The Monsters on Main Avenue
Scranton, Pennsylvania, as a prop in politics
I spent the first wave of the pandemic in Scranton, Pennsylvania, walking its dark, cracked streets night after night with a friend, a detached street sign, and a video camera in tow, slinking around Joe Biden’s old childhood haunts under moonlight.
And it’s those treks through the former industrial juggernaut that ultimately gave birth to the satirical film embedded above.
The project was crafted as a response to presidential candidates using the city as a political prop. My aim was to finally offer a voice — albeit a comedic one — to the Scranton area itself, where Biden and I grew up precisely 40 years apart.
In 2008, Scranton was deemed “ground zero for old-fashioned American values, the psychic heartland.” And every presidential election since, the city of Scranton has been seized and distorted by political campaigns as well as poked, analyzed, and dissected by pundits and journalists alike.
In fact, these groups have had so much to say in recent years about my hometown, that it got me wondering — if given the opportunity, what might Scranton say about them?
‘Scranton Values’
Long before Scranton was pitted against Park Avenue, as it was recently by the former vice president, I had already been researching the ways candidates cast themselves in the region as voices of the working class, necromancers of the financially deceased and forgotten pockets of America.
Video recordings of Donald Trump’s unbridled pandering to the earnest and trusting people of Northeastern Pennsylvania are as stomach-turning to watch as one might expect.
But it was only after watching Joe Biden’s campaign video, “Scranton Values,” and reading a local story on presidential hopefuls’ failure to pay bills they’ve racked up there that I hit the gas on the project. Candidates have been amassing alarming bills in their never-ending tours through the city, ultimately sticking the checks with the financially distressed people of the area.
Scranton is now viewed as a must-stop locale for any candidate. And last election, eight of the 11 hopefuls who visited the area incurred bills for police overtime.
The bills can range anywhere from several hundred dollars to tens of thousands for each stop. Police Captain Dennis Lukasewicz is quick to point out that it “depends on the person who’s coming in.”
“If it’s someone who’s running in the primaries, it’s a little less intensive. But if it’s a presidential visit, then we are increasing our manpower tremendously.”
Millionaires sticking a lower-income city with bills they’ve accrued after holding events that use the area’s working-class values as a tactic to get votes, the irony just seemed too great to bear.
Surreal to watch
From a local perspective, the sudden attention the city has received in the past dozen years by entertainment media, broadcast news, and national politicians has been astonishing.
A decade before “The Office” premiered on NBC, my friends and I could be found shuffling through the laminate shelves at Blockbuster on Greenridge Street and searching for movies that mentioned any of the towns in our area. There were only two or three, but “Kingpin,” starring Woody Harrelson, was a favorite. The film depicted Scranton as a bleak industrial slum. Inaccurate as it was, we felt proud. Someone out there knew we existed. And it was surreal to watch.
But then in 2008, Scranton rocketed to the forefront of U.S. national politics along with Joe Biden, who Barack Obama labeled, “the scrappy kid from Scranton who beat the odds.”
“…if given the opportunity, what might Scranton say about them?”
My siblings and I grew up just several blocks from Joe Biden’s legendary childhood home, blissfully unaware odds were stacked against us. Was our town different? I still don’t think it was or is. And from my perspective, therein lies the problem.
When I became a journalist, at the start of Scranton’s fame, I bit my lip each election while peers from outside the area stomped through my family and friends’ neighborhoods, offering their Rockwellian, whistlestop perspectives.
But this attention, these portrayals weren’t doing any harm, or so I thought. That’s until I read the aforementioned article about presidential candidates ghosting the city on bills they owed.
Even now, the thought of these candidates taking advantage of my former home in those rolling mountains makes my blood boil.
No matter how hard politicians try to tease and pull the residents of Scranton apart, they push on, going to work, caring for their children, and living as a united community. They make little fanfare of the responsibility, spotlight, and debt placed on their shoulders. Unfortunately for you, for Joe Biden, and Donald Trump, I was not graced with these stoic traits.
Enough is enough. It’s time for those from the Scranton area to speak up.
If you can play Scranton
A century ago, Scranton was a vaudeville hub. And performers were known to say, “If you can play Scranton, you can play anywhere.”
The reason that expression caught on was because the ill-tempered coal miners of Northeastern Pennsylvania used to throw beer bottles at performers when they would say, sing or do anything on stage the miners didn’t like. Talent scouts would mill around smokey, wooden bars, and theaters in downtown Scranton. And if a performer could make it through a visit to the city, they were ready for the big time.
What you see in the media about Scranton and national politics as well as what you’re reading at this very moment are both rebirthings of that period and that process.
Scranton sits within a county that could help swing Pennsylvania, which itself is a swing state. Lackawanna and Luzerne County, where the nearby town of Wilkes-Barre sits, are lead dominos in a political domino effect. If one were to knock those game pieces over, the rest might fall as well.
Let me throw a few more bottles, however, at the candidates crowing on stages and racking up debt in Scranton.
Presidential hopefuls have used the city as their blue-collared theater for decades, where they’ve laid out plans to pull rusty regions like Scranton out of economic ruin.
And yet, these very same candidates, who have promised light at the end of the city’s ever-deteriorating tunnel, have been slipping out of town and going dark when Scranton calls for reimbursement on bills.
Donald Trump, notoriously bigmouthed about his alleged mountains of cash, has played a part in several unpaid bills from the police overtime needed to safely support events in the area. But by contrast, the very city paying his bills was deemed financially distressed in 1992 and has since teetered on the edge of bankruptcy arguably in part because of its own struggles with corrupt local politicians.
Though not a rally, Trump’s Fox News town hall in March of this year alone cost the city over $24,000. But the participants, a sitting U.S. president and a news outfit with a parent media corporation worth several tens of billions of dollars, both skipped out on the bill for the extra policing that the event required, leaving those in the swing state to pick up the check.
This practice, however, is not limited to Republicans nor conservative media conglomerates by any means.
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have been guilty of this practice as well. An event for Joe Biden in Scranton in 2016 cost the city over $11,000, roughly the same cost of yet another Donald Trump event that year.
‘Praise, promise, and poof’
Countless other presidential candidates, outside of Joe Biden, have zeroed in on values in their attempts to vie for blue-collar votes. Ronald Reagan, for example, famously launched an attack in his 1976 campaign on the “welfare queen,” which was an economic and gendered symbol largely seen opposed to these working-class values.
But Nick Carnes, Duke University professor of political science and author of “White-Collar Government” and “The Cash Ceiling,” points out that blue-collar-based appeals in 2020 come paradoxically at a time when Washington is increasingly distant from the working class itself.
“If working-class people [in the U.S.] formed their own political party, that party would make up more than half of the country. But it would have less than two percent of the seats in Congress, in every Congress going back at least to 1901,” Mr. Carnes says. Millionaires, however, account for more than half of those in all three branches of government, he adds.
And many of these values-based appeals often come with the promise to return to a “world that was,” an idea that unlike in 2016, crosses party lines today amid a pandemic and economic collapse.
Think of it as the praise, promise, and poof effect. Candidates praise the area’s values, they promise to help working-class regions if elected, and then poof, they leave.
On the walkway leading into Joe Biden’s childhood home in the Greenridge neighborhood of Scranton in August of 2016, Hillary Clinton promised that “nobody will love Scranton as much as I will as president.”
One month earlier, Trump also told Scrantonians he loved them and then casually promised to bring manufacturing back to the region.
It was dizzying. Yet with all the emotional and vague promises, campaign after campaign, administration after administration, the city’s very real and very clear problems remain.
Data has shown Scranton’s drinking water has more lead than Flint, Michigan’s. One of its biggest schools closed long before the pandemic because of asbestos. Its mayor went to jail last year for corruption. And there’s an ever-expanding landfill that now towers over the region. The list goes on.
“The city is spending the little money it has to listen to candidates talk about how they’ll fix Scranton and others like it. Shouldn’t Scranton just stop these events and use that money to, well, fix itself?” I asked my father, who before ritirement, was a businessman in downtown Scranton.
“Matt, candidates love coming here and telling us about ourselves. It’s part of the process.”
Luckily, Scranton’s new mayor, Paige Cognetti, the city’s first female elected to the job and a native Oregonian who worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, has put an end to footing the bill for campaign policing and other extra city services.
But candidates still have much to say about the area — too much to say about the working class and too much to say about Main Street — to ever stop them from coming.
It’s for these reasons that Main Avenue, a wide throughway in North and West Scranton, becomes an intriguing symbol of disconnect between the working class and candidates ranting about Main Street, America.
Turns out Main Street hasn’t existed in Scranton since the late 1800s. Scranton’s Main Street was renamed Main Avenue a few decades before the city’s collars started changing from blue to white. There’s no evidence that the renaming of the street was symbolic, though in this context it does feel figurative.
So when candidates promise to put people back to work in coal mines and factories there, these promises often fall on the ears of office workers who are employed in health and education, two of the city’s biggest industries.
The Biden house
My childhood wasn’t too dissimilar from the one Biden describes in his memoir, with bands of wandering children riding bikes on culm dumps and exploring the mined-out mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Culm dumps are colossal piles of loose coal waste that our parents told us would swallow us up if we weren’t careful. They used to catch fire with relative frequency and could sometimes look like dusty volcanoes.
Just as Joe Biden describes in his book, “Promises to Keep,” I too have shimmied over the city’s river on a slippery pipe. I’ve been hassled by bullies in the Greenridge neighborhood, climbed trees in the park near the Biden house on North Washington Avenue, and watched friends’ parents struggle in desperate ways that only those from a Rust Belt town can understand.
And I myself have crash-landed in Scranton off and on since graduating from school, defeated by the outside working world. And seeing the way some struggle, or even the way I struggled in my mid-twenties to pull it together there, has given me a deep understanding of how removed these political portrayals of the area actually are.
Working the day shift at a Scranton-area strip mall bar with three dollars in your pocket and no way out is a hopelessness I don’t wish upon anyone. But a suggestion that it might all turn around if you can just help elect Donal Trump, who famously promised during a 2016 rally to reopen the area’s 19th-Century coal mine operation — that’s just insulting and shows a glaring lack of understanding of the area’s plight.
Similarly, unable to find real work in the early 1950s, Joe Biden’s father had the smarts to look elsewhere when the vice president was only ten. So the Biden family left. Unfortunately, that same “get up” attitude that Biden says his father taught him wasn’t wired as concretely into the walls of all the homes in the so-called Electric City.
Less than ten years ago, one in three children in Scranton was found to be living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
President Trump recently said Biden “abandoned” Scranton when his family moved out, which is absurd and even offensive to those from the area, as it implies there’s a power dynamic that’s reliant on Joe Biden for the city’s success.
Yes, Joe Biden is from Scranton. But Scranton doesn’t need him. In fact, I still can’t pin down whether Joe Biden has really ever done anything for the city, after having built an entire career on its identity.
I do know, however, that the former vice president has leaned into his first ten years of life to a degree that I, at first, found suspicious. He’s made a political fortune from it, and this rehashing of the past made me question his real affinity for the area. It just seemed forced and politically convenient. And I’m not the only one who noticed.
An actor portraying Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live in 2012 said of Scranton, “I grew up there. I love it. It’s the single worst place on earth.” The joke got huge laughs outside the area.
Eight years later, words like “exploitation” and “economic appropriation” began working their way into my discussions about both candidates’ obsessions with the area.
“I don’t care what ties they have. It feels wrong to keep using the city as leverage,” I said to my mother this spring during our weekly phone call.
“But Matt, Joe Biden’s really one of us. And the area loves him,” she shot back.
“You know my friend, Maddie. Well, she and her friends used to go driving with handsome Joe Biden in his convertible when they were in high school. Maddie said he’s absolutely the nicest guy,” she added.
According to, well, according to my mom, Biden used to visit the area on weekends well into high school. Or at least, that’s reportedly what Maddie told her. You know, local chatter… culm dumps… handsome Joe Biden driving my mother’s friends around in a convertible… who knows.
We all want to be local
Speaking of local chatter, full disclosure: I’m technically from a neighboring town of Scranton’s.
The city border crossed the lawn of our neighbor across the street. And though it was a big point of contention when I was a kid, it is and was all the same. Scranton encapsulates the entire region for those around it and even a way of life. And politicians in the past twenty years have been quick to expound on that idea.
Like coal miners from a century ago, presidential hopefuls have used that patch of earth as an identity and a resource, one to be leveraged and sold to other Americans for power. And the closer you are to the source, the more earth you can ultimately claim.
Every four years, Scranton area residents watch quietly as campaigners and candidates demand to be recognized as locals.
Eric Trump said a few years ago in front of a raucous rally for his father that he attended school in Pennsylvania and spent much of his youth in Scranton. But Pennsylvania is an immense, diverse state. And Scranton is as far from New York City culturally and geographically as it is from Eric Trump’s preparatory alma mater, The Hill School, in southeast Pennsylvania.
In a less stretched truth, Hilary Clinton has repeatedly pointed out she spent summers at Lake Winola with her grandparents, who are from the city. But I’ve never been to Lake Winola and had to Google it.
And there are many more candidates who have staked a claim to the area, which has become synonymous with a “scrappy” and “hardscrabble” identity. These labels are worth gold if you are a Washington politician in a fine Italian suit. But to a Scranton kid in a hand-me-down, they feel like hot culm on the skin.
And it’s for this very reason why I questioned Joe Biden’s affection for the city and the odds he faced there.
I’m particularly sensitive to such vaguely woven terms and tactics about Scranton because I spent many nights as a kid analyzing political rhetoric about the city.
Evenings during high school were spent filming Scranton city council meetings for the town’s public access station and running the tapes back to air minutes after the meetings concluded.
Those council members — whom I took special care to frame tightly with the station’s comically large cameras — faced tough bouts of questioning from concerned citizens who have since watched their city’s mayor and two county commissioners go to jail over criminal conspiracy, bribery, and extortion.
So synthesizing incredibly complex ideas of the working class and turning them into marketable positives, i.e., scrappy and hardscrabble, brought back memories of the spin that would be employed to keep angry Scrantonians at bay in that televised room those many years ago.
But I admit these are identities that felt placed on Joe Biden by the Obama Administration. And a happenstance encounter with the former vice president in Scranton would soon point to clarification.
St. Paul’s Parish
During his most recent visit to the area in July, I spent the afternoon waiting to catch a shot of the former vice president speaking at an event in nearby Dunmore. But he was running late, the crowd was sweltering under the sun, and I didn’t have much time. I had to begin my rather long journey back to my new home, outside the area.
Sitting at an intersection before I left, coincidentally on Biden’s old street, I spotted his convoy, zipping down Greenridge Street right in front of me.
I followed at a distance in first gear past the boarded-up Victorian cathedral that my friends and I tried to sneak inside as teenagers, past the neighborhood library where I spent hours as an adolescent rummaging through the stacks, and finally pulling up to Zummo’s Cafe, a former penny candy store, where I spent my allowance as a very young child.
And it’s there, outside the plain brick walls of St. Paul’s Parish, that I saw Joe Biden sitting quietly. He was reflecting, observing the working-class neighborhood where we both grew up and the church that we once shared, albeit decades apart.
With no one around aside from his security, the former vice president of the United States was sitting peacefully in his car, next to the parish parking lot where I once sat, atop a skateboard, thinking about whether I’d ever have the nerve to leave the city.
It was surreal, like catching a mention of the city in a Blockbuster movie. And I felt proud.
You see, Scranton is a splintery nest of a place, and from an inside perspective, the rest of the world sometimes feels like it would require wings to get out. And so, many of us stay close, perched between the mountains in the mysterious industrial city we love.
Biden sat there for only a few moments, but I saw the distant reflection of his weathered face looking out on his, on our neighborhood. I knew what he was feeling.
It’s what so many native sons and daughters feel when they visit: that they’d drop everything to be ten years old again for one afternoon, making their way home on those cracked streets at dusk, sweaty from shimmying across slippery pipes over the Lackawanna River or just climbing trees in Greenridge.
Certainly, that feeling isn’t limited to those who grew up entirely in Scranton. Finally leaving the area was hard enough in my twenties. It must have been gut-wrenching at ten.
I was and am convinced. A phony, he is not.
Scranton as a laboratory
Now that Joe Biden may enter a position to help the city that aided him so dramatically in his career, should something be done to repay the favor?
Is there a debt that is owed well beyond the money he and other candidates have racked up from city services?
I certainly think so. Regardless of what his YouTube videos might say, loyalty and a sense of hometown pride, those are Scranton values. The city doesn’t need to tell him that. He demonstrates his awareness of these notions with every speech.
So let me instead test out a Biden value. Joe, to you I say, “Get up.”
Well, first beat Donald Trump and, for the sake of the whole country’s mental health, set a course for a calmer and more unified nation. It feels appallingly sheltered to be typing so, but obviously such broader objectives are far, far more important at the moment.
But if you can, if you would, reserve some strength to then get up—to get up and help Scranton with the same effectiveness that simply being born there did for you.
For once, there is an opportunity for a sustained spotlight on the city, one that doesn’t dim once candidate wheels leave the tarmac. Keep that light shining and point it at the city’s water, the asbestos in the school, and the corruption in its politics. After all, Scranton is simply one aging industrial town trying to find its way among thousands.
You have the ties and may soon have the power to establish the city as a laboratory, a publicly-facing guide, and a symbol for how to fix all that ails the rusted and the splintered in America.
Why not help Scranton be the platform for discussion on how to repair the working-class towns of America? Scranton is not unique. The odds here are the same faced by so, so many. And that’s where the city can be of help.
Together, we can leverage lessons from our collective odds, the very ones you and Barack Obama have spoken so poetically yet ambiguously of.
They are real, however. And Scranton is not bliss. I certainly see that now. And so, working towns like ours must act quickly, before the next wave of Scranton culm dump kids are born.
Now get up, Joe, and once elected, transform Scranton from a prop to a symbol, one that has enough momentum to point in a direction, any direction that’s away from the empty anthracite ground.
Spotlight Scranton. And leave that light in the city so that it may learn to illuminate itself.
This is the only way forward, the only one with any real Scranton value.
Get out of the car
I returned home with my wife, my curious street sign, and my camera equipment to Spain after three months of being away.
Back in my office in Barcelona, I received a call from my parents, who told me that after 50 years in their home in the Greenridge neighborhood, they’d be moving out of the area.
I could hear parrots chirping in the palm trees near my office while we spoke, outside a strange new life that I’ve now created with my wife, miles away from the Scranton area.
I hung up the phone and thought about Joe Biden, sitting in his car and looking out at our old neighborhood an ocean away.
For I too will soon lose my Scranton anchor, the family home in Greenridge. And from here on out, my view of Scranton will also likely be limited to what I can see from behind a car window.
But unlike Joe Biden, I hope I never have to get out of the car to convince the locals that I’m really one of them.
I know they’d give me a hard time for it. Those people are scrappy as hell.
Matt Danzico is a journalist, filmmaker and designer. He is a former head of innovation for BBC News in London, a digital executive for NBC News in New York, and a day-shift bartender for Killdare’s Irish Pub in Moosic, Pennsylvania.
