Ban The Bikes

In 2007, mayor Pawlowski hired his first director for the combined park and recreation department. The hire was recommended by Pawlowski's  city manager, Fran Dougherty. The new park and recreation director had no background about parks per se, but did have a masters in recreation. Dougherty would also hire the next two directors, who had the same identical background in recreation.

Cycling became their common goal for the parks, and in 2009, a consultant was hired to formulate a plan for an interconnected cycling path throughout the city park system. Two new parcels were later purchased to facilitate the connection between existing parks. Advise about managing the park land itself was farmed out to the Wildlands Conservancy, and we ended up with the weed walls they call riparian buffers. Iconic park features, such as the WPA structures, were allowed to deteriorate.

During these years there was only one person speaking out in defense of our traditional park system, yours truly, on this blog. It is a battle I have mostly lost. I failed to save the small picturesque dams in Lehigh Parkway. During the summer the buffers still block both view and access to the creeks.  Ironically, the buffers have no actual benefit, because the storm water is piped under them, directly into the streams.

During this coronavirus crisis the parks are especially crowded with families and their young children. A cyclist whizzing by at 30 miles an hour is a tragedy waiting to happen. The other morning a cyclist passed me looking down reading his iPhone.

I call upon Mayor O'Connell and park director Karen El-Chaar to ban cycling in the parks during this period of heavy use.

photo above:  In 2009 I conducted a press conference about the dangers of combining cyclists with people walking in Allentown parks.

The Allentown Parking Authority Monster

Although the shopping district in Allentown has shrunk down to only Hamilton and 7th Streets, the meter district remains as it did during the heydays of the 1950's. The meters extend from Walnut to Chew, from 5th to 10th, well over 1000 meters in 20 sq. blocks. Parking meters extend out to 10th and Chew Sts, three full blocks beyond the closest store.* These meters are a defacto penalty for the residents, mostly tenants. In essence, it is a back door tax on Allentown's poorest citizens. The apologists claim the tenants can purchase a resident meter pass, however their friends and visitors cannot. To add insult to injury, in 2005, to help finance a new parking deck for the arts district, the Parking Authority doubled the meter rate and fines. Testimony to City Council permitting the rate increase indicated it was favored by the merchants. At that time I documented to the Council that in fact the merchants were not informed, much less in favor. The vote was 5 to 2, with Hershman and Hoover dissenting
* I used the above copy on my posting of October 3, 2007. In the past several weeks the Parking Authority finally removed the meters in the 900 block of Chew St, 50 years beyond their legitimate need.

UPDATE: The post above is reprinted from September 2009. I have published dozens of posts on the Parking Authority. In 2005, I conducted two press conferences on their abuses; One conference was at 10th and Chew Streets, and concerned the oversized meter zone. The second conference, directly in front of their office, concerned the fabricated merchant survey that they  presented to City Council. Old tricks die hard. Forward ahead to 2015, and the Parking Authority will once again penalize both existing merchants and residents.  The new plan is to double the meter parking rate from $1 an hour, to $2, and extend the metering time to 10:00pm.  They claim that the merchants are in favor of this plan. Although I will not conduct my own survey, as I did 2005,  their survey defies logic.  Why would any of the few surviving merchants want their customers submitted to a destination city parking rates in Allentown? Despite the hype,  Allentown is not Miami Beach or N.Y.C.. In reality, just as the taxpayers are subsidizing the arena zone,  now the merchants and residents will be subsidizing the arena plan through punitive parking rates.

UPDATE Memorial Day Weekend 2015: I did end up asking several merchants, and no, they were not surveyed. Eight years from the original date of this post, and the Authority is still up to the same shenanigans.   Reilly's City Center tenants, merchants and customers will get a free pass for the Authority's inconvenient parking lots. Other existing tenants in the NIZ, such as the south side of the 900 block of Walnut Street, will not be eligible for residential parking permits.  If you have a problem with any of this, remember, you must now put money in the meter at night, before  complaining to City Council.

UPDATE MARCH 20, 2020:  As of noon yesterday, the Parking Authority suspended tickets in the residential permit zones.  However, normal parking meter tickets will continue.  This would have of course punish merchants still open for business during this virus crisis. However, while there are virtually no merchants left on Hamilton Street since the NIZ revitalization, the punishment would have mostly affect the minority merchants on 7th Street....or in other words, life as usual in Allentown. Governor Wolf has declared that all non-essential businesses must close. Will the monster also now stand down?

Morning Call Doubles Subscription Rate

Digital subscriptions to the Morning Call are increasing from $15.96 to $27.72 per month. This is at the same time when some other home internet services are being lowered, to help the self isolated cope during  the Coronavirus crisis. This is at the same time that the Morning Call has cut back on staff and news coverage.

I've been a subscriber for 50 years. I only stopped the hard copy version a few years ago, because their delivery became both unreliable and too late in the morning for my preferences.

Readers of this blog know that I have issues with the paper, mostly with their reluctance to confront local sacred cows about hypocrisy. Although I have documented ex parte communications between the state and the Wildlands Conservancy about Wehr's Dam, the Morning Call refuses to allow me Another View piece on the topic. However, last month they did promise to investigate the situation themselves.

I will continue my subscription regardless of the price, but I'm not sure how many other readers will do likewise.

Crimes By The Wildland Conservancy

photo by Tami Quigley

The top photo shows the Robin Hood Bridge, before the Wildlands Conservancy demolished the little Robin Hood Dam, just downstream beyond the bridge. The dam was only about 10 inches high, and was built as a visual effect to accompany the bridge in 1941. It was the last WPA project in Allentown, and considered the final touch for Lehigh Parkway. Several years ago, the Wildlands told the Allentown Park Director and City Council that it wanted to demolish the dam. The only thing that stood between their bulldozer and the dam was yours truly. I managed to hold up the demolition for a couple weeks, during which time I tried to educate city council about the park, but to no avail. If demolishing the dam wasn't bad enough, The Wildlands Conservancy piled the broken dam rubble around the stone bridge piers, as seen in the bottom photo. I'm sad to report that the situation is now even worse. All that rubble collected silt, and now weeds and brush is growing around the stone bridge piers. I suppose the Wildlands Conservancy considers it an extension of its riparian buffers.

The Wildlands Conservancy is now going to demolish Wehr's Dam at Covered Bridge Park in South Whitehall. The township commissioners are cooperating, by having a grossly inflated price associated with repairing the dam, to justify a disingenuous referendum. Sadly, by next spring I will be showing you before and after pictures of that crime.

top photo by Tami Quigley

above reprinted from August 2016

UPDATE: To everyone's surprise, especially the Wildlands Conservancy and the South Whitehall Commissioners, the referendum to save the dam was approved by the voters in November of 2016. The Wildlands Conservancy and the South Whitehall Commissioners are now conspiring to have the dam demolished anyway, by exaggerating its problems with the Pa. DEP...I have documented the communication between the Wildlands, State and township,  As for Lehigh Parkway, the Wildlands Conservancy should be made to remove the former dam rubble that is despoiling the vista of the Robin Hood Bridge piers.  I have been trying to interest the Morning Call about the voter suppression in regard to the Wehr's Dam referendum.  In today's paper there is an article about the danger high hazard rated dams pose to residents downstream.  I hope the paper's article today is a coincidence, and not intended to serve the Wildlands conspiracy about Wehr's Dam.  BTW,  Wehr's Dam is rated low hazard, because it poses no danger to residents.

reprinted from November of 2019 and before

The Morning Call Inadvertently Enables Deception

The Morning Call continues to inadvertently  support deception by one of its favorite sacred cows, The Wildlands Conservancy.   Last year I provided documentation to the paper demonstrating that the Wildlands was working with South Whitehall Township to ignore the voters referendum saving Wehr's Dam.  The paper continues to ignore this violation of the voter's trust,  and refuses to print my op-ed on the topic.  Yesterday,  the paper had a story about road salt getting into our waterways,  and  once again presents the Wildland Conservancy as the local authority on the problem, and the corresponding solutions to it.  The Wildlands recommends riparian buffers to help filter the salt from the streams.  What the Wildlands fails to divulge is that they get grants to design buffers in the parks, but that the storm sewer systems are piped directly into the streams,  bypassing the buffers.  This is the sort of  omission  and deception regularly used by the Wildlands to justify the grants that they use for these projects.  They are allowed to use a percentage of the grants for administrative purposes,  providing a revenue stream for their salaries.

The consequences of their distortions have been substantial.  Lehigh Parkway lost its beautiful decorative Robin Hood Dam, which was the last WPA construction in the park.  The removal of the Fish Hatchery Dam resulted in a massive trout kill during the next major storm.  They continuously cite current generalized environmental trends, but ignore the specifics related to a particular site.

In fairness to The Morning Call, circumstances help the Wildlands  pass off these deceptions. For instance, the Wehr's Dam controversy which stretched out for two years, was covered by five different string reporters.  There is no regular reporter assigned to the South Whitehall Township meetings. Allentown has City Council members, a park director, and a mayor who are not native Allentonians,  nor are they very familiar with the park system.  Never the less, the paper should be committed to protecting our icons,  before promoting any organization's agenda ahead of our history.
photo of former Robin Hood Dam, demolished by The Wildlands Conservancy
POST ABOVE REPRINTED FROM JANUARY OF 2018

ADDENDUM MARCH 17, 2020:  A month has passed since I was told by another publisher of The Morning Call that he would look into my documented allegation that the Wildlands Conservancy was actively conspiring to subvert the Wehr's Dam Referendum, and demolish the dam.  The miniature Robin Hood Dam pictured above was demolished by the Wildlands Conservancy, its rubble piled around the stone bridge piers,  which degraded the esthetics of the bridge.  Before, during and after, the Morning Call never wrote a word on that destruction....They remain missing in action once again, as another historic icon of the valley is threatened.

Walking Dead Journal

In a recent post I used the word retiring in the title. I have an unwanted update for the local paper and politicians... I'm not literally retiring from this blog. I used the phrase to emphasize a shift in blog content... The blog recently has contained less politics, and more local history.

There are less political posts because I attend far fewer meetings than in the past, and frankly I'm exasperated by the ones that I do attend. For instance, it is outrageous for Allentown to have created the Noise Exemption Zone, so that the Maingate Nightclub can avoid normal Liquor Control Board guidelines. The city should not be sacrificing the tranquility of a neighborhood to help out one business owner who is friendly with some members of the administration... That is cronyism straight from the Pawlowski era.

I have been republishing historical posts because I started a facebook group concentrating on local history. My posts are different than most historical posts...I do not reference Wikipedia, but rather my own personal memories.

The title for this entry refers to the current atmosphere about the coronavirus. I've been getting ridiculous notices about policy changes from companies that I would never have any physical contact with, such as the server for a domain name I own. While molovinsky on allentown has no new policy for the virus crisis, I always recommend drinking alcohol when reading these posts.

Allentown And Litter

When I grew up in Allentown and graduated from Allen in the mid 1960's, the sidewalks were clean. Now, I don't mean just free from litter, but they were actually clean. Women in babushkas would come out of their houses with buckets of water, and wash off their stoops and sidewalks.

On Monday mornings, from the amount of litter downtown, you would think that there was a parade over the weekend. Years ago a bureaucrat said, "You see litter on the street, but you don't often see people littering." Actually, you can see them littering...Park near any center city market, and watch the wrappers drop like leaves off a tree in the fall.

 The Parking Authority could issue tickets for littering, but of course it's much easier to sneak away after ticketing a car, than confront a person directly.

Years ago there were not so many barbershops downtown, and the streets were clean. Now there are endless barbershops, but the streets are filthy.  People seem much more concerned about their appearance, than that of the city.

When I write posts such as this, people get very offended, and accuse me of being culturally insensitive. I could care less, but wish that they would pick up after themselves more.

photocredit: old stock photo from Baltimore Sun, not Allentown.

Boxing Tournament Sets Low Bar For Students

The  Executive Education Academy Charter School is hosting a boxing fund raiser next month... It's tone deaf on every front....

The first version of the promotion said come watch your favorite celebrity get punched in the face.  I'm actually a boxing fan, and I certainly don't think that boxers are any less intelligent or accomplished than anybody else. But, never the less, I hope that our school taxes, being diverted to charter schools, find more academic goal models for their students.  Furthermore, schools should not be staging any public event during the virus crisis.  I suppose they don't think that any of their students  aspire to a career in public health or medicine.

Because many local celebrities are involved in this promotion,  this post, like many other of my posts over the years, will offend more than a few people.  As usual, I could care less. I was offended last week when three young men shot a fourth in the head, to steal his gun. I'm offended by how low the community allows the bar to be set for our students.