Domestic Left #48: Valley and ridge, history and memory
Driving the Lincoln Highway (more or less) across Pennsylvania
Last month I had occasion to drive back and forth (or, perhaps more accurately, forth and back) across Pennsylvania. As I wasn’t under too much time pressure, and I loathe the Pennsylvania Turnpike more than almost any other road I have ever driven, I opted to take other, less direct routes. Going east, I chose to drive U.S. 30, mostly because it is largely concurrent with the Lincoln Highway.
The Lincoln Highway was the first attempt to create a coast-to-coast highway for automobiles. It was originally conceived in 1912, and formally dedicated in October 1913, but for many years it was more of a publicity campaign than a construction project. It was conceived and promoted not by the federal government, or indeed by any government entity at all, but by the voluntary Lincoln Highway Association, who pleaded and cajoled local authorities to undertake the road improvements that might make it possible for someone to drive across the country. (At the time, long-distance travel was, sensibly, done on the railroads, not in private vehicles.)
While the Lincoln Highway Association was successful in raising some funds from the auto and auto-related industries, a notable refusal was that of Henry Ford, who reasoned that “the public would never learn to fund good roads if private industry did it for them.” A reminder that the auto industry, no less than the railroads, only became successful as a capitalist enterprise thanks to massive public subsidy.
The Lincoln Highway’s original route passes close to my apartment, but since it crossed the Allegheny River on a bridge that no longer exists, I opted to join it in Polish Hill, where it runs along Bigelow Boulevard. It follows Bigelow’s spectacular curve skirting The Hill neighborhood, then takes a left on Baum through my old neighborhood of Bloomfield.
Baum Boulevard used to be known as “Automobile Row” for its density of auto-related businesses — and, indeed, it still boasts several dealerships along the blocks just east of Bigelow. But it once was home to more than dealerships — from 1915 to 1932, the Ford Motor Company not only sold but assembled Model T’s in an eight-story combination factory and showroom at the corner of Baum and Morewood. That building has recently been renovated into “The Assembly,” a life-science research hub developed under the aegis of the University of Pittsburgh, yet another bit of shiny eds-and-meds real estate dressing itself in Pittsburgh’s industrial past.
The highway turns right onto Penn Avenue in the center of East Liberty, once the third-largest commercial district in Pennsylvania, after the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh downtowns. (“Third-largest” is perhaps the most common epithet in Pennsylvanian historical memory: my neighborhood of Allegheny City, a separate municipality until Pittsburgh annexed it in 1907, boasts on its historical markers of having once been the state’s third-largest city.)
The Lincoln Highway was called “The Main Street Across America” long before Route 66 made its claim to be “America’s Main Street.” The modern Route 30 avoids the main business districts of towns like Bedford and Everett, and the cities of York and Lancaster entirely, circumventing them as a four-lane, limited-access freeway. But when the Lincoln Highway was being conceived, local towns wanted the highway to route traffic along their main streets, to bring customers and prosperity to their commercial centers. And people who chose to forego the comfort of the railroads to traverse the country in their flimsy Model T’s presumably wanted to see some local character.
Today local character can certainly still be found along the route, but it isn’t always charming, or prosperous. East Liberty is gentrifying, but there are still empty storefronts next to the macaron boutiques, visible scars of the massive depopulation Pittsburgh suffered in the 1980s as steel mills closed and whole tracts of abandoned houses in some neighborhoods began to revert to field and forest. Wilkinsburg, the boro that the Lincoln Highway passes through after it leaves the city, is simply depressing, pawn shops and hair salons clinging for dear life to crumbling brick structures.
Mostly, though, a lot of what the Lincoln Highway passes through today evokes no visible history whatsoever. It is the world created by the automobile, and thus in some sense by the Lincoln Highway itself: the endless strip malls and convenience stores of Westmoreland County, the infamous strip of fast-food restaurants and gas stations in Breezewood, the prosperous, bland, bespoke suburbs along Lancaster Avenue outside of Philadelphia. From your car window, you would have no idea that the Edgewood Towne Center mall in Swissvale was once the site of a heroic, eight-month strike by UE Local 610 in the early 80s, a rare and successful fight against the concessions that dominated that era, when capital was hell-bent on destroying the working-class livelihoods that kept the Main Streets of America alive.
Past Latrobe, Route 30 and the Lincoln Highway climb up into the Laurel Highlands and the Allegheny Mountains, and I finally began to love the land of Pennsylvania. The Turnpike passes through the highlands, too, but in the cold, distant manner of an interstate hurrying to get there from here. The Lincoln Highway, on the other hand, meanders leisurely along Loyalhanna Creek, the tall trees close to the road creating a curved and curiously intimate cathedral.
The Laurel Highlands are the highest part of Pennsylvania, and on the day in January I drove through them that meant that the rain and wintry mix I had been driving through soon turned to snow, a somewhat dicey prospect on a two-lane road winding through mountains. Thankfully, both the precipitation and the traffic were light — no exasperated locals whipping around my slow-moving Japanese import at 60 miles per hour, throwing up slush — and the roads remained reasonably clear, allowing me to appreciate the stark beauty of snow floating down and settling in thin lines on bare tree limbs, a perfect impressionist painting of winter.
Past Stoystown lies the Flight 93 National Memorial, marking the spot where the terrorist-hijacked plane bound for the White House on September 11, 2001 was brought down by its own passengers. I might have stopped had it not come up so suddenly in the snow.
The eastern edge of the mountains is marked by a steep escarpment known as the Allegheny Front, and the views out into the valley as the Lincoln Highway descends towards Schellsburg are breathtaking.
East of the Allegheny Front lie the long corrugations of earth running southwest to northeast that make road maps of central Pennsylvania look like a loose net being cast down towards Harrisburg. Known as the Valley and Ridge province, it was formed by the folding, faulting and overthrusting of the earth’s crust some 300 million years ago, the intense pressure and heat compressing the recently-deposited bituminous coal into its harder and hotter-burning cousin, anthracite.
The Turnpike simply barrels through the ridges in a series of tunnels; the Lincoln Highway climbs over some and passes through others at water gaps, river-cut openings that predate the buckling of the earth. U.S. 22, which I drove on my westward journey, mostly follows the Juniata River between Harrisburg and Altoona, but just west of Lewistown it climbs up into the mountains through a series of cuts that reveal the curvature of the rock, hard quartzite layers, separated by thin black seams, bent U-shaped like a swimming noodle.
The Valley and Ridge Province also had rich iron deposits, which in the late 1700s gave rise to a thriving iron industry in the Juniata region, powered by charcoal from the thick forests that blanketed the area.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, the Juniata iron industry fell victim to the greater efficiency of anthracite-powered iron production to the east, and the rise of steelmaking to the west. Now all that remains are a few historical markers by the roadside.
You will probably not be surprised to learn that the Lincoln Highway — the first national memorial to the 16th President — goes through Gettysburg. I had not been intending to stop there — I visited the national military park as a preteen with my family, and even as a kid with a fairly keen interest in military history, I found it pretty boring. But while approaching town I desperately needed a restroom, and the first one available was at a small visitors center near McPherson Ridge, where the battle began.
The thing that struck me after I walked across Route 30 to check out the monuments was their seeming randomness. There is a statue of General John Buford, who played an important role on the first day of the battle but commanded merely a single division of one of the nine corps on the Union side. There is a memorial to “Hall’s 2nd Maine Battery,” whose casualties totaled two men killed and 18 wounded, less than one-tenth of one percent of the overall Union casualties, which topped 23,000. (Confederate casualties were perhaps 50 percent more.)
After five or ten minutes wandering among them, and catching glimpses of other monuments to the north and south, across what seemed to be fields where corn or some other crop is actively farmed, I belatedly realized that these statues and pillars were erected, not to welcome modern automotive tourists to the site of a great battle, but to memorialize specific men where they triumphed or fell, not unlike the Flight 93 memorial back up the road.
For the most part I stayed on Route 30 even when it diverged from the route of the Lincoln Highway. But one place where I made a point of following the historic route was in East Pittsburgh, where a right exit swoops left over the highway and then down into the Turtle Creek valley. As Electric Avenue enters the small downtown, a vast gray building looms ahead, the former Westinghouse East Pittsburgh Works.
This plant was the site of another civil war of sorts, as the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the federal government, the Catholic church and the Congress of Industrial Organizations sought to replace the militant UE Local 601 with the more compliant International Union of Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers (IUE). The struggle was literally (in one sense) fratricidal: brothers Tom and Mike Fitzpatrick were leaders of, respectively, the UE and IUE forces in the plant. The IUE prevailed narrowly in 1950 with the assistance of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which aided the IUE’s red-baiting of UE by subpoenaing Tom Fitzpatrick and other UE leaders to testify at hearings in the run-up to the representation election.
There are no monuments to those who fought this battle, only the shell of a vast factory that once employed tens of thousands of workers, and which Westinghouse closed in 1986 with, so far as I can tell, no fight from the IUE.
Allentown, Pennsylvania, is perhaps the most famous victim of deindustrialization outside of Pittsburgh and Detroit, thanks to Billy Joel’s 1982 song. (The song was apparently inspired not by Allentown, but by nearby Bethlehem, a former steel town which took even more of a beating in the 80s, but the name “Allentown” fit better into the melody Joel has already written.)
Allentown is not on the Lincoln Highway, or anywhere near it — it’s on Route 22, and I stopped there on my westward drive. It is currently the third-largest city in Pennsylvania.
It does not seem to be doing too bad these days. The downtown, where I stopped for breakfast, coffee, an hour or two of work and a short walk, was not exactly bustling on a Thursday morning, but it wasn’t abandoned. The handsome, 24-story art deco building that dominates the city’s skyline is being sold by the utility company that built it nearly a century ago, but the business press seems optimistic that it will be profitably repurposed as luxury housing.
The neighborhood immediately west of downtown seems to be one of those neighborhoods
is so fond of, blue-collar enclaves where immigrants live in well-kept homes in aging buildings, work hard in the service industry, open small shops and restaurants, and live lives “out in public, in a way that most well-to-do, well-educated Americans find embarrassing.” I heard as much Spanish as English, and the streets were plastered with posters for an upcoming concert by Dominican rapper El Alfa in nearby Reading.The Lincoln Highway does go through two medium-sized, formerly industrial cities in the middle of the state, York and Lancaster, and I drove through both of them on the other variance from Route 30 that I took. Pennsylvania Route 462 follows the original route of the Lincoln Highway, becoming Market Street in downtown York and King Street in downtown Lancaster. I didn’t stop in Lancaster, but I did stop in York for lunch, finding some of the best felafel I have ever had in a small Egyptian hole-in-the-wall restaurant and strolling around downtown. Like Allentown, there wasn’t much going on midday on a Monday, but the commercial real estate seemed full of functioning businesses, and the buildings were well-maintained.
I stopped to read a historical marker commemorating William Parker, an escaped slave who passed through York in the 1840s before settling in the small town of Christiana, some 40 miles to the east. Parker’s home became a station on the Underground Railroad; in 1851 a slaveowner from Maryland showed up with an armed posse looking for his “property,” who were in fact at Parker’s house. Parker’s (presumably mostly white) neighbors came to his defense, and shot and killed the slaveowner. They were charged with treason but acquitted.
East of Lancaster Route 30 runs more or less flat through Amish country. It was late afternoon as I drove this stretch and the sun had come out, the farms and fields bathed in the soft light of the golden hour. It felt like driving through a publicity video, every shot carefully composed to create the impression of a simpler time and life, like driving through that idealized country of small farmers and artisanal producers, proudly independent of, and in their own imagination prior to, both capital and labor, that has such a powerful hold on the American imagination.
At least it felt that way until I came across the 1.2-million square foot Urban Outfitters distribution center in Gap, Pennsylvania, built ten years ago and now creating chronic congestion in this unincorporated community of less than 2,000 people. A quick perusal of the internet indicates that the center was, on balance, welcomed by locals, despite their concerns, for the sake of the thousand-plus jobs it would bring, packing and unpacking garments made by far-away hands, the latest buckling and folding of the social fabric as capital and people move.
With one of my favorite obscure-80s-bands-turned-middle-aged-dad-rockers Too Much Joy having just released a song called “Lincoln Highway,” I couldn’t not make a playlist for this issue. But I just did a playlist mostly about driving in January, so, other than the TMJ “title track” as it were, this playlist is more a collection of songs about cars. Or, in other words, adventure, status, sex, swagger, heartbreak, longing, death, and despair.
I first learned about the Lincoln Highway when I watched Noah Caldwell-Gervais’s YouTube travelogue/documentary about it last summer. Caldwell-Gervais is a YouTuber who mostly does long-form reviews of video games, a world utterly foreign to me, but his 7 1/2 hour account of driving the Lincoln Highway in a 1978 Ford Thunderbird is surprisingly fascinating, especially given that the whole thing is simply him reading a script over, essentially, dashcam footage. If you’re curious but don’t want to commit to the whole thing, the Pennsylvania section starts at 5:34 and includes some nice footage of Baum and Penn Boulevards and East Pittsburgh.
Writing obituaries is ... not my favorite part of my job, especially when they are of people I worked with and knew. During the three years I served on the UE General Executive Board, from 2001-2004, I got to know both Bob Rudek from Local 1111 in Milwaukee and John Lambiase from District Six in Western Pennsylvania. Bob was solid and thoughtful, John enthusiastic and full of energy, both of them selfless and completely committed to what was best for the members and the working-class as a whole.
Both of them retired in 2008 and by all accounts enjoyed their retirements, but still, they are honored dead and I hope that in memorializing them I can encourage us all to take increased devotion to the cause to which they gave so much of their lives.