Courthouse Memories, The Final Chapter

This column originally appeared on Sept. 14, 2008


The deputies were taking Bruce Johnston Sr. from the courtroom to a waiting van outside the courthouse to take him back to state prison. He’d just sat through another in the seemingly endless series of hearings on his appeals over his six murder convictions, and my editor at the Daily Local News had sent me over with a spare camera to try to get a picture of the infamous killer.

I spotted the group on the second floor making their way to a set of back stairs that no one used. I had just enough time to run down the front marble staircase and scurry down the hall, fumbling with the camera to get it out of its case. Seeing their heads disappear down the stairway, I leaned over the railing above them and shouted, “Hey, Bruce!”

Handcuffed and in a prison jacket, he looked straight up at me on the landing above, and I snapped one shot.

The picture appeared in the paper the next day. It was grainy and not entirely in focus, but the light above him left two shining white dots in his eyes as he stared directly into the lens. He looked exactly the way you would think a man who would order the shooting of his own son to look: demonic and scary.

That’s my first and best memory of my years in the historic Chester County Courthouse, which I’ve covered off and on since the late 1980s. In case you hadn’t heard, they’re moving the courts to a new county Justice Center (Motto: “It’s Not The County Prison, But You Can See It From Here”) down the street. The movers took all the stuff from the courtrooms Thursday, leaving only an eerie ghost town-like vibe to the place. Which, I suppose, is why memories came flooding back as I waited out my last jury in the courthouse Friday afternoon.

I remember standing outside the magnificent confines of Courtroom One near the end of the first Andrew Byrne trial in March 1992. Pat Carmody, the lead prosecutor in the highly publicized case, was getting ready to deliver his closing argument, in which he would try to convince the jury that John Duffy, the attorney representing Byrne and one of the county’s most gifted closers, had got it wrong. Every seat in the courtroom was taken, with people lining the sides and rear or the room. Carmody was pacing nervously and with a sigh looked over at me.

“I knew I should have been a film critic,” he said. The jury found Byrne guilty.

I remember some choice comments from the bench, sometimes directed at me. Although judges have largely gotten used to seeing me come and go from their courtrooms, some wonder why I choose to visit them. “Slow news day?” Judge James P. MacElree II usually inquires when he sees me sitting in the front row with only a DUI or two on the docket. “Is there something going on here that I should know about?” Judge Phyllis Streitel asked me the other day as I settled into a seat in her courtroom.

Once, a lawyer had been giving Judge Robert Shenkin a not-very-brief recounting of his view of the law and I kept ducking in and out to see if the next case, the one I was interested in, had begun. “Look,” Shenkin told the attorney in mid-sentence, “if you’re boring the press, what do you think you’re doing to me?”

On Friday, I snuck into a hallway from Courtroom Six’s jury room to the courtroom itself, and poked my head into the half-dark emptiness. It was a view I’d never seen before -- from the bench towards the gallery – and is what a juror sees when he or she is about to render a verdict on another human being. It is a picture I’ll keep in my head for a long while.

As The Sun Sets Over the Courthouse...

This column originaly appeared on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2008

As the summer comes near its close, we look at the symbolic winter of the Chester County Courthouse. Within weeks of this writing, the halls here will be empty, the courtrooms vacant, the prisoners' lock-up void of its normal inhabitants. By the time we celebrate Halloween, our daily quarters will be blocks away and years ahead. The Justice Center awaits, shiny and new, unexplored territory.

In the meantime, the quest for justice in the old building moves on.

Or at least most of the time.

Over in Courtroom Five, Judge Thomas G. Gavin has just noticed an old familiar face sitting in the pews. It’s veteran defense attorney Paul Rubino, looking harried. “Why aren’t you off somewhere working on your tan?” Gavin wants to know.

“Not me,” Rubino sighs wearily. “Everyone else at the office is on vacation, and I’m left to slave like a dog.”

“Oh my. Poor you,” Gavin commiserates, the barest hint of sarcasm dripping from his voice. Rubino wants to know when he can squeeze in a guilty plea on Gavin’s trial schedule for a client he just picked up. Not next week, Gavin warns him; the judge will be away.

“I’ve got to work on my tan,” he smiles.

In Courtroom Three, however, there is real work to be done – at least while everyone waits for the deputies to bring up the next prisoner. The task at hand today is complex, but timely: a critique of the best event so far in the Beijing Olympics. One attorney picks the synchronized diving; another chooses the on-going Michael Phelps medal saga. But Judge James P. MacElree II knows what it is he really wants to see.

“How about synchronized belly-flops?” he opines from the bench.

Imagine two great oxen of Olympians jumping off the diving platform in tandem, twirling their way ever downward side-by-side, and flat-lining on their bellies on the calm surface of the pool at the exact same moment, MacElree says dreamily. No penalties for a big splash in that contest. In fact, the Japanese team would likely score winning rounds every time just by putting their top sumo wrestlers on the squad, he predicts.

The judge is rolling now. It would be, he says, like a skit from “Saturday Night Live” with John Belushi as the contestant. You could get defensive linemen from the NFL and power forwards from the NBA to compete in a Dream Team of belly busters to bring back the gold from Tokyo. Points would be added if your trunks came off and …

Oops, there’s a defendant shuffling into the courtroom.

“What is your name sir?” MacElree instantly intones, his voice now a model of judicial decorum. “Have you had adequate time to speak with your able counsel?”

Meanwhile, in the semi-stately, oak-paneled confines of Courtroom Two, Judge David Bortner has some serious business to discuss with his two assistant district attorneys, Andrea Cardamone and Cristin Kubacke. There’s a open week coming up for Courtroom One this month and if they put together at least one trial there’s the possibility they might get to try the last case in that stately space before the move to the new digs.

It would be a historic “last,” said the rookie jurist who was sworn in just eight months ago in that same courtroom. But we have competition, he advises the pair; Judge Ronald Nagle might have a trial and he could also put in a claim on the space.

And so it comes down to which of the two newest judges on the bench will have the last go round on the county’s grandest bench.

Don’t push it, Bortner counsels the prosecutors, If you’re going to get a guilty plea, take it, even though a plea can come in any of the shoeboxes they call courtrooms around here. History would be nice, but...

“The pursuit of justice comes first,” Bortner concludes.

Pooling One's Interest

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 25, 2008

Word has it that the Chester County Commissioners are taking suggestions for what should happen to the vacant space they will have when they move all the judges, prosecutors, public defenders, prothonotaries, clerks of courts, tipstaffs, secretaries and veteran criminal defense attorney John J. Duffy's motor scooter to the new Justice Center.

Word has it that they'll take suggestions from just about anyone as to what to do with the vacant North Wing and Mosteller's Annex, all the way down to that dog Marley who everyone seemed to be making such a fuss over last week. (Even West Chester Police Chief Scott Bohn's family dog was said to have asked to secure a spot watching the movie-making proceedings on West Gay Street on the off chance that Marley the Mutt might need a stunt double.)

Word has it that the county would just as soon rid itself of the Mosteller Annex, which used to be a department store back when former West Chester Mayor Thomas Chambers could still play a game of half-court basketball without an oxygen tank and a de-fib machine seated next to him on the pine, because, well, frankly, because it's the ugliest building in the borough not owned by renowned landlord Stan Zukin.

Word has it that as long as the price is right, anything goes with the Mosteller site, short of the housing the future home of Andy Dinniman's Personal State Senate Library and Skate Park, with its “Before Mustache,” “During Mustache,” and “After Mustache” sections divided by floors and an animatronic greeting by a life-sized Bam Margera, bar not included.

Excuse me, but Memo to Carol, Terence and Kathi: No need to send out the RFPs. Save the postage. I've got the answer that should have been as obvious to you three commissioners as Joe Norley at a West Chester U frat party.

Two words: Community pool.

West Chester has been aching for a community pool -- where hot, tired sweaty citizens could relax themselves after a hard day's work and, as I have pointed out on many occasions, is within walking distance of South Church Street -- ever since 1983, when I, coincidentally, spent my first summer watching the temperature in my South Church Street apartment rise above 95 degrees.

There didn't seem to be much room in the borough, however, for a pool the size that could accommodate hot, tired, sweaty journalists because the space was taken up by frivolous luxury uses like houses and stores and parking lots. Now, however, opportunity is presenting itself with all the anticipatory glee of a 15-year-old hacker looking at the Downingtown Area School District's computer “security system.”

So tear down the Mosteller, dig a nice hole, get the crews to come pour some concrete, plant a few trees for shade, get Wally the Wiener Man to provide concessions, and open it up in time to provide a backdrop for the first “Swinging Thursday” event. Don't worry: We don't need anything as fancy as an Olympic-sized pool with lap lanes, because frankly, we don't lap. We float and bob and chill like a half-empty wine bottle in Marsh Creek Lake.

Word.

And Now For Something Completely Different ...

This column originally apared on Sunday, May 4, 2008

Readers of a certain age will remember fondly the cartoon “The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show,” and as part of that series the inevitable exchange between two codgers sitting on a park bench watching as madness and frivolity ensues around them.

“That’s something you don’t see every day, Chauncy,” one would always remark. “What’s that Edgar?” would come the reply, followed by a description of the cartoon moose and squirrel being chased in some ridiculously menacing, and completely unexpected, way by a vaguely Eastern European couple somehow involving a lighted bomb.

That situation — albeit absent the moose, the squirrel, the vaguely Eastern European couple and the bomb — was what the folks at the Chester County Courthouse were saying to one another Thursday.

For the first time anyone in West Chester could remember, an all-female jury was empanelled to hear a trial.

The 12 women were of different ages and races, wore differently colored clothing, and had different hairstyles and hair colors. Six wore glasses, and six didn’t. But they all had in common at least one thing — the extra X chromosome.

Even the alternate juror, chosen in the event one of the other jurors had to be excused before the conclusion of the trial, was of the fairer gender.

Judge Thomas G. Gavin, in whose courtroom the jury sat, was among those to marvel at the sight. Despite years of work in the courthouse, including 22 on the bench, he said he had never come across an all-female jury and had never heard of one being seated. But the veteran jurist recognized the unique situation the jury presented, even as he apologized for keeping them outside the courtroom while he conducted other business.

“I was taught never to keep a woman waiting, and now I’ve kept 13 of you waiting,” Gavin said as they took their seats for the start of testimony Thursday. “I realize the degree of difficulty I now find myself in.”

Ultimately, the jury did not get to decide the case, as a mistrial was declared and Gavin was forced to send everyone home. Shame it was, said more than one courthouse observer, since it would be nice to know how an all-female jury would deliberate.

That question, in fact is at the heart of the history of women as jurors. The male-dominated legal community for years kept women off panels because of ignorant prejudices against their perceived weaknesses; would they be too sympathetic to judge the case on its merits and too easily swayed by emotions to render a fair verdict?

The first all-female American jury was seated in 1654, because the court needed to know if the defendant, Judith Catchpole, could have been pregnant at the time of the alleged crime.

But years and years have gone by since women starting serving on juries, and the course of American justice seems to have proceeded fairly much apace. There is no evidence I know of to show that juries with women bring back verdicts predominantly one way or another. And you never know, if there had been “Eleven Angry Men and One Calm Woman,” would we have gotten a verdict sooner, and without all that melodrama? Now our chance is gone.

And all I know is that Bill Scott was the voice of Bullwinkle. But not that Bill Scott.

The Truth About Pat

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 30, 2008


Allow me to clear up a few misconceptions about Pat Morley. I would have done this sooner, but Patrick, as I always referred to him, out of honor and respect and because I didn’t know his given name was actually Thomas, would not permit it, out of pure Irish stubborn humility and dignity. If people want to believe things about me that aren’t true, he would have said, I can only hope they spell my name right when they do.

But now Patrick is gone, and he can’t stop me. Thus:

It is not true that the Chester County Commissioners built the Courthouse Annex in 1892 so that Patrick would have a place to sit and talk with his fellow tipstaffs. Truth be told, the building was already 28 years old when Patrick entered the world in West Chester’s Riggtown neighborhood, so the timing is off.

But he was as central to the Annex as the marble on its walls, and nowhere near as cold. As a new reporter to the courthouse in the early 1990s, I thought of the lobby outside Courtroom Two as Patrick’s living room away from home. He populated it as if he had always been there, and always would be.

It is not true that everyone liked Patrick. Because he rarely left West Chester — living outside the borough’s confines for only four of his 88 years — he did not give all the people in the world he never met a chance to get to know him and, ipso facto, like him. But those who did cross his path — and whom he would not allow to wander off without a handshake and a quick wink — did.

When you think of how many people today hate one another, and how they wear that hatred like a badge of honor, it seems impossible that someone as amiable and kind as Patrick could have existed. But I can attest that he did.

It is not true that Patrick loved his wife, Catherine, his entire life. He did not, in fact, come across her until he was 26, so that would not have been possible. But I have it on good counsel that he did love her from the moment in the spring of 1946 when he spotted her at the Eagles Club in West Chester.

I can also report in good faith that their life together started with one of the most romantic gestures I have ever heard of. Arriving late for their first date, Patrick saw Catherine get on a transit bus bound for her home in Downingtown. Realizing that opportunity lost is fate never regained, he hopped in his car and chased the bus down on Route 322, passed it and waited for it to stop. When it did, he got out of his car, Catherine stepped off the bus, and two sons, two daughters, two sons-in-law, two daughters-in-law, seven grandsons, six granddaughters and two great-granddaughters later, they still smiled when they saw each other.

Finally, it is not true that Patrick’s funeral was the largest seen in St. Agnes Church. Nor was it the smallest. But it may hold the record for attendees who believed they were singularly special in the departed’s eyes.

The service reminded me of what actress Ruth Gordon said at the funeral of the once famous writer and broadcaster Alexander Wollcott in 1943. “I was Aleck’s best friend,” she told a stunned crowd. “As, I suspect, were all of you.”

Thomas J. “Pat” Morley. Born Feb. 7, 1920. Died March 21, 2008. Rest in peace.

A Table, Some Chairs, a Bitter Memory

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008


There are no rules to the way we react to trauma. Some people become obsessed by their misfortune and it grips them whole. Some shake the evil off their coats like a drenched dog drying himself.

Years spent sitting in court rooms has shown me that the victims of crime approach their lives differently after the harm that befell them was inflicted. There are no longer any walks after dark. Strangers are greeted with distrust. Children become more clinging, or less approachable. A proud stride is reduced to a painful shuffle. But until last week, I never thought of that trauma having an impact on a room, and a piece of furniture.

Two years ago, a Honey Brook man argued with his girlfriend about the course of their relationship. During the fight, he took their 30-day-old son and held him up, dropped him to the floor and kicked him twice, in the head.

The assault took place in the kitchen of the woman’s home on Horseshoe Pike as the family ate dinner. In a letter she wrote to the judge who was set to sentence her former boyfriend for the assault, the woman remembered that location particularly.

Here is what she wrote:

“He did all of this in the kitchen where my children and I used to share so many laughs, sit down as a family for dinner and have family game night. Now we are unable to sit around the table; it’s become a useless piece of furniture. The chairs are now in the children’s room, where they sit to eat their dinner, while the table grows cobwebs.

“It’s too painful to enter the kitchen where the assault took place. Even after I tried to re-arrange it to make it less painful, we can still see the image of (her ex) holding (her child) in the air by the back of his pajamas, then being thrown to the floor.”

Her description struck me as profound, and poetic. The trauma suffered that night had an impact not only on the physical and mental well being of those involved, but on their relationship to their own environment. And the picture is immediately recognizable: what family doesn’t use the kitchen table, or counter, or island, as a place to gather and laugh and talk and play and perhaps shout a bit. It is the central place for where the business of being a family gets conducted.

And what more poison could there be than to bring violence into that space, and how could you not feel a chill every time you went back to that place?

The idea of the table itself being shunned, being cast aside, growing dust and cobwebs, drew me in. Inanimate objects do have lives, I thought. We give cars names and they grow personalities. We find a rock in the cool shade and it becomes a friend. Violence enters our homes and the furniture itself become witnesses and victims.

At the end of her letter, the women pleaded for a sentence that would bring her family justice. Here’s how she put it.

“Please let us get that phone call, knowing maybe we’ll go to sleep tonight and actually wake up tomorrow and be able to live again, start on the process of moving the chairs back into the kitchen, sitting around the dinner table as a family … and just finally get back some happiness.”

New Justice Center Emphasizes Security

This article first appeared on Monday, Nov. 26, 2007.

WEST CHESTER – Chester County’s new Justice Center on West Market Street has one district court, seven floors, more than a dozen cells – group and individual size -- for prisoners, enough space for 18 courtrooms, and a stairwell with 152 steps.

But most tellingly, it also has 172 individual panic buttons to bring courthouse security personnel on the run.

That final figure is the result of changes in design for the 422,000 square foot, $100 million building brought about by a bloody attack in the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta two years ago.

In March 2005, a man on trial for rape overpowered a court deputy, took her gun and killed three people – the judge overseeing his case, a court reporter and another deputy who confronted him as he fled the courthouse. He later pistol-whipped another man whose car he stole and shot and killed a federal marshal unconnected to his trial.

The courthouse killings in Atlanta came just two weeks after a federal judge’s mother and husband were found murdered in their home, and set off a flurry of concerns about the safety of judges, prosecutors and others who work in courthouses across the country.

What had thus been planned as a somewhat standard-issue building housing the county’s Common Pleas courts and court-related offices underwent a metamorphosis into a high-tech structure whose complexity rivals hat of a hospital and whose security suggests something close to a modern maximum security prison.

“This is in no way a run-of-the-mill building,” explained Don Thompson, the county “owner’s representative” who is overseeing the work on the Justice Center, as he did for the Chester County Prison expansion in Pocopson and the county’s Juvenile Detention Center in West Bradford.

“This is a big building. A really, really big building. It is a special place that requires service you can’t ever imagine would be done at another facility,” Thompson said during a recent tour of the building. “The normal frame of reference of an office building that you and I would work in just doesn’t apply.”

Among the security measures that are incorporated in the Justice Center include a basement sheriff’s lock-up that is state of the art in its safety measures to keep prisoners from escaping; judges chambers that are accessible only by security card or electronic entrance; separate elevators for the public, judges and prisoners; and courtroom corridors that are inaccessible to the public and are used only by sheriff deputies and their charges.

It is a far cry from the current courthouse facility, where shackled prisoners walk down hallways in plain view of the public, and can be brought into the courtroom only one at a time. No longer will someone riding one of the courthouse’s four elevators be ordered off so that the deputies can transport a defendant to the courtroom of his or her destination.

“I think the county is going to get a good building,” said Thompson. “Perfect, no. What they paid for? Yes.”

The decision to build a new court facility was years in he making. As long as a decade ago the county’s judges began urging the commissioners to expand the court facility to make room for the new judges the county gained because of its striking increase in population, and all the component personnel – extra prosecutors and public defenders and courts clerks, for example.

The decision was first made to expand on the footprint of the current courthouse, located in the center of West Chester bordered by High, Church, Gay and Market streets. But a dispute between the county and the borough over the density of the planned construction and the proposed demolition of historic properties led to the ultimate decision to relocate the court facilities to the 200 block of West Market Street, across from the site of the county’s new parking garage.

In some ways, the delay itself became a favorable circumstance; because construction did not begin until after 2004, the county was able to incorporate the security changes brought about by the Atlanta courthouse shooting into its design while the building was still being built, instead of after it was completed.

Thompson said that when he came aboard the project, the design by architects Bernardon Haber Halloway of Kennett Square were already on the books. It became his task, he said, to go to all of the county’s court-related department heads, show them the design and ask them what changes they needed.

Which leads Thompson, a friendly man who needs only a small invitation to talk about the project in his hands, to tell the story of the district attorney’s restroom.

In the original design, the DAs office had no interior restroom facilities. In his conversations with District Attorney Joseph Carroll, however, Thompson discovered what a mistake that had been; if left unchanged, it would have put criminal witnesses and victims in the uncomfortable, if not unsafe, position of having to share the facilities with someone connected with their case – perhaps even the defendant.

The DAs office now has its own washroom, Thompson said.

The original design also showed judges having to share courtrooms; now, each judge on the bench currently will have their own courtroom – although they may have to trade off during criminal sessions. Not all courtrooms have been given the necessary individual prisoner lockups, so a judge who hears mostly civil cases would have to move to another courtroom temporarily if he or she is hearing a criminal matter.

When the Justice center opens in late spring or early summer, it will have 15 completed courtrooms, one for each of the county’s judges. There are three additional courtrooms that will remain unfinished until more jurists are added.

Thompson says that special touches in the building – terrazzo floors and milled cherry wood paneling, for example – make it somewhat elegant. Those touches also prove less costly to maintain, however, so that the county will end up spending less money in the long run. He refers to the center as a “50-year building,” ready to stand up for the long haul.

The commissioners, who every month or so are faced with the decision to approve construction change orders that add to the cost of the building, have expressed faith in Thompson’s proposed changes.

“I’ve got lots of confidence in Don,” said Commissioner Patrick O’Donnell, who owes that nevertheless he has ridden Thompson hard on some of his requests.

“I think there were design flaws in (the center) that hadn’t been thought out clearly,” he said. “But Don does not come in with changes lightly.”

Thompson predicted that the final cost of the building will be within three percent of the original budget.

“I’m very proud of that,” he said.

New Posts

Hello all from the Chester County Courthouse.

If you read further down, you will see that I have left my cubicle at the main office of the Daily Local News and returned to the bowels of the Chester County Courthouse, where I will be filing stories as the "senior staff writer" and Courthouse Bureau Chief for the Daily Local. It's sort of like sending Mary Richards out to scout down stories for Ted Baxter to read over the air, except nobody watches when I toss my cap in the air at the intersection of High and Gay in ol' WC.

I thought that in addition to the weekly ... well, semi-weekly, column posts, I'd throw up ... well, put up, some of the stories I had the most fun writing, or which I thought would be of most interest to my diverse audience.

Hope you enjoy.

Oh, and everybody say hello to the new kid on the block, Mike Sherman, the sports editor of the Daily Oklahoman. You can catch more about him on YouTube.

Holiday Displays Controversy

This story originally appeared on Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2007

WEST CHESTER -- The Chester County Commissioners are set to approve conditions under which groups can get permission to erect winter holiday displays.

The new policy, scheduled for a vote Thursday at the board’s formal session, would requite that the display conform with current First Amendment law concerning religious displays such as creches or Menorahs.

The move comes in the wake of a dispute last year after a Menorah was erected on the courthouse lawn for the first time. Its presence led a former county commissioner to argue that the commissioners had opened the door to other displays, and soon the board approved the display of a nativity scene on the lawn.

At their work session Tuesday, the commissioners made it clear that they did not want the courthouse lawn to become a central point for groups to put up displays year-round. The only times that displays would be permitted under the policy are during the winter holiday season -- roughly from the end of November to mid-January. An exception is also made for the United Way of Chester County, which has historically put up a sign indicating its fund raising activities on the lawn.

“it would be our practice to not have other displays on the courthouse lawn,” said Commissioner Patrick O’Donnell. He suggested that it would be unseemly to have groups “start hanging stuff up all over the eaves” of the historic courthouse.

Commissioner Donald Mancini said he was in favor of an even more restrictive policy that would ban all displays from the courthouse front lawn. He noted that the building had just undergone a $2 million renovation and that there was some concern that displays would detract from the historic character of the building. But he said he would go along with the new policy allowing winter displays.

“I recognize that’s not going to be workable,” he said of the ban. “As long as things are workable, and so everyone knows what’s going on” he would support the policy’s adoption.

The proposed policy states that groups may erect winter holiday displays so long as the commissioners determine that the display “will not have the effect of causing a reasonable observer to believe that the count is endorsing religion” and “will not adversely affect the appearance of the courthouse”

It also requires that any group proposing a display mus provide proof of general liability insurance in the amount of $1 million.

Former Commissioner Colin Hanna, who last year led the charge for the presence of a creche on the courthouse lawn, said the policy appeared workable.

“It seems like a reasonable attempt to develop a policy that both honors our traditions and doesn’t cross the line into constitutional impermissible establishment of religion,” Hanna, now head of the Pennsylvania Pastors Network, said Tuesday.

“The policy also leaves the final discretion in the hands of the commissioners, and I think that is appropriate,” Hanna said.

In late 2006, the commissioners were approached by former Commissioner Andy Dinniman, now a Pennsylvania state senator, with a request from the Chabad of Chester County, a Jewish organization, to allow a Menorah to be erected on the lawn, next to the traditional Christmas tree and snowman displays. The commissioners agreed to allow one to be placed here. Soon after, Hanna wrote the commissioners and demanded that they allow a creche -- a traditional Christian display.

The commissioners agreed, and soon an East Bradford woman, Helene Eissler, paid for a creche that stayed on the lawn during the Christmas season.

The Chester County Courthouse became part of the battleground over the debate on what religious symbols are permitted on a public building in 2001, when two residents objected to the presence of a plaque listing the 10 Commandments on the front of the courthouse. Both Dinniman and Hanna, commissioners at the time, supported the presence of the plaque, and a federal court eventually allowed it to remain.

The new holiday display policy requires groups wanting to erect displays to make application to the county by Nov. 15, and to pay all costs associated with constriction and maintenance of the displays. The commissioners suggested that if there are a large number of requests, not every organization would be granted approval. But they also said approval would not be made on a first-come, first-served basis.

If adopted, the full text of the policy would be posted on the county’s website, www.chesco.org.

Back to the Future

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007

Chester County, one of William Penn’s original land subdivisions, turns 325 this year.
The Chester County Courthouse – that amalgam of buildings that occupies the center of downtown West Chester turns, by measure of its different annexes, new wings and awkward additions, 161, 115, 43, and 26 this year, give or take.

On May 12, I celebrated my 50th birthday. And on Thursday of this week, I will commemorate 25 years working for the Daily Local News.

They say that home is where the heart is, but they don’t really stamp with that idiom with an image of what that home should looks like. For my money, home stands about five stories tall, is made of part Indiana limestone, part brick and part Nova Scotia Pictou stone, and has a doorway that reads, “Justitia” above it. It’s got a clock tower on its top and a frieze on its side that features not only Yankee Hall of Fame pitcher Herb Pennock but also the Marquis de Lafayette.

I started covering news as a reporter/drudge out of the courthouse in the late 1980s, and moved there on a semi-permanent basis in the 1990s.

If you want to count numbers, I composed an estimated 1,200 stories during the six years I was at the courthouse regularly, covered 15 murder trials, sat in three different press rooms, and received about 18 haircuts.

The latter may not have anything to do with the quality of the news accounts I was giving at the time in the overall scheme of things, but certainly concerned my employers at the time enough so that the publisher would make a point of coming into the newsroom expressly to comment on length of my hair when it had retreated to a space above my shirt collar.

I began falling in love with the courthouse when I began covering the courts beat – trials, pleas, filings, legal arguments, lawyerly foibles, Judge M. Joseph Melody, etc. After awhile, I learned the rabbit warren of back stairways and basement tunnels that allowed me to get places where the normal person wasn’t going, and used that knowledge to spend my time avoiding work as much as possible by gossiping with some of the most interesting people you’d ever want to meet – usually while they, too, were taking a break from their underpaid, overworked jobs.

I knew I’d found a home the first time a judge heard me yawning and said to one of the lawyers in front of him, “If you can’t keep him interested, what do you think you’re doing to me?”

I say all this because The Management at the Daily Local News has seen fit to ship me back to the courthouse, presumably to continue where I left off 11 years ago.

I know I will miss my post as news editor, as much I know as the newsroom callers who asked me to send a reporter to their daughter’s school play will miss my polite responses, but I am looking forward to the changes that I know I will find, and to seeing once again the old faces who still populate the courthouse’s hallways and courtrooms and back stairways.

I see it this way: Home may be where the heart is, but it is also where the Motion to Dismiss is filed.

The Case of the Brick Windows

This appeared on Sunday, March 4, 2007

Everyone loves a good mystery, even more when the mystery involves something in your own backyard.

You know, like whatever happened to the 12 missing votes from the 156th Legislative District (ballots, you may remember, it has yet to be disproven had my name on them)?

Or exactly when did Andy Dinniman‘s Groucho mustache disappear? And where did it go?

Better yet, how did William H. Lamb, former law-and-order district attorney of Chester County, turn into the Slots King of Fishtown?

But sometimes there are mysteries right under our noses that we don‘t notice until someone points them out.

Like The Case of the Brick Windows, suggested to us by Constant Reader Bob B.

Mr. B, a keen observer of goings-on in West Chester and its accompanying environs, noticed that there was something off-kilter about the new Justice Center (Code Name: We-Don‘t-Know-What-To-Call-It-Yet) going up on West Market Street. To wit: there are five bricked-in windows on the front façade of the building, right there near the corner of North Darlington Street.

The bricked windows go from the ground floor up. At a glance, they remind you of that scene in ”The Matrix“ when Mouse tries to escape from the on-rushing Agent Smith SWAT Team after coming back from Neo‘s visit with The Oracle, and draws aside a window curtain in Morpheus‘ apartment building, only to find that the window has been replaced by a brick wall and that he has nowhere to go and he‘s going to get shot up to smithereens when the SWAT storm troopers break down the door and, thus, become the first of the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar to perish.

Or it doesn‘t. Whatever.

Mr. B. was puzzled by the brick windows because they are not depicted on the original architectural drawings of the project. (Trust me: he checked.)

So he left it up to me to solve the puzzle and get back to him. ”If anyone can get to the bottom of the story, er, actually five stories, top to bottom, it‘s you,“ he fawned, leaving me slightly faint. So, with the help of Chester County Public Information Officer Extrordinaire Evelyn Walker, I did.

Here‘s the skinny, as delivered by the county‘s architect through Ms. W:

"It became necessary to locate a telecommunications and electrical room in the southeast corner of the building in order to properly serve the large floor plates. The architects desired to maintain the character and rhythm of the fenestration along Market Street; therefore, the cast stone surrounds and brick infill were proposed to satisfy the aesthetic goal. Sincerely, Paul Andrew Sgroi, AIA."

Frankly, I‘d have just said: "Oops!"

Mr. B. accepted the explanation with some rancor, and not just because of the technocratese that the answer came in. He declared that the brick windows were an eyesore that the citizens of Chester County would be stuck with when coming to West Chester to file their election recount petitions, or whatever else they‘ll do at the Justice Center, "rhythm of fenestration aesthetics" notwithstanding.

He suggested that the county get a huge refund from the people to blame for the snafu. I can‘t disagree.

Because, as Bill Lamb might say: ”Cha-ching!“

Whose Bricks Are These?

This appeared on Sunday, February 4, 2006


You know me — I love the Chester County Courthouse. Those engraved bricks around the Market Street side? I love them, too. But some of them should offer an explanation for those wanderers who stroll by on a Sunday morning.

"In Memory of Guernsey Cow Exton?"

Remember, the majority of people who live in Chester County don‘t remember anything here before they put up the Beaver Chase Run subdivision in London Grove. They‘re supposed to pay homage to a mid-century dairy bar? I think not.

"The Farnum Twins?" Sounds like an act out of Ringling Bros. "Breakfast Club?" There are two of these, so I suggest they get together and pile on the packcakes as a single unit or be somewhat clearer about whose breakfast and where.

There are two, count ‘em, two "Mike Perrone West Chester Building Depts.," bricks, raising the question of whether Mike is trying to get a message across, or whether some obsequious contractor got carried away.

Everyone likes a mystery myself now and again, but the meaning of "X1E-XIE/Minky/Wly R + S"? Wanna run that one by me again? Should I guess, "secret formula for removing white residue stains from real brick sidewalks?"

Nearby is "Khaki Was Here" and "Imagine." Okay, one‘s the name of a John Lennon song, the other‘s a great name for a post-punk, hip hop, skater band. But what about "Jasmine & The B Boys." Maybe a hip hop, skater, post-punk band?

If you were an alien and dropped down on West Market and took a look at the bricks, you‘d wonder about the proliferation of Swopes and Taylors. "In Honor of Charles E. Swope." "In Honor of Rep. Elinor Taylor." "In Honor of Stephanie Swope." "In Memory of Edna M. Swope." " Elinor Taylor WC Council 1974." "In Honor of Charles E. Swope Jr." "In Memory of Charles E. Swope." "The Swope Foundation." You‘d think they ran the town, for the love of Pete. Oh, wait a minute …

There‘s a certain amount of advertising going on here, which might strike some as unseemly. You can forgive the "Giuntas Thriftway Since 1927," but one might wonder whether the "Jane Chalfont" of one brick is the same as the same "Jane Chalfont Inc." of another. Is "Riggtown" a neighborhood, or a truckers‘ depot on the Pennsylvania Turnpike?

There is a symmetry to it all, though, with "Hillsdale Class of 2003" lined up not too terribly far away from "Class of 62 WCHS." The "in honor ofs" match up nicely with the the "in memory ofs," putting the living in the vicinity of the dead, and it‘s nice to see both "Fred Gusz" and "Fred Gusz Jr." occupying the same territory after all these years.

It is a fun little tour to make, and if you want to know about "In Memory of Betty Rellahan," I‘d be glad to tell you. I can talk about her all day.