TBW Daily Diary

Had a reason to drive down Front Street and into Shipoke this morning and was quite impressed with the site decoration in Riverfront Park for today's Gay Pride festivities. Tents of all shapes, sizes and colors and several dozen colorful flags were scattered about. There was no doubt that a major fun event was about to take place; really made Harrisburg look like a special city again, if only for a few hours . . . . Today's TripAdvisor visitor was a school teacher from Pittsburgh. As soon as she consulted the travel site she knew that she had to come to The Bare Wall. She had grown up in a house at 712 Green Street in Greensburg, so our address had to be a good omen. We enjoyed her visit . . . Received a letter from David Hoffman full of good news; Dave explained that most of the parking lots in the HACC midtown area are actually privately owned and merely leased to the college. That means that they are paying property taxes to the city and are not exempt . . . That does take me back a bit—to the late 1960s when property owners in the city found that it was more profitable to tear down their houses and create parking lots; the resulting destruction of perfectly good housing was one of the reasons we created the Historic Harrisburg Association . . .