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In and around Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley you can still see the scars that mining coal has left on the landscape over the past century and a half, and whose continuing presence is testimony to the unique failure of the US among wealthy nations to assist its citizens in transitioning to other forms of work. There is a less obvious, but more powerfully positive movement under way in this region, though. It is being driven by a forward-looking younger generation, both home-grown and recently arrived, which is striving to fashion a new economy, often using the physical foundation of the old. There is surprising beauty in the gritty, and sometimes outrageous, fusion of past and present that these 21st-century pioneers are creating. This revival is the most interesting and most important story of the Rustbelt.