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Kentucky or New York? (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
1. Intellectual Inting
A mostly photojournalism newsletter by Chris Arnade that so far is centered around him taking walks in out-of-the-way parts of America and photographing them and writing about them.
Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott are either the northern-most cities in Appalachia, or the eastern-most in the Rust Belt, depending on what expert you talk to.
What the residents tells you though is clearer: They are struggling towns with good people trying to keep their heads afloat. Towns that haven’t recovered from all the lost jobs that were once here, like making shoes or making computers, and all the good people that left because of that.
The story after that, almost nobody agrees on. Some will tell you things are on the up and up, what with the nearby college growing and all the construction projects planned. Some will tell you things are as bad as ever, that all the renewal projects and fancy programs from the Governor, city council, etc, are just more of the same. Band-aids to quiet us residents down, and line their and their friends’ corrupt pockets with government money.
Dirt Track outside Binghamton
Geographically and aesthetically the area is fully Appalachian — cities of red brick warehouses, rail yards, wooden homes from the grandiose to simple, churches in every form, Walmart plazas, and solitary smoke stacks coughing into a low slung sky, all jammed into the narrow flats along the Susquehanna River, surrounded by beautifully rough hills.
Culturally and economically they are more Rust Belt. Mostly white towns (European descendants), with a growing minority and immigrant population, still dealing with being on the losing side of the US’s changing economic and cultural scene for the last seventy years.
Main Street
Those changes created a vacuum of vacant buildings, crumbling communities, and despair, that was filled with urban renewal projects, immigrants, and drugs.
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