When the irresistible attraction of a lucrative new job lured me out to Allentown, Pennsylvania, from New York City sixteen years ago, I felt as if I had just fallen from Oz to Kansas with a resounding thud. Unfortunately this place didn’t feel like home, and there was no Auntie Em to greet me. I had landed well outside the New York Achievement Belt where I had grown up. 

The look of the place was different, the culture was different. I saw no smart young professionals sitting outdoors at pseudo-bohemian eateries... no funky shops selling strange hats or Tibetan prayer-wheels. The urban Baby Boomer culture had yet to establish a beachhead here. I remember driving up and down the streets of my new city, recoiling at the bleak and endless blocks of row houses with their lame little porches and sorry turrets -- those dark, depressing, forgotten monuments of low-budget Victorian architecture. I reasoned that nobody of originality or consequence could ever have emerged from those ramshackle rows of brick. Surely the mind dies young in such a place. The very atmosphere reeked of failure, of pale conformity and tired blood.

For a bachelor who had lately arrived from New York, the town appeared to be a desert on the order of the Sahara or at least the Gobi. It seemed that everyone of intelligence had bolted after college, leaving only the old-timers and the kids who married straight out of high school. I’d walk down a street and see not a single face that appeared to be illuminated from inside. Who turned off the lights? This was a shock to my system; the feeling of social deprivation was palpable and at times excruciating. Was I just being an obnoxious yuppie snob? Not really; I wasn’t looking for MBAs so much as kindred spirits: people my age who enjoyed the play of words and ideas, whose abundant curiosity led them to read and travel and cultivate mirth. If they could appreciate my dead-on rendition of King Edward VIII’s abdication speech, so much the better. 

Meeting single women of quality in Allentown proved to be a challenge comparable to finding a Mexican restaurant in Zimbabwe. After one frustrating session at a local night spot, during which I tried to extract something resembling conversation from three or four stone-faced women, I drove away in a semi-inebriated whirlwind of misery. Rushing homeward toward the comfort of my TV, I remember yelling out my car window at the darkened row houses of Allentown: ‘VEGETABLES! You’re all VEGETABLES!’ I concluded that this was the kind of city most people spend their lives trying to escape -- and here I was moving in under my own volition. Was I mad? Did I need the money that badly? Could I catch the next tornado back to Oz?

Of course, I was looking forward to earning a grown-up salary for the first time in my career, so I resolved to give the old town a chance. I’d stay for a year or two, then move on to something more civilized. So I settled into an apartment across from a gently rolling cornfield on the edge of town. My balcony overlooked the field, and during those first summer evenings I’d gaze at its shadowy contours by moonlight from the comfort of my hammock, the stars sparkling above, the fireflies glimmering below. By day I explored the park next door, a lushly landscaped oasis that had been the summer estate of General Harry C. Trexler, the city’s chief nabob during the age of Teddy Roosevelt and John Philip Sousa. In fact, Trexler had been responsible for creating the area’s truly spectacular park system, with its endless winding corridors of rushing streams and weeping willows. If I drove beyond the parks, I’d enter a lost world of Pennsylvania Dutch farmlands, with their ancient stone houses and decorated barns. I explored rustic villages with names like Seisholtzville and Hosensack. My cynic’s soul would leap as I found myself driving across authentic covered bridges; these were no Disneyfied replicas constructed out of fiberglass.

Even Allentown itself had its charms, as I discovered: outdoor band concerts during the summer, a vast and bustling farmers’ market all year ‘round, food fairs and music fairs and old-time crafts fairs, with blue ribbons awarded to Mrs. Lichtenwalner’s patchwork quilt or Mrs. Hunsicker’s homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie. I consumed Pennsylvania Dutch food with gusto and listened for traces of the old accents among the Dutch elders. I attended surprisingly good productions of Shakespeare, baroque concerts, memorable evenings of Gilbert and Sullivan. I joined a committee to save the town’s independent art cinema, housed in a vintage 1928 Art Deco theater with its original pipe organ and gilded ceiling. I won friends and influenced people. I even came to admire the sturdy, understated dignity of those old brick row houses, not to mention their residents. As for the women -- well, the fact that I’m marrying a Philadelphian probably won’t sound like a ringing endorsement of the Allentown social scene, but I’ll be remembering a few special women with lasting fondness and gratitude.

Now that I’m packing up my apartment and moving on, the thought of abandoning Allentown fills me with blubbering regret. I spent my prime years here, enjoyed long walks and charming conversations, worked a little too hard, made good money, squabbled occasionally with my cat, probably spent too many evenings alone. I blossomed as a literary cynic; I wrote a book and a hundred essays. I learned to chuckle at the pretensions of the yuppie class and gained immense respect for authenticity, which somehow managed to survive in abundance here. I’m sorry I judged Allentown so harshly when I first moved here from New York; I learned that first impressions are less important than lasting impressions, with towns as with people. First impressions are based on quirky instincts; lasting impressions arise from experience. I’ll take experience over instincts any day.

Cynic's Pick of the Week

Pity poor Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. The Italian jewelry company that created their diamond-studded wedding bands reportedly broke an agreement that it would never reproduce the handsomely thatched couple’s unique finger jewelry. The company is hawking lookalike ‘Brad & Jennifer white-gold wedding bands’ for about $1000 each, and the two excessively idolized stars aren’t amused. In fact, they’re suing the jeweler for $50 million, which could probably buy them the Hope Diamond with enough left over to pay their hairdressers’ salaries for life. I’m not sure who wins the cynic's raspberry in this story: the jeweler, the two litigious superspouses, or the shameless couples who feel the compelling need to buy ‘Brad & Jennifer’ reproduction rings.