Harrisburg PA, a mid-size mid-Atlantic city
 

Harrisburg, capital of Pennsylvania and a pretty nice mid-size mid-Atlantic city. The urban area has about 400,000 people, roughly equivalent in size to Wichita,
Madison, or Reno. Harrisburg has great urban bones and a decent economy, but being a smaller city the urban renaissance affecting bigger cities hasn't made a
lot of headway yet.

These are mostly cellphone pictures I snapped one afternoon this autumn. There are a couple of additional pictrues from a brief trip there in 2006 that I'm
using to supplement.

The city is on the Susquehanna River: ------------>



Downtown has a lot of bulk for such a small city. ------------>



State house:




From the capitol, State Street runs straight down to the river.




Perpendicular to State Street are 2nd and 3rd Streets, which are really the bigger commercial streets. 3rd Street continues beyond downtown as a neighborhood
main street, into Harrisburg's small collection of gridded neighborhoods.
















It's got solid rowhouse neighborhoods.










There's a pleasant park next to the capitol.




Oh, and capitol itself includes statuary of naked people, always a favorite.






Harrisburg is on a spur of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. By US standards it has great rail service, connecting mainly to Philadelphia. Here's the station:




That's all. Have a nice day.

Harrisburgh looks nice, picturesque streets. :)

Nice quickie. I agree that Harrisburg has very good bones... and it has pretty natural surroundings. It seems like it should be a vibrant place with the state govt there, but it's always pretty dead it seems.

Wow, certainly a beautiful city.

Thanks for showing it off.

Nice!

Nice pictures! I always drive around Harrisburg, but rarely venture into the city. There's some nice neighborhoods. And Troeg's is there, too.

The Agricultural Complex is a pretty interesting place.

Looks like a cool town. Thanks for sharing.

Ah the old stomping grounds. I have some fond memories but glad I am gone... Nice pics!

It's a beautiful place and has all of the makings of a hip urban city but...it just never quite makes it. The mentality keeps holding it back and the brain drain hits it hard.

This is a fairly recent change, there used to be parking islands with large trees on them and the cars would face them vs the curbs as they do now and you couldn't see the river from the steps. They wanted it to go back to the original way so a lot of work was done and this is what is there now. Fun fact: when it was the parking islands/trees the politicians would drive around late at night cruising for the male prostitutes and what not that would hang out there (there's a very popular gay bar right by there and the entrance is accessed via an alley right off of State).

This is very true and outside of a few pockets it is overall consistently dead. Many reasons for this: small DT and not much there in comparison to the bordering municipalities, DT is not a huge employment center, the last few administrations have been business unfriendly, making the situation worse, etc.

Not anymore, they have moved to Hershey.

Harrisburg combined with neighboring Lancaster and Carlisle actually add up to about 1.6 million people. It's a surprisingly robust area.

Nice shots.

But Lancaster may as well be on another planet, HBG and Lancaster don't function with a lot of cohesiveness. Carlisle and HBG are in different worlds as well however, Carlisle does have more commuters to HBG for work so it's a bit more connected at least in that way.

Oddly enough in many ways Lancaster is more progressive and their DT blows HBG's away now.

Nice mini tour! I generally agree with Eastsidehbg that apart from shared commuters and media markets Lancaster, Harrisburg and York do not cooperate with one another on many issues such as transportation, planning, and even tourism promotion. Unfortunately, the mindset is still fragmented and provincial among the politically empowered classes in the lower Susquehanna Valley.

Eastsidehbg, it's funny you mentioned how progressive Lancaster is compared to Harrisburg. I used to work at the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia and many of my coworkers from York would remark on how much more advanced Lancaster was compared to York. I thought that was humorous because I never really perceived a large gap between the two, but the more I reflected on their comments, the more I realized there was a grain of truth to their observations.

Yeah I was really sad when this had gotten derailed [pun intended] and it would have done a lot to bring the metros together. If South Central PA could get its act together it could be a quasi-DMV or an LA of sorts.

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/ind...ntral_pen.html

It really is something else to think that a place known for its Amish community is more progressive than the state capital and York (although York had also taken some solid steps to making its DT better and I was there years ago for a wedding and was impressed with its progress...not sure what it is like now, though, as almost 5 years now that I think about it can be a long time...). I think having the younger college crowds in York and Lancaster has helped move it forward, whereas Harrisburg really doesn't have any of that (again, oddly enough for being the state capital).

PA is really a strange place...

:haha: So true. It's quirky. I love this state except for the unfortunate areas of crime and poverty in certain parts of the state due to the de-industrialization of the Northeast and Rust Belt.

The architecture in Pennsylvania is just great though. The germans who built many of the towns really new how to make a place look cozy and nice and liveable. Especially eastern PA. But western PA has it's gems too. Pittsburgh has a very diverse array of awesome architecture and even many of the small old logging towns in central PA look fantastic.

I love the train station. Its site as a train depot dates back to the civil war era and there is a lot of history there, as it served as a hub for sending union soldiers into the battlefields not too far south. (I think the current station was built in the 1880's). I can't say that I ever rode a train through there, but yes, by US standards, especially for a city as small as Harrisburg, it does seem impressive that it survives to this day.

both new york STATE and outstate pennsylvania are somewhat underrated in my opinion.

Did you go inside the Capitol building? It's a hundred times prettier than the US Capitol building in my opinion.

Agreed, it is a magnificent building:

http://www.pacapitol.com/

Harrisburg lacks a major university anywhere in the proximity. Penn State Harrisburg doesn't count and even that is 10 miles southwest of the city.

Nice pictures but I can't help but think that you made it look better than it is given the economics of rust belt cities like this.

On a completely different note, in order to get to Hershey from Harrisburg, do you have to take the Hershey Highway?

:coolugh: