When it comes to the history of industrial Allentown, the railroad buffs are among the current experts. Our heavy manufacturing base moved its materials on the tracks of several railroads. The Front Street area was crisscrossed with tracks and sidings. The West End Branch ran along Sumner Avenue, crossed Tilghman Street, looped around 17th Street and ended near 12th and Liberty. The Barber Quarry Branch ran along the Little Lehigh until it then followed Cedar Creek. It crossed Hamilton Street near the current Hamilton Family Restaurant and ended at what is now the Park Department Building. The rail buffs are current day archaeologists, looking for remnants of those glory days. Shown above is a portion of the Barber Quarry pier and track. This is at the bottom of
Lehigh Street hill, near the former bank call center, near the former Acorn Hotel, in a former city still called Allentown.
photo courtesy of Mike Huber, Coplay
above reprinted from March of 2011
ADDENDUM AUGUST 22, 2023:The bridge has just been rebuilt, and the portion of the earlier railroad bridge show above was removed.
A couple of tracks in this comment:
ReplyDeleteA. What is there now under the city that would be interesting to find? In maybe as short as fifty years, some might treat Keck Park like a gold mine (The old city dump). I don’t know what’s under center city from original Northamptontown besides Zion Church basement, if that’s even pre-1800’s.
B. What could we be leaving behind now by accident, or next year on purpose, that would tell the year 2525 (or 3535) who we were? Our current development/renewal techniques don’t leave much previous traditional archaeological material behind (like Iron Age building new on top of old). Ground compression and detailed chemical analyses might be about it, or am I leaving something out? If civilization collapses, and center city’s wood decays, could the nail plates and PVC pipe clue our descendants in as to what was there?
C. If all our future life trash migrates to hard drives and server farms, will the ROM remain in a cyber basement waiting for some off-the-wall data search to wake the ASCII bits, or will grinding up/overwriting of old memory chips/drives destroy our selfie legacy?