The Battle for Harrisburg
A few Friday nights ago my wife had to make apologies as I missed a family get together we had scheduled for dinner.
“Austin can’t make it tonight… he is riding around Harrisburg after sundown with two women, looking for trouble,” she explained.
“Riding around in Harrisburg… on a Friday night… with two women,” her sister asked, “My God… aren’t you at all concerned?”
“Nope,” she answered, “He is with Lori Davis and Sylvia Cooper… they will take care of him.”
I was as safe as in my sweet mama’s arms.
The outing was a field trip of sorts, Lori told me she was going to show Sylvia the sights, give her a taste of what is happening in the neighborhood she calls home. I went along for the ride, and we were actually driven by Phil Williams, the man who will soon succeed Lori as the president of the Harrisburg Neighborhood Association.
Lori ran for mayor a few years ago out the frustration she feels with the Augusta municipal government over what she says is a complete lack of code enforcement and police presence in her neighborhood. Although she did not win, she brought a lot of attention to the problems her neighborhood faces. Sadly, that attention does not seem to be getting much accomplished.
In the city of Augusta if you own a dog or a cat but you don’t take care of it, the authorities will at minimum take the animal from you on the spot, and possibly lock you up for cruelty to animals. Nor are you are allowed to operate a dilapidated vehicle or, for that matter, leave it parked unattended to rot. But in the city of Augusta you sure as hell can let a piece of real estate go to hell in a hand basket, and it seems a concerned citizen has to move heaven and earth to get anything serious done to fix it.
Abuse or neglect a kitty, and you get the hoosegow. Abuse or neglect a home in Harrisburg, and prepare to get a strongly worded letter. Maybe.
The night of our slum trek, we pulled over for a quick minute to look at my great-grandmother’s old house on Fenwick Street, which she lived in until her death in 1973.
MaMa Bentley lived alone there for years, and would often walk to Buck’s Produce Market, or Johnson’s over on Crawford Avenue, right down from the Baptist church she attended most of her adult life. She didn’t drive, so it was quite handy to be so close.
Platt’s Funeral Home, where we said goodbye to her almost 40 years ago, is still right there as well. As much as I miss her, I am glad she never saw what happened to the neighborhood she called home for so long.
She had a sturdy little brick home that stands proudly well taken care of, all these years later, but the condition of many dwellings in close proximity is appalling.
The homes that have residents, and many of them do, are an odd mix of lovingly protected testaments to old-time construction, and those sadly lacking anyone with the pride or means to take care of them.
The homes that are empty, and many of them are, are rat traps and drug houses that look like something out of a story that Edgar Allen Poe would have written if he lived in modern day Baltimore.As nasty as many of these little shanties are, many of them have cars parked in the yard that are easily worth double what I paid for my ride, and I don’t drive a jalopy.
They also seem to have a rather odd collection of porch dwellers with iPhones, Androids and, yes, I saw a few iPads and satellite dishes. I guess even these folks are fed up with the high price of cable. Young men speed by regularly on bicycles, wearing three pairs of pants (you can count the waistbands) even though it was 90 degrees at 8:45 p.m. None of them have helmets (which means they are breaking the law), and none of them seem to obey any traffic regulations.
I didn’t tell my friends that I was keeping track (because I didn’t want Sylvia and I to duplicate our efforts — you can read her impressions in last week’s City Ink column), but I personally counted 67 code violations, 17 traffic offenses and at least 14 houses/shanties that if they weren’t selling drugs right that minute, should be used in a Hollywood drug movie, because they sure looked the part.
Lori says the lack of code enforcement and a non-responsive sheriff’s department have let them down. The supporting evidence she showed us that night was pretty substantial. The “powers that be” better hope she and Phil don’t start a regular shuttle tour, or their denials are going to make them look pretty silly.
There is enough of a problem in Harrisburg to justify at least one full-time code enforcement officer making cases there exclusively. If the Sheriff announces that he intends to make a minimum of one Harrisburg drug arrest a day, he could spend the next two years keeping the promise.
Augusta Mayor Deke Copenhaver may have beaten Lori Davis at the polls, but the Harrisburg squalor and lawlessness she warned him about on the campaign trail is whooping his city’s ass every day.You Might Also Like:
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