Comment on Diamond City Partnership Q&A: ‘It’s up to us’

Larry Newman is that affable guy with the beard you spot around downtown Wilkes-Barre, crossing Public Square with a group of people in suits holding brief cases, or walking the halls at Wilkes University after giving a talk on urban development for a classroom here or a business breakfast there. A Kingston native and a graduate of Wyoming Valley West High School, Newman left town to earn a bachelor’s degree at Princeton and a master’s at Harvard, landed jobs outside the area, and ended up coming back because, as he put it, “I grew up loving urban planning and realized the community I grew up in had just as much potential as anywhere else in the country.” He went to work for the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Commerce and eventually took the reins as executive director at the Diamond City Partnership. Newman, 48, is neither shy nor strident in sharing his knowledge in what makes a city work well, why old revitalization plans failed, the area’s best assets, and how he’d like to see them leveraged for the better. He shared some thoughts during an interview with the Times Leader earlier this month. Q:What is the Diamond City Partnership? A.: It is Wilkes-Barre’s downtown management organization, a nonprofit founded in 2001.