> When the steel industry suffered it's upheaval, Pennsylvania took a real beating. Steel was the computer industry of eighty years ago: it meant the future, and job security was guaranteed. When it went under, it took families and whole towns with it, including mine.
>
> However, that was the mid-seventies, like you said. Philadelphia (and Pittsburgh) lost many of its oldest families when the steel mills closed, but would that still affect it now?
>
Yes, I'd think so, because: 1) It's like ripples in a pond. they keep spreading outward for a long time 2)have any significant new industries filled in the gap? If you're not growing, you're dying, they say.. the technological companies that *have* been the economic growth areas in the last 10 years are not so geographically tied to a particular area in the same sense that steel, coal, etc are; they can basically locate anywhere so tend to locate around each other so they can access the same skilled labor pool. I guess the steel belt didn't meet that criterion, or have the luck to be the seminal area for computer technology.

Eh, I don't think I'm articulating very well here, but yeah, I do think it's still effecting the area today.



> > koala"...and I'm living here in Allentown, where they've taken all the coal from the ground..."mom
>
> You know that song was actually about Bethlehem, the town adjoined to Allentown? Billy Joel just thought that Allentown sounded better.

I didn't know that. Good choice, because you say "Bethlehem" and most people think "Christmas".


Bethlehem is also the home of the JustBorn factory, where they make those Peeps. Maybe that's where all the steel workers went, they're all making chickens out of sugar.

...wow, you ought to offer that up to the Poetry Pool...the imagery of these men of steel, now hammering out, er, marshmellows...
>
> The steel mills are still standing in Bethlehem, and they look really eerie.
>
> ---The sugar-covered beast slouching towards Bethlehem

koala"going to have to buy some Peeps now"mom