Longtime manager remembered as visionary
F. Lee Mangan shaped borough from 1978 to 2010
LANSDALE » A longtime leader in Lansdale Borough, who shaped the town for nearly a quarter of the 20th century and well into the 21st, has passed away.
F. Lee Mangan, the borough’s first full-time manager from 1978 until 2010, passed away Sunday at age 70.
“Borough staff, past and present, are saddened by the news of Lee’s passing and our thoughts and prayers are with his family as they go through this difficult time,” said Lansdale Borough in a statement Tuesday.
Mangan was born near WilkesBarre but moved to Lansdale at age four, graduated from Lansdale Catholic High School in 1968 and from East Stroudsburg University in 1972, before being hired to manage the borough at age 27 in 1978, according to MediaNews Group archives. During his time at the helm, Mangan was involved in nearly every aspect of running the town, several former colleagues recalled Tuesday.
“I worked handin-hand with Lee, and he was always a good listener, always used my suggestions, or at least thought about them, and I liked working with the man,” said former councilman Joe Flyzik.
Flyzik recalled on Tuesday that he and Mangan both grew up together in the same apartment complex and would cross paths on the same playground in town, but grew closer starting in the mid1980s when Mangan was manager and Flyzik took over Wilson’s Hardware on Main Street.
“He always made it a point to check, when I had my hardware store, he’d ask me how business is, and would always support local businesses,” he said.
“I think he was very fair to all the employees that worked for Lansdale Borough. He was a little demanding at times, but that’s what you have to be. He had a big job, running the borough, and he set the mold for that job,” Flyzik said.
When he first arrived on council in 1998, Flyzik said, Mangan was already looking ahead to the future of one of the biggest parcels in town: the Madison Parking Lot, located a block off Main Street, where a series of apartment buildings have been constructed over the past two years.
“When I first got on council, they had a big plan for the Mad
ison lot, but it was more commercial than residential. Merck, Sharp and Dohme was looking at it for a training center: they were going to put a training center there,” Flyzik said.
“They had a whole plan drawn up, and also had a small model of it drawn up. The Stony Creek rail line runs right over to the Merck property, so they could just shuttle people back and forth, but that just didn’t work out.”
Mangan also looked into options for SEPTA to add a new train station on Ninth Street to spur development of the adjacent American Olean tile property, Flyzik said Tuesday, and occasionally looked beyond the borough, once proposing whether to investigate the possible purchase of the Mainland Golf Course in Harleysville.
“Lee heard it was going to be sold for housing, which obviously didn’t happen, but Lee came up with the idea, council looked into it, and he wanted to operate it as a borough property, for income that would come into Lansdale Borough. But that didn’t get too far off the ground,” he said.
Other projects Mangan pursued were more successful, including redevelopment of the Pavilion shopping center on Broad Street: “Lee pushed for that, because he wanted an attractive-looking entrance to Lansdale,” Flyzik said.
Former councilwoman Anne Henning-Scheuring on Tuesday recalled Mangan’s efforts to reshape the Stony Creek Park off of Hancock Street, as well as securing state grant money to renovate and modernize the Lansdale train station.
“There was a lot going on behind the doors that he helped with. He was just a kind man. If you asked him for something, he would do it for you as best he could. I think most people in Lansdale really appreciated him,” she said.
Dick Shearer, longtime head of the Lansdale Historical Society and a writer and editor with The Reporter during Mangan’s early tenure as manager, said Mangan was constantly looking to shape the town’s future.
“In my opinion, he was a visionary. He had a lot of really good ideas for the borough. Some of them may have been a little bit more than the borough was ready to take on, at any given time, but in many cases he was right, and time showed that he was,” Shearer said.
Few other towns in the area had full-time managers when Mangan arrived in the late 1970s, Shearer said Tuesday, and Mangan learned on the job how to work with his council and local lawmakers like former state Sen. Ed Holl and longtime state Rep. Bob Godshall to secure state aid for the borough.
“He knew the contacts he had to have around the state, and even on the federal level, and he really liked the job,” Shearer said.
The borough statement adds that Mangan secured state, federal and county grant money for local revitalization, open space and transportation projects, setup a “Lansdale Low Interest Loan” program to support Main Street businesses in the 1980s, and served on numerous state and local boards and bodies, including as president of the North Penn Visiting Nurses Association, of the Pennsylvania Municipal Electric Association and the Partnership Transportation Management Association.
In the early 2000s, Mangan helped the historical society acquire and refurbish the research center adjacent to their Jenkins Homestead, establishing a permanent home and steady source of public funding for the volunteer group in charge of preserving the town’s history.
“He was very much involved in the whole thing, to the point where he was insisting that they match the stucco color on the homestead and on the search building next door,” Shearer said.
“He had them paint half a wall one time, and he came around and looked at it during different times of day, to see if it looked different in different sunlight. And I’m sure he did that with other things around town.”
Former Mayor Andy Szekely, in office when Mangan was fired by council in early 2010, said he felt the manager was unfairly criticized for the failure of the “Lansdale Center for the Performing Arts” at 311 W. Main Street, and given little credit for development projects including the Turbo Lofts apartment conversion, the West Main Street gateway, and the Station Square shopping center.
“Lee worked for the borough for 35 years, and there were a lot of big projects that occurred — those were all things that have positively impacted the borough,” Szekely said.
After being ousted by council over numerous problems with the arts center project, Mangan resurfaced in nearby Worcester Township, which he managed for 3½ years until retiring in 2015.
According to his obituary, a “drive-through” visitation service will be held from 10 to 11 a.m. Friday at Huff and Lajker Funeral Home in Lansdale. A private graveside service will be held afterward at Whitemarsh Memorial Park in Ambler, and a celebration of life will be held when family and friends can safely gather.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made in Mangan’s memory to Church of the Messiah, 1001 Dekalb Pike, Lower Gwynedd, PA 19002; or the American Heart and Stroke Association, 1617 JFK Boulevard, Suite 700, Philadelphia, PA 19103; or to the North Penn VNA, PO Box 867, Lansdale, PA 19446. Current Lansdale Borough Manager John Ernst said Tuesday that council will likely recognize Mangan with a moment of silence at its next meeting Sept. 2 and had not yet discussed any further commemoration.
“People should remember him as a person who was truly a visionary, in a town that, over the years, didn’t have a tremendous number of them,” Shearer said.