Essay: Outside the Amtrak Window, a Picture of the U.S. Economy

By Jacob Krupnick for The New York Times. Photographs by Pieter Hugo for The New York Times.

Pieter Hugo for The New York Times

Off the Rails: For a true picture of the United States economy, ride the train from New York to Washington and take a good, hard look out the window.

As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it's all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There's Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by "The Wire" — all on the line that connects America's financial center and its booming capital city.

Pieter Hugo for The New York Times

Baltimore Stevie Tudor, left, and Cody Brown.

The weirdness of this juxtaposition is hardly acknowledged anymore, because we've all had a few decades to get used to it. But for most of the 180 or so years of the train line's existence, the endpoints of this journey — New York and D.C. — were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between. The real value in America was created in Newark's machine shops and tanneries, Trenton's rubber and metal plants, Chester's shipyard, Baltimore's steel mills. That's where raw material was turned into valued products by hard-working people who made decent wages even if they didn't have a lot of education. Generation after generation, and wave after wave of immigrants, found opportunity along the corridor. Washington collected the taxes and made the rules. Wall Street got a small commission for turning the nation's savings into industrial investment. But nobody would have ever confused either as America's driving force.

This model was flipped inside out as Wall Street and D.C. became central drivers, not secondary supports, of the nation's economy. Now, on its route between them, the train passes directly through or near 8 of the 10 richest counties in the United States, but all of this wealth is concentrated near the endpointsof the journey: Manhattan's satellites in northern New Jersey and the towns where lobbyists and government contractors live in suburban Virginia and Maryland. This is a geographic representation of a telling contradiction. For the past 30-plus years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, there has been much lip service paid to the idea that the era of big government is over. Long live free enterprise. And yet in the case of those areas surrounding the capital, wealth has gravitated to the exact spot where government regulation is created. Why? Because many businesses discovered that renegotiating the terms between government and the private sector can be extraordinarily lucrative. A few remarkable books by professors at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business argue that a primary source of profit for Wall Street over the past 15 to 20 years could be what I call the Acela Strategy: making money by exploiting regulation rather than by creating more effective ways to finance the rest of the economy.

But how do we make sense of what has become of the in-between? That was the challenge we posed to the South African photojournalist Pieter Hugo. This fall, Hugo spent two weeks documenting life along the corridor, focusing his gaze on what can be found roughly within sight of the train tracks. That was our animating idea and organizing principle: to stop and look carefully at what can be glimpsed only fleetingly from a passing train.

Though industrial decline can have a perversely romantic appeal, we weren't especially interested in rehashing the sad state of old factories. Instead, Hugo sought out the everyday life that dwells in these fissures of the American economy: the retired factory worker still making his home in a neighborhood that has decayed around him, the kids playing on blown-out streets, the store that sells used tools.

This is an economy changing too fast for the residents to keep up. For many who live along the corridor, the central theme is the decline that's all too visible. The old brick factory buildings with huge windows that gave workers light and air in a pre-air-conditioned world are boarded up, crumbling or, in a few of the luckier spots, being converted into condos. There's also another, somewhat more hopeful story on display, though you have to look a little harder to see it. These are the decidedly unromantic houses of modern production: short, vast complexes, built without any nod to aesthetics. There are few windows in these buildings, because precision machinery operates best without the fluctuations in heat and humidity caused by exposure to the sun. They are one story high, because it's too costly to build a second or third floor capable of withstanding the weight and pounding of massive machinery. There are some workers inside — there to make sure the machines keep running — but not many. These jobs, which go to people with advanced, post-high-school training, typically offer a good-enough wage to afford a house in the suburbs, far from the industrial zones that hug the rail line. The people who do make their lives right next to these factories — in Elizabeth, N.J., or Chester, Pa., say — generally can't afford the technical schooling that would qualify them for jobs inside.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 5, 2012

An earlier version of this picture essay misidentified the company for which John Challenger, who commented on the DuPont chemical company's recently announced intention to cut 1,500 jobs worldwide, is chief executive. It is the global outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which, among other things, tracks layoff data; it is not DuPont.

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