The looming, imposing courthouse at Pottsville, PA, July, 2003. Pottsville is the county seat of Schuylkill County. It was once a booming and wealthy small city in the heyday of anthracite coal. The town is the birthplace of famed author, John O'Hara, who put it on the map worldwide under the name "Gibbsville", quite uncomfortably for that place's good citizens. Several members of the notorious Molly Maguires, Irish derived coal miner labor revolutionaries were hanged here in the 1870s in the adjacent county jail after a rigged trial orchestrated by Reading Coal and Iron CEO, Franklin Gowen. He used the Mollies and anti-Irish sentiment as convenient whipping boys to break the miners' union movement. It stayed broke untill the early 1900s.

The county jail was once a comfortable off-and-on home for a time for the Bruno gang, notorious in the Kelayres, PA massacre.

View is from the Trailways bus terminal.

The Pottsville, PA Trailways bus terminal near Norwegian Street. Except for the auto this is the main point of public access-egress. No railroads visit Pottsville anymore as they did in O'Hara's time. Hazleton similarly, the condition of both places well described in the following ...

From the "Protectorate" link at the top of the page":

"... Not slummy but certainly seedy, Pottsville is old without being "preserved." Although local boosters express hopes of transforming the city into a charming mecca for antiques hounds, this is almost impossible to imagine. The city that once burgeoned with four furriers, five department stores, seven jewelry shops, nine shoe stores, eleven furniture stores, thirty-seven clothing shops, three movie palaces, twenty lunchrooms and restaurants, and nine hotels (and also a red-light district that drew high rollers from New York and Philadelphia) is now neither thriving nor quite dead. Many of the storefronts are empty, and the agencies and enterprises housed by the others -- an office-supply store, a center for maternal and family health services, a rape crisis center, a temp agency, a luncheonette -- are hardly the sort to attract the strollers who used to crowd Pottsville on Friday and Saturday nights. ... "