The Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Commission Announces 2010 Commemorative Historic Calendar

Harrisburg PA 12-11-09 – Just in time for the holiday season and corporate and personal giving, The Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Commemorative calendar has been released to a limited number of local retail outlets. The 12-month wall calendar celebrates the upcoming 150th anniversary of the city’s 1860 incorporation.

“We are very excited about this unique piece, which we feel will appeal to ‘Harrisburgers’, past and present, who appreciate this lovely city and its journey over the last century and a half to become what it is today,” said Ellen C. Brown, Executive Director of The Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Commission, “The calendar is handsome tribute to that journey.”

The beautifully designed 8.5 by 11 full color folded calendar opens to feature photos of all Mayors of the City of Harrisburg, from William H. Kepner in 1860 to present, along with a time-line of Harrisburg’s historic events beginning with John Harris’ arrival in 1716 through to 2009.

Each month features archival sepia-tone photos of cityscapes and landmarks. Laid out in a “before and after” format, Harrisburg scenes from the late 1800s to the early part of the 20th century are complemented with a color inset photo of the same scene today.

The February pages illustrate Italian Lake in 1925 prior to its development into a park and formal garden as part of the “City Beautiful Movement.” March depicts a Market Street western view from 1914 in which the Market Square Presbyterian Church spire towers over the other buildings pictured in the square. The inset view shows the same spire today, dwarfed by downtown highrises.

A side bar of a brief history of the featured scene, as well as additional archival photos and drawings, adorn each page.

The calendar, which retails for $9.95, is available at Strawberry Patch at Strawberry Square, Midtown Scholar Bookstore, Wonders at Whitaker Center, and The Historical Society of Dauphin County, who will also sell them online as well. www.dauphincountyhistory.org

Coffee mugs, glassware, pet clothes, keychains and other Harrisburg SusqueCentennial commemorative gift items are available for purchase as well.

The calendar is just one aspect of The SusqueCentennial Commission’s planned celebration for 2010, which includes Harrisburg history exhibits, Old Home Week, Genealogy Workshops and a Founder’s Day Celebration. More information
about the celebration and events can be found on the website www.harrisburg150.com

Colorful mural brightens up wall on North Third Street

By Mary Klaus
August 27, 2009, 4:23PM

Area artists, city teen-agers and community volunteers teamed up on Thursday to erect a colorful mural on the formerly blank wall of a midtown art gallery.

“Mending Hearts, Minds and Communities” now decorates the walls of Gallery Blu at 1633 N. Third St. Ellen C. Brown , executive director of the Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Commission, Inc., called the mural “the debut” of the commission’s “Paint the Town” project” that is part of the city’s 150th anniversary celebration next year.

She expressed hope that “such a project would soon migrate beyond the city’s boundaries into every township, borough and municipality within Dauphin County.”

Countdown to the SusqueCentennial Television Shows

Tune in to WHBG TV 20 to catch the first episode of “Countdown to the SusqueCentennial,” a show designed to educate and inform the public about upcoming SusqueCentennial events and programs. In this first show, host Mike Greenwald talks with SusqueCentennial Commission’s Executive Director, Ellen Brown, Highmark Blue Shield Market Vice President Michael Fiaschetti, Living Legacy Advisory Board Member and CEO of the Institute for Cultural Partnerships Fredrika McKain and Don Marinelli CEO/Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. The group discusses the cutting-edge technology being used for the Living Legacy Project and also highlights the Project’s educational potential. Visit www.whbg.tv/ for a complete schedule of program times.

New shows will be featured each month, highlighting the numerous activities and events planned for our celebration, so please plan to tune-in often!

Harrisburg’s 150th Anniversary Celebration

by Ellen Brown
Sunday September 06, 2009, 8:20 AM

It has been said that when a child dies, the world loses a piece of our future, but when an older person dies, we lose a piece of the past.

With today’s remarkable digital technology, the past is not predestined to vanish like dust in the wind. Although we can never replace the warm presence of a cherished loved one, today’s cutting-edge innovations can capture their faces, voices, spoken memories and lifetime of accumulated wisdom more vividly, permanently and conveniently than at any other time in history.

Most of us have heard awe-inspiring tales about the Great Depression, the potato famine, the steel mills, the civil rights marches, America’s high-profile assassinations, the war protests, the TMI scare, the Agnes floods, and more, from our parents and grandparents.

Their firsthand accounts often are more compelling than any textbook or documentary could ever hope to be. A new DVL technology pioneered by Carnegie Mellon University can preserve this riveting oral history for all time.

This is one of the primary reasons that the nonprofit SusqueCentennial Commission is planning a Living Legacy series as part of our city’s 150th anniversary celebration in 2010. With a generous gift from health insurer Highmark, the commission is making a digital video library of 150 “living legacies” to assemble a powerful living, breathing time capsule for this dynamic city.

While most scrapbooks are collages of faded photographs, torn ticket stubs, dog-eared passes, tear-stained love letters, and pressed flowers, this online scrapbook is accompanied by voice, and is a colorful story unfolding in real time. The stories can be accessed with a few touches of a computer keyboard and linked to related sites with a few simple clicks of the mouse.

Like the lure of old photo albums, scrapbooks and yearbooks, this series promises to be captivating. We can not only tap into the sense of sight, but hear voices and relive stories that made history. For example, retired Dauphin County Judge Lipsitt is one of our 150 “Living Legacies” who has related mesmerizing tales of being a Boy Scout, meeting with FDR, serving in the trenches of World War II, and sentencing Nick Perry after his lottery scandal conviction.

When Lipsitt first began to practice law, he was barred from the Lebanon County Courts, among others, because he was Jewish. His stories are truly amazing history that might have never been revealed without this opportunity.

You do not have to be a judge, an Olympic athlete, an Academy Award-winning actress or a high-ranking politician to participate in this historic undertaking.

We are seeking not just shapers of history, but astute witnesses to the march of time. Our esteemed selection committee is seeking a broad cross-section of voices and experiences. We know that the extraordinary lies in the ordinary. Please consider contributing to our high-tech treasure chest. You can nominate someone you know at nomination@harrisburg150.com through the end of the year. Give a storyteller in our midst a chance to tell their story.

Let the amazing stories heard around our kitchen tables at the holidays spread beyond those homey walls. Let us capture our shared history before it is lost to time.

Through this project, which also will include 150 public art murals and an Old Home Week celebration, we can depict the spirit, soul and heart of this historic city.

Knowing that a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving picture, accented with spoken words, especially uttered by someone we love dearly, is priceless.

As the late singer Jim Croce sang years ago, “Photographs and memories/All the love you gave to me/Somehow it just can’t be true/That’s all I have left of you.”

Be a part of the Living Legacy series, and we can hold tightly to more than just “photographs and memories.” We can truly keep Harrisburg alive.

Ellen C. Brown is executive director of the SusqueCentennial Commission.

INFOBOX:
To nominate someone for the Harrisburg Living Legacy Series, email nomination@harrisburg150.com

Check out www.harrisburg150.com

Harrisburg Patriot News

Parade marchers invited

Participants can register for the Harrisburg holiday parade until Oct. 9.

Bands, organizations, groups, businesses, individuals, military groups, nonprofit organizations and dancers can participate in the parade, which steps off at 10 a.m. Nov. 21. The theme is “Harrisburg Celebrates a World of Holiday Traditions.”

The parade offers more than $7,000 in prize money to entries in six parade categories. Last year, more than 2,500 marchers participated and more than 50,000 spectators lined downtown streets for the 90-minute extravaganza. In addition to the many parade categories available to participants, the parade has a special Military Division dedicated to America’s armed service personnel, past and present, and a new SusqueCentennial Division previewing Harrisburg’s 150th anniversary celebration that will take place in 2010.

For information and general registration forms, log on to www.harrisburgevents.com or call 717-255-3020.

Questions regarding parade participation should be directed to the Department of Parks and Recreation’s special events director at 717-315-2079. Those interested in becoming a parade sponsor, or providing volunteer balloon handlers should contact Gloria Saleh-Giambalvo at 315-2092. Groups or individuals interested in being a part of the SusqueCentennial kick-off parade division should call Ellen Brown at 717-255-7346.

Midtown gains a community garden, mural to be dedicated on Monday.

Sunday, August 30, 2009
BY MARY KLAUS mklaus@patriot-news.com

A community garden in midtown Harrisburg grows more than beans and basil, peppers and potatoes.

The garden in the 1600 block of North Third Street also grows beauty and renewal.

Located on a lot that once held three deteriorating row houses, the garden and a recently painted mural will be dedicated Monday by the Dauphin County Commissioners, who helped fund it.

“This area has been reclaimed by the neighborhood,” said Ellen C. Brown, Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Commission Inc. executive director, as she stood in the garden. “It will instill community pride.”

Brown said that she hopes to see similar projects during the city’s 150th birthday celebration next year.

For years the homes at 1627, 1629 and 1631 North Third Street were ramshackle eyesores until they were torn down in 2002.

Helping pay for the change from blight to garden was a $25,000 grant from the Dauphin County Office of Economic Development.

“We put in 21 raised gardens, each 4 by 8 feet,” said Travis Watkins, U.S.D.A. Natural Resources Conservation Service state outreach coordinator. This year, the gardens were planted by the Penn State Cooperative Extension Youth Development Program. Next year, he said, people can lease the gardens.

Watkins said that each garden contains 2 tons of rich soil. The produce ready to be picked attests to the richness of that soil.

Plump scarlet tomatoes ripen in the sun. Canary yellow wax beans hang off plants. Green peppers shine while potato plants hide a good crop underground. Dark green zucchini proliferate.

Even more colorful is the adjacent “Mending Hearts, Minds and Communities” mural painted Thursday on what had been the blank wall of Gallery Blu at 1633 N. Third St.

“Neighbors can take ownership of a property that once was abandoned,” said Brown. “The garden will teach everything from conservation to commerce. There’s growth here again.”

Two 11-year-old city residents came to the garden Thursday to pick yellow beans and discuss what they will plant their next year.

“I want to grow some watermelon and tomatoes,” said Jasmine Rodriguez. Her friend, Aireonna Thomas, held a handful of beans and smiled. “Me too. I also want to plant potatoes and some flowers.”

HISTORY OF A CITY

Harrisburg’s sesquicentennial celebration doesn’t officially start until March, but a high-tech oral history project is already under way.

Harrisburg began with John Harris Sr. settling in the midstate in the early 1700s, but the city did not receive its charter until March 1860. The SusqueCentennial celebration of that event will include a digitized collection of two-hour interviews of at least 150 local residents to be made available online.

Nearly 40 interviews have already been completed for the Living Legacy Series, and organizers plan to have the interactive archive online by next summer.

Dan Marinelli, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, helped develop the technology for the project. He visited Harrisburg last week to meet with local organizers.

The university’s Entertainment Technology Center recently worked with a group in Chicago for an African American history project, but the Harrisburg project will be a crucial public test of the system, he said.

“It’s ‘Does the interface work? Can Grandma get online and access it as opposed to someone having to guide her there?’” Marinelli said.

When complete, the oral history collection featuring audio, video and printed transcripts of interviews with local residents who represent arts, business, government and education, will be available publicly online. Site visitors can search individual questions or ideas about Harrisburg’s history, such as railroads or floods, and the archive will provide results from relevant interviews.

The archive’s searchability should be attractive to younger generations, Marinelli said.

“To have technology in the classroom more reminiscent of how kids interact with their leisure technology is innovative,” he said. “Why can’t I use the same technology I use on my iPhone as I do to learn?”

Ellen Brown, Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Commission executive director, said she hopes to develop curriculum for grades K-12 so local schools can utilize the online archive in the classroom.

For instance, students at Scott School in Harrisburg might not know the history of John Scott, the education innovator for whom the school was named, she said.

“They can learn not just about history, but about the environment,” she said. “Hurricane Agnes, TMI [Three Mile Island], that’s science.”

People interviewed for the archive will be asked about their childhood, education, family, career path and their most unforgettable memories of Harrisburg, said Fredrika McKain, a member of the advisory board that selects those to be interviewed.

“We want to show young people in the city that no matter what their background is, they can succeed,” McKain said. “They can reach their goals and dreams.”

Happy anniversaries: Be part of the living legacy of Harrisburg

by Patriot-News Editorial Board

There’s really no way to keep it a surprise: Harrisburg is months away from the big 1-5-0.

While John Harris Sr. first settled in the area in the early 1700s, and his son built up the early makings of a town a half-century later, the city did not receive its official charter until 1860.

There will undoubtedly be festivities and partying in the streets in 2010 to mark the occasion, but anniversaries are about more than fireworks and food.

As Shakespeare wrote in his play “Coriolanus”: “What is a city but the people.”

To help Harrisburg truly reflect on its past, present and future, the Harrisburg SusqueCentiennial Commission received a grant from Highmark Health Insurance to create a “Living Legacy” series. The commission wants to film 150 Harrisburg residents telling their stories of the city.

It’s the ultimate Reality TV, except the end goal isn’t high drama with makeups and breakups broadcast for millions.

The goal is to showcase the diversity of our community and the “heroes next door.” The videos will be put online — maybe even on YouTube — and this oral history project will join the many photographs, ticket stubs, momentoes and the city’s charter as part of the official history of Harrisburg.

There is still time to be a part of this special gift to the city.

The SusqueCentiennial Commission has a “casting call” of sorts out to people for whom Harrisburg has played a special role in their life.

A Harrisburg birth certificate or lifelong residence is certainly not a requirement for the job.

So grab your memories and nominate yourself or someone you know: nomination@harrisburg150.com.

copyright 2009 Patriot News
copyright 2009 PennLive.com All Rights Reserved

SUSQUECENTENNIAL LANDMARK BANNER SYSTEM NOW INSTALLED

Mayor Stephen R. Reed and officials from the Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Commission and the Harrisburg Downtown Improvement District today announced that a system of colorful banners has now been installed on street light poles in Harrisburg, all of which feature important landmarks in the city from both the past and present. The banners were installed as part of Harrisburg’s upcoming 150th anniversary of being incorporated as a city in 1860.

Reed said some of the banners are colorful expressions of the SusqueCentennial spirit while most others display a noted Harrisburg landmark and the date in which the landmark was either built or emerged on the Harrisburg cityscape. In some cases, the landmarks have either been altered or expanded over time. Many no longer exist.

Reed said the landmarks have been captured through black and white photography, lithographs, and color postcards of the period and feature buildings, parks, streetscapes, bridges and monuments. Most of the images were retrieved from the collections of the Harrisburg City Archives with others provided by the Dauphin County Historical Society, the Historic Harrisburg Association and the Pennsylvania State Archives.

Reed said in most cases, the banners have been located either adjacent to or in the vicinity of the downtown landmarks being illustrated, so as to make a relevant visually-interactive experience of Harrisburg both then and now. Many other banners depict landmarks of other areas of the city.

Reed said the $40,000 project is a partnership between the Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Commission, the Harrisburg Downtown Improvement District, and the City of Harrisburg. He said a brochure is now available listing the names of the featured landmarks, which also includes a map showing their locations on the streetlights. Further, a website is also online through where users can obtain more information about each landmark by exploring the interactive downtown streetlight map. The website is available at www.harrisburg150.com, www.harrisburghello.com, or click on the SusqueCentennial link at www.harrisburgpa.gov.

The banners will remain in place throughout the summer and will be reinstalled during the summer of 2010 when the SusqueCentennial activities actually culminate.
Reed said the Landmark Banner System is a component of the overall Harrisburg SusqueCentennial Celebration taking place in 2009 and 2010. Other highlights of the SusqueCentennial Celebration include the Highmark Living Legacy Series, the “Paint the Town” Mural System, Genealogy Workshops, and other planned activities and events.

Highmark sponsorship welcome in era of strapped governments

Our state is trying to grap ple with an estimated $2.3 billion budget shortfall, and part of the fallout will be in various program cuts.
Meanwhile, our local governments are facing the same kind of pressure, causing reductions that could impact some police forces as well as increase taxes.
In the face of this storm, it was heartening on many levels to see Highmark Blue Shield’s $500,000 donation for a high-tech oral history project marking the 150th anniversary of the incorporation of the city of Harrisburg in March, 1860, approximately six years after the birth of The Patriot-News.
First, this project was unlikely to happen with out someone or some busi ness support ing it. In a city with nu merous seri ous issues, there wasn’t going to be money avail able for this kind of proj ect. In addition, the Living Legacy Series will involve Harrisburg University of Science and Technology as well as students from Sci-Tech High, Harrisburg Academy, Penn State Harrisburg, HACC, Harrisburg School District, and the Capital Area School for the Arts.
In the end our region will have unique and important historic remembrances, while local students will have an equally unique opportunity to do something for future generations and learn history in a very special way.
This kind of support, fortunately, is not unique. In the midst of this incredibly difficult economy, the companies and people of this region donated more than $10 million to the United Way of the Capital Region’s annual campaign to help our neighbors, friends and family members in need.
It was a historic milestone and unique among United Way campaigns in our state and around the nation. On the heels of the campaign, United Way is now launching a campaign to raise $100,000 over the next few weeks for emergency food and shelter services in Cumberland, Dauphin and Perry counties. Every penny raised will go to the cause. None will be used for administrative expenses.
The same kind of effort is being mounted by United Ways in Lancaster and York.
These kinds of private donations help communities do everything from creating important projects like the Living Legacy Series happen to making certain money and services are available to feed and shelter those in need. It is an important aspect of our region
It is efforts like this, and all those in-between, that reinforce once again how deep our sense of community and community responsibility is both in good times and in times like these.
We are all fortunate to have so many people and companies that care.
To contribute to the Basic Needs Campaign, send donations to “United Way Basic Needs Fund” at the United Way of the Capital Region, 2235 Millennium Way, Enola, PA 17025. You can also donate online here: UWCR online donation form.

©2009 Patriot-News
© 2009 PennLive.com All Rights Reserved.