Today's one-liner: "The shortest way to the distinguishing excellence of any writer is through his hostile critics." Richard LeGallienne
Local Government TV
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Saturday, January 10, 2009
Lehigh Valley's Not So Distant Past
Above is a brief glimpse at the Lehigh Valley, when Steel was King.
30 comments:
You own views are appreciated, especially if they differ from mine. But remember, commenting is a privilege, not a right. I will delete personal attacks or off-topic remarks at my discretion. Comments that play into the tribalism that has consumed this nation will be declined. So will comments alleging voter fraud unless backed up by concrete evidence. If you attack someone personally, I expect you to identify yourself. I will delete criticisms of my comment policy, vulgarities, cut-and-paste jobs from other sources and any suggestion of violence towards anyone. I will also delete sweeping generalizations about mainstream parties or ideologies, i.e. identity politics. My decisions on these matters are made on a case by case basis, and may be affected by my mood that day, my access to the blog at the time the comment was made or other information that isn’t readily apparent.
That's hard to believe...
ReplyDeleteBased on the cars it looked like 1949-1953 vintage. Nice shot of Hamilton Street, long before the animals.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, and yet, depressing. My old man ran an Evening Call-Chronicle newsstand at 9th and Hamilton. He said streets bustled with theater goers and ladies wore hats on Saturday night.
ReplyDeleteChange isn't always for the better.
Bernie ---- awesome post and video clip!! Wow have we changed here. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThat's why those who pretend things are so wonderful are only deluding themselves. True, we are more tolerant and have more diversity now than ever. But everything else is a step backwards. Bethlehem seems to have done the best job of coping with the changes. Easton is just starting, now that Panto, a realist, is in charge. But A-town remains a mess. The mayor props up a few restaurants with public money and hopes like hell that at least one of them will stay in business until he gets re-elected. Only in A-town can a mayor brag about a surplus based on borrowed money. A-town's biggest problem, public safety, has been ignored for years by a mayor who has instead spent his time rewarding campaign contributors like Cityline or Zawarski with city work or KOZ classifications.
ReplyDeleteI posted the comment at 9:27, which shows up anonymously for some reason. Sorry about that, but I am the guilty party.
ReplyDeleteBernie,
ReplyDeleteGreat clip. As a former steel worker it was great to see the images that are a part of my mind. Thank you again. Bill
PS - Try to stop picking on the A-Town Mayor. He is doing the best he can with a difficult situation that he inherited.
Bill,
ReplyDeleteThanks. I look forward to seeing you when you invade Northampton County next week, unless Assault team leader Dougherty is holding you in reserve.
Bill, about the only nice thing you can really say about Pawlowski, and that's only if you're a Democrat, is that he is a Democrat. Other than that, he's a terrible mayor, mostly because he has ignored the peoiple who need his help most - the working poor.
This is a guy who can't seem to file a campaign finace report, when he does file one, without screwing it up. This is a guy so acerbic that most other Democrats can't stomach the guy. He has inherited a lot of problems, true, but he was part of the administration that helped create them. For most of his first three years in office, he tried to pretend there is no crime problem, ironically holding a fundraiser on the very night that three people are shot just blocks away.
The best thing that could happen to Democrats is that one of them stand up against him. But he has raised too much money from the special interests who placed him there.
Now most of his support comes from people who expect something aside from good government.
Well there was another good video about Hess's as well [PBS39].
ReplyDeleteIt's 58 minutes long.
"Hollywood On Hamilton"
Just click on my name
Glenn, Thankks for the link. I saw that program and it was one of the local PBS' best efforts.
ReplyDeleteAfter the video, I clicked on one of the other videos that popped up. It was a PBS special on Steel that I've seen before. It was sadly ironic to watch as it boasts of the bridges, scrapers, and military machinery built with steel from "the Steel."
ReplyDeleteAnd now part of our national conversation is about the need to rebuild our infrastructure. What steel are we going to use? Japanese, German, or Russian? And speaking of our military needs, could you imagine if a conflict of global nature broke out, and we couldn't import from all the different industries we let die in our own country? We could NEVER fight a WW II now, but I guess we are not expecting too....
We let rest of the world manufacture for us, so we can be a consumer nation.....and we turn around and borrow from the rest of the world, so we can be a consumer nation....and, now our leaders are trying not to let the economic ground beneath us totally collapse. How vulnerable we are.
Speaking of...you could take a peek at "MY" satirical video ["The Way I Remember It"] about growing up in Allentown [9:24minutes].
ReplyDeleteJust click on my name to watch "MY" video.
Thanks for sharing the clip Bernie. Brought back some fond memories, but also some unpleasant ones. Growing up in Bethlehem we shared in that industry's prosperity, but also its rancid pollution of the air and waterways. There were many hard-working steelworkers, led by a union that was only concerned with its preservation. It was a bloated, inefficient workforce. Management milked the company for all it was worth as well. Steel's downfall in Bethlehem was predictable but no one seemed to care. Now all we have are hulking, rusted blast furnace towers and an illogical desire to worship the legacy of Bethlehem Steel. Life goes on. I really don't miss the "good old days" of dirty air and industrial excesses. The Lehigh Valley has changed, in my opinion for the better. We should focus on what we can do to restore the glory of our inner cities rather than pine for the past.
ReplyDeleteThat was Hamilton street the truck was driving to the big dept store?
ReplyDeleteI was born in 1979, so it was kinda before my time.
Hamilton street looked more like 248 south of Slatington!
I clicked on the "Allentown fairground hotel" video.
Not sure where that was on the fairgrounds.
I could tell you where to get good smoked beef sticks at the farmers market.
I could tell you where I stood when I saw Ween and the Flaming Lips at the fairgrounds.
But no clue where a Hotel could have been.
And your correct about Panto.
ReplyDeleteThe mayor he came after (twice) "Positive" Phil Mitman, well he was a joke.
If it wasn't paying some private group to look into it for him with tax payer dollars.
It was his logic building up Condos galore would save the city. (Over looking the lack of jobs in the valley to afford these condos, and the lack of businiesses to drive the prices as high as they wanted.)
What happened to this idiot of basic bussiness? He is CEO and president of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp.
Wonder why business is fucked in the Valley ask a resident of Easton!
Spike,
ReplyDeleteI believe the "Fairgrounds Hotel" is still there at 17th and Liberty. Those first shots seem to be looking out across 17th St and east on Liberty.
All medical buildings now.
Bernie, I wasn't even born yet but every time I see these clips and old photos I often wish I could go back in time and just feel, for a moment, what the excitement must have been like on Hamilton Street. It seemed to be like a little NYC. I understand why so many wane nostalgic and complain loudly; because to fall from such glory to the present is UNBELIEVABLE ! It almost seems the Allentown of the past and the Allentown of the present are two different places. If it weren't for the never-changing building structures, I wouldn't believe they were the same location.
ReplyDeleteIn a sad sense of irony, you can compare the situation to the ending clip of the movie,
Planet of The Apes, when Charlton Heston realizes that he was not on a different planet, just in a different time. I believe this is how many of the original Allentonians feel.
Alfonso Todd
I stumbled across that neat little video on youtube and wanted to share it. I'll have another tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny. When you see the older video, you think "little NYC." Today, I saw a 7 minute video by an ex-Allentonian who comes in and points out all the blight and decay. In his mind, Allentown's present is a "little NYC" too, but he speaks of "hardened" people, etc.
I like Allentown people and know a few bc of my grandson's involvement in youth sports. They are not hard at all. The kids are REALLY great. But the story that you told depicts what is going on. A lot of people, many of them Hispanic (and perhaps not legal), are taken for a ride. I felt so bad for that mom and dad, with a three year old child, who lost their home.
The area has been invaded by the non-working crimminal class. They have made Allentown a slum. Until there is a way to get the crime heavy thugs out of the City there will be no peace.
ReplyDeleteAh diversity what a wonderful thing to behold from the hills of Emmaus.
Anon 5:58,
ReplyDeleteDo not make the mistake of concluding that, because a high percentage of crime comes from Hispanics, it necessarily follows that diversity must be the cause. That is illogical, but many fall prey to that type of thinking.
People with no education and no job skills are the ones most likely to engage in criminal behavior. In A-town, where most of the housing consists of cheap rentals, people with little education and job skills are attracted. Molovinsky calls it a poverty magnet. I did not get it at first, but understand his thinking now.
Ideally, diversity will expand the working base and education level in an area. That is not the problem.
Bernie, good catch. Things really have changed. And some for the better. Seems prudent for all to keep that in mind.
ReplyDeleteYou can be poor but be a decent person. some people blame poverty for acting and living like animals. Education is freely available courtesy of the taxpaying home owners. If the animals fail to take advantage of it, if the so-called parents AKA babbimommas and babbidaddis live like animals, who's fault is that.
ReplyDeletePeople have lived poor for centuries but can also live clean and decent.
Diversity in Allentown has breed criminal filth. Smoke that in you logic pipe while you smoke dope and sing kumbaya
"You can be poor but be a decent person."
ReplyDeleteWhat do you know about being a decent person? Anyone who refers to other human beings the way you do is not decent.
There is also no way you can claim that ASD offers an education. The teachers there are not properly funded and many of the students do not stay in one place long enough to learn anything.
The MC Reader Forum allows this filth. I won't. I will delete any additional bigotry from you.
anon 12:17 thanks!
ReplyDeleteBeing born in 1979 and never being in Allentown until George HW Bush was President.
I wish I could have seen Allentown before then.
Funny thing growing up all we heard about the Valley was how dangerous Easton was.
I ended up moving to Easton and finding it was safer than my hometown where I grew up.
I can't wait to be back in 18042!
Congrats to LVR for stoking the flames of bigotry as he points out Allentown's "step backwards."
ReplyDeleteIt is sad that we have posters on this blog that refer to other humans as "animals."
"Congrats to LVR for stoking the flames of bigotry as he points out Allentown's 'step backwards.'"
ReplyDeleteI post a video about the LV from not so long ago, depicting Hess's, and that's fanning the flames of bigotry? Only in twisted little minds like yours.
In the words of Eddie Vedder:
ReplyDelete"Id rather be...
Id rather be with...
Id rather be with an animal
Id rather be...
Id rather be with...
Id rather be with an animal"
How is Princess Polowski's homeless commission doing?
ReplyDeleteGreat film....the shot of Hamilton Street, circa 1950 was telling. May younger viewers will have a problem understanding our small cities 1950 style and today's versions. The bustling city seen in the grainy film shows a pre-Interstate, pre-suburban, pre-mall America. In those days, you lived on a farm OR in a city. There were no suburbs.
ReplyDeleteToday's Allentown is the result of the unexpected decline caused by the middle-class exodus from the city. It took about 35 years, but the seeds for Atown's demise were planted when we built extensive highways, did away with the trolley, encouraged people of means (middle class) to move to "new" communities, miles away from the central cities. In building these scattered cities away from cities, a new shopping infrastructure was needed. Shopping centers/malls sprang up, proving that you did not need cities anymore. Business parks followed. The exodus of money and jobs from Allentown was combined with an influx of poor renters. Allentown bears little resemblence to the city shown on the film. It's less robust, less wealthy, less clean, less everything except poor.
The same thing has happened to every eastern US city. It's just that some cities battle back better. Leadership is critical.
Forgot to "sign" -
ReplyDeleteVOR