28 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 rail connections. “Patch towns” – small, planned settlements, sometimes referred to as “coal patches” – were established down by these seams by coal companies to house workers. These patchtowns were satellite grids of those found in Hazleton. The streets are lined almost entirely with duplexes – which immigrant workers built to house their families – and the spires or ogee domes of churches built by different ethnic groups from Eastern and Southern Europe arriving for work. Although tensions often existed among these pan-European immigrant communities, the opportunity to build, worship, and create distinct religious and cultural institutions made it easier for newcomers to establish and sustain themselves. Over time, these neighborhood grids came to reflect both the original vision of planned mining communities and the later expansions that accommodated continued waves of immigration in the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1950s, the region, built by successive waves of newcomers, gradually emptied. The city’s population peaked around 40,000 in 1940 and had dwindled to 22,500 by 1990. David described Hazleton in the 2000s as “a ghost town.” Rossanna added that the streets were filled with “empty storefronts, empty houses, and empty buildings.” “What happens when your population shrinks like that?” asks Bob Curry. Elaine describes the moment: “Our children and everyone else’s children had left and were not coming back.” Bob continues, noting that “a brain drain of the young, entrepreneurial set, the young professionals” were driven away by the lack of opportunity. This mass exodus of people left a void in the social fabric as the industry that had structured daily life disappeared. Limited municipal capacity and weakened civic institutions left few mechanisms to help residents process these moments of social and economic transition. Today, the city’s infrastructure is strianing in the opposite direction. Unlike earlier periods, when newcomers were able to build their own homes and physically expand the footprint of the city, little new physical infrastructure has been created to support the city’s population increase. Nearly 60% of the city’s housing stock is still made up of duplexes built pre1930, while suburbanized zoning codes adopted in the 20th century effectively prohibit the construction of these very duplexes. As a result, families who have recently immigrated to Hazleton are living overcrowded in these aging duplexes, sometimes six families in housing meant for two.
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