Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Yeah, Scranton area is kind of an extreme commuter area now for the NYC region, so there's finally some growth. Lots of commuter buses, and a long-planned rail link. It's extremely cheap compared to closer-in suburbia.
I'd assume places like Scranton were declining 100 years ago bc mining and the railroads started declining. Pretty sure that area was economically dependent on mining and railroads.
But yeah, at some point Scranton was pretty important. The rail corridor between NYC and Scranton, called the Lackawanna Cutoff, is arguably one of the most impressive on earth. When it was built, it was considered and engineering wonder.
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I opened a thread about metro areas that declined and as usual, we end up focusing on the major ones. However, organizing those lists, I found many examples of those very early urban declines and surprise, surprise: all in Britain. Same story: very early industrialization, coal-focused economy. The British also had their frontier on the British Empire, sucking people out. And as their rural exodus ended in the mid-19th century or so, cities were the ones providing emigrants.
Personally to me, Rust Belt is a very fascinating as I live in a country with not a big old industrial heritage and of course, my father's family business is on farming, lived in a dynamic agribusiness city, now live in a big, dynamic metropolis. And when we travel abroad, we'll obviously focus on the touristic hotspots. I see pics of those coal towns in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and it's the most exotic thing to me.