on 3rd & Verbeke Streets Formerly at the corner 3rd and Reily streets, the
Midtown Scholar Bookstore and Famous Reading Cafe opened in 2008 and subsequently expanded to the corner of Verbeke. Considered the largest used academic bookstore between
Chicago and
New York, it contains thousands of used books, scholarly and otherwise from a wide range of fields. The Midtown Cinema
movie theater is Harrisburg's only first-run
independent and
foreign film theater. In 2007,
Harrisburg Area Community College opened its new Midtown campus at the corner of 3rd and Reilly streets in the renovated Evangelical Press Building. The building holds many of the college's technical programs and has a capacity to hold several hundred students. From 2019 to 2022, HACC began to leave its Midtown 2 building by the end of its lease, opting to relocate the programming to its main Wildwood campus to save money. Midtown is known for its sizable
LGBTQ population, while most of Harrisburg's
gay bars and establishments are actually in the
Capitol District on the edge of Midtown. The former
Harrisburg Midtown Arts Center (H•MAC) building, which built upon what was a
Police Athletic League building and former residence on Third Street, operated two performance venues with a bar and restaurant prior to its closure in 2026. ==Economic decline and gentrification==