On July 24, Bob Solomon, Katie Rohner, and their
three children — Sammy (age 13), Phoebe (age 10), and Max (age 8) — started a three-week cross-country trip from their New Haven home to Berkeley, California, where they will spend the fall semester. This is an installment from their occasional journal:
On July 24, we left on our 20 day cross-country trip. Since we had to pick up our daughter Sammy, age 13, at camp in Massachusetts, after six hours on the road, we arrived back in New Haven. Starting out down I‑95 at 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon may not have been the wisest choice, but we had a goal of Bethlehem, PA by Friday night, so we set off. We hit all the predictable traffic, but managed to pull into Bethlehem before dark.
Bethlehem is a depressed town and, as we drove past Bethlehem Steel, it was hard to imagine a more dramatic image of lost jobs than the hulking and rusting plant. Right in the middle, however, was a new casino, a glass cube in the midst of melting vats and factories many times the size of the casino. We drove past, through neighborhoods not unlike New Haven’s, and found a place to stay. The next morning, we had breakfast in the oldest part of town, drawn by the Moravian Bookshop and its claim as the oldest continuous bookstore in the world, dating from 1745. The historic part of Bethlehem was beautifully restored, but pretty empty. There are several colleges in the area and it may be different during the school year. The only empty store noted that a tenant was coming soon, with support from the local community development department, so there’s a good chance that much of the neighborhood benefitted from state and local subsidies. We noticed an ancient-looking wall across the street and walked over to take a look. A plaque noted that it was the remains of an historic printing press, which was torn down in the 1960’s to build brownstones, which were themselves torn down fairly recently. It all sounded like a familiar story.
Weather is always a subject while traveling, but usually the issue is the heat. In Bethlehem, it was the cold. The headline in the local paper complained that the cold summer had adversely affected summer businesses, which were now looking at their worst income in years.
We passed the steel mill again on our way out of town, when we decided to turn around to see if we could get a closer look at the plant. There is a certain haunting beauty in the enormous futuristic building and it was easy to imagine the thousands of workers from Pennsylvania and surrounding states who spent a lifetime producing steel. for the country. We found our way to the entrance, where we were stopped by two security guards, Tanja Martinez and Eddie Dennis. Tanja’s grandfather, who melted steel, worked for Bethlehem for many years, until he was laid off in 1993, two years before the plant closed. Eddie was excited that we were from Connecticut – he grew up in Waterbury. Tanja no doubt expressed the collective dismay of those who devoted their lives to the plant only to see their jobs move to China, with the eager assistance of Bethlehem Steel. She told us about the plans to turn the melting plant into a community center, with shops, a theater and concert hall, an ice skating rink, and much more. It sounded pretty ambitious. We wished them well, and head back to the interstate.
Pennsylvania goes forever, and almost all of it was corn fields, growing right up to the highway, often without fences, so that you could literally pull onto the shoulder, get out, and pick a few ears. We remember driving in the same area, with a much more diverse group of crops, but on this trip we rarely saw anything beside corn and hay. When we finally turned south, on I‑81, little changed, until we finally hit Maryland and then Virginia, for the long haul to Harpers Ferry and Nashville.