Bradford, PA
In the Allegheny National Forest country of north-central PA. Bradford was the heart of the original 1860s oil boom — Pennsylvania Crude is still pumped from the surrounding hills, the highest-quality crude in the world by some measures. The airport sits 13 miles south of the Kinzua Bridge Skywalk. Zippo lighters have been manufactured in Bradford since 1932; the Zippo/Case museum is downtown. Single 6,500ft runway, Class D.
When built in 1882 the Kinzua Viaduct was the tallest railroad bridge in the world — 301 feet high, 2,053 feet long, carrying coal trains across the Kinzua Gorge in north-central PA. Rebuilt in steel in 1900. In 2003 an F1 tornado ripped through the gorge and tore out 11 of the 20 towers, twisting them into the trees below. Rather than rebuild, Pennsylvania turned the surviving towers into a skywalk — an open-grate observation deck cantilevered 600 feet out into the gorge, ending at the point where the tornado snapped the bridge. The downed towers still lie scattered in the forest below.
The small western-PA town where, every February 2 since 1887, a groundhog named Phil emerges from a stump on a forested knoll called Gobbler's Knob to forecast six more weeks of winter or an early spring. The tradition descends from German immigrant folklore (Candlemas Day, badger weather-forecasting) brought to Pennsylvania in the 18th century. The 1993 Bill Murray film made the town a worldwide brand. Punxsutawney sits on the edge of the bituminous coal fields that powered Pittsburgh steel. The Knob itself is two miles outside town, an unassuming wooded hill the rest of the year.
Darwin D. Martin was a self-made man — orphaned at six, working as a soap salesman by twelve, employee of the Larkin Soap Company by his late teens, then Larkin's secretary and one of its top executives. By 1903 he was rich and looking to build a house in the Parkside neighborhood of Buffalo. His brother William Martin had recently commissioned a young Chicago architect named Frank Lloyd Wright for a house in Oak Park. Darwin asked his brother to introduce him. Wright was 36 years old, several years into the Prairie Style work that would define the rest of his life. The commission Darwin Martin gave him was extraordinary — a 15,000-square-foot main house, a conservatory, a carriage house, a pergola connecting the buildings, a separate gardener's cottage, and a smaller Barton House for Darwin's sister Delta and her husband. Wright designed the complex 1903-1905. He considered it (along with the Robie House in Chicago and the Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield) one of the three masterpieces of his Prairie period. He also designed the Larkin Administration Building downtown in 1904 — the office building considered Wright's first masterpiece in any genre — which the company demolished in 1950. After the 1929 crash, Darwin Martin lost his Larkin fortune. He couldn't pay the taxes on the complex. After his death in 1935 the property fell into receivership, the Martin family lost it, and by 1937 the City of Buffalo took it for back taxes. The conservatory, pergola, and carriage house were demolished in 1962. The main house sat empty for years; squatters lived in it. It was used as briefly as architecture offices for the University of Buffalo. By the 1990s it was a wreck. In 1992 the Darwin Martin House Restoration Corporation began a 30-year, $50 million reconstruction. They rebuilt the demolished conservatory, pergola, and carriage house exactly to Wright's original drawings (his drawings still existed). They restored 394 art glass windows. They rebuilt the demolished gardens. The work was substantially complete by 2017. Today the complex is open Wed-Sun for tours and is widely considered the most thoroughly restored Wright Prairie-period complex anywhere. Buffalo also holds Wright's Blue Sky Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery, the Graycliff Estate on Lake Erie (Isabelle Martin's summer home, also Wright), and the recently completed Filling Station — Wright's only built gas-station design, executed posthumously at the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum.
A 220-degree railroad curve completed in 1854 to get the Pennsylvania Railroad over the Allegheny Front without using a tunnel — the line wraps around three sides of a natural amphitheater, gaining 122 feet of elevation in 2,375 feet of track. The curve made it possible to ship freight from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and on to the Midwest, cementing Pennsylvania as the industrial spine of 19th-century America. Norfolk Southern still runs 50-plus trains a day around the curve. The Nazi sabotage plot Operation Pastorius (1942) had Horseshoe Curve on its target list — three German agents landed by U-boat with explosives, but turned themselves in before getting near it.