The Wildlands Conservancy had no resistance convincing the past two park directors to stop cutting the creek banks and call it a riparian buffer. Both directors were from out of town, trained in recreation at Penn State, and had no feeling or knowledge of the park's history and traditions. To add absurdity to the situation, the storm sewer systems in Allentown are piped directly into the streams, bypassing the buffers, making them useless to their stated purpose. To add further irony to the absurdity, the park department must now spray insecticide on the underbrush to control the invasive species. Worse than blocking access and view of the streams, the recent director endorsed the Conservancy demolishing two small historic dams, after being here only six weeks, and never actually having seen the dams himself.
Why do I dwell on water over the dam? The Wildlands Conservancy is now pitching the dam demolition and riparian buffer agenda to South Whitehall Township. If they get their way, the beautiful picnic vista overlooking Wehr's Dam will be replaced with a wall of weeds. I'm on a mission to make sure that beauty and history survive at Covered Bridge Park.
above reprinted from September 9, 2014
ADDENDUM JANUARY 6, 2025: While I did, with the help of others, save Wehr's Dam, I have had no such success with the creek banks in the Allentown parks. On the contrary, this season yet another new park director didn't even do the once annual invasive species mow down.
Although I am a long time known advocate for the WPA, I was denied a seat at the new Parknership table. I did manage to place a letter to the Morning Call that appeared yesterday, and I will continue to speak out in defense of the traditional park system.
Could you reprint your letter here, for those of us that don’t read the Call?
ReplyDeleteApparently your letter to the Call was either important enough, or annoying enough, to be placed behind their paywall... and I'm out in the Midwest currently, so I'll never get to read it... ggggrrrr.....
ReplyDeleteAllentown parks need better care
ReplyDeleteReading the recent Morning Call article on transforming the Allentown park system was outright painful to an advocate for the traditional park system like myself. Only newcomers to Allentown, which includes the current park director, could think that they can possibly come up with some better ideas and plans than Allentown always enjoyed until recent years.
Putting up signs in Spanish will not improve the parks, but cutting the grass to the creek’s edge in Lehigh Parkway’s Robin Hood section would. Iconic sections of our park system, like the creek by the Rose Garden, are in a state of neglect, masquerading as conservation.
The current mayor is obsessed with inclusion, but our park system does not need new ideas, but rather better care. Once upon a time Allentown’s park system graced picture postcards and was a destination.
Michael Molovinsky
Allentown
Respectfully, a letter to the Morning Call is of little import these days. The publication is past the point of irrelevant. It is dead, it just does not know that. Of course it would not, its demise was self inflicted, just hastened by the move to digital news.
ReplyDeleteMy letter aside, the Morning Call might be more viable than you think. Although I'm a dinosaur, there are others who count on the MC for both local news and sports. I do realize that newspapers have only a fraction of previous Ad revenue and print editions will soon be only a memory.
Delete129 acre NIZ consists of businesses relocated from other Lehigh Valley locations which had failed in short order.
DeleteMy last count was 117 by the end of 2023. Must have been many others. Tuerk's a jerk.