The author returns to his hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania in 2010 for the first time in 35 years and is startled to find just how much things had changed. During subsequent trips to Allentown, Berkwits located former classmates and rekindled friendships, but most of all he wanted to understand why and how the mid-twentieth-century boomtown had succumbed to blight, and whether it would ever be able to recover.