A Lot about a Lot...

Along West Chestnut Street • April 5, 2003

Once upon a time a train ran through it. Here my lens looked north. About two miles to the right... toward the east... the main line of the old Pennsylvania Railroad and now AMTRAK's main line runs east along those nearby tracks to the Atlantic and west to the Pacific. For about 80 years, until 1929, those trains sliced Lancaster City in half. Here's a picture looking northeast of what once stood in that lot up there.

N. Queen St & W. Chestnut streets • Lancaster City Depot c. 1900

When the big smoky engines wormed their passenger and freight across Lancaster's streets, traffic stopped. Lancaster stopped. The 'new' station up by the mainline's been recently restored from it's 1929 shabbiness and the old tracks plucked out of the streets, restitching the city's halves together. Incidentally, that RR station is Pennsylvania's second busiest. And was the set for key scenes in Harrison Ford's Amish movie, Witness.

And after the old depot was razed, until two years ago, stood (??) that lot I'd captured in 2003. Sometime I'll get around to showing the sparkling structure that's been fit into the lots from the Chestnut street curb to behind where that Hertz-signed factory stood. Now the entire street's renewed and filled with period-appropriate new transport, retail, pubs, offices and condos. The gentry's returning to the diverse mix of Lancaster that's constructing new layers atop what archeologists will someday probe. 

You can smell ambition and optimism in the air that once hovered above that shabby 2003 lot.