Dude, who even knows.
Post with 13 notes
DID YOU KNOW: Pennsylvania was the first and for a while the biggest petroleum-producing region in America, a heritage reflected in the brand names of Pennzoil and Quaker State motor oil?
Question with 10 notes
paleglanceaustereface asked: My impression was that the Eastern corridor/ area around Philadelphia was mostly doing fine and also Pittsburgh and maybe a little bit around it was. And that p much all the other cities were kind of rustbelty and doing bad, and the rest of the state not so good as well. How much do you know about other Rust Belt places, like, could you tell me about Buffalo? Any others that spring to mind/you'd think it'd be good to talk about?
You strip out my tone of elegaic cynicism, that’s more or less right.
Once Philadelphia, and then middle-class professional NY and DC started decanting into the Philly suburbs you ended up with a big enough educated work pool to start building corporate offices right there. Allentown is about 90 minutes to Manhattan competitive with some of the Hudson Valley towns that are seeing interest, with a lower cost of living. So it’s hoping to follow the same path though who knows whether all the vacant office space will make up for the fact you can’t catch a convenient flight to anywhere.
Legacy of a heavy industrial economy, Pittsburgh has a bunch of educational institutions with a specialization in technical fields, plus the barons left a pretty strong high-cultural infrastructure and with everyone remembering why they liked cities that relatively cheap one isn’t too hard to recruit skilled workers to.
Philly in some ways is becoming a sort of overflow valve for New York - artists, professional services who want a city, like the cheaper cost of living, and could always take Amtrak up to an art opening or deal closing anyway. As corporate law firms merge into national conglomerates they’re putting more stuff there for similar reasons. A decade or so ago the state picked up the Philly school district (which, like DC’s, had been run as kind of a jobs program for the black middle class, underperforming on student metrics, and a big barrier to expanding the tax base by drawing affluent professional families back to the city), smashed it against the wall and set it on a glide path to be replaced by chains of charters. The state’s currently in the middle of a fight over school funding that honestly I don’t understand, that might mess with that.
The “medicalization” of the economy isn’t *just* going to community college to change bedpans (though it is definitely that). Teaching and research hospitals, a lot hooking into the Pittsburgh chemical/educational institutions I mentioned.
One subtle thing there is that between Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements for services; HHS and HRSA grants for training and working institutions; and students with federal grants, (potentially forgiveable or dischargeable) loans, scholarships, the NHSC, etc., cranking up medical intensity is an effective way to draw federal funds into the state economy, not unlike Murtha’s military pork.
So it’s not a hellpit, but there’s still problems.
One, I mean, when the great working-class statewide economy left, they replaced it with a decent urban professional economy, which I guess is nice if you’re an urban-based professional or their service provider, anywhere else you’re still pretty much fucked.
Two, I don’t know how stable this stuff is long-term. A big chunk of the Philadelphia economy is basically Comcast, which tried to merge with Time Warner two years ago, and Pittsburgh counts on pharmaceutical companies that are always merging and streamlining and what what. And all the corporate expansion is underlain by tax rebates, “enterprise zones”, etc., etc. where governments underbid each other to host or retain the tax base.
I mean, not like the old industrial behemoths didn’t hold or misuse the whip hand - the Coal and Iron Police, for fuck’s sake - but the mines were there, the mills were there, it’s not like they were leaving in a snit.
I’ve been around upstate New York when I was at Cornell, but it’s not really something I know that well.
Question with 15 notes
paleglanceaustereface asked: ell we're living here in AllentownAnd they're closing all the factories downOut in Bethlehem they're killing timeFilling out formsStanding in lineWell our fathers fought the Second World WarSpent their weekends on the Jersey ShoreMet our mothers in the USOAsked them to danceDanced with them slowAnd we're living here in AllentownBut the restlessness was handed downAnd it's getting very hard to stayWell we're waiting here in AllentownFor the Pennsylvania we never found. What's your opinion on it?
You know, I was aware of that song but I never really paid attention to it. Never liked Billy Joel or the whole ‘80s working-man’s rock thing anyway.
I should clarify that the Pennsylvania I grew up in wasn’t all that beat down. Thrived during my tenure, even.
I grew up in Doylestown - the seat of Bucks County directly north of Philly at the end of SEPTA’s R5 line, it’d been around since colonial times so had an actual town center, though when I showed up it was a little hollowed out by shopping centers and malls. Longstanding summer retreat for Broadway and other New York arts folks - I can point out the field that inspired the “corn as high as an elephant’s eye” line from Oklahoma!, though it’s an office park now. Henry Mercer and his Moravian tile and concrete castles, the Pennsylvania Impressionists nearby in New Hope.
As Philadelphia emptied out of the middle class, the farms in the surrounding communities became subdivisions, bolstered by tax refugees from the New Jersey pharmaceutical and telecom industries. Toll Brothers, the pioneers of the “McMansion”, were based locally, which means that as new classmates moved in and I visited their houses I noticed each new innovation in the form as it appeared - the 3 car garages, the vaulted entranceways, the vaulted living rooms with rear stairs and balcony.
Doylestown being the existing regional center (and not as crowded as New Hope) aimed at becoming the nightlife and cultural hub for all this, and seems to have hit the mark - built an art museum and library in the old prison, got a “resort town” designation that lifted Pennsylvania’s per-population cap on liquor licenses. You go back to the center of town today it’s all signs and facades and streetlights that just drip “historic” - which is funny because I first encountered them clad in ‘70s modernism - boutiques for the kind of people that send their daughters to riding lessons. The duplexes and modest homes on the hill by the old rivet factory and the Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks plant (the first became a parts warehouse for a local car dealership chain, the second was torn down to build a garage for the courthouse, which was in turn torn down to build a new courthouse AND garage) being bought up and torn down and built out to the lot lines.
FOR ALL THAT, I did one time head up to Allentown, driving with my friends one summer day because modems were still 33.6k and that’s what we did when we were bored. Headed to see what it was like, and the biblical cities - Bethlahem and Nazareth - and Hellertown, where our AP Physics teacher grew up and turned into this whole mythology for example problems - shooting rats in the quarry, riding the roller coasters at Dorney Park, his buddy flying a helicopter in ‘Nam.
One thing that struck me was just the steepness of the density gradient of these places built before the automotive era. You’d be passing through hills, and fields, and over small bridges over creeks, and then there’d be this huge rusty coking plant, smokestacks rising to the sky, girded with pipes running everywhere, looking for all the world like… …well like a fucking coking plant, I guess, that wasn’t a thing we had a reference for, maybe the 1989 Batman or Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video. The outlying edges of cities looked about the level of suburban density we’d expect but when you’d hit the center you’d have an incongruous few blocks that looked like someone dumped a bit of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, tall stone and brick hotels and offices.
We agreed the plant would be a great place to play paintball, went to Hellertown and this ball field that was part of the mythology, there was a little league game going and the concession stand was open, had some ice cream. The place was depressing. It wasn’t menacing or decayed like Kensington or West Philly, just depressing in the way cloudless days in winter make the blue sky itself a bit grey. Before the Doylestown retail economy picked back up in the mid-90s, I was used to houses and businesses that looked like they last updated in 1982, there even the clean and well-lit stuff looked like 1967.
Post with 24 notes
Everyone knows about “y'all”, but did y'all know that Pennsylvania’s 2 major cities each have their own second person plural pronouns - “youse” and “yinz”?
Question with 35 notes
Anonymous asked: Explain why Pennsylvania was horsewhipped and was falling part? How high Iof a chance a new state would be created out of it?
(re:)
Well a lot of it was Pennsylvania is the keystone (Pennsylvania humor!) of the Rust Belt - where iron meets coal to make steel, which was the purpose of Pittsburgh and the whole SW corner of the state, plus Allentown and the Lehigh Valley in the east. Anthracite mines to feed the steel plants, the Great Lakes manufacturing complex the plants fed in turn.
There’s that, and then there’s farmland - not the best soil or access, and too hilly to improve much but hey it’s a sure thing the great eastern metropolises HAVE to grow nearby for freshness, right, right, right? (The Amish and Mennonites have actually been expanding their holdings recently tho, the land works just fine for their needs.)
Then finally there’s Philadelphia, which was there because it commanded the Delaware and thus the Delaware Water Gap past the Appalachians, which hasn’t mattered since the Erie Canal and railroads, and at this point is mostly there because Philadelphia was there. White flight, black crime, the underlying fundamentals that “five-story brick buildings in proximity to rail spurs, non-containerized docks, and dense labor-identifying neighborhoods” was no longer an appealing industrial model. At least it still had some finance and culture and tourist and professional stuff to hold onto, Camden and Trenton across the river in Jersey became - and as far as I can tell still are - absolute hellpits.
Course a big swath of the center of the state is the northern edge of Appalachia, which has always meant marginal farmland, rough coalfields, and poverty in the best of times.
And so, piece by piece, all of that fell apart in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, and it just never came back again. (The state’s federal representatives were pretty agile at propping it up with pork - rural parts of the state are famous for their constant road work and John Murtha in charge of defense appropriations did a lot, but then the end of the Cold War, the parties changed and committees were leashed in the Republican Revolution of 1994, and BRAC deliberately took the draw-down out of legislators’ hands).
Now you hear happy talk about building a new economy on services, medicine, education, research. What this means is the eastern flank of the state is becoming a bedroom community for New York down to DC (mostly providing the services of comparatively low taxes and reliably white classmates) while the rest of the population is left to age and die in place while their kids go to nursing school to change their bedpans.
If you’ve got your shit together you can become a teacher, or a cop, or an addiction counselor. If you’ve got it especially together you can become their supervisor or trainer! (If you don’t, you can become their client.)
If you live by the Marcellus Shale you can get into fracking, if you don’t mind your tapwater catching fire (ha, like you’ve got a choice).
If you live in Philly and have some connections and you’re into that thing you can get in on the great white Urban Renaissance, all the long hard work of repressing the negroes finally paying off (long before Giuliani Time there was Frank Rizzo and Ed Rendell).
If you’re the ambitious type, probably you leave.
But there’s always Penn State football.
Page 3 of 3