Allentown Vision Center: A Cure for Pawlowski's Myopia

On Friday, Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski was doing what he does best - puffing about Allentown in a state-of-the-city address at the Holiday Inn at 9th & Hamilton. Believe it or not, you had to pay $12 for the privilege of listening to his spin. Don't know whether he was doing his power point thing.

If you walked across the street to visit the Allentown Vision Center, you'd hear a much different tale from Kathy Dalton for free. Unlike most of the Hamilton Street businesses in that vicinity, the Vision Center has been around for ten years, and without a nickel of public support. Owners Mark and Kathy Dalton have hung in there, but are increasingly disenchanted by a city government and newspaper that just don't give a damn. Their shop windows have been broken four times since the new year began. Twice, merchandise has been stolen.

You won't read about this in the newspaper. Nobody was killed or maimed. In fact, Kathy tells me that the police report number for the latest incident is somewhere in the 400s, even though this was only early January. No report of these four instances of vandalism ever appeared in The Morning Call. There's only so much space, but this failure to cover the actual news perpetuates a Pawlowski myth that public safety is improving.

Those Big Brother blue cameras sprinkled throughout the city to deter precisely this kind of criminal mischief? Completely ineffective, according to the Daltons. For one thing, there's a ten second delay, ten seconds that could mean the difference between life and death when public safety is involved. In addition to the delay, police officers tell Kathy those cameras get very blurry when it rains or snows.

While completely failing in their duty to protect the Daltons from the criminal element, city officials had no problem citing them last Winter for not painting their facade, even though it's insane to paint in freezing weather. The Daltons paid their fine.

Frustrated, the Daltons and Allentown Vision Center are considering moving somewhere else. Can you really blame them?

Kathy was kind enough to allow me to share her email with you

My name is Kathy Dalton, and my husband, Mark, and I own the Allentown Vision Center. Our office is in center city, at 939 Hamilton Street. I know the Lehigh Valley is not lacking in providing content for your blog, but the story of what is currently happening at my Downtown Allentown business may be of interest to you. I’m a big fan of your blog, and I know this story is probably too small for you to touch, but it’s worth a shot.

Since the new year began, we’ve had our vision center windows broken 4 times, with someone breaking and entering the building (and stealing merchandise) twice. It has been a terrible start to the year, as you can imagine. We’ve been doing business downtown for over 10 years, and we bring whole lot of foot traffic to Hamilton – sometimes as many as 100 folks a day.

The reason I’m writing is because I would normally expect to see crime like this reported in the paper, but there’s been no mention in the police blotter or elsewhere. Also, we hired our own security for one evening after the 3rd incident, only to learn that police only rapidly drove by our business 4 times on Hamilton between the hours of 9 PM and 4 AM – this is amazing to me, considering the police know we are being targeted. We’ve had absolutely no luck getting the police to report to us what may have been seen by the security cameras recently installed by the city, and we learned last night that the cameras are basically inoperable when it rains or snows!! (The precipitation blurs the camera’s images!) I respect the APD, but I am concerned at the lack of response to our problems, and I thought this would make a great story for your blog . Considering that the mayor is reporting a decrease in crime, this case study offers a glimpse of those of us dealing with the reality of crime in Allentown.

Thanks for your time. If you want to follow-up, you may call my private cell phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx, or you may simply visit the office. We’re open between 9 and 5, with a lunch from 1 to 2, but we’ll gladly meet with you during lunch if that is easiest for you. Keep up the good work blogging! (I’ll also be contacting Mike Molovinsky about this – I hope that’s not bad manners to contact 2 bloggers about the same story.) Keep up the good work blogging!

Thank you –

Kathy Dalton
Allentown Vision Center
939 Hamilton St.
Allentown, PA 18101
OFFICE: 610-434-1000

Update: Micchael Molovinsky, the other blogger contacted, has a related post.