Growing up in Trenton New Jersey I had friends whose parents worked at the massive General Motors plant out there. I crossed the "Trenton Makes" (The world Takes) bridge, the words emblazoned in big red letters, proudly proclaiming the cities status as an engine of production. Steel from Pennsylvania used to come in via the railroad and the Delaware Raritan canal to be used by the Roebling company to manufacture steel cables that were then used all over the world. Most famously, the cables for the Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges.
By the time I moved to Trenton all of that was long gone, the GM plant was soon to be closed, workers could opt to move to Michigan if they wanted to keep their jobs. About half of them left, I wonder if they'd have stayed if they knew that the Michigan plant would be shuttered a few years later. The city was in the beginning stages of what would soon become a permanent rehabilitation project. The long empty Roebling factories were rebranded optimistically into mixed use shopping and housing, "Roebling Center" was supposed to bring jobs and economic activity to the area by giving state workers a reason to stay in the city and spend their money after 5pm, but that didn't work.
The canal that used to be filled with barges moving goods is just a really nice bike path now, actually not so nice depending on which part of town you're riding through. The trains are, for the most part, shut down as well. NJ Transit and Amtrak run along the NE corridor but the raw materials and goods that used to move between the cities have disappeared.
Growing up back then I didn't realize what I was missing, I wasn't old enough to feel the loss of the factory jobs, and my generation was being groomed for jobs in the "service sector", "just get a college degree", they said, and you too could work in a nebulously defined job category that never quite materialized as was promised after all of the factory jobs went away.
No, now college degrees that cost 1000x more than they did a few generations ago, and instead of a manufacturing workforce that was unionized and could afford a home and a family on a single parents income, we have "the gig economy", where the slightly more well off amongst us can all summon workers with the touch of a button to do our bidding, taking advantage of the fact that their choice now is to be a servant or starve. All while the promise of the American dream, an affordable home for everyone who is willing to work hard, is being rolled back and re-written right in front of us.