Scene on the Road

I'm on assignment for the newspaper in Wyoming and Wayne Counties photographing Arlen Specter's own annual road trip during the U.S. Senate’s August recess. He's visiting constituents all over Pennsylvania. After staying overnight, I decide (because I didn't get very far on Route 309 last week) to skip the upper Northeast Extension, and drive back south to Philadelphia on 309 toward Allentown.

I remember my first drive through the coal region of Pennsylvania when I arrived at the Inquirer in the early 80's - think Billy Joel's "Allentown" or Bruce Springsteen's anything to get in the right mindset. I was coming here after living in Kansas City and Dallas - think J.R. Ewing and Southfork Ranch - so it really was like I was entering a parallel universe. I was especially amazed at how close to the road all the houses were in the small towns.

Twenty years later, driving along the mountains of Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, I marvel at how, like almost everywhere else in America now, the interstate passes shopping complexes and malls with the same Starbucks, Borders, Target, Panera Bread, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Williams Sonoma you see in the big cities.

But many of the smaller town sights that first intrigued me - the huge culm banks of waste coal, rusted machinery and old breakers along the roadways - are still around as I head south toward the Eckley Miners' Village, one of the hundreds of company mining towns or "patches" built in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania during the nineteenth century.

So I've got "ghost town" on my mind when, just outside Hazleton, I see an old overgrown parking lot, with three street light poles.

I spend the next half hour wandering the site, shooting close-ups of the weeds winning their battle with the concrete, trying to figure out what this place might have been. There is no large foundation next the lot, so I guess it wasn't a factory or business.

About a hundred yards away, there is an old baseball backstop and a former basketball court, so the best I can surmise is that it might have been a recreation center. But the parking lot seems too large for that, and the field is too far away. The light poles also seem wrong.

As I leave, I find utility worker Don Lynn, of Berwick parked under the shade next to my car, eating his lunch. I ask him, and he certainly remembers the place. It was Angela Park, he tells me, and he was there many times. If you're from Northeast Pennsylvania, you remember it as well. If not, check out Joel W. Styer's website defunctparks.com

Photographers seem to be drawn to abandoned industrial sites, deserted areas and places where other people once - but no longer - worked, lived, or played. The ghost towns are not just in the American West, and photographers all over wander old power plants, railroad yards, factories, hospitals and schools.

I am not encouraging anyone to go anywhere they shouldn't - but if you have any abandoned site photos, please send them to me - as jpeg attachments to roadtrip@phillynews.com - so I can post some here. And be careful. According to the Department of Environmental Protection, twenty-nine people have died while trespassing on Pennsylvania mine sites alone in the past six years.

I was intrigued enough to look around the Web, and these are some of the photographers' sites I liked:

Just up the street from our newspaper, fellow Inquirer photographer Michael S. Wirtz photographed the Divine Lorraine Hotel in North Philadeldphia. It opened in 1894 and was later occupied by Father Divine and the Peace Mission Movement. It will soon be condominiums. Click here for his slide show.

One of many local photographers to shoot inside Eastern State Penitentiary, Dennis W. Felty, says it's "...a very powerful and moving experience. More than any other institution I have visited, you can feel the presence of the individuals who lived their lives in the 8x12 foot cells." His website is: northstargallery.com

Shawn Dufour photographs abandoned sites around Boston and says it's an adolescent compulsion he never grew out of, "like the urge to check out a purportedly haunted house at the end of the block." Photos at: www.abandonedsubwaytunnels.com

Also in New England, photographer Rob Dobi says, "I find as a photographer I am able to give these abandoned structures a second life of sorts, preserving them in a picture for others to see and interpret their history for themselves." Go to photos.dobi.nu/

Driving in the deserts out west at night, Troy Paiva says he "watched with fascination as the countless abandoned and bypassed roadside buildings and towns unreeled in the windshield, dead and forgotten." His Website: www.lostamerica.com/

And finally, Uryevich, in Russia writes, "from my really happy childhood I developed a liking for any rusty metal constructions, cement blocks and for the silence of the wind which walks through this. I like them because there is an infinite life that stays there throughout the years..." www.abandoned.ru/

Now back to the village of Eckley. In 1854, a mining firm leased land from a Philadelphia estate and and began mining Council Ridge. The company built a village for the miners and their families with stores, schools, and churches, exercising enormous control over the lives of their workers as they supplied the economic, educational, and religious needs of the villagers.

Over the years, English, Welsh, and German miners were supplanted by the Irish immigrants and then by southern and eastern Europeans, like everywhere in anthracite region.

Strip mining gradually replaced underground mining. Steam shovels stripped away the land around Eckley as well as part of the village.

The work force and the population of Eckley gradually declined, different mining companies bought and sold the town until 1969 when a group of Hazleton area businessmen purchased it and deeded it to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

It's now part of the Anthracite Museum Complex, which includes the Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum and Scranton Iron Furnaces and the Ashland Museum of Anthracite Mining, all administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. is now a museum devoted to the everyday lives of the anthracite miners and their families, preserving a way of life which dominated the anthracite region for over 140 years.

In the Pennsylvania anthracite coal region that large structure above is called a breaker. This was where the coal was of separated from the rock and slate. It was then crushed into usable pieces and sorted by size. Everywhere else in the world it's called a tipple. You can still see breakers all around the area. This one though, is just a movie prop. It was built - at 1/3 scale - for the 1970 movie, The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris. It has concrete columns inside the facade, but it's an accurate depiction of a 19th century breaker, so the museum kept it.

Albert and Donna Tyson, visiting from Waymart were more impressed by the mine owners' homes. Or rather by the contrast. They lived in the largest, most fashionable houses, located away from the miners' cottages and the village's buildings. Albert, a retired twenty year U.S.Navy veteran told me about one of the Gothic Revival houses as they walked up toward me along the row of worker's house. "The boss lived in a mansion. It's a shame how the people lived, he had three maids and a gardener."

North of Allentown on Route 309, I am drawn to a town on my Pennsylvania road map. There are many reasons why I stop while on the road. Sometimes it's a sign on the side of the highway, sometimes a recommendation, other times just a feeling. This time, it's the name. Hometown.

Whenever anybody every asks me where I'm from, I have a lot of different answers. What I don't have is a hometown.

I have a birthplace, Mt. Clemens, Michigan. I also lived in Duluth, Minnesota, but I left before I can remember anything. By the time I entered kindergarten we were living in D'Iberville, Mississippi, where my family stayed until I was in junior high. During those years we lived in Japan. Then, it was three different high schools: in South Carolina, the Philippines and Nevada.

So, looking at the map, I realize that's something I've always wanted. My own Hometown. Maybe I could claim a part of this one. All I have to do is buy some officially licensed merchandise.

I figure I can find a bumper sticker, or coffee mug, or refrigerator magnet with "My Hometown" on it. Even settle for an "I went to my Hometown and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt," t-shirt.

Turning into what I guess might be a Main street, I stop in at a few businesses. Nothing even close. How is it, I wonder, in this shop 'til you drop country of ours, can there be a consumer demand that isn't being met. Isn't this the most capitalist country in the world? But I'm a photographer, so I can make my own souvenir - a self portrait standing in front of the big, bright, smiling "Welcome to Our Hometown" sign. If I can find one.

Maybe I missed it coming into town, so I drive back out. Maybe, going for inclusiveness, the city mothers and fathers even have a huge "Welcome to YOUR Hometown" sign. More disappointment. There isn't even a "Hometown City Limits."

There is a brand new shopping center with a Wal-Mart. Is it the Hometown Center? Nope, the sign reads" "H.T. Commons." City Hall and/or Police Department? Turns out the municipal building is for something called Rush Township. There is a Hometown Farmers Market on the road out of town, across the road from the Hometown Tavern, but that's it. Finally, after almost giving up, and starting to head back down Route 309, I spot the Pepsi / Hometown Fire Company sign.

Sitting inside the open garage door are firefighters Jim Stewart and Bill Arner.
Not finding any Hometown logo product or worthwhile signage, I'm still looking for at least a good hometown story to take with me. Stewart tells me about "a guy who stopped by, kinda like you, and he said, 'hey, I'm from Hometown too. Hometown, Illinois.'" Was he a firefighter? I ask. Did he want to trade fire patches? "No, he just wanted to say hi." So I turn to Arner. What do people say when you tell them where you're from? "I live in Tamaqua," he answers.

Stewart's grandfather Oscar was the first fire chief, and his garage was the first firehouse, chartered in 1941. They're now the Rush Township Hometown Volunteer Fire Company #1. The old surplus Army Jeep they use for brush fires still has a Hometown sign on the door, but everything else is Rush Township, Stewart tells me. The new trucks sport a frog logo because they are painted with green trim on white - "Kermit on steroids" - Arner jokes,

Behind the trucks, on a bench in the back of the garage, I spot an old bronze World War II memorial plaque, "In honor of the men and women of Hometown..." Stewart takes me outside to show me the brand new replacement plaque, for Rush Township heroes, erected just this year. "They wanted to include everybody, from all the wars, and from all over the township." he tells me.