The Second of seven chapter of “The ghost of a city: Harrisburg’s debt history: 1900 to the present”
These days we often hear that a forest must occasionally burn down so that new growth can revitalize a forest.
This is also true of cities. And it’s certainly was true of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Two calamitous events, spread decades apart, forced Harrisburg to rebuild: the 1897 fire that destroyed the old brick state capitol building; and the 1972 Agnes flood that destroyed much of Harrisburg.
By 1902, the present granite capitol building was built to replace the old and cramped eyesore that had burned down in 1897. The old brick capitol building no doubt had walls and ceilings dinged by decades of cigar smoke, and floors stained by tobacco spit. (When Charles Dickens visited Harrisburg in the early 1840s he was appalled to see locals spitting tobacco in every parlor and banquet room.)
In his 1927 book “Harrisburg: The City Beautiful, Romantic and Historic” (Stackpole Books), Harrisburg doctor George P. Donehoo writes, “The old Capitol Building was destroyed by fire at noon on February 2, 1897. The destruction of the historic old building, first occupied in 1822, marked the end of the old and the dawn of a new era in the life of the city of Harrisburg. Out of the ashes of the old Capitol there arose not only a stately and beautiful new State House, but also a new and beautiful city of Harrisburg.”
“The destruction of the old Capitol was one of the best things which ever ‘happened’ in the history of Harrisburg,” Dr. Donehoo ventures in his book. The erection of the new granite capitol building that we take for granted today, Donehoo advises, “marked the commencement of the real development of Harrisburg as a ‘City Beautiful.’ Before it was erected, no matter what it was called, Harrisburg was an overgrown country town.”
Dr. Donehoo’s language is sometimes out-of-date, flowery and stilted, but his sentiment is solid.
“For twenty years the author has admired and studied this splendid structure (the new state capitol building) and the more he knows it the better he admires and loves it for all that it is and for all that it represents. …The dome, surmounting the building and yet, under the dome the beautiful white marble and the paintings of (Edward Austin) Abbey with the memorable words of William Penn: ‘There may be room for such a holy experiment.’
“What were the surroundings of the old Capitol?” Dr. Donehoo reminds his readers in 1927. “In fact, think of the present city as it then was, with not a single truly modern building in it, with bad streets and with a river front strewn with garbage of every sort, with no attempt to beautify anything, save a few homes. Suddenly the entire city awoke to the realization as to what the place looked like when the beautiful and stately Capitol was placed in the midst of a lot of ugly buildings and in an environment which was utterly out of keeping with this rare gem.”
The expensive new state capitol building, Donehoo argues, made it possible for a wide swatch of Harrisburg citizens to consider floating bonds and borrowing money to improve the rest of the city.
“Imagine, if you can,” he writes, “attempting to pass the huge sums ($1 million – ed.) in municipal loans for city improvement in the days when the old Capitol stood in its antique self-content on the hill? There would have been as much of a storm of protest on the part of the people of the town of Harrisburg as there was in New Orleans in other days when the city wished to place sewers in the old Spanish quarter, where the sewage ran in the gutters on unpaved streets. The people who lived in placid self-content in that quarter said, ‘Our fathers got along without sewers, so can we.’“
