The nine nations of north america by Garreau, its a very interesting read.

"And tough is what defines North America's nation of northeastern gritty cities in a multitude of ways.

Gary. South Bend. Flint. Toledo. Cleveland. Akron. Canton. Youngstown. Wheeling. Sudbury. London. Hamilton. Buffalo. Syracuse. Schenectady. Pittsburgh. Bethlehem. Harrisburg. Wilkes-Barre. Wilmington. Camden. Trenton. Newark.

The litany of names bring clear associations even to the most insulated residents of other regions. These names mean one thing: heavy work with heavy machines. Hard work for those with jobs; hard times for those without.

When columnists speak of managing decline, this is the region they mean. When they speak of the seminal battles of trade unionism, they place their markers here. When they write of the disappearing Democratic city political juggernauts, not for nothing do they call them machines, for this is where they hummed, then rusted.

When television presents the concept "Archie Bunker," it locates his neighborhood here, for the four boroughs of New York that are not Manhattan are part of this nation.

In an ironic way, this place is the real New South, for it received the vast internal migration of job-hungry blacks fleeing the once-overworked land of Dixie, and now it is the warehouse of their discontent. North America's Gulag Archipelago, it's been called; the continent's chain of urban prison camps.

Its capital must be Detroit, the birthplace of the assembly line, but its spiritual center is bankrupt Cleveland. Its hope may be Baltimore, but its shame is Cicero, the northern town whose hatred broke the heart of Martin Luther King, Jr. This is the nation of the Foundry.

A foundry, in which molten metal is cast into forms, historically represents one of the most basic and ancient technologies known to man. "If you want to use your imagination a bit," says Sheldon Wesson, of the American Iron and Steel Institute, "one would guess that the first foundry was born when primitive man saw this reddish crud melting around his campfire, and this hot stuff trickled down into the sand, and when it cooled, it assumed the shape of the area in the sand where it had trickled. It didn't take much of a leap for him to realize that he could produce a form to his own specifications. I've seen foundries today so primitive that you wouldn't believe it. Just wet sand on the floor of the factory. A guy comes along with a hand ladle and pours hot metal pretty much as it was done a million years ago."

Well, not a million years ago, but in the case of copper, at least three millennia before the birth of Christ. Iron is mentioned in the Old Testament eighty-six times, and steel, three.

And historically, the nation of the Foundry served as basic and time-honored a role in the development of North America as the facilities after which it is named. In fact, especially for the hundred years ending during World War II, North American industrial history and the history of the Foundry were close to being the same thing. But even before that, during the 1770s, around the eastern Pennsylvania iron deposits, "iron plantations" were formed, the largest at Hopewell, Pennsylvania, with twelve hundred inhabitants, casting and forging arms, shot, and cannon for the Revolution. The most famous of these plantations, among the many destroyed by British troops trying to weaken George Washington's armies, is Valley Forge.

Early in the 1800s, water power, which had driven the air bellows to create the high temperatures necessary to melt metal, was replaced by steam power. This was an important advance for several reasons, not the least of which was its timeliness, as the demand for boilers, locomotives, rails, and bridges surged with the accelerated western movement of a rapidly growing continent.

But it was also important because it freed the industry geographically from its dependence on locations next to East Coast rivers, flowing rapidly down from the Appalachians, and facilitated its move closer to its supplies of raw materials, most of which were in, or west of, the mountains.

It was in the mid 1800s that a system was invented that would make the production of steel so cheap that the much stronger material could compete with iron - the Bessemer process. In 1864, at Wyandotte, Michigan, on the Detroit River less than ten miles from the Dearborn that Henry Ford would put on the map half a century later, the first North American commercial pour of Bessemer steel was made. From these ingots, North America's first steel railroad track was made in 1865, at the North Chicago Rolling Mill.

Steel from the nation of the Foundry changed the face of the continent. Barbed wire allowed the building of fences in the tree-less Breadbasket, transforming it from rangeland into farmland and promoting the creation of towns. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, steel rails linked the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads, and thus the coasts. The "Chicago school" of architecture changed the ways cities would look and function by pioneering the steel skyscraper in the 1880s and 1890s.

Meanwhile, steel was changing the geography of the Foundry itself, the interior of which found itself ideally situated in the middle of a triangle of the three resources basic to both iron and steel:

High-quality iron ore from northern Michigan and, after the completion of the Sault Sainte Marie locks linking Lake Superior and Lake Huron in 1855, the Mesabi Range of Minnesota.
Bituminous coal, to be baked into the high-heat-value coke of almost pure carbon, found in virtually the entire eastern mountain range, but mainly in the valleys of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
Limestone, which is the shells of prehistoric crustaceans squeezed into rock, used to remove impurities in the iron and steel. It can be found in deposits miles long and thousands of feet deep all over the Northeast, especially in New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Ontario.

But best of all, the water-rich Foundry was laced with navigable waterways ranging from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River to the Erie Canal, and, to this day, water is still the cheapest way to move heavy, bulky items.
So industrial towns grew next to ports. Pittsburgh, the home of United States Steel and Pittsburgh Plate Glass, and the third greatest headquarters city in the United States, is located where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers merge to create the Ohio River. (It's no accident that the football Steelers play in Three Rivers Stadium.)

Cleveland is located where the Cuyahoga River - famous for once being so polluted that it burst into flames - meets Lake Erie - also famous for once being so polluted that it was incapable of sustaining marine life.

Detroit is on the western edge of Lake Erie, as is Toledo. Buffalo is on its eastern edge.

You can still get from Buffalo to Albany via the 18 25 Erie Canal, and from there to New York City on the Hudson River. It was that barge canal, linking New York City and the Great Lakes, and along which the cities of Utica, Syracuse, and Rochester were built, which was the beginning of the end for Boston and New England as the primary industrial region. It transformed New York City from a second-class seaport to the East Coast's commercial center. It helped make New York the Empire State. Today's Interstate 90 roughly parallels that canal.

Chicago, Gary, and Milwaukee are on Lake Michigan.

Toronto is on Lake Ontario, and as recently as 1959, that was making an enormous political and economic difference in North America. Nineteen fifty-nine was the year that the St. Lawrence Seaway was completed. As noted above, it's not that the Seaway connected the Lakes and the Atlantic for the first time. What the Seaway did was allow all but the largest oceangoing traffic (for example, supertankers) into the Lakes. Prior to 1959, Quebec's Montreal was functionally the end of the line for large craft, and, not coincidentally, Montreal was the financial and commercial hub of Canada. In the last twenty years, that title has passed. over to inland Foundry Toronto, and to this day you can find presumably paranoid Quebecois who view the Seaway as nothing but an elaborate Anglo plot to screw the French-speakers once again.

Be that as it may, the point is that these cities would not have evolved, or at least evolved the way they did, had they not been strategically located to wrest wealth efficiently from the very dirt of the planet. These cities were well positioned to have the various earths shipped inexpensively, via the abundant waterways, to central locations. There, they would be thrown together at high heat to make metal and other extremely basic nineteenth-century industrial products. In this process, they attracted wave after wave of cheap immigrant labor-first the wave of Europeans, then the wave of southern blacks, recently the Hispanics. Not for nothing did they call it the Melting Pot. How many people have "melting pots" in their kitchen? That's a Foundry term and concept.

The problem with the Foundry is that it is failing. Its cities are old and creaking, as is much of its industry. It is still struggling with its historic role as the integrator of wildly different personalities and cultures and ethnic groups, and there is no assurance that the sociological battles that it has been assigned will end in victory.

But, the Foundry is not North America, despite what the continental news media - most of which are headquartered there - may lead you to believe. The Foundry is the only one of the Nine Nations that can be said to be on the decline. The other eight are, at worst, economically stable (for example, Quebec and New England), in the sense that a plausible balance between quality of life and modest growth rate make for stability. And others are generating wealth and growth so fast that their biggest problem is controlling the boom.
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There are frequent newspaper headlines that suggest strongly that the Foundry has had first. crack at some of the great North American mistakes - but the question is whether an analysis of this news would help shed any light on the decline of population and investment in the region.

There are almost a hundred nuclear reactors on this continent, for example, but only one went haywire, raising a profoundly emotional response from the world, and it was in the Foundry: Metropolitan Edison's Three Mile Island, just outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

There are an estimated fifty thousand chemical dump sites in North America, and some of the worst of them are in Dixie, but the continental symbol of the revolt of the mutants is in the Foundry: Hooker Chemical's Love Canal, near Buffalo.
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There are an untold number of flashy, "stunt" architecture high-rise buildings in North America, but the most telling examples of fortress architecture, with no windows, or windows that are mere slits, are in the Foundry. Even Detroit's Renaissance Center, with its all-glass cylindrical and hexagonal towers, is built behind thirty-foot-tall medieval earth embankments. It's not easy to walk to the Renaissance Center. It clearly was meant to be arrived at by car, through checkpoints.
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All of North America has pollution problems, the Houston Ship Channel among the worst. But only the Cuyahoga River actually burst into flames; only Lake Erie toyed with dying; it is mainly in the Foundry that acid rain has made dramatic inroads, killing off mountain-stream fish populations.

All of North America is confronting the energy crisis, but some of the most trenchant continental memories of deprivation came in the winters of '77 and '78, when much of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York was immobilized by cold; the Ohio River was clogged by ice, thwarting coal-barge shipments; and, on top of that, factories closed for lack of natural gas. How many people are there who wouldn't respond in a thought-association quiz to the challenge "snow," with the city "Buffalo"?"