By Dennis Lieb

The hideous scar on the face of Easton’s West Ward refuses to heal. If left up to the forces of “free enterprise,” the wound would be reopened to the detriment of who knows how many future generations. 

Rewind to 1978. I was fresh out of electronics school, with my first full-time job being a short two-block walk from my home on Chidsey Street to the Pfizer research department on N. 13th Street. 

Pfizer was trying to repeat its success in the red paint pigment business by producing magnetic oxide coatings for the audio and video tape industry. 

That was my job: concocting, testing, and perfecting the end product from a small facility across the street from what is now the redeveloped Simon Silk Mill. 

It was my first close look at how big business operated in this country. Let’s say worker safety was a low priority. And environmental concerns? That was for suckers. In my short year there, I saw almost daily routine violations involving the dumping of spent or unusable dry chemicals over the banks of the Bushkill Stream, later to be bulldozed over — out of sight, out of mind. 

The end for me came mercifully after a letter I wrote to the next shift team that I had taped to the office door was intercepted by management. 
 

Some Background

It was supposed to be standard operating procedure that each shift worked in pairs (this was a 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week operation, trying to replicate production-like standards within a research project environment). 

While on the third shift from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am, I was always scheduled to work alone — in an environment of dangerous chemicals, heavy industrial machinery, high-temperature slurry tanks, and, in certain situations, a product that could instantaneously combust. 

On at least one occasion, I had to drag a burning 55-gallon drum of material out onto a second-floor fire escape landing and kick it down the stairs. 

In these situations, I was often the only human on the entire 13th Street side of the plant, while the guardhouse (the only structure still standing on today’s flattened site) located on the Wood Avenue side was supposed to call to check on us once an hour. That never happened.

This was the gist of my letter to the next shift, which within 24 hours, got me fired.

A few years later, the Pa. DEP held a public hearing in the auditorium of what is today known as Paxinosa Elementary School. The subject was the re-certification of Pfizer’s air pollution filtration system, and the meeting attracted about 100 people — including me. 

The public was welcome to comment, and many did. It was clear from the decades of rusty, un-eradicated fallout all over my neighborhood that, if they were using air filters at all, they weren’t working. At age 23, this was my first experience speaking behind a microphone at any government function, but I gave my horror story as a former employee. This included the fact that the air filtration system in my building had never been turned on during my entire time there. They said it made too much noise.

I don’t think anything anyone said that night had the slightest impact on the DEP decision to re-certify the equipment or investigate Pfizer’s continuing operations. A short time later some of the incompetent operators who took my place formulated a bad batch of material and, instead of adjusting it in process, simply opened the plug and drained 1000 gallons of it into the city sewer system. 

Long story short, the heavy magnetic slurry attached itself to the sewage treatment plant’s metal equipment, causing millions in damage; our sewer rates doubled to pay for the repairs; a citizens group sued Pfizer (and won), and they eventually sold out and left Easton — the excuse being that their reputation in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics business was tarnished by involvement in “dirty” industry. 

Their replacements, starting with Harcross Pigments and concluding with the final occupant Huntsman, presided over the slow unraveling of a 100 year industrial legacy. 

A New Era?

Fast forward to around 2000, and Easton’s downtown was threatening to dry up and blow away. Except for The Crayola Center, retail trade was in shambles, and the Easton Farmers’ Market had been reduced to one merchant. The Goldsmith administration had no interest in government intervention. 

An informal meeting occurred over coffee between our state representative Bob Freeman, and me. We agreed that the city was sinking and that the culprit was an antiquated, suburban-style zoning ordinance that placed undo burdens on anyone trying to redevelop in the city. 

It was also clear that a new zoning ordinance would be beyond the expertise, manpower and budget of the city planning department even if they had the incentive to do it, which they didn’t. So, we did what any other lunatics would do in that situation: write it ourselves. 

Without notice or permission from city hall, we assembled a group of eight intelligent Easton volunteers (no elected officials or bureaucrats) and started rewriting it. 

Another fast forward, and today, the biggest reason downtown looks the way it does is from our volunteer work. Within that ordinance are re-designations of neighborhoods to promote the physical assembly of buildings and streets in ways that promote the architectural and urban design context of their surroundings versus trying to tell people how many parking spaces they must supply or unnecessarily limiting their uses. 

Our group also anticipated that the former Pfizer plant would someday become available for redevelopment, so we wanted to ensure that it would not be a burden to those trying to actively incorporate it back into the city. 

And here is where the chickens come home to roost, as they say. It’s one thing to leave as many options open as possible and another thing to overlook one very important question:

What would be the worst possible outcome?

If that question had been asked at the time — more than 20 years ago — it might’ve been a Super Walmart or some similarly awful big box intrusion. We could’ve also been ahead of our time by including a “formula business” ordinance as a sister document to the zoning — something to prevent cookie-cutter chain stores from ruining the local economy. Hindsight is always 20-20. 

But today we return to the actual dreaded possibilities for the barren former Pfizer plant – a massive one-million sq. ft. warehouse.

Are we going to repeat the mistakes of the past century and inflict further damage on my lifelong home, the West Ward neighborhood, or are we finally going to use the tools provided in a citizen-crafted ordinance to create something beneficial to the entire city — not just another cookie-cutter money machine for some out of state developers?

Here are the facts that everyone should know. 

A) There is insufficient access — especially eastbound — for large vehicles without a complete rebuild of the 13th Street interchange, which would take years and hundreds of millions of our tax dollars. 

B) Using the 25th Street interchange/Wood Avenue as access would overload an already gridlocked, dendritic (branching, like a tree) street system that was constructed for a suburban population that has outgrown all expectations. 

C) Stormwater runoff for a one million square foot building within close proximity to the Bushkill Stream cannot possibly be remediated on site. It would result in massive destruction of the stream corridor along the Karl Stirner Arts Trail and additional flood risk along the Delaware River. 

D) This is NOT industrial development. Giant warehousing is a non-productive, low-employment level business (becoming more automated all the time) that places great burdens on infrastructure and surrounding neighborhoods and is unsuitable for shoehorning into an urban context. Pfizer and its successor businesses had the major drawback of iron oxide fallout, which thankfully is now gone forever but it was otherwise low impact (minimal noise and virtually no traffic issues).

Our citizens task force zoned that area as Adaptive Reuse, which allows a wide variety of opportunities, including warehouses, but did not anticipate the insane scale of warehouse development today. 

The spirit of the ordinance was to provide for multiple uses — such as the Silk Mill redevelopment — but regardless of the vagueness of the ordinance language, the intent was not for one massive monoculture over the entire site. 

The Takeaway 

If the developer chooses to ignore the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission opinion (which, as we know from Lafayette’s dorm project, is not binding) and assuming that their opinion is negative, they can still proceed anyway without Easton Planning or Zoning review because warehousing is an approved use. 

If there are dimensional limitations to the scale of such a project they would be included somewhere in the zoning ordinance but I haven’t found them. Not that a warehouse of lesser size — over 200,000 square feet as previously planned — is even a viable alternative.

Two additional points:

First; Route 78 was completed in the 80’s to handle interstate commerce and divert heavy truck traffic away from Route 22 — a heavily used, 1950’s era commuter road. This facilitated (for better or worse) massive warehousing projects along both 78 and 33 where large, flat tracts of land — away from populated areas — were most suitable, if not necessarily wanted (see stormwater runoff issues with the Chrin warehouses in Tatamy and Palmer Township). 

Bringing that truck traffic back to an antiquated section of 22, which has no potential for expansion and already requires heavy maintenance, is counterproductive to say the least. 

Second; The zoning of the property as Adaptive Reuse also infers that similar adaptive reuse remains possible in the future. The Silk Mill lends itself to such reuse due to its human scaled buildings of brick and stone, broken into a multi-building compound, with a generous amount of fenestration for natural light and air. 

A warehouse structure — single story, flat roof, solid precast concrete walls, no window openings, no architectural merit — has no such reuse potential for the coming era when transportation fuel costs exceed the return on investment for moving freight by truck. 

In Conclusion 

Things like this have no business reaching the point of official review without serious citizen input. This project has had none. Before adoption, when the Mitman administration was reviewing our ordinance, I put forward the idea of a citizen participation ordinance. This would require developers proposing projects of a certain scale to meet with the residents first, hear all concerns, and prepare a report on those concerns and their responses before any official government review could be held. 

I was told that the place for something like that was in the Comprehensive Plan, which had yet to be begun. Guess what? Never happened. 

The other major requirement for anything proposed on this scale would be a multi-day, public design charrette.

Our development model today is entirely top-down. Cities put out RFPs (requests for proposals) and allow the developers to decide what will be built, which is whatever brings maximum return to them. Instead, we should be creating community visions for our publicly held properties (Pine Street garage, the former Days Inn, the former Boyd Theater, Silk Mill, Easton Iron and Salvage, and others) via public chartettes and putting out RFQs (requests for qualifications) to see who is willing and capable of developing our vision. 

If we propose either a Participation Ordinance or charrette process to developers (or local government bureaucrats) they will say that the process is too long, will cost too much, and will delay implementation. Well, these Easton projects have dragged on for years anyway. They are all subject to citizen lawsuits, environmental violations and other unexpected delays resulting from a lack of detailed analysis in the first place.

So why not get it right the first time?

Today, the worst possible outcome for the Pfizer site is proposed within view of my front door. I’ve done what I can about this warehouse issue. I’ve spoken to Bob Freeman. I’ve sent emails to everyone I know. I’ve left messages with Becky Bradley at the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission and Maya van Rossum, head of The Delaware Riverkeeper Network. But I’m done with direct advocacy in front of microphones. That’s for the next generation of citizen activists to take on. Perhaps someone reading this will be inspired. I hope so.