Tanner's Alley Neighborhood

It was also an area pockmarked with sandpits and studded with piles of building materials from a dozen years of construction on Capitol Hill. Free African Americans from the countryside and fugitive slaves drawn to the free soil of Pennsylvania built shanties and established homes on this parcel of land in the shadow of the new Capitol. A sizable community already existed by 1825, as many of the rioters that confronted slave catchers at the Courthouse in April 1825 had come from this area.

In 1838 the borough added land north of South Street, and streets were officially laid out, including Tanner's Lane. In November 1839, the congregation of Wesley Union Church moved into a new brick church, built on land at the corner of Tanner's Lane and South Street that was purchased from the Forster family. When Wesley Union Church moved from its old and cramped log church building in Judys Town to the new location on Tanner's Lane, the social center of Harrisburg's African American community moved with it.

Within two decades the four densely-settled blocks bordered by North Fourth, South, Short and Walnut streets contained Harrisburg's primary African American neighborhood, with most of the African American residents concentrated on tiny, muddy, Tanner's Alley. An African American Masonic Hall was established here, William Jones moved to the neighborhood and built boarding houses here, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison spoke at the Wesley Union Church in 1847, after being chased by Harrisburg rowdies from the Courthouse, and Joseph Bustill settled in this neighborhood in December 1855 to reorganize and revitalize Harrisburg's flagging Underground Railroad operation.

This same neighborhood, however, also housed some of Harrisburg's most notorious gambling dens, brothels, and lager houses. Local newspaper men complained of the race-mixing and the violence that erupted with alarming regularity in the quarter that editor George Bergner disdainfully dubbed "Bassa Cove." He wrote:

Some of the police force of our city must by this time be fully cognizant of the fact that there exists in “Bassa Cove” at least two of the meanest and most disreputable dance houses, frequented not only by the lowest dregs of our colored population, but by equally debased white men.

A Disgraceful Riot occurred on Saturday night last, between a party of canal boatmen and colored men at a house of ill fame in that classic region of our city known as “Bassa Cove.” No arrests were made.

It was this mix of tight-knit community and outlaw economy that made Tanner's Alley a successful Underground Railroad center. Only Federal Commissioner Richard McAllister, in the desperate early years following passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, was ever able to penetrate the tiny carriageways and blind alleys of the neighborhood and root out carefully hidden and guarded freedom seekers. After McAllister left office, Tanner's Alley again became a haven.