Dennis R. Lieb.....Is Easton Burning?

Welcome everyone. It is time now - as they used to say in the music biz - to dig the new breed. I'll be one of your new contributors, but before I tell you about that, a few housekeeping items. First, sorry for missing the gala blog kick-off this morning but I'm working at two jobs these days and the paying gigs come first. Second, its gonna take a while for me to get up to speed on the technical side of running a blog so bare with my sure-to-come errors for a while. Lastly, a few of you may have clicked on the profile for me that appears in the sidebar of the blog home page. If so, let me tell you that it was originally set up for a blog called West Ward Rising that I planned on hosting during my run for city council last spring. Time restraints prevented me from doing that and the background info on me is minimal at best. I will work on fleshing that out over the coming weeks. But enough of that...



I will not be tackling any specific topic today. Many of you already know me and what I'm about. For those who don't, I'd like to put a little perspective on where I'm coming from before tackling anything specific. I'll ease into the meaty stuff over the coming weeks.

OK, you may be wondering about the title of this piece. I'm a stream-of consciousness kind of writer and the title of the 1966 WWII movie Is Paris Burning? (shot in B&W with French dialogue and English sub-titles no less) popped into my head when thinking about where to start. In the film, Hitler - knowing the end of the War is near - sends one of his best Generals to Paris to destroy the city before it falls back into Allied control. Various French resistance factions compete with each other for the opportunity to liberate the city while American General George S. Patton makes haste to get there first and put another feather in his four-star cap. It is a confusing and convoluted plot, made more confusing by the French language soundtrack. Ultimately, the German General, realizing that his Fuhrer has gone completely nuts, refuses to carry out the order to burn the city. All factions - Germans, French and Americans - fret over, compete for the glory of and eventually revel in the saving of Paris from the torches and dynamite.

Now, what does this have to do with Easton? I have been to Paris and Easton can't hold a candle to it. But neither can most anyplace else. There is more beautiful architecture and civic space within a five minute walk than the eyes and mind can comprehend. It is a city that as recently as the 18th century was a rabbit warren of filthy little dead-end streets and massive overcrowding with practically no sanitation facilities, clean drinking water or functional infrastructure. Louis Napoleon (aka Napoleon III and nephew of Bonaparte) rebuilt the city into what we see today. In the 1850's and 60's he turned loose his Prefect of the Seine (we'd call him a mayor) Baron Haussmann, who single-handedly (and with great financial slight-of-hand) created a design code for city buildings, instituted public/private development standards and practices, built the sewer system, created a fresh drinking water supply and laid out the Grand Boulevards, parks and public squares that are the signature of Paris today.

Easton was founded by forward thinking men and women. It had it's various Baron Haussmann's if not perhaps any single Napoleon III. I live on Chidsey Street, named for Easton's first elected mayor, Charles Chidsey. He once threatened to throw a Northampton County bureaucrat in jail over a dispute about ownership of Center Square (our first courthouse occupied the spot where the monument now stands)...my kind of guy. We could use someone like that when the county wants to build another prison. His family home was on Bushkill Street in downtown. It and many other homes, businesses, churches and public structures were torn down for Rt 22. The street named for him, the street where I now live, was eviscerated by that same highway project and has never been the same. Much of the tight fabric of the SW quadrant of downtown was obliterated by "urban renewal" in the 60's and 70's. What we have to show for that today is a closed Perkins and a whole lot of asphalt parking lagoons.

My point is that each city in America has unique attributes, though to a different degree, that allow it to compete with the livability of Parisian neighborhoods if not on as grand a scale. And each city has it's "little Hitlers" that want to press a boot print into that city and remake it in their own image...all in the name of progress. There are those who would rather destroy the city than see it progress of it's own right. There have been Generals sent here to help/hinder? that process. The Federal Highway Administration, HUD and others have all had their turns. In the interim, small players - some alone and some in groups large and small - have competed for the crown of reformer, rehabilitator, improver. From the Downtown Improvement Group (their acronym was DIG; quite telling), who wanted to depopulate downtown and run highways through Center Square, to today's Main Street Program, Weed and Seed and WWNP.

My perspective on all this is something that can't be dumped out on the page all at once. The nuances are too subtle. Right and wrong, black and white...definitions drift, meanings co-mingle. Everyone thinks they are helping. Everyone wants to be a success...wants the city to be a success. What that means changes from day to day and decade to decade. I look back and wonder what some of them were thinking. Today it's about "sustainable cities" or "greening the planet". Will those after us look back and wonder what we were thinking?

I am primarily interested in the built environment and how we assemble the human habitat. We aren't doing a good job of it. We must do a better job. My secondary interest is in the democratic process (or lack there of) that we employ to come to the consensus of what to do about our city. I hope to spend the coming weeks and months deconstructing where we have been, where we are going and where we are today. An author I read a lot, James Howard Kunstler says this: “The future can now reconnect with the past to create that dwelling place I call a hopeful present...The future will require us to build better places, or the future will belong to other people in other societies.”

It won't always be easy or pretty or fun. I am doing this because I want to clear away what some call the "fog of war" we often wade through when tempers flare and ideologies clash to the detriment of all who inhabit the City by the Three Waterfronts.

Talk soon.

Onward and Upward,

DRL