You know, I was aware of that song but I never really paid attention to it. Never liked Billy Joel or the whole \u201880s working-man\u2019s rock thing anyway.
I should clarify that the Pennsylvania I grew up in wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s R5 line, it\u2019d 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 \u201ccorn as high as an elephant\u2019s eye\u201d line from Oklahoma!, though it\u2019s 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 \u201cMcMansion\u201d, 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 \u201cresort town\u201d designation that lifted Pennsylvania\u2019s per-population cap on liquor licenses. You go back to the center of town today it\u2019s all signs and facades and streetlights that just drip \u201chistoric\u201d - which is funny because I first encountered them clad in \u201870s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2018Nam.
One thing that struck me was just the steepness of the density gradient of these places built before the automotive era. You\u2019d be passing through hills, and fields, and over small bridges over creeks, and then there\u2019d be this huge rusty coking plant, smokestacks rising to the sky, girded with pipes running everywhere, looking for all the world like\u2026 \u2026well like a fucking coking plant, I guess, that wasn\u2019t a thing we had a reference for, maybe the 1989 Batman or Madonna\u2019s \u201cExpress Yourself\u201d video. The outlying edges of cities looked about the level of suburban density we\u2019d expect but when you\u2019d hit the center you\u2019d 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\u2019t 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.
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