PARK & SHOP

Park and Shop Lots

Downtown Allentown boomed for about 100 years. During the prosperity years following World War II, the two car family emerged. Several business leaders of Allentown realized both the parking problem and the potential to enhance sales. Park and Shop was begun by Harvey Farr, Donald Miller and John Leh. The current small parking deck at 10th and Hamilton, above the current uptown police substation, was the first deck in the country. To make the parking lots, shown in the postcard above, houses were purchased and torn down. Although the gentlemen mentioned in this article profited from their influence, they always provided solutions for the betterment of the community. They seemed to be a benevolent oligarchy. As the viability of the Park And Shop enterprise declined along with the intercity shopping, The Allentown Parking Authority was conveniently formed by local politicians, and it purchased the lots using Municipal bonds; The process allowed the aforementioned gentleman to land on their feet, in a downward market.

Flash ahead thirty five years to another downward market, and we have one gentleman, J.B. Reilly, buying up center-city with municipal bonds backed by state taxes. Reilly has purchased far more property than ever owned by Park and Shop. He has purchased virtually the four square blocks surrounding the arena, a significant portion of the Neighborhood Improvement Zone(NIZ). Again the process was facilitated by our elected officials. Let us hope that the new monarchy will be as benevolent as the old oligarchy. 

above reprinted from 2012

ADDENDUM AUGUST 4, 2022:Although the Morning Call certainly promoted the NIZ, analysis and critical commentary has pretty much been limited to this blog. While the NIZ has enriched J.B. Reilly beyond comprehension, and the streetscape to a passerby looks improved, if quality of life for Allentonians has improved, it is not clear. It certainly has not provided the promised tax relief for weary homeowners.

When 6th Street Was West Allentown

In 1903, the 600 block of 2nd Street housed one Russian Jewish family after another. They built a small synagogue there, which was kept open until about twenty years ago. My grandfather, who then worked at a cigar factory, had just saved enough to bring his parents over from the old country. They lived in an old house at 617 N. 2nd. The current house at that location was built in 1920. By the time my father was born in 1917, the youngest of five children, they had moved to the suburbs just across the Jordan Creek.

My grandfather lived on the corner of Chew and Jordan Streets. He butchered in a barn behind the house. The house is still there, 301 Jordan, the barn is gone. He would deliver the meat with a horse and wagon. On the weekends, when the family wanted to visit friends, the horse insisted on doing the meat market route first. Only after he stopped in front of the last market on the route, would he permit my grandfather to direct him. excerpt from My grandfather's Horse, May 13, 2008

Allentown has just designated the neighborhood west of the Jordan to 7th Street, and between Linden and Tilghman Streets, as Jordan Heights. The area encompasses the Old Fairgrounds Historic District. Allentown's old fairground, in the years between 1852-1888, was in the vicinity of 6th and Liberty. It was an open space, as is the current fairground at 17th and Chew Streets. When my grandparents moved to Jordan Street it was a modern house, just built in 1895. Many of the Jewish families moved to the suburbs between Jordan and 7th. The Jewish Community Center was built on the corner of 6th and Chew, today known as Alliance Hall.
I wish the Jordan Heights initiative well. There's a lot of history in those 24 square blocks, and hopefully much future.

reprinted and retitled from previous years

photo: Opening of Jewish Community Center, 1928, 6th and Chew Streets.  Now Alliance Hall

The Corner Market

Although I doubt that there will ever be a show at the Historical Society, or brochures at the Visitors Bureau, perhaps nothing encapsulates the history of Allentown more than the corner grocery stores. Allentown proper, is mostly comprised of rowhouses built between 1870 and 1920, long before the era of automobiles and suburban supermarkets. Most of the corner markets were built as stores, and over the years many were converted into apartments. Up until the late 1940's, there may have been well over a hundred operating in Allentown. Some specialized in ethnic food. The bodega at 9th and Liberty was formally an Italian market. Live and fresh killed chickens were sold at 8th and Linden, currently H & R Block Tax Service. A kosher meat market is now a hair salon on 19th Street. The original era for these markets died with the advent of the supermarket. In the early 50's some corner stores attempted to "brand" themselves as a "chain", as shown in the Economy Store sign above. That market is at 4th and Turner, and has been continually operating since the turn of the last century. Ironically, as the social-economic level of center city has decreased, the corner stores have seen a revival. Most of these new merchants, many Hispanic and some Asian, know little of the former history of their stores, but like their predecessors, work long, hard hours.

above reprinted from March 2012

photo of Yost Market in Phillipsburg, N.J. by Carl Rubrecht, 1970 

ADDENDUM: The enamel Economy Stores sign has been removed.  I hope that the owner sold it,  because it was valuable. As for the A-Treat sign, the era of painted signs on brick buildings is long over, although some ghost images still remain in Allentown.

When Allentown High Was Pennsylvania Dutch

In 1950 when 16 year old  Jayne Lichtenwalner made this plate in art class,  Allentown for the most part had a Pennsylvania Dutch demographic.  Jayne's family lived at 642 Chew Street.  The principal of Allentown High was Clifford Bartholomew.  After Bartholomew retired from being principal,  he later would go on to become mayor.

Move ahead seventy years, and the Pennsylvania Dutch student is an endangered species in the Allentown School System, perhaps even extinct. The new superintendent of the system is from Detroit,  and the mayor is from Chicago.  The dominant demographic in center city is now Hispanic, and they just elected the Chicago mayor for a fourth term, even though he's indicted for corruption.

I grew up on the south side near the Mack Truck assembly plant. I graduated from Allen in the middle 1960's, and remember when Bartholomew was principal and then mayor. I worked in center city when the stores died and the neighborhoods changed.  This blog was designed to be the juncture of local history and politics.  Because I find the politics at the moment so distressing,  I'll be conducting  more history classes. 

above reprinted from November of 2017

ADDENDUM AUGUST 1, 2022:This past weekend Allentown's current majority, Puerto Ricans, celebrated their heritage. A new mayor, fluent in Spanish, presided over the festivities. The New York Times had already noted the demographic transition as a sociological phenomenon twenty years ago. Recently, CBS News unfortunately tried to link the changes to the current national divide, culminating in the January 6 insurrection.

Outside analysis aside, Allentown is faring well. Like America itself, the new century has brought many changes to the valley. Allentown's location and quality of life continue to attract newcomers.

A Former Factory and Neighborhood of Allentown, Pa.

The Wire Mill was a sprawling industrial plant along 13 acres of the Little Lehigh Creek, just east of Lehigh Street, near the current Martin Luther King Drive.  An 1899 map of Allentown contains the footprint of various industries of the time, and the Wire Mill was the most prominent.  The Lehigh Valley RailRoad constructed two bridges over the Little Lehigh, to bring its Barber Quarry spur line into and out of the plant. Began in 1886, it produced wire and nails until 1943, and then sat abandoned for another twenty years. During WW1, it employed up to 1,200 men around the clock, producing barbed wire for the trench warfare in Europe. The factory sat on the south side of the former Wire Street, which housed narrow row houses on the other side of the street, and the neighborhood above it.



That entire neighborhood was demolished in the early 1970's, as Allentown embraced the modern urban renewal models of the time. The old, modest neighborhood of small row houses, between Lawrence and Union Streets, and on both sides of Lehigh Street, between 4th and 8th Street, were bulldozed away.  It was, in a large part, home to Allentown's black community. How ironic that we destroyed the cohesion of a neighborhood, but renamed Lawrence Street after Martin Luther King. The only remnant of that community and neighborhood still there is the St. James A.M.E. and Zion Church. A former vibrant neighborhood was replaced by a sterile bank call center, sitting alone on a large vacant hill. That building is now the new Building 21 city operated charter school. I would have complained about that urban renewal plan if I was blogging back then. Now, 50 years later, I still consider that plan a failure. Hopefully, future bloggers will have something better to say about Allentown's current revitalization.

The Wire Mill was at the bottom of the Lehigh Street hill, shown above

reprinted from March 2016

Allentown's Double Parking

Yesterday, Paul Muschick of the The Morning Call speculated on the reason for all the double parking in Allentown.  Being politically correct,  he overlooked the oblivious answer... We have  herds of Rude and Crude living in Allentown.  Why has this problem persisted for so long?  The Allentown Parking Authority doesn't want to deal with face to face confrontations with the offensive offenders,  they prefer placing a parking ticket on an empty car and then running away.  The Allentown Police consider the problem beneath their law enforcement pay grade.  Muschick mentioned N. 7th Street as ground zero for the problem.  Fellow activist Robert Trotner referenced Muschick's column on facebook, and a Hispanic business owner complained about the lack of parking spaces on 7th Street,  for the volume of current businesses.  He does have a point, but the double parking in Allentown occurs everywhere in center city,  even with many empty spaces.

The city should identify parcels close to 7th Street that can be acquired for additional parking.  Peter Lewnes has done an excellent job developing 7th Street into a business district, as it was in Allentown's distant past.  Being as politically incorrect as I am,  I cannot refrain from noting that the same merchants and clientele now on 7th Street, were deemed undesirable when they were previously on Hamilton Street.  As I have written before, there was actually more commerce on Hamilton Street with the so called undesirables, than there is now.  However, the NIZ wasn't really meant to increase commerce, but rather to increase the real estate portfolio of certain individuals. Another recent article in The Morning Call,  on the NIZ,  avoided such realities.

above reprinted from June of 2018

ADDENDUM JULY 28, 2022: In Paul Muschick's current column, entitled You Can't Fix Stupid, he laments that the double parking continues, despite a new $million dollar parking lot and signs in Spanish. Although he speculates on numerous possible causes and solutions for the problem, he avoids my insensitive Rude and Crude analysis....Reality can be so awkward!

Only The Best For Public Housing

For an Allentown historian with an interest in photography, the photo above is as good as it gets; Eleanor Roosevelt visiting Hanover Acres, Allentown's new public housing project in 1942.  Paul Carpenter has a column where he brooded about public housing recipients complaining that they can't smoke, while living on our dime. I'll do him one better. They're now griping about it in new housing, Overlook Park. Hanover Acres and the newer project, Riverview Terrace, were both torn down several years ago to construct new townhouses. It's supposedly a mixed income project, with homes both for sale, and Section 8 rentals.

Over the years Hanover Acres became a "terrible" place to live, a crime-ridden eyesore. Overlook Park, the $88 million development that's sprung up in its place, however, is "beautiful." Daniel R. Farrell, executive director of the Allentown Housing Authority, described turning Hanover Acres into Overlook Park as "an amazing transformation."The development features 269 rental apartments and room for 53 single-family homes.

It was built by Pennrose Properties, which specializes in politically correct and politically connected housing for profit. They have done well in Allentown with Mayor Ed. Not long before Hanover and Riverview were demolished, they were completely remodeled, with high end kitchen cabinets and counters. Shown below is yours truly, in Little Lehigh Manor, built in 1944. Those brick houses of the same vintage are still new enough for home buyers today. Most of Allentown's existing row houses were built between 1895 and 1930. If Carpenter is upset about smoking, he should drive over to Overlook Park and see what they're now smoking in.

above reprinted from July of 2012

ADDENDUM JULY 27, 2022: When I first wrote this post a decade ago, the issue was tearing down Hanover Acres to built Overlook Park.  It never occurred to me then that Allentown would now be tearing down the new public housing on the Lehigh Street hill, to replace them with more modern units. 

The Parkway houses of my youth still stand, and I still remain confused about public housing.

Wildlands Conservancy Responsible For Fish Kill

reprinted from July of 2014

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 expanded, they also revised, 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.

reprint from July of 2014

UPDATE JULY 23, 2020: The Morning Call continues to protect the Wildlands Conservancy, and will not report about the Conservancy's back-channel with Pa. DEP to demolish Wehr's Dam, nor will allow any opinion pieces about it.

ADDENDUM JULY 26, 2022: A complete new slate of South Whitehall Commissioners has asserted themselves to respect the voter's referendum and save Wehr's Dam.  The Morning Call wrote a whitewash story last year justifying the previous delay to commit to the dam, and ignored the back channel communications between the Wildlands Conservancy and the Pa. DEP, which was an attempt to sabotage the dam.