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I do include Baltimore and Philadelphia as part of the Rust Belt. Not sure about Newark or the many declining New Jersey communities like Union City or Asbury Park.
When I think of the rust belt I typically think of the Great Lakes region. Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh would be the quintessential rust belt cities. I know most of Ohio and much of PA is considered rust belt as well. I guess from central PA to eastern Iowa for me.
When I think of the rust belt I typically think of the Great Lakes region. Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh would be the quintessential rust belt cities. I know most of Ohio and much of PA is considered rust belt as well. I guess from central PA to eastern Iowa for me.
Great lakes cities were big in the automobile industry, which a lot of people fixate on as rust belt, but it was much more than that. Pittsburgh isn't considered to be in the great lakes region typically, and wasn't very associated to the car industry, but was of course rust belt, maybe even the center of the rust belt. Almost all of PA is/was part of the rust belt, think places like Allentown too. Philly and Camden definitely. Baltimore definitely.
The only places in Iowa that feel like they're part of the Rust Belt are the cities along the Mississippi, and the larger ones (Dubuque and Davenport/Bettendorf) seem clearly on the upswing. Industry was never that big a part of the state's economy.
As a NJ native I 100% consider our cities to be part of the rust belt. Trenton used to be a huge steel hub.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cornsnicker3
Farthest East Point - Albany, NY
Farthest West Point - Duluth, MN
Perhaps, I don't think there is a real definition of where the rustbelt is or was, or for that matter still is.
Personally I tend to see the true rust belt as further west, the big cities in the Midwest and surrounding areas, including parts of Canada.
Trenton and Albany
Trenton and Albany in contrast were old trading hubs (especially Albany) built at tidewater where ships can come in. They then became state capitols. So there may have been factories in and around these cities but the majority of the economy revolved around trade, transportation and government. This in contrast to some of the rust belt factory towns where sometimes the making of a single product or two would dominate the local economy.
Port Cities and Mill Towns
It is also true that some of the smaller cities in New Jersey have factories, but some of them are more port cities or mill towns than rustbelt. Mill towns usually were powered by water and developed earlier than the later rustbelt.
Here is a list of mill towns in New Jersey, which btw I believe is very incomplete (for instance where is Paterson as well as the entire state of Pennsylvania?) so I believe there are more.
One area that's hard to classify as Rust Belt or no would be rural southern West Virginia and also the WV cities of Charleston and Huntington as the Kanawha Valley used to have a lot of industry. It still does but far less so now, and the coal industry has also suffered tremendously, though this began with the War on Coal which started much later than the industrial losses in most of the Rust Belt.
Always of thought rust belt being west of i-95 since most of the cities on i-95 were pretty established well before the 1800s. Baltimore has rust belt tendencies, but is pretty far south and too far east from the core rust belt reigon. One thing I've noticed about the rust belt is that they mostly refer to soda as pop which is the opposite of cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Newark. West of the Appalachian mountains, East of the Mississippi and North of the Ohio River.
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