TheBurg

12 | The Burg | 06.15 O ne evening in March 1986, Mike Trephan was at the reception for his own wedding, at Catalano's bar and lounge in Wormleysburg, when he got a call from then-Mayor Steve Reed. "He says, 'Michael, the river's coming up,'" Trephan recalled. "'You've got to move—'" Trephan knew what Reed was talking about: the hull of what was to become the Pride of the Susquehanna riverboat, a hulking metal frame that was perched on a City Island beach, unmoored. For the past year, Trephan and a group of local businessmen had been working to build an old-fashioned passenger boat to augment the city's riverfront attractions. Trephan, who had recollections of taking a ferry to City Island as a child, called it "an old memory becoming a new dream." He got off the phone and, along with his wife, headed for the island. Rising waters had imperiled the project once already. Months before the wedding, the river had torn the boat from where it was docked on the west shore, wedging it against a pier of the Market Street Bridge. e disaster prompted a Patriot-News reporter to liken the riverboat to the Titanic—a display of hubris that was doomed to failure. But the hull was rescued and relocated to the island, and Trephan, after coaxing more positive coverage from the paper, kept the project and its capital campaign alive. On his wedding night, he got to the boat before the swelling river did. "And who shows up and helped us? Mayor Reed," Trephan said. "We were all dressed up, but we got the boat tied up. I think he's the one that brought ropes over, if I'm not mistaken." e boat stayed anchored to the island. e riverboat was just one piece of City Island's transformation under Reed. For nearly a century, the island had been a recreational site for city dwellers, following the 1890 construction of the Walnut Street Bridge. According to Eric V. Fasick's "Harrisburg and the Susquehanna River," a collection of images of the river published earlier this year, the newly granted access led the city to develop bathing beaches, playgrounds and baseball diamonds there. By the time Reed took office, however, in 1981, the island had fallen out of use and acquired a reputation for prostitution and cruising. Trephan called it "disheveled," though, he hastened to add, it "wasn't as bad as people say it was. It just wasn't developed." All that changed under Reed. In 2010, giving an interview for a local history project, Reed recounted his search for an enterprise that would have a "catalytic effect on changing the image and perception of the city." "You needed something that had universal appeal," he said. Waterfront investments, he went on, were "almost no-brainer types of developments. Once you do them, people will come. You build it, they will come." Treasured Island Many people have high hopes for the future of Harrisburg's City Island. But can its players paddle in the same direction? By PAuL BArker IN The Burg

• Cover