Empty Hazleton, PA at the corner of Broad and Wyoming streets. As late as the 1960s there would have been dozens of shoppers and passersby at this location, even on such a cold January day. Most commerce and the hundred-odd main street stores departed town to the local malls and the Wal-Mart.

While Mother Nature is happily restoring the surrounding mine-blasted woodlands and mountaintops, the town itself seems to have a compulsion to replicate that ruinous, boom-time, strip mining activity of old. Several dozen locally historic and architecturally interesting buildings have been razed along the main Broad Street, leaving that once impressive boulevard gap-toothed and raggedy. A blunt but mostly true account of this state of affairs in a national publication recently provoked much civic ire.