Descriptions of Places

As a first time visitor to the entire Southern Appalachian region, I can't write with much authority about the Smoky Mountains, but there is so much to write about that I have to try. The Smokies consist mainly of a huge east-west (more like ESE-WNW) running ridge, 70 miles in length, with many branching offshoots. This mountain range, though one of the tallest in the East, is not along a major divide. It is bounded at both ends by deep river valleys that bisect the ridge and drain the entire region northwest into the Tennessee River, via the French Broad and Little Tennessee Rivers. The Eastern Continental Divide is roughly 30 miles to the southeast, along the Blue Ridge. The general profile of the Smokies is dome-shaped. The ridge rises steeply on both ends from river valleys below 2000 feet to peaks at 4-5000 feet in a couple of miles. The ridgeline then rises more gradually its center. The highest point, Clingman's Dome at 6,643 ft, is roughly halfway down. Another high...

The tour of the assembly plant at the Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn, MI is one of the main things to do for tourists visiting Detroit. This is the factory where they put together F-150 pickup trucks. It was fourth on our list, after the Motown Museum, the Institute of Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art, all of which are closed on Mondays. To get to "the Rouge" from Detroit, you have to drive past it, a few miles into suburban Dearborn, to an institution called "The Henry Ford." Here you park (for a fee), buy your pass, and board the shuttle bus back towards the factory. The corridors of this university-like great hall offer other attractions: the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, An Olde Time Village and petting farm, an IMAX theater, several restaurants, and more. Banners proclaim the institution's impactful works, like The Innovation Project: "Inside every child is the potential to change the world." On a December weekday afte...

I don't have facts here, I just have family stories. My great grandparents, Masha and David Shoshkes, emigrated to Newark, NJ from a small town in Poland as adults. David went into the produce business, starting off with a pushcart. Through hard work and sacrifice, the story goes, he saved enough money to establish a store on South Orange Avenue. Later, he became a distributor, driving his truck to delis in the suburbs with their produce orders. One of his clients was the Town Hall Deli in South Orange, which still exists. As he accumulated some capital, David invested in real estate. These ventures were risky, and due to one financial setback, the family had to pack up and move into an investment property of his, for a number of years. This house was in an Italian neighborhood of nearby East Orange with few Jewish residents. It seems that my grandpa was bullied in school while they lived there. My grandpa Milton was a smart kid. He liked sports but violin made a more lasting i...

Now, I'm no stranger to the progress and decline of American industry and its effects on the landscapes and communities of our nation, but really Detroit is on a whole other level. That metro area is dominated by manufacturing in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. Even in the main downtown, with its tall commercial buildings and cool early 20th century architecture, the factories make their presence known, visible in the immediate surroundings from upper floors and parking decks, and encountered by walking a short distance outside the commercial area. Of course many of these industrial complexes, especially in the inner city, are abandoned and falling apart. But throughout the metro area, the living power and influence of industry is evident in countless examples. How tempting it is to suggest that if manufacturing left this place once and for all, it would have no reason to exist. The region's geography is also simpler than most metro areas. A city on a river m...

This is an area right in the heart of the Catskills, running up against a high ridge along the range's main divide. A few miles to the west of Slide Mountain and the range's steepest terrain, it is a spot surrounded by many layers of big long, lumpy Catskill ridges and miles of nearly unbroken forest on all sides. Biscuit Brook is a tributary of the West Branch of the Neversink River at the top of the Delaware river's watershed.  It drains the southwestern side of a 3000 foot ridge along the "Catskill Divide" dividing the Delaware's and Hudson's basins. The stream runs for about 3 1/2 miles down a narrow, gradual valley, emptying into the Neversink just below 2000 feet. Long ridges flank the valley, remaining flat-topped and above 3000 feet for almost two miles from the main divide Though the gradient of the river is not steep, the valley is moderately rugged. Biscuit Brook flows directly across red Catskill sandstone bedrock in many places. The ground...

The rivers that drain the Catskills to the west follow a similar pattern. These include, shown on the map from left to right, the Delaware, with its West and East Branches (major tributary the Beaverkill shown in purple), the Neversink, with two branches towards its headwaters, and finally Rondout Creek. All of these streams descend from the mountains in a southwesterly direction,  then turn to the southeast where the mountains give way to the lower-relief Allegheny Plateau. They later cascade down into a valley of the Ridge and Valley province behind the Shawangunk Mountains. Rondout Creek takes this common descent in the shortest distance. Its gradient, though moderate in the grand scheme of things, is steepest among these rivers. Flanked by mountains, its upper half flows down through the narrow and deep Peekamoose Valley, walled by steep slopes 2500 feet and 1500 feet tall. The summits of Table Mountain, Peekamoose Mountain, Lone Mountain, Rocky Mountain and Balsam Cap ...

The Shawangunk Mountains sit at a special spot on the continent. In Southeastern New York state, the Appalachian Mountain range follows a general pattern that continues all the way to Virginia, and to some extent down to Alabama. Driving across these mountains, you will cross bedrock in chronological order of its formation. Let's take Route 17 starting at the New Jersey border. The Ramapo Mountains in Rockland and Orange Counties, part of the Crystalline Appalachians, have extremely ancient gneiss bedrock. It was uplifted from deep in the earth's crust and now forms a resistant highlands. From the town of Monroe on through the rest of Orange County, the gneiss recedes below the surface and one encounters rolling terrain of the Great Appalachian Valley, made up of somewhat less ancient deep ocean sediments. Crossing into Sullivan County, the road ascends Shawangunk Ridge. Here, resting on top of the Great Valley's shale, is a massive amount of white conglomerate composed o...