November 24, 2006: The LCCC Battleground 8

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So here's a new wrinkle in this battle to squash the project to save Lancaster City. It seems that the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority controls this entire project. The LCCCA has seven members. Three are appointed by the County Commissioners, three by The City Of Lancaster. One is appointed every few years by either the city or the county. The rogue commissioners appointed their three but this is the city's turn to appoint four. Hence they hold a majority of one until... until...

(You can start this story by clicking here and reading it forward).

I took this image on November 24 of 2006. The City of Lancaster was scheduled to have its majority on the LCCCA until September of 2007, when the County Commissioners could seize control of the majority and vote this entire project to a stop. Which meant that furious construction would have to take place in the nine months following this picture. Making the story even more tense... Those County Commissioners I've been describing for days now were set to face the voters in November of 2007, about a month after they grabbed final control of the LCCCA and this project.

This hole would have to fill up fast. Which meant even more costs as the supporters of the Convention Center and Hotel together with their tiny majority of one on the LCCCA struggled to erect the project before the commissioners could stop them in court, or stop them by appointing a one member majority of the LCCCA board.

2007 loomed as a nail biter.

December 3, 2006: The LCCC Battleground 7

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The "cost-overruns" were mounting into the millions by year's end of 2006 (You can start this story by clicking here and reading it forward).
A new Lancaster City administration was about to take office into an expanding mess. The rogue county commissioners and their allies that small gaggle of fanatical opponents to the city's planned convention center had pushed the project into the high cost/high interest mess of the decade's middle. Their relentless court actions and delays had forced the entire project to the edge of doom.

Meantime contractors worked to support the facade of the historic Watt & Shand department store which had inspired the entire project. Clever architects had planned to carefully shave this facade free from the decaying interior which was scheduled for demolishment. And as that old structure got razed this facade would be carefully supported by an exterior skeleton of braces until a new hotel could be built behind it.

All of that was planned by the hundreds of thousands of citizens who supported the project, still those two commissioners and their tiny band of obsessed fanatics began another round of court suits. BUT... BUT... as 2006 came to an end, 2007 promised an election year in which all three county commissioners would have to face the voters. Yet not until November. Worse yet, even if they were swept from office they had until the very end of the year to do their worst. 2007 looked to be ugly, especially since those commissioners had a very large weapon to fire.

October 24, 2006: The LCCC Battleground 6

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October's high Fall in Lancaster. The trees are usually either at or just past full color throughout the late parts of the month and brisk days turn to quite cool as we head into November. By this time in 2006, the first fights were fought over the construction of this Convention Center which I've discussed for six day now. And they were delaying the activities which had already been slow to start as a result of earlier court fights.

Original budgets for this project were drawn up in the early part of the decade and contracts were let as interest rates plummeted. Construction and commodity prices as a result of the low interest rate boom had not yet exploded. It was a sweet time to plan a big project like this. But by 2006, after years of wrestling critics led by those rogue commissioners had pushed the project through delays into a time when both prices and interest rates were soaring.

So their actions, while not yet successful in any court order to stop the process, were successful in pushing it into viciously more expensive waters. And still... here on October 24... the machines worked by day, and their operators wondered by night if those commissioners would have locks on all the gates by daybreak. And in County Commission offices a determined obsession seemed to have enveloped those two commissioners and their small cadre of supporters to either stop or strangle the project at all costs...

Cost passed increasingly along to taxpayers.

July 15, 2006: The LCCC's Battleground 5

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For that past four days I showed you views from the roof of that parking garage that slashes horizontally across the top of this picture.

But this time I wanted the fourth wall to fall away, so I stood in front of the Lancaster News Paper's printing building and looked back, first to the left and then to the right. You can see that developments created the gap in a hockey player's smile on the other side of South King Street. Up to the left is the front of the Watt&Shand department store whose facade the designers hoped to preserve to wrap around the front of the new hotel, while in front of me the convention center was planned to rise within the gap. See down there to the right, some buildings were getting stripped away to leave those buildings on the corner. More to tell about them tomorrow.

I can tell from analytics tracking that visitors are coming from all around the world to watch this cultural and economic struggle in Lancaster. And from your private e-mail I know a lot of you are now wondering how this battle's come out. You're wondering if everything in that image up there was brought to a halt, leaving that hockey smile broken into the city's center.

And you should wonder because as I took this picture the contractors were expecting that some judge would issue an injunction to the two county commissioners who were spending tax dollars as if they were their own. No... no... people like that never spend their own money. In fact lots of the actors in this drama expected those commissioners would get an injunction they could use to stop all of this.

"Jump forward Ted," a writer begged me. "Come on... stop the tease. How's this story end? Are we watching a tragedy or a triumph? And for whom?"

July 16, 2006: • The LCCC's Battleground 4

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Here's an image of bravery. A band of people from High Construction, The Lancaster Newspapers, Fulton Financial Corporation,and The Lancaster County Historic Preservation Trust had won the support of every key economic and cultural institution in Lancaster County, including the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce, The Economic Development Corporation, the County's Convention and Visitor's Bureau, and the Mayor, Council and legislators from the City of Lancaster to raze nondescript rotting structures between N. Vine Street on the left of this picture and along S. King Street at the top of this image to make way for the construction I've shown you in the past few days. They'd also won the approval of two of three outgoing County Commissioners to establish the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority... The LCCCA I've mentioned over the past days.

Days before this photo was taken the majority of the old buildings were demolished to clear this area. On the top right of this image you can see yet more large buildings (the dark brick ones) which were scheduled to be pealed away. The remaining structures to the left were scheduled for preservation that would incorporate them into the new convention center.

BUT... two of the three incoming county commissioners, who were elected on pledges of support for this project abruptly abandoned those promises to join with powerful interests of opposition made up of hotel owners, city haters, change opponents, government haters, and a gaggle of anti-everything zealots.

In spite of the astonishing support for this project... those rogue commissioners began to assemble an army of attorneys to restrain and kill this construction. If they were successful the original supporters could lose tens of millions of dollars and economic recovery in Lancaster City would be crippled or probably ended. At the moment I took this peaceful picture, a full on battle had exploded and the other side controlled the entirety of the Lancaster County treasury. The future of an important historical city was plunged into an invisible civil war. Its enemies had captured County Government.

At about that time I asked the executive director of a key agency for his prediction regarding the potential completion of this convention center and its companion hotel. "Ted," he frowned. "A scale of ten? On a good day, I peg its chances of not getting cancelled at 5. No," he thought for a moment. "Make that 4."

May 30 • 2007:• The LCCC's Battleground 3

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There's an odd thing about construction... it appears to happen in spurts. At first the structures on this site were razed in just a few days and everything looked very different. Then the niggling details took over and even after months so little appears different, at least at first glance. But as you study the little things, you sense that tens of thousands of them have occurred. And as all of that was going on, the two commissioners, one a Democrat, the other a Republican continued their battle pouring tens and hundreds of thousands into the pockets of lawyers trying to stop this thing.
Yet oddly, resistance to their resistance seemed to be building. It was faint at first but by May of last year as I travelled around Lancaster County I began to hear supporters emerging. People who sensed that this could mean the rebirth of their county seat. That it could mean a dependable source of revenue for a city staggering under state and federal mandates. But still, one wondered as Spring broke, if backlash could possibly offset those two of three commissioners and their gang of supporters.

Things still felt grim.

March 10, 2007: The LCCC's Battleground 2

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I began this series yesterday in the future, August 11, 2007. That was a scene setter. And what happened before? Today let's step back six months and peer into the hole that might never fill. Or at least that's what rational people thought on March 10th as they cleared the space and dug into the colonial dirt of downtown Lancaster.
As the heavy metal machinery gathered in the pit, heavy hitter lawyers were gathering at the direction of two of three county commissioners who were turreting the guns of the Lancaster County treasury to bear in order to stop these machines.

August 11, 2007: The LCCC's Battleground 1

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This is a battle zone... or it was when I took this picture. Over the next days I shall post some more pictures of this site ... some made earlier... some... later. This is the Lancaster County Convention Center arising in the very epicenter of the City of Lancaster. The actions of a coalition of county hotel owners, anti government activists, anti development activists, economic illiterates, anti Lancaster City activists, and some few superstitious zealots came together with the political aspirations of two of three county commissioners to stop this project. They claimed to speak for the majority of the half million people in lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They mounted every delaying tactic and court maneuver imaginable. Even as this image was taken, there was serious doubt about just who they did represent and whether this hole would ever be filled.

Incidentally, this series of panoramas are each designed to be very large prints of perhaps six to eight feet on their longest edge.

Ruins

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Last night I saw a picture of an ancient Roman ruin. Then I looked at Stonehenge. And I wondered about their connections. Each was the product of an entirely distinct civilization which overlapped not at all. We think of them as solid pieces of some ancient history. But how solid were they?

Look at my image of the Watt & Shand building at the epicenter of downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Here the facade of a grand building has been stripped from its body to be grafted around a new Convention Center. Like most cities, Lancaster once had a thriving downtown dominated by a large department store. The age of the mighty department stores lasted what? Eighty years? Sixty? Fifty? And then, the automobile pierced their economic air like a pin through a bubble. A romantic attachment to those years has developers piecing that Watt & Shand department store skin onto a body the same way cosmetic surgeons are diddling with breasts, noses, and now even entire faces.

I wonder how long Stonehenge was functional? Twenty years? Sixty? Because it's old, we think of it as epochal. Almost eternal. A legacy of a vast civilization. When in fact, it might have been culturally or economically intriguing for one or two generations. The Celtic equivalent to a long lasting television series.

As much as people seem to like the Watt & Shand ruins, I wonder when the folks in Lancaster will decide to create their own cultural contribution. Something that says that we were here as well. Or we ARE here as well. I worry that we are becoming like the folks who lived around ruins, unable either technically or culturally to take any farther steps.

Hey, preservation's a good thing, but so's progress. It's something the Americans who built this Watt & Shand building believed in. I wonder if we've lost that vision as we paste the skin of old ruins onto today's expressions?

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6),1/400 at f/13, Exposure Bias Value: -1, ISO:200, Focal Length: 22 mm, Date: 7/31/07 @ 6:01pm, Flash: Off, Metering: average, Camera RAW

Trinity In The Window

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I'm off to see the world tomorrow. Well, okay... off to see America. Um... The American South. The east coast of the American Deep South. Where hanging moss decorates the great elms. And mint juleps are served on silver trays. Where the pace and charm are southern. Where people work smarter, not harder. Heat teaches them all of those things.

Which means I may not post much until the eleventh since someone else will be here in my home. But before I go to see a an old friendly place with fresh eyes - here's a look at a place which no one has ever seen before. This image shows the facade of a grand old department store once owned by Watt&Shand families. They've carefully peeled off this facade to build a grand Lancaster Convention Center and multiple star hotel behind it. And for just this moment in time you can peer through that Gay 90's wrapping and see the colonial grandeur of Trinity Lutheran Church in the setting May sun.

By Fall the windows will fill up with Convention Center things leaving this the last time that visitors will see Trinity once again from the city square. Here... share this moment with us. Remember what may never happen again.

Mr. A.S. Groff's Hope

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I went out this evening determined to grab some good news. Some uplifiting image. Something bright and shining. Adios El Grimmo!

And then, in the middle of the Lancater Convention Center construction site... Look... look at Mr. A.S. Groff's hardware store. See the sign there... Well in fact no one's seen that sign for... for... A hundred years? Who even knew they once sold hardware there? They scraped away false facades and brought down some of the building's neighbors and "Pop!" ... Up came Mr. A.S. Groff's sign bravely announcing his ambitions, his optimism, his joys, dreams and brave expectations. There they are, painted on the side of a building just below a door that now opens onto nothing and... And I can feel how happy Mr. A.S. Groff and Mrs. A.S. Groff were the day they looked up and saw their names up there way over South King Street.

And in the golden setting sun of the last days of May here in 2007 I felt Mr. A.S. Groff's joy - as the twilight gently painted it bright on these few weeks before it gets covered again...

Then it shadowed over.

VPLs

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It is bad form to show visible panty lines. Which has led, in part, to thongs. From my viewpoint: Hey, not a bad thing. Nope,not at all.
Looking down at Christian Street here... There's a need for some infrastructure thonging. See how it's popping up through the covering? Can you imagine the foundation garments hidden beneath one of Lancaster's oldest streets? The church on the left dates from the early seventeen hundreds. Not even young by European or Asian standards, but hereabouts... it's ancient. And so too is whatever's under Christian Street. Problem is, the stuff doesn't want to stay covered.
Bad form eh? Wonder how they keep the past from tearing up into the present other places? On the other hand, given the way history keeps unexpectedly repeating itself in everything else we do... Maybe we need to apply some thong therapy to our politicians, our executives, our journalists... and to our Christian Streets... Eh?

Facade

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Yesterday I showed you the wreckers who were digging around into the middle of something. I told you that they were banging and drilling inside of the very epicenter of the city of Lancaster. In fact where King and Queen streets come together is the town square - everything else radiates outward from an obelisk memorializing the county's Civil War dead.
And just behind that sculpture on the south-eastern corner sits the county's grandest building... what was the Watt & Shand department store. The wreckers are disemboweling it to create room for a grand new hotel and a convention center. But, with the care of a diamond cutter, they're preserving this radiant vista.

Wrecking

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And tomorrow I shall post what they are digging behind in the very epicenter of historic Lancaster City. In the interim you might notice that this guy is looking at stuff that hasn't seen sunlight in well over a century. Those fire escapes to the right? they were hidden in a dank, grim alleyway - and you'll note they were appended quite a while back. Apparently the original structure was built for access from this side, but later structures which have just been demolished closed off horse-drawn deliveries. This walkway is wonderful, the best view in town to what's turned out to be an archeological surprise.