoon to 15 years, and taken to prison.

A Park Protestor From The Past

`Green' Curtain Blocks Sledding And The View
January 09, 1992|The Morning Call
To the Editor:

Hold your sleds girls and boys! Others, too, on the alert! With the planting of a dense cluster of 60 evergreen trees and the erection of a "No Sledding" sign, creating a veritable iron curtain, the park and watershed people have once again undertaken their repetitive effort of the past 45 years to eliminate a most popular sledding slope in Lehigh Parkway. The motive -- crass self-interest in defiance of public good. The effect -- an impassable barrier and concealment of a magnificent vista of "one of the finest valleys in Eastern Pennsylvania."

Children and adults from the 400 homes with longtime and easy access to the slope and others arriving in cars have enjoyed sledding here after school and into the night and throughout the day and night on weekends. Yet sledding is but one of the attractions of this enduring slope. In summer children and teachers from Lehigh Parkway Elementary School have enjoyed a walk down the slope and into the park for a break from book and blackboard. Birders, joggers, hikers and others on a leisurely stroll engrossed in their particular interest have found the slope irresistible.

For a host of others, this opening into the park after a long stretch of woods presents a charming vista and urge to descend. Interest is immediately evoked by the sight of a mid-19th century log house  and a historic wagon trail leading past the site of a lime kiln to tillable lands of earlier times.

The view takes in an expanse of meadowlands, now groomed, to the Little Lehigh River and up the western slope to Lehigh Parkway North. Indeed, a pleasant view to be esteemed and preserved for generations to come. It was distressing on New Year's Day to see a family and their guests intent upon a walk down the slope suddenly stop in amazement and shock as the closure became evident.

The cost in dollars through the years of the park peoples' fixation on destroying the Parkway slope must be staggering indeed without dwelling on other deliberate depletions. Typically, the placement of the 1991 "No Sledding" sign employed a team of four men with three vehicles -- a backhoe, a panel truck, and a super cab pickup truck, the latter furnishing radio music.

BERT A. LUCKENBACH
ALLENTOWN

Burt Luckenbach was a park activist, who wrote this letter in 1992. Few remember sledding on that hill above the Log & Stone house, but I do. The open hill was located at the end of Lehigh Parkway South, near the intersection with Coronado Street. The Wagon Trail has also been blocked off for years. I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Luckenbach, but like to think that he would approve of my efforts regarding the parks.

reprinted from December of 2017

Another Hatchet Job By Morning Call

The Morning Call,  despite being sued by Marty Nothstein for its previous hatchet job against him, has done it again.  The first dose of yellow journalism centered on a Me Too allegation from an anonymous source.  Although even the alleged victim said no foul, no harm, the paper went with the story anyway.  They now are going with chapter two, demeaning his longterm directorship at the velodrome.  What makes these stories so yellow is that the upcoming election is so near,  and that opinions are formed from headlines, not disclaimers and corrections.

Because of the lawsuit, the Nothstein camp has understandably refused to comment.  Although the story may or may not have some validity on its own,  the lawsuit and election make its publication at this time completely partisan and improper.

If Chris Borick and Muhlenberg College wish their polling to appear legitimate, they should completely disassociate from the newspaper.