Category: default || By jt3y

They have a lot of diners in central Pennsylvania --- real, honest-to-Charley roadside diners with bottomless cups of coffee, pancakes served any time, and scrapple. And while that's not enough of a reason to want to move up there, it's certainly tempting.

I had to do some research up at the York County Heritage Trust and a couple of interviews for the book project, so I loaded up the old family truckster Friday morning and hit the Turnpike.

Do you know it now costs $11 to drive the Turnpike from Monroeville to Harrisburg? Good gravy. I felt like the guy in Abe Lincoln's joke who was tarred and feathered, and then run out of town on a rail --- were it not for the principle of the thing, I'd just as soon walk.

York is a funny old town. It's very, very busy --- or at least it seemed to be. The downtown area of Pennsylvania's Red Rose City is a strange mix of 1800s buildings and half-hearted '50s and '60s urban renewal projects. The parking garage where I left the car is right out of 1968, and most of the streets are one-way thoroughfares, which is another sign of '60s traffic planning (see also Greensburg, McKeesport, Washington, etc.). The central core of town has been thoroughly rehabilitated and gentrified --- it's all lawyers' offices, chi-chi coffee bars and antique stores, and there's a beautiful old hotel called the Yorktowne. But walk a few blocks away and you're in neighborhoods full of rusty cars and falling-down rowhouses.

York also apparently used to have a perfectly decent town square at the corner of Market and George streets. I say "apparently" because at some point they yanked it out and straightened the streets to get more traffic through the intersection. That's left the great old buildings on the corners with these absurd plazas in front of them between the new curbs and their old front doors, which are now set way back from the streets. Friday afternoon, someone was holding some sort of a protest rally at the intersection, and people were honking --- in support of whose rights or causes, I have no idea.

I would have liked to have spent more time poking around town, but unfortunately, I was on a tight deadline. York had been the headquarters of the McCrory-McLellan-Green five-and-ten stores, so I decided to see what was left.

Damned little, as it turns out. The entire McCrory archives fit into two small boxes at the Heritage Trust. The company had a big headquarters building and warehouse out in the east end of town, but the warehouse has been subdivided and the office building was torn down to make way for a Home Depot. There's also a shiny new Wal-Mart next door, which represents some sort of irony.

McCrory's had a long, ugly slide into oblivion (and two lengthy bankruptcies) as its owners drained its profits and funneled them into other enterprises. Still, the company hasn't been gone for that long (about three years), and it's a shame that an enterprise that was founded in 1882, and once numbered 1,300 stores, has left so little behind. Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose.

I had to be in Harrisburg early the next morning, so I headed north to look for a motel. I hit Elizabethtown at just about 8 o'clock and started flipping around on the radio, I hit on an FM station in the non-commercial end of the dial playing The Vogues' "Turn Around, Look at Me." Well, this was a nice break from the NPR sermonizing or Jebus preaching you normally find at that end of the FM band, so I kept listening.

The DJ came on. "From Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, those are the Vogues, and these are the Platters," he said. It turns out it was the radio station at Elizabethtown College, and they have a Friday night oldies party. And, it just so happens that Elizabethtown has a motel called the Red Rose.

Red Rose! Yeah, I know, it's as in "Red Rose City" (Lancaster is the "White Rose City"), but any Pittsburgh oldies buff would think of "Red Rose Tea" (the song, not the tea) first. What are the chances I'd be driving through a town I'd never heard of, listening to the Vogues and driving past a "Red Rose Motel"? It had to be fate, right? Or kismet?

No, it was probably just coincidence. The Red Rose Motel turned out to be old, but clean and well-maintained, with little tourist cabins bedecked with knotty pine paneling and steam heat. And the price ($41 a night) wasn't bad, either. I had dinner at the Elizabethtown Diner. The special turned out to be homemade macaroni and cheese casserole, stewed tomatoes, brussels sprouts, mixed vegetables, salad, and roll and butter for $7.95.

Normally, I can't stand stewed tomatoes.

I ate every bite.

On the way home Saturday night, I decided to try and beat the Turnpike Commission out of its $11, and took Route 30 home. We had taken a family trip across the state on Route 30 when I was a kid, and I remembered it being a little shabby, but relatively smooth sailing, except for some congestion where it goes through small towns like New Oxford.

Not any more. Every square foot between York and Chambersburg has been developed with really crummy strip malls --- the kind of crummy-looking cinderblock affairs that feature a Dollar Tree, a nail salon and a video store.

If your strip mall is anchored by Dollar Tree, you've got problems, you know. Do banks really lend money for these kind of real-estate projects, which are doomed to fall apart and wind up empty in a few years?

Never mind, I know the answer. Which explains why I'm getting 1 percent on my savings account.

Anyway, it was 75 to 100 miles of misery through what James Howard Kunstler calls "jive-plastic" buildings before the clutter finally went away and the highway opened up. My pain was alleviated somewhat when I found a public radio station out of Hagerstown that was carrying Garrison Keillor's program.

Keillor was interviewing a historian from Springfield, Ill., who was working as the curator for a new museum and library dedicated to the life of Abraham Lincoln. So there I was, listening to a story about Abe Lincoln while driving the Lincoln Highway through Gettysburg.

Maybe there's something to that fate thing after all.