The photo above means a lot to me, for the things just out of view and now gone. You're at the crossing tower on Union Street, near 3th. There's another gate stopping the eastbound traffic, which has backed up toward the Jordan Creek. The same train has also blocked traffic further down the line, at Basin Street. It's the early 1950's and the tracks from the two rail lines, Lehigh Valley and Jersey Central, cross here. At the end of Union Street you can make out my father's market, Allentown Meat Packing Company. The whole side of the building is a sign, painted directly on the brick in red and silver, Retail Meats, Wholesale Prices. You'll pass Morris Black Building Supply and The Orange Car before you get there. You'll also have to cross another set of tracks, which was the Lehigh Valley old main, before they built the Railroad Terminal over the Jordan Creek, at Hamilton Street. Our commercial past is now consigned to memory and future urban archeology.
reprinted from December of 2013
While I appreciate the family connection you have to the area, for those of us personally detached from the area I can’t complain too much.
ReplyDeleteI don’t miss sitting in traffic waiting for a train to pass. I don’t miss the huge, rusting gas tower blighting my view.
I don’t even miss the old macadam roadway, as I’m pretty sure what’s still there now is the same as what’s in your photo. If it wasn’t, the city must be nostalgic as well since drivers get to experience the same bumps and potholes we had in the past.
Maybe it’s time for a road reconstruction there, or at least a resurfacing. My car’s alignment can only take so much nostalgia.
Delete@7:04
You are one of the multitude who doesn’t miss the days of the then proud and prosperous Queen City.
Soon institutional and social memory will be entirely erased.
It was a tremendous privilege to have been a native Allentonian once, as a native might phrase it.
What a wonderful experience it was.
“You can’t go home again.”
I closed in on the billboard graphics. Everything Nice. Gonna start my morning with this thought. And I love trains.
ReplyDeleteanon@7:04: If Allentown could trade now for those days, it would be so far better off!!!!! We didn't have a roll of privately owned new buildings on Hamilton, by for by the taxpayers, but the area shown in photo was full of industry, with good paying jobs. The large gas tank wasn't rusty, and UGI wasn't constantly digging up the streets, as now, to replace new plastic gas pipes they undersized in the last dig-up. Now we crawl on Rt. 22, because the money to widen it was used instead for a new entrance for a warehouse barron.
ReplyDeleteAh, yes. Remember passing through there daily. The Orange Car, Bradley Pulverizer (never did know what they did). The smell of cooking A&B Meats, and then, BAM! the stench of the Allentown Sewer Plant.
ReplyDelete