The empty hulk of the Bethlehem steelworks blights the South Side, block after abandoned block of crumbling brick foundries and warehouses.
And then comes the construction site. An $800-million casino is going up on part of the old works, and there are new shops and restaurants among the abandoned storefronts nearby.
"Things are way better than they used to be, five or 10 years ago," reports Tim Gad, a bartender at a local pub. "It used to be a lot worse." The drug dealers are off the local streets, which are safer and busier.
The reality of the Pennsylvania Rust Belt is so much more complicated than the lyrics of a Springsteen song. There is economic misery here, but revival, too. There are abandoned businesses, but new ones as well. And so the two candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination must dance between playing to the pain and embracing the hope.
And when one stumbles, as Mr. Obama did so badly last week with his ill-chosen remarks about "bitter" rural voters who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," he pays a price.
"People aren't as one-dimensional as guns and God," observes Thomas Terraforte, who's stuck inside a laundromat on this fine spring morning. Bethlehem, he says, needs politicians with new ideas for injecting capital into the local economy. It certainly doesn't need patronizing generalizations.
Bethlehem is central to both Mr. Obama's and Ms. Clinton's aspirations. Bethlehem, Allentown and Easton are in the Lehigh Valley (pop. 790,000), birthplace of the American industrial revolution and the epicentre of its industrial decline.
The region has lost 30 per cent of its manufacturing jobs since 2001.
Today Bethlehem struggles, with some success, to retain what is left of its manufacturing base and attract newer, smaller business to replace the bankrupted smokestack industries. While semi-skilled manufacturing jobs continue to disappear, local industry leaders complain that they can't expand as quickly as they would like because of a shortage of skilled workers. The Lehigh Valley Industrial Park, located on part of the old steelworks, now has 400 businesses employing 20,000 workers and continues to expand. The health-care, education and service sectors are also growing. The region's jobless rate, at 5.2 per cent, is only slightly above the national average.
And more and more, the cities of the Lehigh Valley serve as bedroom communities for Philadelphia (80 kilometres away) and New York (110 kilometres away). Housing prices in the region have increased 50 per cent in the past five years.
It is the suburbs and bedroom communities around Philadelphia that many observers believe will determine the outcome of the Pennsylvania primary. As Lehigh Valley goes, so goes the state.
This makes Sue Huber an extraordinarily important voter. For the life of her, she can't make up her mind whether to support Ms. Clinton - "I like her, and I like some of her ideas" - or Mr. Obama - "he's young, and he has good ideas, too."
The Huber household is troubled. Ms. Huber's husband owns an auto repair shop, "and he can't make ends meet any more," what with the skyrocketing costs of providing health care for his family and workers.
She worries about the family budget, the sorry state of the health-care system, jobs getting shipped overseas, the war in Iraq. (Her son is in the air force.) And she mourns the loss of a quality of life that, for her and her friends, appears to be in decline.
"It used to be when I was growing up, we could go out, spend days at the park, enjoy things. Now, we can't do anything."
Yet others speak with greater confidence of a city that has turned the corner, that is bringing in new jobs. Main Street, a fine collection of 19th-century buildings, is as full of tea rooms and art galleries as the South Side is full of working-class 'hoods and vacant stores.
The South Side is also home to Lehigh University, a highly ranked school where Mac Jacob, taking a break from his studies, is happy to declare his support for Ms. Clinton, though "my friends all yell at me. They all hate Clinton."
One thing Mr. Jacob shares with Cara McIlnay, seated a few tables away and a confirmed Obamaphile, is the belief that Mr. Obama's remarks about bitter voters will do him no good in the Lehigh Valley.
"He stepped out of line on that one," she nods. If the quote had appeared earlier in the primary season, she believes, it might have been fatal.
The industrial workers, the suburbanites and the growing Latino population in Bethlehem favour Ms. Clinton. Mr. Obama will look to the students, and to the affluent liberals on the north side of the river.
But he knows that if he is to win Pennsylvania next week, he must expand his appeal, eat into Ms. Clinton's voter base. Recent polls show him closing the gap.
What remains to be seen is whether voters in this complex region shrug off his recent remarks, or turn away from what had been a campaign with growing appeal, here in the declining, renewing heartland of American industry.
Obama closes gap
Barack Obama has managed to narrow the popularity gap with Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania since both campaigns turned their attention to the last large-state primary after no clear winner emerged when Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont voted on March 4. These are the poll averages from http://www.realclearpolitics.com.
| Clinton | Obama | |
| Now | 47% | 40% |
| March 5 | 46% | 37% |
