These are three telling headlines in today’s POTTSVILLE REPUBLICAN AND HERALD.. A factory closing, a school having issues, and yet another store in the Frackville Schuylkill Mall shutting doors.. 

There was an old adage about the coal region of Pennsylvania: There’s a church and bar on every street corner. These days the churches have shuddered and even some bars too–it’s the bars closing that may bring pause…

A major hospital with 100+ years of history in Ashland Pennsylvania is now an empty vessel. The silhouette at night of the empty structure is a frightening sight.. 

Schools have closed and merged, leaving buildings to become dilapidated. This year, an old Catholic School Immaculate Heart in Girardville was taken down after days of heavy machinery chipping away at the heart of the building..

The people of the coal region, though often mocked for poor grammar, are good people. This was a good area.. But it’s fast becoming a land of no return, a place where no industry thrives.. A place where malls teeter on the brink of closure, where schools struggle not with grades but with meth and bath salts.. Where police dismantle their oath to protect and serve and instead sever ties with morality. This is an area where coal mines are abandoned, housing histories of millionaires.. but those millionaires’ homes just waste away into desolation.

There was once a close knit society in the region. When I grew up, things weren’t perfect, but they were fine. There were businesses, factories, churches, restaurants. Now there’s not. There’s little here.. There’s so little.

Are there still good people? Amazingly people.
Does the area still have a chance? That is a tougher question.

I have long believed that every town in the coal region could be the next Jim Thorpe. It could happen.. but it would take a lot. 

And with industry constantly leaving, and more ‘things’ constantly closing, that is becoming a much harder prospect to fathom..

Right now, February 13, 2014, there’s a monster snowstorm hitting the coal region and other states along the East Coast.. The snow is covering the pollution and litter, the pothole filled roads, and the empty buildings. But when it melts, it will all be there again. 

I am beginning to feel, strongly, that the coal region is not the place to raise my three-year-old son. He will not be growing up in the same place I was .. 

That close knit society is losing thread. 
The empty buildings have nothing to offer.
A vacant hospital two miles away can’t help.
And a mall without stores is the loneliest place in the world.

What is best.. trying to create a better place to live, or realizing that things are far beyond repair and going somewhere that is already a decent place to be?

That is the question.. 

And over the next year or two my wife and I will be debating that question..