The scene was like something out of the movie Citizen Kane.
Across the street from the Harrisburg incinerator, a warehouse full of cowboy and Wild West artifacts was opened to the public for several days this weekend.
The thousands of cowboy memorabilia will be put on the auction block this week as part of a plan to help save Pennsylvania’s capital city from bankruptcy following nearly three decades of wild and out-of-control municipal bond financing.
Harrisburg now totters on the brink bankruptcy. Its streets and schools are decaying, its water mains breaking.
But all the city now has to show for the decades of profligate spending are the cowboy and Wild West artifacts, piled high in the warehouse next to the incinerator, which also now must be sold to the highest bidder.
Though the public, at least in name, owns the cowboy artifacts, it was the first time in 20 years the general public has been allowed to view the collection.
The warehouse full of expensive yet useless Wild West junk serves as a cautionary tale of government and bond financing spun out of control, lost in time, space, and reason, and beyond the reach of a public long shut out of the decision-making process.
The city’s mayor, without the knowledge or participation of the public, floated the municipal bonds for other purposes from which funds were siphoned for the cowboy artifacts.
Mayor Steve Reed’s solitary dream was to build one, or several, Wild West cowboy museums in — where else? — Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He spent ten years secretly amassing the collection.
Voters would oust Mayor Reed before the museums could be built.
Today, all that’s left of Mayor Reed’s Wild West fantasy are the cowboy artifacts, and the debt.
Wild West surreal
The scene this weekend at the Harrisburg cowboy warehouse was at once kitschy, ludicrous and surreal, in a Wild West sort of way.
Western wagons and buckboards lined the front of the warehouse.
The buckboards and wagons faced the infamous Harrisburg incinerator complex, which may or may not be sold anytime soon to the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority.
Inside the warehouse, a six-foot-tall stuffed buffalo greeted the visitor. The buffalo looked a little ratty and had obviously seen better days on the prairie.
The warehouse beyond the buffalo was wondrously stuffed to the ceiling with cowboy junk, like some Wild West King Tut’s tomb.
And I do mean junk.
Piled and stacked to the ceiling are hats, cowboy and Indian suits, trinkets, and badges.
All seem dusty, dirty, and, truth be told, junky. Either the folks of the Old West didn’t live so well, or these trinkets were owned by cowboys on the down side of life, or the wrong side of the tracks.
As I take in one absurd object after another, it’s hard not to think about the actual needs of Harrisburg’s citizens, whose kids these days often cannot get pencils and books in their school rooms, and whose streets in 2013 are nightly shot up by gunfights in the hood.
In the warehouse we have a dime store wooden Indian. We have a framed public notice of the 1901 hanging of one Thomas ‘Black Jack’ Ketchum, and Black Jack’s sourpuss portrait. We have a stuffed moose head. We have posters, gambling devices, bathtubs, piss pots, and furniture of every sort and description.
We have a framed Bowie knife purported to have once been owned by General George Armstrong Custer. “He will always be remembered for Custer’s Last Stand at Little Big Horn,” a certificate below the knife reads.
There’s kachina dolls (a favorite of former Mayor Reed); Indian headdresses; buckskins, and worshipful brightly colored posters of Geronimo.
A framed wanted poster offering a $500 reward for Billy the Kid catches my eye.
Pat Garrett caught The Kid, but still no posse for those who secretly paid upwards of $10 million for this cowboy collection in Harrisburg.
I’m flummoxed and have no idea what some of this stuff is, or is supposed to be. It’s like poking through some crazed man’s attic.
A five-foot-tall Jesus on a cross, done up like a bloodied Mexican martyr, puzzles me.
“It’s a Santos statue,” a woman tells me. The woman is a little stocky, and wears her long black hair straight down. She’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Like me, she’s sweating slightly in the heat of the musty nutty warehouse stuffed with junk from the American Old West.
“In the villages on holy days people would parade with the Santos statues through the streets,” she tells me. “There are more of them, polychrome objects, over there in that case. That one on the horseback is quite sophisticated, I think.”
She points to a glass display case, filled with Santos statuettes and charms.
Dictator
This sweating Jesus, and these odd cowboy artifacts, were all washed by the sands of time from their dusty places of origin to this unlikely warehouse on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River.
Because of sloppy paperwork, no one knows precisely how much Mayor Steve Reed spent collecting the cowboy artifacts, or even how many artifacts were purchased. Somewhere between $7 and $10 million was spent on the cowboy collection, it’s said.
No one knows for sure because there were no committees overseeing the project: no committees, that is, other than Mayor Reed’s committee of one. He was as lonesome as Billy the Kid riding out on his bronco into the sage at sunset.
In the end, this lack of public support and participation doomed the mayor’s project. No one else but Mayor Reed gave a tinker’s damn about a Wild West museum in Harrisburg.
“With Steve Reed you were afraid to confront him,” says Wendi Taylor, who for decades with other citizens tried to oppose Mayor Reed’s municipal bond-driven plans. “Because you knew he would use the power of the police force against you, codes enforcement, and he would use his political clout to get you. And so I think a lot of people didn’t want to know.”
Taylor and a group of other concerned citizens filed suit against Reed in the early 1990s to stop the mayor from spending $7 million in proceeds from the sale of the city water system to the Harrisburg Authority.
The angry citizens won the lawsuit, but Reed only grew more creative, and isolated from the public. Reed used bond proceeds at the Harrisburg Authority to secretly finance the purchase of the Wild West artifacts. He ran up more than a billion dollars in bond debt over the incinerator, schools, and other rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul projects.
“When I found out the water system was sold and the $7 million went into an account that only Reed could spend, I was upset,” Taylor remembered last year. “But I was most upset with city council. I was upset with city council, the treasurer, and the controller, because they didn’t do their job…. I mean, when you think about it, Steve Reed wanted to be a dictator. And the only thing stopping him was the checks and balances.”
“Every two years, the incinerator would need, like, $5 million in improvements,” Taylor says. “Then (Reed) would borrow $8 million — $2 million to plug the hole in the city’s budget, $5 million for what he wanted to do, and $1 million would be the bond costs.”
Rosebud
There is nothing normal or expected about a warehouse full of cowboy artifacts meant for a Wild West museum in central Pennsylvania.
But there it stands, a monument to out-of-control Pennsylvania government.
No one bothers to say the obvious: this was not how municipal bond financing was done in the old days.
Certainly nothing like the warehouse stuffed with cowboy oddities happened before the 1980s.
What happened to create this mess?
State-approved political bond financing in the mid-1980s, coupled with all-powerful “public” authorities like the Harrisburg Authority in the 1990s, created this juggernaut.
Concerned citizens like Wendi Taylor could do nothing to stop the wild bull.
In his movie Citizen Kane, Orson Welles explains how Charles Foster Kane traveled the world amassing his collection of junk.
Kane was rich, and used his own money.
Mayor Reed was from humble origins and used municipal bond money.
In the end, in the movie, there’s no explanation other than Kane uttering “Rosebud” as his sled of that name is tossed into the incinerator flames.
The citizens of broke Harrisburg have yet to get any explanation at all about how government and finance allowed their Tombstone to be secretly and outrageously built, only to be carried out and destroyed on the shoulders of the bloody Santos statue in the warehouse, across the street from the incinerator.
