Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Teddy Kupfer, an associate editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Charles McAwee. Charles is the editor of Real Clear, Pennsylvania,

which launches this month and covers the goings-on in the Keystone State.

He's a former City Journal editor who still writes for us from time to time,

his latest contribution being a long print feature about the Lehigh Valley,

which has become the key warehousing and logistics hub of the northeast. And Charles is also from

Hershey, Pennsylvania, or thereabout, which happens to be 20 minutes from my hometown of Camp Hill.

So Charles, thanks very much for joining me. Thanks, Teddy. That's right. We grew up on opposite ends of the Susquehander River. You were a west shore kid. I was in the East Shore kid. So good to talk to you today. Appreciate it. So let's dive right into your print story, which is about the Lehigh Valley. You know, the region includes the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton, and spans, as you note, more than 700

square miles of residential neighborhoods, suburbia, rural locales, and farmland. It was once an

industrial powerhouse, which began to boom after the discovery of anthracite coal, and later

became the home of Bethlehem Steel. Now it boasts a flourishing 21st century industrial economy that centers around logistics.

Surging demand for quick delivery makes the region an ideal location to distribute goods

throughout the East Coast, and this has boosted the region's jobs, property values,

and tax revenues.

So why don't you tell a little bit about how this transformation unfolded and what the region looks like today? Yes, Teddy. So this region is

really a global hub for industrial facility growth. And if anything, it's continuing its lawn

tradition in terms of fueling industrial America. And that goes back, as you noted,

to the early 19th century with the discovery of anthracite coal northwest of the Lehigh Valley and the

Lehigh River, which runs through the valley itself, that supplied coal to the New York

of Philadelphia markets, and the region itself became this booming center thanks to Cole, and ultimately

Bethlehem Steel, which emerged in the late 19th century and then by World War II, had

employed 30,000 people in the Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton area. So really, this is a region

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