The Injustice of Place
A new book looks at the confluence of geography and disadvantage.
Sociologists Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer, and Timothy J. Nelson preview their forthcoming book The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America in an Atlantic feature titled, “What the Best Places in America Have in Common.”
The setup:
When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in 1964, the nation didn’t have any method of counting the poor, or even a firm notion of how poverty should be defined. His administration scrambled to come up with a measure to chart progress. The gauge, it was later decided, would be the minimum income needed for a family of three or more to put food on the table multiplied by three (at the time, food constituted a third of the typical family budget).
Income is one vital indicator of well-being, but it is not the only one: Things like health outcomes and social mobility matter too. That’s why we should shift our focus from poverty to disadvantage. Disadvantage is a more useful term than poverty because we aren’t just talking about income—we’re trying to capture the complexity of a person’s life chances being hindered by multiple circumstances. Disadvantage is more accurate because it implies an injustice. People are being held back—unfairly.
Disadvantage cannot be understood at the individual or family level alone. Thanks to social-science research, we now know that children’s life chances are profoundly affected by their context—not only income and family circumstances but also their community—more so than by their genetic profile or the medical care they receive.
That strikes me as incontrovertible. Indeed, it’s rather obvious that income isn’t the most useful measure because of wildly varying costs of living—which the Federal Government acknowledges in things like the locality adjustments it pays its workforce. And the OTB commentariat will need no convincing that things like easy access to decent hospitals, schools, and the like really matter.
With this in mind, we created what we call the Index of Deep Disadvantage, which reflects two traditional measures of income (the poverty rate and the “deep poverty rate,” meaning those with incomes below half the poverty line), two markers of health (birth weight and life expectancy), and the rate of social mobility for children who grow up in low-income families. We used this index to rank the roughly 3,100 counties in the United States along with the 500 most populous cities.
I’m by no means an expert in sociological research methods but this sounds perfectly reasonable on its face.
Immediately, the rankings revealed a stark geographical pattern. The first surprise—especially for professors who have spent our careers studying urban poverty—was that the most disadvantaged places on our index were primarily rural. But they didn’t fit the stereotypical image of rural America. Though some of these were majority white, most were majority Black or Hispanic. We could see, too, that many places with large Native American populations ranked among the most disadvantaged in the nation. Considerable poverty exists in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. But in our apples-to-apples comparison, none of those cities ranked among even the 600 most disadvantaged places in the nation. The only cities on that list were a relatively small number of industrial municipalities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Rochester.
What fascinates me here is not the findings but that the authors, who are wildly better read on this subject than me, find this the least bit surprising. That rural areas are rife with poverty and are filled with people of color is something that it feels like I’ve always known.
Some might say we should have taken into account the high cost of living in many cities, but this is more complicated than it appears. Although people pay more for housing in some places, they also benefit from good health-care systems, a more generous safety net, public transportation, and higher-quality schools. Those living in the 200 most disadvantaged places on our index were just as likely to have major difficulties paying for housing as those in America’s 500 largest cities.
It’s hard to pay for housing if you don’t have a job, after all.
The places that our index identified as the 200 most disadvantaged are concentrated in three regions—Appalachia, South Texas, and the southern Cotton Belt. (Not one county in the West, apart from those with disproportionately large Native American communities, showed up on the list.) These places share a history of intensive resource extraction and human exploitation not seen to the same degree elsewhere in the United States. In each place, this economic pattern emerged (or, in the case of the Cotton Belt, fully flourished) in the late 19th or early 20th century. In each place, one industry came to dominate the economy, a pattern that held, broadly, until the 1960s, when King Cotton, King Tobacco, King Coal, and South Texas agriculture, would bow to the twin forces of automation and global competition.
Again, the authors are professional scholars of poverty at elite universities and I am not. But I’d have instinctively picked Appalachia and the Cotton Belt as areas where disadvantage reigned. Appalachia, especially, is practically code for backward and poor.
Here, though, the go in a direction that would not have occurred to me and, indeed, may well be controversial.
We would have had to be exceedingly dull or stubborn to have missed the fact that these places resembled, well, colonies—internal colonies within the U.S.
I must admit, I struggle with the analogy. It makes some sense in the case of the Indian Reservations and, to a much lesser extent, the Black Belt. Mostly, these are just hollowed out places that have been left behind. Still, they make a case.
Using terminology such as nation within a nation or colony to describe the exploitation of communities of color within the United States has a long history among Black scholars and activists. While visiting many of the nation’s most disadvantaged places, we set out to build on this work through historical research, ethnographic observations, and in-depth interviews.
In central Appalachia, we drove through the remnants of company towns, many only one or two streets wide, and the hollows—narrow valleys that can stretch for miles between the mountains. We came to Clay County, Kentucky, which before the Civil War was home to both mighty salt barons and a tapestry of subsistence farms. Big Timber and Big Coal took over after the Civil War. Today, the opioid crisis is ravaging the region. Locals in Manchester, the county seat, lament the decline of the movie theater—now a Pentecostal church—and the loss of the bowling alley; numerous bars, cafés, and beauty salons; and a park that has been plowed over for a highway-construction project. People blame the rise of opioid use on the fact that there is now “nothing to do but drugs.”
In South Texas, spinach and onion fields were once so enormous that they met the sky’s vanishing point in almost every direction, yielding fabulous profits for those who owned the land. Yet the landless laborers who planted and harvested those crops faced unimaginable hardship. For generations, the appearance of towns in South Texas followed a pattern of social hierarchy: sturdy wood-frame houses, paved streets, and enclosed sewers in the white neighborhoods; shacks, dirt roads, and privies in the Mexican parts of town. Forced to migrate to find work during the off-season, generations of Mexican American children lost their right to a decent education. Even today, adult-illiteracy rates in these places are among the highest in the nation.
When we hit the outskirts of the typical Cotton Belt town, fields gave way to a string of gleaming white antebellum homes with large lawns, old-growth trees, and grand entrances framed by columns reaching two or three stories high. These places seem serene on their face, yet in Leflore County, Mississippi, for example, Black residents told us that violence was the No. 1 problem they face. The rate of death due to interpersonal violence there was nearly four times the national average, and well above that of Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago. As we would soon learn, Leflore County and the larger region it represents—the sprawling Cotton Belt stretching from the Carolinas to eastern Arkansas and Louisiana—is indeed among the most dangerous in the nation.These places have a long tradition of violence, both accepted and sponsored by government. For generations it was the greatest tool at the disposal of the white elite to oppress Black Americans into labor.
Throughout these regions, we saw the same themes emerge again and again—unequal schooling, the collapse of social infrastructure, violence, entrenched public corruption, and structural racism embedded in government programs.
Again, I’m not sure the colony verbiage is useful here and it quite possibly distracts from the analysis. It makes some sense in the case of mining towns where the ownership lives elsewhere. Otherwise, this is just standard exploitation.
Exploring the other end of our Index of Deep Disadvantage—the places identified as those of greatest advantage—was also vital to our research. Once again, we were surprised by where the index took us. It was not Manhattan or tech-rich Seattle. Instead, the list pointed us to the upper Midwest: Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Iowa. Overall, poverty rates in these places are very low, babies are born healthy, people live to a ripe old age, and a low-income child usually has a similar chance of making it into the middle class as any other kid.
So, basically places that have thriving economies and are overwhelmingly white and monocultural? That’s not all that shocking in hindsight but, unlike their findings as to the most disadvantaged places, I wouldn’t have instinctively known this.
Counties that rank among those of greatest advantage began as agricultural communities with modestly sized farms, many originally secured through the 1862 Homestead Act that made landownership widely available. Many of these places have built on this history of broad-based wealth by making significant investments in schools, which has contributed to high graduation and college enrollment rates over generations. Using the best data available, we found that they have enjoyed the lowest rates of violent crime, income inequality, and public corruption in the nation. These counties are unusually rich in social capital: Residents are connected to one another through volunteerism, membership in civic organizations, and participation in other community activities.
These places are not without their challenges. Local job opportunities for young college graduates are sometimes limited. Yet these communities have been more successful than most in preventing poverty, promoting health, and ensuring a level playing field for their children.
Again, my strong hunch is that this is a function of the monocultural nature of these places. They lack an Other and therefore have a strong sense that they should take care of one another.
Indeed, the authors get there:
The upper Midwest is also overwhelmingly white. When we examined the relationship between whiteness and rank on the index, we found that a higher percentage of white residents is a significant predictor of a place’s rank, which is not at all surprising when one considers that the good schools and the good jobs have long been bestowed liberally on whites while being denied to Hispanic and Black Americans.
“Bestowed” is a weird way of framing this. And, of course, “white” is a changing construct. There’s a rather long history of discrimination against the Irish, those from Central and Eastern Europe, and, of course, Ashkenazi Jews before they eventually became assimilated into whiteness.
But race is not as predictive as the level of inequality, the unemployment rate, or the degree of educational attainment. Furthermore, many places that are disproportionately white, in states such as Ohio, Maine, Illinois, Indiana, Montana, Michigan, and Idaho, do not rank even among the top half of advantaged places in America. What makes the communities that are most advantaged unique is their histories as places of broad-based wealth. How different would conditions be in other parts of the country had they followed a similar, equitable course?
Honestly, I’d need to see this unpacked considerably to understand the argument.
The lesson is that people seem to thrive—not always in high salaries but in health and life chances—when inequality is low; when landownership is widespread; when social connection is high; and when corruption and violence are rare.
This seems circular, in that this is essentially how they’ve defined “advantaged,” but it seems rather unassailable.
The social leveling that is characteristic of communities in the upper Midwest is more than just a quaint cultural feature. It is the foundation of a community’s well-being. Until these regions’ virtues are shared nationwide, poverty and disadvantage will continue to haunt America.
Alas, I don’t see this changing any time soon.
![McConnell, Other Republicans, Blocking Criminal Justice Reform [Updated: Vote To Go Forward]](https://otb.cachefly.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Handcuffs-Jail-512x256.png)
A light topic for Monday morning.
Agreed…this isn’t changing anytime soon.
The effort by Biden to bring broadband to these locales is a infinitesimal step in the right direction.
I expect the big picture here is largely correct. But from the quotes I have to wonder about the graininess of their study. I have no doubt that NY City on average is a better place to live than Lower Hogwaller AL. But I wonder if there aren’t neighborhoods in NY that are worse.
With that in mind I’ll point out that the “street” in the photo, which heads the Atlantic article, looks to be an alley. There seem to be substantial two-story houses flanking it. However, that said, I’ve seen towns in which the streets do look like that alley.
@gVOR10:
I was thinking the picture showed a neighborhood that had once been okay, but had seriously declined.
@gVOR10:
Elsewhere in the article the authors delved into why areas of large cities don’t fall into the same status as the rural areas sited. Mostly it has to do with availability of healthcare and better schools, they also noted that the disadvantaged of urban areas have a greater chance and likelihood of improving their circumstances.
Regarding the picture. Having traveled many ‘blue highways’ that took me through places that were once comfortable if not thriving after WWII and into the 60’s, it’s not unusual to find those locals today looking like that picture, if not worse. The downturn was the result of a mine closing or the only large employer shutting down or even that employer being acquired by a larger company that moves all the professional functions to a different location and then bleeds the remaining jobs over a few years.
I haven’t dug deeply in this (been really busy and traveling lately), but I’m skeptical about making judgments based on per-capita county-level data, given the huge population differences between some counties. Such as this example:
Cook County has a population of 5.2 million and contains 111 municipalities, including Chicago, according to Wikipedia. Lefore County, MS has a population of 28k and 5 municipalities with half the population living in the county seat.
I just don’t think comparing per capita rates between these two counties for pretty much anything tells us very much, at least without adding a LOT of additional context.
That said, I’m directionally aligned with this piece, but think it has flaws and blind spots. One example:
There are a lot of things that can create or cause disadvantages that aren’t due to “injustice.” Also, unless “disadvantage” is clearly and cogently defined, it is not actually very useful. For example, we can measure poverty because we’ve created measurable definitions of poverty, as imperfect as those may be. And measuring poverty allows us to analyze trends and evaluate public and other policies. How are we supposed to measure and analyze “disadvantage?”
This article was of great interest to me for three reasons.
1. My father’s roots lie in Clay County, Kentucky. My ancestors lived there from shortly after the Revolutionary War. My family started extracting the big timber with slave labor before the Civil War. If there was ever wealth in the family it has been long lost. Two things that significantly changed the lives of people who lived there were WWI and WWII. Both were opportunities to learn about the wider world and improve economic well-being. But perhaps the most important event was ending the feuds, an effort led by a feuder-turned-preacher, James Anderson Burns, who brought people together to provide their children an education. When I first visited as a child, there were tobacco fields and tar-papered homes. Now the tobacco fields are gone, the homes tend to be well cared for–some modest, some luxurious (children returning home after they retire). The short story of the area is one of economic disruption when the timber and coal were extracted, but also of the wealth of the original settlers petering out over generations. However, when I visit, I am cousin to nearly everyone I meet and the strong sense of community and Appalachian pride prevails.
2. I now live in white rural community in southeastern Oregon. It too had its hey day. The fertile lands of the Northern Paiutes were settled by ranchers. Then the timber in the nearby mountains was logged. The US Air Force had a base here for about 25 years to monitor off-shore sea communications, and then it was closed. A town that once had a JC Penney and a bowling alley has developed areas of blight that are worse than the photo shown in the article–and far worse than anything I saw during my last two visits to Kentucky. The city has an urban renewal plan to replace the blighted areas with new homes and new businesses. The only people really doing well are the ranchers. There is a small middle class, but no broad-based wealth. However, I have never seen a community so focused on raising their youth and community activities. The Paiute were a nomad culture, with no central leader. When they were displaced during the Indian Wars, they did not have a strong leader to negotiate with the military and Indian agents. Consequently, they have no reservations or recognized status. But after generations of experimenting, they are learning and implementing economic ventures for their community.
3. I was raised in a rural community that boomed because of timber and earth dam construction. When the timber was extracted and the dams were built, the working families moved away for jobs. Rich retirees from California moved in and the number of school children dropped. Blight was next. The Oregon fires of 2020 destroyed much of my childhood community.The blight was simply burned up. People sold their land and moved. The poor went to areas where they could restart their lives. New housing is being built by old- and new-timers. The community has been amazingly resilient, and like Kentucky and where I now live, tourism is hoped to be the Next Big Thing.
I agree with the article that broad-based wealth and strong community connections are vital to quality of life. Where I think it missed the mark is that economic downturns due to loss of industries is seems to be the common denominator. Maybe the areas that still have broad-based wealth were based on agriculture that was never displaced within a decade or less like the towns I know well.
The story of America seems to be capitalists acquiring the fertile land, extracting natural resources, off-shoring jobs, and then leaving communities to suffer economically for generations.
Without realizing it, I think, they are advocating for more of the nation to take up the NW European values and customs. The dominant national origin in the US Midwest is German. But many of the farming areas are dominated by people whose ancestors emigrated from Nordic countries.
If you want to see a live example of how it’s done, I suggest the youtube channel ‘Laura Farms’. Started in 2020 while home from college due to COVID, it is a young woman, now couple, (Gen-Z) following the family farming tradition. This year, they are now farming their own land. Previously, she was working for her father and also working her own fields using his equipment in some sharecropping or other arrangement. Her husband was doing similar with his father. Grant, her husband, related how he got started sharecropping with his grandparents.
Granted, family and culture has prepared them. Most of us would pass out if we had their debt load for tractors, land, seed, fertilizer, implements, fuel, 18-wheeler trucks, Pivots, wells, well motors, etc.
There is a lot to be said for what a kid learns around the dinner table as parents talk about their business. And the ups and downs of running small business don’t stay at the office as it impacts the whole family’s disposable, or even subsistence income year to year.
@Sleeping Dog:
Oh, it’s still happening. The largest employer moves and what’s left. Here’s a small engine repair person who is on a bit of a rant about Husqvarna, which is closing operations in several US small towns and moving to Brazil. Seven hundred jobs in a town of 2500 is a big hit the town isn’t likely to recover from. Similar happened when the private equity guy gutted Cabela’s home town when he took over and made his tidy profit selling it to Bass Pro Shop.
@gVOR10:
I am fortunate to be able to travel to many, many cities, both in the USA and abroad. Yes. There are part of NYC, and Los Angeles, and Austin, and Chicago, that are worse than many rural areas. I live and spent about 60% of my life in Los Angeles, and there are parts of Los Angeles that are right out of a Zombie apocalypse movie. Seriously.. Hundreds, if not thousands, homeless people who are obviously severely mentally ill trying to make it through each day in a small area creates a zone that people just avoid. It’s sad.
Homo sapiens dominates planet Earth not because we are stronger or faster or tougher than other animals, but because intelligence allows us to adapt to a fantastic variety of environments. Adaptation is survival. When a once amenable environment – a forest with lots of game in hunter/gatherer times, a valley with rich soil and ample water once agriculture became a thing, or a company/factory/mine with lots of jobs in the modern era – ceases to provide the necessities of life, you move on, you adapt. Or you don’t adapt, either because you simply can’t, or because you choose not to.
I feel compassion for people who cannot adapt, a bit less for people who choose not to, but either way I’m not sure what society can or should do about it. We can’t prop up every coal town or textile county that goes bust. We can’t build a hospital and a grocery store in hollowed-out areas. Creative destruction is a key element of capitalism.
I do like the concept of disadvantaged. We were poor due to choices my father made and my mother’s mental illness, but my father had an engineering degree and all of my many aunts and uncles had decent jobs. Grandparents were farmers. It never really felt hopeless or impossible to overcome like some of the distant family living in Appalachia where there were many generations of poverty. They were disadvantaged while I was just temporarily poor which I could fix by leaving home.
Steve
@Mary Furr: Nice post. Thanks. I’m from NW Washington, and your story doesn’t sound all that unfamiliar. Not the same, but yeah. Especially the impact of logging and the end of logging.
The blight referenced is something I grew up with, and thought of as kind of run-of-the-mill. I still know places that look like that, less than 50 miles from where I grew up.
I am a bit surprised by the notion that so many of these communities have people of color. Not the native tribes, I knew about them. But the Hispanics and black Americans.
I am not surprised that professors that have spent their lives studying urban poverty, as they have said, were caught flatfooted by this. These rural areas are mostly forgotten and misunderstood by people who don’t have deep knowledge of them. The resentment fueled in these communities toward the political process is important politically AND it is also a smokescreen for people who aren’t disadvantaged at all, but simply want more advantage, or the advantages they have to not be taken away.
Disrupting this pattern to something that’s healthier would be hard, slow work that doesn’t fit in a political cycle, so politicians, as such, are never going to do it.
@Jay L Gischer:
The disadvantaged in urban areas often have middle and upper class advocates for helping them. In the regions that the authors mentioned, Appalachia, So. Texas and the Cotton Belt are also regions that today’s local ruling class seeks to keep the disadvantaged down rather than help them improve their lives.
@Andy:
I read that part differently. I think the authors are not saying that disadvantage is “due to” injustice — they are saying that persistent disadvantage is (an) injustice.
@Michael Reynolds:
I would appeal to your better nature, but you would claim not to have one. So how about this: the electoral college, the senate, and first past the post single representative districts mean that our fate is tied to the fate of these hollowed out areas. When they fail, they elect morons. They are an anchor holding the rest of us back, firmly wedged in the bottom of the seabed.
It is in our best interest to figure out how to get that anchor unstuck, since we don’t have the tools to cut it free. Fuck compassion, we have to fix small town America for our own benefit, despite the people living there.
The economy should serve the people, not the other way around.
We can’t get rid of capitalism (at least not quickly and easily, and without a massive revolution), but we’ve never been a pure capitalist country anyway.
If the “market demands” that these areas be sparsely populated regions of bitterness and grievance that will hold the rest of us back, it’s time to interfere with the market.
It’s far easier to develop a rural infrastructure program than it is to get rid of a spare Dakota. I’d love to cede it to the local tribes as a land-back program, but it isn’t happening.
It makes sense in areas where there is active extraction of wealth (Minneapolis funding half the city through traffic tickets on the black folks, for instance). But a lot of the areas the authors are mentioning have already had all the wealth extracted, and what’s left behind is just an empty shell.
I agree that the authors’ case would be stronger to just drop the word.
@Andy:
I think we need models that can show the differences between urban and rural poverty, the effects that need to be remediated, and the causes that need to be fixed.
I think this “disadvantage” model is a decent early pass at it. Not without flaws, but either decent or pointing towards something decent.
@JKB:
I don’t think these authors would disagree agree with you that we should join NW Europe in valuing collective action and shared sacrifice over winner-take-all indivualism, or that take up the NW European custom of truly progressive taxation on higher earners.
Then, like NW Europe, we might be able to improve the general welfare with fully-funded schools, universal healthcare coverage, and efficient mass transit — thereby cutting back intergenerational poverty and its resultant crime, degeneracy and dysfuction while increasing innovation, quality of life, relational resilience, and economic development.
I doubt this will happen soon in the US because Americans refuse to plan for longterm progress and well-being, instead scaremongering German and Nordic customs and values as socialism.
@DK:
I see what you did there. Well played, DK. I was just going to whine that the dog whistle hurt my ears, but your reply was much better.
I’m not sure why the authors would be surprised about the upper Midwest. Politically, it went from prairie populism to the New Deal, so maybe there are social benefits to being progressive and pro-labor and solidarity (at least against the norm of the rest of America). But some Americans seem to believe social capital is a magical thing conjured out of a 1000 100% apolitical bowling leagues because the alternative is talking about politics and the pursuit of power.
@Gustopher:
Nice slogan, but meaningless. Which people? All the people? Is this second grade and everyone gets a trophy? You’re all winners! You’re a millionaire, and you’re a millionaire, and you’re a millionaire!
Let’s say there are, oh, a nice round 1000 distressed communities, spread across 50 states, is that 1000 hospitals we need to build? What distance can we require people to travel? 1 mile? 10? 50? Where do we get the doctors and nurses?
There’s the world of slogans and then there’s the real world. In the real world, no, we are not going to provide urban-level amenities for Cowpaddy, Mississippi. My ‘better nature’, should it appear, would not alter reality.
As a side note, here are future distressed communities:
Tyson Foods to shut four US chicken plants in blow to small towns
Somehow, I don’t think beating up on LGBTQ folks will put money in the townpeople’s pockets.
@Scott: Well sure. But as Reynolds noted,
If those plants need to be destroyed in order to increase the profit margin of Tyson Foods, well, it isn’t like the company owes something to the community* or anything, amirite?
*(that probably granted some sort of tax break to attract the company)
@Michael Reynolds: “Creative destruction is a key element of capitalism” is also a slogan, but it’s a shitty slogan representing shitty values and an assumption that nothing can ever change because we are all slaves to multinational corporations .
How do you solve the Oklahoma problem? Two senators, a five of representatives, seven votes in the electoral college. Crushing rural poverty leading to a revanchist politics harkening back to an era that never existed. Or the West Virginia problem?
How much of the country can you write off and still have a country that isn’t a hateful shithole?
We have a mixed economy. The government has its fingers on all the scales, rewarding consolidation and “efficiency”. Everything from what infrastructure we build to what government contracts reward to how we enforce antitrust laws. And all of that can change far easier than some other Alabama solution.
It’s the set of tools that we have that are easiest to use.
We can’t put a first class trauma center every twenty miles.
We can break up the meat processing industry, and require at least ten different, geographically diverse domestic suppliers of meat for the armed forces for “national security” reasons. We can put strings on federal funding for state programs to require N% of goods and services to be from within the state, so benefits for Nebraska actually support Nebraska.
We could also find a way to sink Mississippi into the ocean, declare it uninhabitable, and then figure out a way to remove it from the union.
Is there some other option that I’m missing? For the country, not for you. You can always run away to France or whatever.
Because, right now, because of our constitution, we are chained at the leg to Cletus and his sister-wife, whether we like it or not.
Also, Cletus’s sister-wife smells bad, and we need her to take a bath. Cletus don’t smell too good either, but he bites more.
News flash: Concentrated wealth based on resource extraction is bad for everyone but the owners.
Duh.
Sorry, feeling snarky I guess.
@DK:
You are buying into the myths about Nordic countries. The truth is far different.
@JKB:
The degree of lack of self-awareness needed to write that is breathtaking. Seriously.
So, which particular non-mythical facts about northwest Europe were you, particularly, referring to in your earlier post, JKB?
@Gustopher:
I endorse your plan without reservation.
Hibbing High School Auditorium
The school auditorium at Hibbing High, Bob Dylan’s alma matter. Take a look, it’s remarkable. Apparently at the time the school was built, mining companies were making a fortune of the local iron ore deposits. The city fathers made them pay for the privilege. The rest of the school is very impressive as well. What a concept. Dylan played here when he was a student, apparently, the staff cut the power to the mic before he could finish. We can have nice things, but we usually don’t.
@gVOR10: Rick Blaine to Major Strasser in Casablanca: “There are areas of New York City I’d advise you not to invade.”