Looking back at Harrisburg in 1920

• Emily Previti/PA Post
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  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

Prohibition officers inspect tanks and vats in Detroit during a distillery raid in January 1931. Eleven years earlier, Pennsylvania had ratified the 18th Amendment establishing Prohibition.

From The Context, PA Post’s weekday email newsletter:

Booze, bulldozers and City Beautiful

Associated Press

Prohibition officers inspect tanks and vats in Detroit during a distillery raid in January 1931. Eleven years earlier, Pennsylvania had ratified the 18th Amendment establishing Prohibition.

• It’s been a century since Pennsylvania ratified the 18th amendment, setting the stage for Prohibition to take effect in 1920. Joe McClure’s commemorative piece for PennLive traces the commonwealth’s response — legal and otherwise — during the ensuing decade-plus.

• WESA’s Katie Blackley goes back further still with this story on the Whiskey Rebellion and how the fact that President George Washington’s use of executive authority to quell the western Pa. uprising 225 years ago set a precedent particularly relevant right now.

• By 1920, the state had bulldozed the stretch between Harrisburg’s capitol complex and State Street bridge as part of the City Beautiful movement. The Old Eighth, as it’s known, had been home to speakeasies, brothels — and 1,600 African Americans and new immigrants (as of 1900). Elizabeth Hardison delved into the history of what was once “Harrisburg’s most notorious neighborhood [and] a racial and religious melting pot” — as well as the current push to memorialize it — in this story for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

Best of the rest

Matt Rourke / The Associated Press

Cooling towers at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown.

• Three Mile Island owner Exelon Corp. says it will shut down the plant this fall without a financial rescue from the commonwealth. StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Marie Cusick has a first look at the legislation that could do it.

• Note about the ACLU settlement over the state DOC’s mail policy: it applies to legal mail. Capitol Bureau Chief Katie Meyer reports prison officials aren’t moving to change how they handle regular mail, despite criticisms from some state lawmakers.

• There was a significant spike in the number of children who were killed or who almost died as the result of child abuse, according to this WESA report on a statistical analysis from the state Department of Human Services. DHS attributes the jump, in part, to changes in reporting requirements in Pennsylvania stemming from the fallout over the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal.