I was expecting to walk through an eerie ghost town instead of a lively, leisurely road.
The said road was a now-defunct section of Route 61 in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Long ago de-commissioned, the road’s dark, cracked asphalt surface had evolved into an extensive outdoor canvas marked up by condensed clusters of colorful graffiti tags and comical images. Massive dirt mounds vegetated by gangly grasses and leafy trees buttressed each end of the street’s stretch.
Very few automobiles drive through old 61, making way for quads to cruise, scooters to speed, and motorcycles to zip up and down the way. The road also dubs as a casual walkway, a pleasant one where I strolled amongst leather-clad gothic couples from Pittsburg, tie-dye wearing guys from rural Pennsylvania, plus families from American lands near and far.
True, Centralia was ghostly in terms of lacking any proper village. No commercial activity, industry, or institutions were present. No neighborhoods remained—with the exception of a couple of houses that still host less than a dozen holdout residents. Decades back, when Centralia was a functioning community, it was a small mining village constructed above a vein of anthracite coal and a network of mines. In the 1960s, legend has it that a heap of garbage was set to burn, but when the flames eventually reached an artery of the mine, the fire trailed off to set the entire underground ablaze.
The underground inferno then continued for decades forth. In the 1980s, the ongoing burning caused the earth to collapse right under the feet of the then 12-year-old boy, Todd Domboski. He fell into the sinkhole but was saved by his cousin pulling him out. Pennsylvania has condemned Centralia, buying the majority of its houses and nixing its area code. Today the remaining homes can only remain occupied until their inhabitants’ death.
The bizarre story attracted me and three other friends to road-trip out from New York City to Centralia for Memorial Day weekend. Driving westward, we joked that we wanted to see the “real America”—a concept we’d heard expressed by several European tourists who felt NYC was too old-worldly when they craved the open spaces, large houses, and car-centric infrastructures of the new world.
Prior to Centralia, the four of us stopped in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, to visit the famous brewing facilities of the Yuengling Brewery, the beer brand that takes pride in its slogan “America’s Oldest Brewery.” We learned on our brewery tour there, though, that the company’s original name was actually Eagle, hence the label’s logo of the big, bold bird.
After touring the industrial source of where proper American beer originates, we drove onward towards the heart of Pennsylvania’s coal region to reach Centralia. There, we parked by the side of a functioning bypass of Route 61, to enter the defunct section on foot.
Walking around the crackled, spray-painted asphalt, we stumbled into a couple of older local men who told us of how they’d originated from Centralia, pre-condemnation. Standing by a colossal rupture in the road, the two men talked about how they knew Todd Domboski—“the boy” —and recounted the small and close-knit nature of the community.
I didn’t see the smoke rising from the rupture like I’d expected. The older locals informed me that the smoke had dissipated in recent years and that the underground fires have migrated, but that visitors used to be able to watch plumes wafting up from the cracks in the road.
Later, by another rigid rupture in old 61’s asphalt, a younger local confirmed that the smoke there was a site of the past. But if we did truly desire to witness the smoke rise from the ground, he said, we’d have to walk uphill into the cemetery and continue hiking through forest paths which eventually lead to a split section of earth that emits the vapor.
My friends and I didn’t hike into the forest. We returned to the car and drove past the two remaining houses on a lower Centralia road, then up through a forested upper road where wily, young woods had overgrown spaces formerly occupied by the town’s bygone buildings.
We parked for a moment at the top of the open hill by the cemetery and stared across the valley to observe a row of white windmills cycling atop a grassy knoll. We drove downhill, to the functioning highway, past a mountain of excavated rock and other mining byproducts, traveling towards Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania.
That night, we checked into our hotel. We joked with the guy at the front desk that we ventured from NYC to see the “real America.”
“Well, you found it,” he replied with a smirk.
The next day, following the recommendations of several locals, we drove toKnoebel's Amusement Park. There, we entered a little museum that presented several dark, unglamorous historical elements about mining, such as how, in the 1800s, boys as young as six were sent to labor underground, sorting coal for four cents an hour, working 12-hour shifts.
To experience some amusement in the park, I rode around a mining-themed haunted house, which featured installations of mule-driven push-carts and dingy, dusty animatronic skeletons laboring away in hard hats. Creeping through the darkness, the little train slinked past a rendition of Centralia, Pennsylvania, in which explosive noises were amplified as the side of a house fell towards the passengers—a campy, yet unreserved embrace of the local culture.
Afterwards we visited the park’s onsite pair of bald eagles. The brave, breathing American emblems looked bold, yet bound in captivity. Like many other parts of the road trip, viewing these caged birds felt like a symbolic (if maybe sometimes ironic) encounter with America
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