first trip north (pt. 3)

The radio stations diminish steadily as I drive North of Pottsville. The buzz drifts on as I try to zero in on the remaining channels. The Righteous Brothers sing “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Some country singer wails about how he wanted to ramble and roam, but she wanted a family and home, building to a chorus of “Angeline, baby, I’m sorry / my future’s in the past / I broke your heart in a million pieces… but Angelina baby, my whole world was you.” NPR is doing a special on the army’s 10th Mountain Division in World War II, a group of trained skiers and rock climbers that worked in altitudes of up to 13,500 feet and in temperatures as low as -20ºF. They were instrumental in the battle for Appenine Mountains in Italy, where they took Riva Ridge, a heavily armed Nazi installation amongst sheer cliffs thought entirely impenetrable. I catch the news at two o’clock. OJ Simpson, cleared of double homicide charges in the 90s, is back in court for assaulting and robbing a sports collector and making off with his own memorabilia. The news turns local, where justice is also afoot. The Naked Thief of Carbondale has been caught after sticking up a convenience store wearing only a hat. They asked him why he did it; “because,” he replied, “I was bored.”

I hadn’t been planning to stop by Centralia on this trip, but my path leads me right through next-door Ashland, and so it seems silly not to go. The most devious feature of anthracite coal is not that it is difficult to light but that once lit, it is almost impossible to put out. Centralia is the greatest testament both to this rather obscure scientific fact and to the disastrous effect it can have on a community. This place was another small, bustling coal town in the earlier part of the last century, but now it is hardly there at all. At some point a vein of coal was lit inadvertently lit, probably by a garbage fire. While the trash part of the fire was quickly doused, the coal part spread stealthily underground, invisibly following tunnels of anthracite deep below the surface. The people above were largely unaware what was happening, even as the ground grew hot in places and thick smoke began pluming from the woods on the outskirts of town. For some time, residents tried pumping dubious chemical concoctions into the abandoned mines, and then new combinations some years later when the old ones failed to stop the smoke. No record was kept of the materials used, and there was no practical way to flush old additives out, so the effort amounted to a regular meal of volatile chemical combinations for the fire.

In 1981, the first accident happened. A child playing in the backyard of a Centralia home shrieked, and his parents ran out to investigate. The ground had opened up beneath him, and he was clutching grass, his feet swaying in a dizzy vacuum at the top of a hole some eighty feet deep, plunging into darkness and ending in burning coal. By this point the fire had already crept under route 61, melting and warping the asphalt. The highway was blocked off, a detour constructed. Around the same time, the owner of a gas station situated in the middle of town measured the temperature of his underground tanks at 172ºF, and the earth thirteen feet under them at over 1,000ºF. The U.S. Bureau of Mines came in to investigate, and suggested a variety of possible solutions. Their most realistic remedy was digging an enormous trench through the town to block off the lit coal lines, but the estimated cost was wildly above what anyone in this busy but humble town could imagine spending. Meanwhile, smoke had begun to rise all over town and cave-ins were becoming an ever-greater danger. People were complaining of nausea and dizziness, probably on account of the tremendously high level of carbon dioxide in the homes and streets, but who knows what other health threats are caused by a massive underground chemical-fed coal fire. It soon became clear that evacuation was the only feasible option.

The federal government provided $42 million to get everyone out. Families left and bulldozers followed. Mindful of the danger rubble could cause in an area where the ground was liable to cave under the weight of a child, the government meticulously cleared all the big detritus left from the leveled homes. The result was a strange, sad place that goes way beyond any ordinary conception of a “ghost town.” In most conventional ghost towns, where, say, miners flocked upon the report of gold and then promptly left once they found none, there are ruins, abandoned buildings, and the like. In Centralia, there is nothing. Or rather, there is a surreally complete infrastructure with nothing to serve. Most of the town consists of suburban grids with no houses on them, a familiar element torn unsettlingly from its context, like seeing only the headlights and fenders of a car driving silently down a dark highway. These are not streets with no names; there are signposts on roads where nobody lives, and stop signs at intersections where nobody drives. Only the ghostly footprints of what was once a town remains. Here a collection of asphalt steps leading up to a front porch that no longer exists; here a driveway leading neatly into an empty lot; here, cruelly, a fire hydrant. Some of the remnants are simply bizarre. In one scraggily, overgrown patch of conspicuously open grass, a refrigerator sits on its side. Everywhere, smoke rises.

Of course, the government couldn’t force people out who wanted to stay, and some did. These are stubborn people, remember, some of them descendents of Irish sharecroppers who would wage rural peasant wars to protect their plots. Centralia’s continuing habitation is the weirdest – and the scariest – thing about the whole affair. Punctuating the eerily vacant landscape are four or five inhabited residences. They are almost all in different parts of town, mostly narrow wooden townhouses, the sort meant to be stacked in tight with identical structures to line a street, only here they are alone, standing vertical, narrow and awkward. In the driveways, neatly parked cars compliment the actual presence of a house, and seem to willfully ignore the scores of identical but pointless driveways surrounding. The houses are painted brightly but shuttered. In one intersection, a gaily-painted wreath hangs on a tree, reading “WE LOVE OUR HOME.” These are the people who keep their town on my Pennsylvania road map, who keep the post office open and demand the construction of a bright, spanking-new fire station on main street (the only two buildings on main street). I have been to Centralia many times now, however, and I have never seen one of them. I suppose if I were that committed to my hometown, I would shutter myself in and avoid poking, curiosity-seeking intruders, too. I’m not sure whether to admire or fear them. I’m not really sure what decades of carbon-dioxide inhalation does to a person, or decades or living in an abandoned town, or, for that matter, what sort of person willfully demands to stay in that sort of environment after all their neighbors have left. They may be heroes, or horrifically mutated monsters, or, for all I know, dead on the cellar floor. How long would it take somebody to find out?

Early on, Centralia became a bizarre kind of port-of-call for Arthur, Edmund, and I. We first learned of it in a book of Edmund’s called Weird Pennsylvania!, and resolved to make a visit. This was back in our senior year of high school, after applying to college and in the heat of that tense, breathless time when the letters are coming in and it feels like your whole life is being decided by the contents of your mailbox. Arthur, I think, learned of his acceptance to Georgetown the morning we left. Anyway, we went, and had lunch in a diner in Ashland where we were amazed that you could still get vanilla coke made with real vanilla syrup, and drove into the smoking town. You can walk anywhere in Centralia; the only barriers are big signs on all the main entrances to the town reading something like “DANGER. Toxic fumes and ground prone to sudden collapse. Entering this area may result in serious injury or death.” Strong stuff, but that’s all. We took pictures under them and tromped around, smelling the sulphuric fumes and weirder smells, hoping one of us wouldn’t suddenly turn a color usually seen only in oil spills and drop dead. We went out on the abandoned high way, crawled over the big cracks, traced the warped median line over strange hills and valleys of asphalt. It felt like walking on the set of some post-apocalyptic film, except it was real, and it was a contained sort of apocalypse, relegated only to the bounds of a small Pennsylvania coal-mining town. In places, the highway was streaked with a graffiti – pictures of skulls, swastikas. “kill all niggers.” “WELCOME TO HELL.” We pulled our coats tighter against a cold wind that tore at the ashen sky and hurled the smoke about. It was the perfect day to visit Centralia. We returned later, together on fall break, with college friends in the winter. In some truly strange way, the town became some sort of symbol or beacon of our friendship.

Returning this time in the van, the weather is incongruently sunny. I decide to pass-up the $8.50 Ashland coalmine ride, instead resolving to have lunch in the town of fumes. I pull in to the familiarly empty streets, but the do-not-go-here-or-die sign is gone. Its posts remain, however; I assume it has been stolen, and wonder how many times it’s stolen each year. I drive on top of a hill and look around. No smoke today it seems, but I feel confident there’s still something burning beneath my tires. One mine fire authority was quoted in an issue of Newsweek as saying that if the rate of burning held steady, Centralia would roast for a thousand years. I open the side door to the van and sit in the threshold, eating tuna fish and watching two enormous dump trucks haul slate-gray gravel up a faraway mountain. They look tiny across the valley where Centralia lays down its empty grids, and the growl of their engines and the muted boom of their falling loads echoes listlessly between the hills, quieter than the soft rush of breeze and grasshoppers. They rise up, dump the stuff, and then glide back down, trailing a cloud of dust ten times bigger than themselves. Here in Centralia, the coal is burning, but across the way, they’re still digging for more. I pull out, eager to move on while there’s still light. The trucks, still revolving in their quiet, remote clockwork, are beautiful.

first trip north (pt. 1)

Bidding farewell to Avdo and Steve and Will, to my parents and the turtles and the acorns, I started north. What a true joy to be on the road at last! I planned to go as far up as I wanted, and then loop back down and return to Hershey in about a week. There, I would resupply, install any gear I had overlooked, and pick up my first copilot! Anthony Cheng is my oldest friend. He was trying to figure out what to do with a free year between college and medical school, and agreed to come with me for the first few months. I welcomed his company, but wanted to first get the hang of things on my own.

I headed up 81 in beautiful sunlight, but soon ran into traffic in the mountains. I resolved to get off at the next exit before things got really hairy, and so found myself in the tiny town of Ravine. It’s just that; one street wedged by a creek in between high hills, its most distinguishing feature being a lot of school buses. I pulled off at a gas station to orient myself, and found a card my family had stowed away in the van. “They died so we might live,” the cover read, with a picture of chicken wings. Inside: “let us dance to their memory,” and the chicken dance came tinnily bouncing from a little battery-powered gizmo. We hope you find these EVERYWHERE! The inscription read. I have the best family in the world.

I continued on, driving deep into the coalmining region of Pennsylvania. This is a beautiful, grim place, strange and half-forgotten, filled with hard people and the husks of towns. It was victim to an inhumane industry that oppressed its workers and scored the land with strip mines and coal fires. Though it sat on one of the richest coal deposits in the world, northern Pennsylvania did not give of its treasures easily. The stuff was discovered 1790 by a hunter named Necho Allen. According to legend, Allen was woken from his slumber at the base of Broad Mountain – on the south end of present-day Pottsville – by a raging conflagration. He had inadvertently ignited an outcropping of coal with his campfire. This is a good story, but it’s probably not true; it would have been almost impossible for Allen to set fire to Pennsylvania’s most stubbornly adverse resource with a mere campfire. His contemporaries immediately realized that the land offered coal almost beyond imagination, but it was anthracite coal, hard, unforgiving stuff, difficult to light and immune to conventional mining tactics. They didn’t figure out how to access it until 1828, when an ingenious Scottish immigrant named James Neilson replaced cold air in the furnace with directly bellows-injecting heated, and at last found success. The process became known as blasting, and ravenous for the riches that had teased them for decades, the men took into the land with a vengeance, using scorched-earth tactics and producing some 300 million tons of coal a year, about as much as the rest of the world combined.

Rural Pennsylvania enjoyed a colossal heyday for about a half a century, aided by the extraordinary additional discovery of oil in the region. The slash-and-burn approach of the big companies brought unimaginable wealth to a few entrepreneurs but wrecked the land and the poor immigrants who worked it. They paid their miners by the ton, which both upped production and encouraged a deadly rabid zeal as hundreds of hungry, dirt-poor men hacked at the coal veins with hammers and pickaxes without regard to safety or sustainability. Bill Bryson notes that “mining has of course always been a wretched line of work everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.” The miners saw little of the wealth that flowed from their work, and the 22,0000 who worked in Schuylkill County alone might have called the period something other than a “heyday.” Their words, however, would probably not be in English; they were mostly fresh immigrants, lured to America by promises of work and fortune. Their lack of familiarity with the local language and culture made them thoroughly exploitable, and exploited they were. They were herded onto freight trains and shoveled into dangerous mines where they struggled to learn the ropes of deadly job on-site. Differences in language often separated the workers from each other, and almost always made the English safety signs inscrutable. Deaths and serious injuries were measured by the hundreds each year. 5,500 of the workers were children between seven and sixteen years old. They worked the simplest jobs, mostly separating slate from coal. Although they might have been two young to see it, this grinding task gave them a good sense of their future: the task was shared by the “breakers,” the broken and the injured, whitebeards too old to work the trickier jobs, finishing their careers as they’d begun them as children. The mines themselves were dark, dank, claustrophobic affairs. Imagine yourself wedged into a dank rock tunnel barely as wide as your own body, surrounded by black mud and trickling water, blanketed by underground shadow far darker than any equivalent on the surface and pierced only by the dim light of your gas lamp, breathing coal dust and powder smoke, incapable of understanding the words of anyone around you, and separated from your family and world by tons of black, caving rock. It was not an easy life.

But these were tough, tough folk. Many of them were Irish, hated in America and hailing from a long, crushing history of small-scale potato farming. They had worked their plots for centuries, starving through the winters and fighting each other when land became scarce. They were accustomed to backbreaking labor and developed a wiry, barbed resilience. When pushed, they would destroy fences, plow cropland by night, kill livestock, and even kill people who oppressed them. To defend their interests, they formed secret societies like the Whiteboys and the Peep O’Day Boys, which were armed and quick to dispense retributive justice “to correct transgressions against traditional moral and social codes.” In the words of sociologist Kevin Kenny, they believed they were following “a just law of their own in opposition to the inequities of landlord law, the police and court system, and the transgressions of land-grabbers.”

This sort of thorny hardiness permitted them to survive Pennsylvania’s coalmines, but it’s unclear to what degree their militancy accompanied them over the Atlantic. The very rumor of secret societies, especially the notorious Molly Maguires, was sufficient to provoke harsh retribution from industrial overlords. To be sure, violence and crime among the mineworkers was common, but whether or not this unrest was organized in part by a secret society is still a fundamentally debated question. James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett, writing sympathetically to the justice leveled against the Mollies, nevertheless admit, “the difficulty of achieving strict and fair accuracy in relation to the Molly Maguires is very great. Sensible men have held there never even was such an organization.” Regardless, the primary historical function of the secret society – whether it existed or not – was undoubtedly to provide an excuse for the coal industry to persecute its own workers, and especially to discourage the budding union that increasingly provided them with real organization.

The union became popular as workers sought outlets for their unrest. A string of mining disasters – including an 1869 fire at the Avondale Mine in Luzerne County that took the lives of 110 men – underlined the need for workers to organize in self-protection. The Avondale project resembled coalmines across the region: the company had refused to supply ventilation or pumping systems, sound scaffolding, or emergency exits. In fact, the mine was only a single, glorified tunnel with no secondary entrance, so when flames blocked the way to surface, the workers were trapped, impounded to a dark, fiery death. As charred bodies were dragged from the pit over the next few days, thousands of miners arrived in solidarity from surrounding communities. At some point, John Siney, the head of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, climbed onto a wagon and spoke to the crowd: “Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with.” He urged his fellows to join the union, and thousands immediately did.

The smoldering malcontent was brought to a boil by the depression of the 1870s, when one-fifth of the nation’s workers lost their jobs to reckless speculation and stock watering. It was in this desperate climate that the union became most popular, swelling to 85 percent of Pennsylvania’s total anthracite miners. If they existed, this was also presumably when the Molly Maguires, who had already supposedly supplied fifty “inexplicable murders” between 1863 and 1867, struck out most fiercely against their oppressors. After coal operators announced a twenty percent pay cut in 1974, the union decided to strike, and on January 1, 1875, thousands of workers laid down their picks. Corporate leaders, unaccustomed to insolence and determined to crush resistance, quickly struck back. Franklin B. Gowen, president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Reading Coal and Iron Company – called “the wealthiest anthracite coal mine owner in the world” – hired Alan Pinkerton to address the problem.

Pinkerton’s detective agency was famed across the land. Their name had became commonplace after successfully foiling an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln, and they were also employed to track western outlaws including Jesse James, the Reno brothers and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Most of their expertise and livelihood, however, was in union breaking, where they often employing violence to crush the will of striking workers. A popular song in 1892 wailed, “hear the poor orphans tell their sad story / Father was killed by a Pinkerton man.” Although the coalminer’s union was adamantly opposed to violence, a continuing stream of killings attributed to the Mollies permitted the Pinkertons and even more shadowy groups thugs to intimidate miners more or less indiscriminately. A gang of armed vigilantes named the Modocs joined the corporation-owned Coal and Iron Police in ambushing and killing militant miners. The slash-and-burn tactics of the corporate response led to some detractors within the anti-Molly forces. James McParlan, the Pinkerton agent originally hired to infiltrate the Mollies, resigned after he realized that masked men were committing the “murder of women and children.” Nevertheless, the backlash continued, union leaders were imprisoned, and after six months, the strike collapsed and miners returned to work, accepting the pay cut.

Some especially ornery elements continued to resist, providing the coal companies with an opportunity to make further example. After a sensational trial, six “Mollies” were hanged in the prison at Pottsville, and four more at Mauch Chunk in Carbon County. A Carbon County judge later described the episode in the following terms:
“The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.”
An industrial spokesman at the time painted a different picture:
“Peace once more reigns in the anthracite coal regions. Mollie Maguireism is practically dead. The inhabitants of the anthracite coal regions are now enjoying the blessed peace which has recently come to them. God rules, justice must reign, and right must triumph.”

The union, as is often case, lost in attaining its goals in the short term and won in the long-term, sort of. Reforms were eventually introduced, but mining continued to be a dark, dangerous affair, left to men who could find work nowhere else. More generally, miners and the wider coalmining region were pretty much always losers. By the 1950s, the industry was in steep decline, and the Knox Mine Disaster of 1959 – where 10 billion gallons of water flooded a riverside dig, killing 12 people – essentially ended deep mining in Pennsylvania. The area suffered heavily from the decline of the industry, with “patch towns,” small communities of 500 people or less tied to a specific mine, left high and dry. Some opened mining museums like the Pioneer Tunnel and Steel Train in Ashland and others survived under the protection of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Most were less lucky, reduced to ghost towns or forced to suffer extreme rural poverty. Driving through them is a depressing affair. From the highway, miles of low, gray green mountains thickly filled with dense forests suddenly give way to ravaged holes or burnt-out timbers overgrown with scrappy, tan undergrowth, the quiet, ravaged testimony of strip mines and coal fires. The names of the towns make their history and purpose clear – Minersville, Carbondale, Slatedale, Ashland. Some of them hunker down, waving flags and crouching courageously on the black soil. Others are simply stacks of loosely shingled shacks crowding each other in little hamlets huddled between the oppressive hills. It’s hard for people to get out of these towns. Many young men join the army to escape, others take over small businesses from their fathers, but the region as a whole wallows in the hopelessness of its economic situation. Harvey’s Diner still serves vanilla coke with real vanilla syrup. The water in its bathroom is scalding. Here a ravaged old man stands vacantly, watering his driveway. He raises his thin, grizzled face to identify my roaring van with an unfocused gaze of hard-learned, tired terror. Our eyes meet, and I briefly feel myself gazing into an endless, icy, hole. Coalmining country.

harrisburg (pt. 3)

The total population of Harrisburg leaped from 53,000 to 71,000 during these years of reform. The Old 8th had hardly been torn down, however, when conflict racked the world with the advent of World War I. The U.S.S. Harrisburg represented the city in that fight, making four voyages to bring American troops to Europe, and then six trips to bring them home after the November 1918 Armistice. However, while the First World War shattered the societies of Europe, the United States entered late in the game, and so it was the Second World War that had the greater impact upon America and its cities. For Harrisburg, war meant business. Full engagement in a global conflict required unprecedented amounts of steel. Pearl Harbor had nudged the sleeping giant of American industry, and Harrisburg was there for its full awakening. It was the war that turned America’s steel industry into Big Steel, and the Pennsylvania railroads churned materials through Harrisburg night and day. By the 1950s, United States Steel chairman Benjamin Fairless was no doubt pleased to point out that America’s steel industry was not only the biggest of its kind in the world, it was bigger than all other such industries in the world combined.

Big Steel basked in the majesty of its success for the next thirty years. However, its management also became complacent during this period of hegemony, and its passivity spelled disaster for the industry. American steel kept chugging away with war-era machinery in cities like Harrisburg, safe and untouched by conflict. Meanwhile, the Japanese and Europeans rebuilt their own devastated urban centers – in some cases from the ground up – and built new machinery to match, experimenting with new manufacturing methods, with oxygen furnaces, electric steel and minimills. While the business awareness and creativity of Big Steel returned to sleep after the war, letting its industry run on autopilot, the market for steel slowly became a global one. Unfortunately, Big Steel slept through this realization, and only woke in time for its own spectacular, cataclysmic crash.

At the beginning of the 1980s, 320,000 workers were sent home. The once invincible American steel companies went bottoms-up, mighty corporations declared bankruptcy, plants closed left and right. Soon, 75% of all American steelworkers had lost their jobs. There were a myriad of reasons for this catastrophic failure; Richard Preston cites “greedy labor unions, bungled government policy, inflation, foreign competition – but ultimately it was a failure of management.” The heads of Big Steel came from the best business schools in America; they worked in lavish business suites in the upper floors of tall buildings, and had little in common with the men fifty stories below who actually made the steel melt and the industry move. They were leaders who could inspire their men to do little other than strike. Most damagingly, their education could not replace the experience of adversity and competition. They were native to an era of supremacy: the last innovations in their industry had occurred a generation earlier during a World War, and everything seemed to be working fine since Hitler fell. They never learned how to shrewdly invest money in technology, and it destroyed them.

The fall of Big Steel punctuated a period marked by a nation-wide deterioration of American economy, ideology, and morale. In 1975, Operation Frequent Wind had scrambled to remove foreign nationals and sympathetic Vietnamese civilians from Saigon. Helicopters zipped back and forth between the embattled city and offshore aircraft carriers, finally lifting off the embassy for the last time as the rumble of approaching North Vietnamese tanks became audible. Americans at home watched the full fiasco on TV, struggling to reconcile shameful images with the national faith instilled in them by their parents, the generation that had won the War and brought America to the fore of global politics and economy. Eventually, most found reconciliation elusive, and a generation of Americans lost faith in their government and their society. Angry vets prowled the streets, hippies toked up, Sylvester Stallone filmed Rocky, and the Harrisburg Rail Yards fell largely silent. The city’s steadily declining postwar population soon dove into a death-plummet, losing around 15,000 people in ten years. The plunge leveled off into another more gradual decline in the 80s, but Harrisburg never really recovered.

One major reason people were so eager to leave might have been radioactivity. Three Mile Island is a major nuclear power plant located just a few miles upriver from downtown Harrisburg, and at 4 AM on March 28 1979, the second unit suffered a partial meltdown. The scope of the accident was unclear at first, and the state and local government struggled to determine what exactly had happened and what scale of evacuation would be necessary. They determined the danger was minimal, and no mandatory evacuation was called, but people emptied out anyway. I remember my middle school gym teacher telling me about the accident. He was one of those who stayed, unwilling to leave home and wary of looters. He spent several days “on the couch watching TV with the porch lights on and the shotgun loaded.” When downtown failed to glow and it became clear the radiation had been contained, people quickly filtered back. The scientific community is largely in agreement that the meltdown did little or no human harm, although the areas closest to the plant have the highest radon concentrations in the country, and one recent study has suggested a link to increased lung cancer in the region.

But it seems clear the accident did the most damage culturally. TIME ran a cover story on the accident called Nuclear Nightmare. President Jimmy Carter ordered a full investigation, and the Pennsylvania House of Representatives conducted their own investigation as well. An unsurprising backlash to nuclear power followed the accident, galvanized by sometimes-unlikely lobbyists like Jane Fonda, who had just finished filming a movie decrying the dangers of the nuclear age. Aerosmith, the Clash, Alice Cooper, Midnight Oil and Jimmy Buffett all wrote songs about or referencing the accident, Saturday Night Live did a sketch alluding to it, Isaac Asimov involved it in a science fiction novel. All this attention did little to allay the growing anxieties of a society that had just lost its sons in an unpopular war driven by a suddenly undependable government lead by a President impeached for corruption. The triumphant, trusting society of the 50s had somehow devolved into a tangle of power politics and economic woes wracked with Cold War malaise, where the faith and conviction of the previous generation suddenly seemed as fragile and transparent as glass, where dreams of financial solvency and personal security fell prey to the vicissitudes of global politics and the secretive decisions of the powerful, where the very resources that lit our houses with electricity could also suddenly, silently inflict nuclear winter.

Harrisburg was hit especially hard. It had been in trouble since the war, reeling from “an economic free-fall” and steady population loss. It relied heavily on industries like Big Steel to provide materials in need of transport; this meant work for everyone when business was booming, but when things turned sour, there was little recourse. Since the war, citizens with sufficient money had been drifting to the suburbs in search of a front lawn and a white picket fence. Following new economic woes and the Three-Mile Island Accident, people positively fled the city, resulting in rapidly declining conditions and billions of dollars of loss. In the 80s, Harrisburg came to be regarded as one of the most distressed cities in the nation. This recognition fueled a cycle of urban drain and suburban encroachment, and before long pretty much everyone who had the money to leave had left, and conditions only worsened for those who were stuck inside. The city was reduced to a hotel for state workers and a prison for the poor. Crime soared and property values plummeted. The capitol grounds were kept beautiful and immaculate, but elsewhere the city became increasingly tattered, especially in ghettos like Midtown and Allison Hill.

It was during this era of distress that my current housemates and I were born. Edmund was growing up on the Hill, Arthur in nearby Lebanon, and I moved to Hershey by way of Connecticut in the early nineties. By that point, however, Harrisburg’s downtown area was already changing. Mayor Steven R. Reed, elected in 1982, had realized that aggressive steps were necessary. He declared a large swathe of downtown an “urban renewal area” and worked with the city government and nonprofit organizations to “develop key parcels of real estate.” Reed eventually helped pump 3.4 billion dollars of new investment into downtown. Strawberry Square appeared, Harrisburg’s first enclosed shopping mall. In 1983, 82 luxury apartments replaced the old City Government Center. In 1984, the city registered its first net gains in the number of businesses and private sector jobs after three decades of loss. Reed was instrumental in acquiring a minor league baseball team for the city, the Harrisburg Senators. He then developed a park surrounding their stadium on City Island. In the 90s, Second Street, once a graveyard of empty stores and vacated residences, began hopping with new restaurants, bars, and clubs. In 1995, the city realized its first net population gain. In 1999, the city unveiled the Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts, a 52.7-million dollar facility that was “the first center of its type in the United States where education, science and the performing arts take place under one roof.”

Reed’s accomplishments did not go unnoticed. In December 2006, the City Mayors organization awarded Reed third place in its annual World Mayors competition. He was the only American mayor to rank in the top ten. At his inauguration, they quoted a Harrisburg citizen has saying “Steven Reed has committed his very soul to public service and is a tireless and positive force for change and improvement. Over the year, he has taken our tired, grey city and filled it with life and color and he always gives the impression that he has only just begun. He is a leader and wastes no time in party politics.”

Other citizens were less enthusiastic. His disdain for party politics is permitted by his lack of political opposition, Edmund’s parents – both long-time urban reformers – point out. Steven Reed is Harrisburg’s longest-serving mayor. He is a democrat, but regularly gains support from both parties. He has won six elections, mostly unopposed. He says "the City of Harrisburg has become an example of urban resurgence at a time when many of America's cities continue to undergo further decline and serious economic stress. Harrisburg's renewal has been multi-faceted, touching virtually every area of city governmental and community endeavor." Edmund would argue vociferously that this universality is not in fact the case. Reed has developed Harrisburg by pandering to its suburbs. His “urban renewal” projects are universally focused upon downtown, near the capitol complex and away from where most city citizens live, especially the poor. The projects he has designed are universally geared towards wealthy suburban commuters who come to work in the capital and then leave. During the workday, the population of Harrisburg increases by 72.7% because the attractive new jobs Reed has brought to the city are all filled by people outside the city. And instead of returning home at 5pm, they can now stick around for dinner at a fine restaurant, see a show at the Whitaker Center, and then stroll along City Island before returning home across the river. This sort of activity invests capital in Harrisburg businesses, but only the region of the city where Reed encourages business: downtown, where the business workers and owners mostly aren’t from Harrisburg anyway. Meanwhile, other parts of the city are almost entirely ignored.

Reed has done no “urban development” in Midtown, where violence and drug trafficking continues unabated, or in Allison Hill, where Edmund makes his home and where a decades-old community “Take Back the Night” program no longer functions because the streets are simply too dangerous after dark. The net population growth in 1995 ignores a general decline of greater severity than that of the 1980s; encouraged by Reed’s policies, the suburbs continue to grow in size and power, and the inner city continues to fester. I know, because I moved into Allison Hill last June, and the broken glass strewn across the cul-de-sac at the bottom of our street still hasn’t been cleaned. We would not object so vociferously to Reed’s plan of “urban development” if it were only an opening method focusing on the most economically promising regions in order to jump-start a citywide resuscitation.

However, Reed gives no indication that he will ever turn his attention to places like Midtown and Allison Hill. Indeed, he seems largely to have given up on the rest of Harrisburg. Instead of actually developing our city – helping the neighborhoods where people live and raise their children – he has cordoned off these neighborhoods as strictly as he can, and turned downtown into a combination office space and amusement park for suburbanites. He has encouraged the ghettoification of the city’s living spaces in order to create a model of economic renaissance for the already wealthy, many of whom do not even live in the city. Most of the biggest buildings downtown are super-sized parking garages. Allison Hill has always been separated from the rest of the city by train tracks. The new restaurants largely stop at Midtown. After 1996, when both halves of the People’s Bridge were partially washed away by high floodwaters and an ice floe, only the Eastern Half was repaired. That way, people in Harrisburg can walk to City Island, which lies in the middle, but undesirables from the city proper cannot walk to the suburbs on the West Shore. Instead of fighting crime by cleaning up depressed neighborhoods and encouraging real urban development, Reed chooses largely to police them remotely. Several expensive “gunshot detectors” have recently been installed on street corners in Harrisburg’s most violent areas. These devices can distinguish the sound of gunshot from ordinary urban din, and send an alert to police dispatches in 3-5 seconds. The “acoustic Gunshot Detection System (GDS)… has been proven to… reduce calls for service by as much as 85%,” newspapers gush, ignoring both that the system itself makes automatic “calls for service,” thereby rendering conventional calls both pointless and obsolete, and more importantly, that the system allows heavily armed police to rush into distressed neighborhoods, make arrests, and exit, supposedly catching the bad guy but leaving the community no safer by leaving the root causes that create and perpetuate urban violence unaddressed.

With the hundred-thousand dollars and change that these detectors have cost the city, Reed instead could have pumped money into after-school programs, community patrol forces that stay inside distressed neighborhoods after the police leave, help encourage new businesses in places like Allison Hill, or maybe even clean off that broken glass a the bottom of the street, any one of which would probably do more permanent good than satisfyingly newspaper-friendly but ultimately insubstantial arrests. Instead, inner city misery continues. Property values stay low, the rate of murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults continues at over double the national average, and the median household income continues to grind some $15,000 below the national average. A quarter of the city continues to live under the poverty line, and over a tenth lives below half the poverty line. It’s no wonder then that Harrisburg Public High School’s senior class is almost half the size of its freshman class; the rest of the students, disillusioned with the opportunities they see around them, drop out in favor of the much more palpable rewards of Harrisburg’s burgeoning gang culture. In Harrisburg, neighborhood kids can make far more money selling drugs than trying to find a job not already custom-fit for someone from the West Shore, at least until they run into trouble and get picked up by a gunshot detector.

Harrisburg still needs help, but it is less likely to get it than in the 80s, when it was still being considered one of the most distressed cities in the nation. It is still distressed, but its injuries are set away in the ghettos and the neighborhoods, avoided as much as possible, policed as minimally as necessary, and generally ignored. The cultural inheritors of the Old 8th Ward do not need to be paved for new capital grounds; they’re too far across the train tracks. The Susquehanna River, typifying the mobility that has always granted Harrisburg its purpose and its character, also serves to separate the communities that are truly on the move from those that have simply gotten stuck. Trains still cross the bridges that link the gaps, but people, by and large, do not.

In the days following the shooting, the character of the slain comes to light. The Patriot runs another article; he was a “loyal man,” his friends said. He loved to fish. He had been down on his luck, and had been mixed up with the wrong crowd for a while, but was getting back on his feet, before the wrong crowd pulled him back down. I have come to feel very close to Harrisburg. I hope people realize the unique potential that lies in its neglected corners. I hope more people move to Allison Hill, and write about it, and live there, and raise their children there, and resuscitate the Take Back the Night movement, and don’t leave at the end of the workday. This will take a great deal of time, however, and I am not confident that midstaters will have the vision or the care to give Harrisburg the attention it deserves. More likely, Harrisburg will remain a city of bridges a while longer, a city where wide veins of river, rail, and highway separate the place from its identity and the reality from its potential. This loyal man, in his silence, reminds me that I cannot be a part of that effort at this point in my life. The bridges of Harrisburg, along with the rivers and rails, move people through as well as separate them. They are intersections and crossroads, and the city’s main claim to fame is still moving people between places of greater significance. It’s no place to get back on your feet. At the end of the summer, I too will cross a bridge, and like hunters and trappers, canal workers and railroad men, soldiers and presidents, state bureaucrats and city workers before me, I will leave.



Material on the rise and fall of the steel industry comes from:
Preston, Richard. American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991.

Material on health implications of the Three Mile Island meltdown comes from:
Field, William R. Three Mile Island epidemiologic radiation dose assessment revisited: 25 years after the accident. . Radiation Protection Dosimetry Volume 113, No. 2 (2005): 214-217.

Material on gunshot detectors comes from:
Barrett, Sophie. Secures® Gunshot Detection System Selected for Deployment in Harrisburg, PA. E.E. Times Online. 12.54 March 27 2007:


Material on Harrisburg Public Schools comes from the Local School Directory online at:


Material on the World Mayor Competition comes from:
Vom Hove, Tann. John So, Lord Mayor of Melbourne wins the 2006 World Mayor Award. Worldmayor.com. 2006:


Material on the Old 8th Ward comes from Harrisburg’s Old 8th Ward online at:


Other material from the Harrisburg Patriot News, city-data.com, and of course, every amateur researcher’s best friend, wikipedia.org.

harrisburg (pt. 2)

While an epic siege of Harrisburg failed to materialize, the war still left a profound imprint. Its streets never saw combat, but they did host an enormous transient population of soldiers for four whole years. The social and economic influence of this new presence was felt across the city, but was perhaps best exhibited in the Old 8th Ward. This was a tough, seedy little neighborhood that had sprung up along the canal, supplying its various needs in abundance: there were warehouses and shipping suppliers, there were inns and brothels. According to J. Howard Wert, the boating men nightly sought “practical experience in every form of wickedness the town could ladle up” before continuing down the canal. The Old 8th could ladle a lot, and so it flourished. During the war, the more disreputable of these establishments met with a whole new level of success as literally thousands of bored soldiers roamed the city looking for excitement. The name of the notorious neighborhood quickly became synonymous with sin and debauchery.

However, not everyone in the Old 8th prospered. Shunned and ignored by the city’s more well to do citizens, its crooked streets quickly became the kingdom of the destitute. Here were dirt-poor immigrants, seeking better lives but starting out on rock bottom. Here also were newly freed slaves, trying to make sense of their bewildering new status in a country that had finally recognized them as human beings, but damned this new humanism by sequestering them into impoverished urban prisons plagued with violence and poverty, locked tight with strict segregation laws. Harrisburg had long been, in Wert’s words, “a haven of refuge for a large, colored population, many of them poor, some fugitives from Southern slavery,” as well as the home of a large, mostly impoverished Irish immigrant community. New arrivals from Italy, Greece, and Russia collided with these earlier denizens to turn the Old 8th into a boiler pot of ethnic diversity and economic misery. The end of the war meant decommissioned soldiers returning home and a recession for the Old 8th’s tawdriest businesses, but most survived. Canal workers reassumed their place as the neighborhood’s signature clientele, and the show went on.

For the city as a whole, however, the end of the war meant big changes. No longer a strategically essential supplies depot, Harrisburg began to drift out of cultural significance. Lincoln’s funeral train passed through on Friday, April 21 of 1865, making a brief stop during its 1,654-mile journey to Illinois. There was a public viewing at the House of Representatives. The next day, 40,000 people packed the streets to see his casket brought back down to the railroad. The Pennsylvania soldiers who helped win the war marched out one last time, joining veterans across the nation in parade rest before the tracks. I wonder what they felt, these still-young men made old by the violent hardships of their era, standing straight and splendid in blue, wordlessly saluting a train. They themselves had rode these rails four long years before, answering Lincoln’s call to take up arms and save the union. Now, after that war was over and won, they stood at the rails for him again, to see him born down the same line, disappearing far over the Appalachians to rest at last at some quieter station.

As the century wore on, urban dwellers around the nation became increasingly dissatisfied with the state of their cities. Unpaved streets littered with trash, houses packed upon houses in dense disorder with no regard to aesthetics or sanitation, dirty water, ineffective garbage collection and disposal, wanton industrialization and a complete disappearance of green space were only a few of the problems plaguing cities in the late 19th century. Frederick Law Olmstead, a prominent architect and reformer, responded with his “park and boulevard system.” Cities needed green space if their citizens were to live healthily, he argued. Acres of grass and trees within cities were not only aesthetically appealing, but they also fostered community, helped prevent the spread of disease, increased property values and even aided worker productivity and lowered crime rates. His ideas gained steam as more urban reformers and concerned citizens realized their value, and soon the City Beautiful movement swept cities nationwide.

Harrisburg was in particular need of such a movement. Always something of a rough-and-tumble frontier town, the capital of Pennsylvania looked more like an “industrial village” than a seat of government by the late 19th century. Few streets were paved, and the Susquehanna was clogged with sewage. Mira Lloyd Dock, daughter of a prominent Harrisburg family, caught wind of Olmstead’s ideas and began campaigning to reform the city’s infrastructure. She did not have a particularly difficult time making her case, especially when in 1897 the entire capitol building was gutted by a fire. Pressure from Dock, the Civic Club of Harrisburg – a women’s organization promoting urban reform – and other individuals and organizations soon motivated the city government to adopt an aggressive City Beautiful movement of its own. In 1902, the Harrisburg League for Municipal Improvements proposed a 1.09 million dollar bond for a wide range of civic projects. To publicize the proposal, high school boys ran door-to-door ads, the Civic Club sponsored lectures, and local newspapers ran editorials. It was met with immediate support from the Old 8th Ward and similar neighborhoods, which had the most to gain from the proposed reforms, but wealthier citizens and landowners soon joined the bandwagon, inspired both by humanitarianism, progressivism, and the advantages of higher property values. The bond passed by a two-to-one margin. Three more bonds were passed by 1914, and two decades into the 20th century, Harrisburg was an almost unrecognizably new city.

70 miles of streets were paved. A system of street cleaning was at last introduced. An acre of parkland was established for every 100 citizens, introducing 900 acres of green. Fresh sewers, flood controls, a reasonable garbage collection program and a new water sanitation facility on Hargest’s Island all improved the cleanliness of the city. Concrete steps were built on the slope of the Susquehanna, allowing people to walk, rest, and swim along its newly fresh waters. To replace the old, burnt-out capitol, construction on a lavish new structure began with an expected budget of five to 10 million dollars. Nine years and 12.5 million dollars later, the capital was completed, and President Theodore Roosevelt called it “the most handsome state capitol I have ever seen and I don’t believe that there is a finer on earth.” 4 million dollars of construction costs went to pure graft (including 850 dollar flagpoles), and the architect and chief constructor both received prison terms. Unfortunately, much more was lost in this period of development and change than building expenses. In a cruel twist of events, the City Beautiful Movement eventually paved some of its earliest and most loyal supporters, including the Old 8th Ward. Although the neighborhood had largely cleaned up its act by the 20th century, it was still home to the poor and the underprivileged. Expanded capitol grounds, now verdant and green, abutted the Old 8th’s rotten tenements and shady saloons too closely. While the capitol was the model of the City Beautiful movement’s vision of healthy, modern urban life, the Old 8th remained a black eye. And so the city decided to expand capitol grounds still further, completely enveloping the entire neighborhood. A bill authorizing the destruction of the Old 8th passed the State Legislature in 1911, and 500 properties were promptly acquired and demolished. Almost overnight, a neighborhood rich in history and culture vanished. Its motley residents fanned out through the city looking for new homes. Many crossed the train tracks and settled further South in the Allison Hill, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

harrisburg (pt. 1)

“A pair of shootings in Harrisburg early Sunday morning left one man dead and another hospitalized,” my morning paper reads. “Jonas Strunk, 35, of Harrisburg was killed when he at 2.36 a.m. near Kittatinny and Hummel streets,” the article fumbles on. The Patriot News doesn’t get much distribution outside of Harrisburg, but it is our city newspaper.

Harrisburg, my new home for the summer. We’ve all heard stories about cities on rivers, about whole societies built on the tides of water. The promise of sustenance and transportation is just too great to resist, and all over the world, civilization grows up hugging shores like a shy infant. All along the great moving waters of the world, the Niles and the Yangzes, people live, work, and die by the vicissitudes of rivers. Along the Susquehanna, a smaller stream here in central Pennsylvania, people have had a crossroads settlement on and off for perhaps as long as 5,000 years. For all that time it’s most prominent utility, always essential and largely unsung, has been moving people between other places of greater significance. And yes, we can thank the river for that.

I usually err on the side of avoiding history, so let me do just the reverse for this city. In its earliest recorded form, Harrisburg was known as Peixtin or Paxtang, a name that still occasionally surfaces on street signs and car dealership advertisements. It was a rest stop for Susquehannock traders on the trail from the Delaware to the Ohio rivers, or from the Potomac to the Upper Susquehanna. All these trails went through Paxtang like good advice, in one end and out the other. Later, the Iroquois would take the land from the Susquehannocks and then lose it in turn to white prospectors. Once they had been bought out and driven off and Paxtang had become the Harrisburg of today – in name at least – the city would become an important rest stop of another sort. Escaped slaves running the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada faced one of many formidable obstacles in the Susquehanna River. Harrisburg was an important stop in that railroad, resupplying the fugitives of slavery and sending them across the river safely. And as the old canals gradually disappeared, Harrisburg also acquired more prosaic railroads, you know, of the steel and stone variety. Its location here on the Susquehanna continued to make it a prominent crossroads of goods, especially steel and iron. The railroads were fruitful and multiplied, and multiplied, and multiplied. I’ve seen an old photograph of the train lines, thick cordons of steel, flanks almost touching, packed in tight rows. They gave the city a second, more temporary river, a wide, chugging current of smoke and steam that cut through the center of the city and then lifted and leapt across the Susquehanna by way of a plethora of handsome bridges built solely to lend them wings over the water. They carried tons of material, mostly metals, through the city every day; trains in from Bethlehem, Steelton, Pittsburgh, out to New York, Philadelphia, Trenton.

Soon, Harrisburg’s rail lines became militarily as well as economically essential as a logistical keystone of the Union’s war effort. After Fort Sumpter surrendered in April of 1861, 13,000 eager young recruits from all over Pennsylvania converged on Harrisburg to answer Lincoln’s call to quell the rebellion and save the union. Even more passed through the city on the way to enlist or reach the front, and so Camp Curtin, a permanent training facility, was established. Through the course of the war, Harrisburg moved men and supplies to the armies on the front, eventually sending over 300,000 young soldiers to the battlefield, making it the largest Federal camp during the war. The crucial importance of Camp Curtin and these railroads also made Harrisburg a primary target for Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee attempted to take the city twice. The first time, he planned to use his victory at Harper’s Ferry as a springboard, but was stopped in a field of corn called Antietam. The second time, he sent two full divisions under Lt. General Richard S. Ewell through Maryland into Pennsylvania, but was slowed by a rain-swollen Potomac River, giving the Union time to respond. Ewell made it as far as Mechanicsburg – eight miles to the west of Harrisburg – before Lee received news of the advancing Federal Army of the Potomac and recalled the divisions to consolidate his forces in the face of this new threat. As it happened, Ewell’s cavalry brigade under Brig. General Albert G. Jenkins made it further, lightly skirmishing the 22nd and 37th New York Militia at Sporting Hill – just across the river – before retuning to the main force. Distracted from their goal of taking Harrisburg, they rejoined the main force and stumbled upon the Army of the Potomac more or less by accident at Gettysburg.

That, of course, was the beginning of the end for the Army of Northern Virginia and the Southern cause. Lee left Gettysburg in driving rain on July 5 of 1863 and limped back across the Potomac to gradually lose the war over the next two years. He never got a third chance at Harrisburg; in fact, he never was able to make another similar offensive at all, and so Jenkin’s skirmish on Sporting Hill turned out to be the furthest the Southern war effort ever got. The last remnants of the battlefield have, unfortunately, been literally paved over; today, a Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commision historical marker designates the watermark of a generation’s efforts in the middle of a parking lot.