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| photo by Tami Quigley |
The top photo shows the Robin Hood Bridge, before the Wildlands Conservancy demolished the little folly Robin Hood Dam, just downstream beyond the bridge. The dam was only about 10 inches high, and was built as a visual effect to accompany the bridge in 1941. It was the last WPA project in Allentown, and considered the final touch for Lehigh Parkway. Several years ago, the Wildlands told the Allentown Park Director and City Council that it wanted to demolish the dam. The only thing that stood between their bulldozer and the dam was yours truly. I managed to hold up the demolition for a couple weeks, during which time I tried to educate city council about the park, but to no avail. If demolishing the dam wasn't bad enough, The Wildlands Conservancy piled the broken dam ruble around the stone bridge piers, as seen in the bottom photo. I'm sad to report that the situation is now even worse. All that ruble collected silt, and now weeds and brush is growing around the stone bridge piers. I suppose the Wildlands Conservancy considers it an extension of its riparian buffers.
The Wildlands Conservancy is now going to demolish Wehr's Dam at Covered Bridge Park in South Whitehall. The township commissioners are cooperating, by having a grossly inflated price associated with repairing the dam, to justify a disingenuous referendum. Sadly, by next spring I will be showing you before and after pictures of that crime.
top photo by Tami Quigley
The Wildlands Conservancy is predominantly a local organization, headed by Mr Kocher and Ms Phillips. These do-gooder environmentalists won't be around forever.
ReplyDeleteThe good thing is that the land, and the parks, and the dams, and everything else these do-gooders manage to destroy can be restored. Turning our parks into weed-filled fields, destroying historic dams and degrading our park system, all of this can be rebuilt and restored in time, once these creeps either die off or move on.
The problem is that presently, our local government entities, including the City of Allentown, just doesn't give a damn. Our parks are not a resource, they're an expense. The City is not the City that Harry Trexler helped to build, or even the one of the 1960s where there was civic pride in a healthy, prosperous city. Allentown is a slum full of poor people who rely on welfare payments; it's a city that has a lot of graft to it, with a a future that is uncertain at best.. although we know it will be here in one form of another full of people who live either on government checks or work in sales jobs or in backbreaking manual labor jobs. The schools are rotten, and there realy isn't a reason for young people to want to move here.
Now the suburbs are a different story. In the future there will be people who want to restore what the WIldlands conservatory destroys, because they can see the the value of what these do-gooders want to destroy. So there is hope, I suppose.
Dave, 801am,
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your assertion that the Conservancy will not be around, or a similar variation thereof. My run in with them happened back in the early '70's, up in Whitehall Township. They will not disappear altogether...."Follow the Money" of the grants that fuel them.
Paul Fiske (The Old Allentown Curmudgeon)
MM,
ReplyDeleteThe first picture has fond memories of native fish being caught!? The second picture has lasting nightmares of Revelations from the bible of fish kills and human waste as well as garbage floating and not one single fish caught since the denigration?!