Even as the region's transportation systems continued to hobble back to life on Monday, with full service restorations on some key New York City subway lines for the first time since Hurricane Sandy, commuter-heavy towns across northern New Jersey remained stifled.
What some see as unsustainable growth is reflected in, as with other tech-heavy towns, a jump in the price of living.
In Ano Liosia, an immigrant-heavy town north of Athens, I visited an assembly that arranges for farmers to sell produce directly to the community, circumventing middlemen and grocery markups — creating, in effect, a farmers' market for the very poor.
Like Clairton, Mingo Junction was a steel-heavy town nearing the end of its life-cycle.
The borough is also one of the poorest in the country with a high proportion of people on sickness benefits, which is something Hartlepool has in common with other heavy industrial towns across the UK.
While much of Oates's writing indirectly owes a debt to her past - her familiar upstate New York landscapes of bleak, beautiful countryside and heavy industrial towns are drawn directly from her own childhood - The Gravedigger's Daughter represents her first foray into the realm of biography.
Compared with other tourist-heavy Vermont towns, Plymouth has kept development to a minimum.
I liked the big bright landscapes, the way the mountains caught the alpenglow in late afternoon, and I liked the heavy-named towns that sat in the valleys: Granite, Bedrock, Sawpit, Crested Butte.
The action begins in 1954, when Kroc, an Illinois salesman of multi-spindle milkshake mixers, lugs the heavy device from town to town and from restaurant to restaurant in the hope of drumming up business.
Obeying federal laws (or their absence on guns) is getting 33,000 people killed every year and inviting terrorists to haul their heavy weapons into town after town - or to buy them locally with the government's complicity - to massacre our children and families and neighbors.
Marfa, a further 2 and a bit hours and 20 or so minutes from the Mexican border is a quaint Deco-heavy artists town, full of galleries, arty cafes and airstreams.
