This column, written by LVEDC President & CEO Don Cunningham, originally appeared in The Morning Call and on the newspaper’s website on Nov. 24, 2024.
I found some old photographs in a desk drawer recently under a stack of useless computer warranty papers.
The warranties had long since expired, as did the desktop PC they were intended to protect. The PC was discarded years ago at one of those electronics recycling collections, a useful service which, oddly, also seems to have disappeared. 
It’s a mystery why certain things remain, like outdated warranties, and things much more needed, like birth certificates and electronics recycling collections, can’t be found.
The photos contained their own perplexities.
They were an odd assortment from different eras of my early decades. The utter randomness of the photos suggests that they were sent to me at some point by a loving grandmother or aunt who found them in a shoebox and couldn’t bear to toss them.
The first photo was of me posing in my junior high school wrestling singlet in the late 1970s. I’m standing in our ranch house living room in front of the dark wood paneling my dad proudly installed.
The photo contains me, the paneling, and an eye-blinding halo of light from the camera flash ricocheting off the shiny artificial wood. The presence of these UFO or paranormal-like phenomena is in so many of our childhood photos it warrants an episode of Ghost Hunters.
Inexplicably, that spot in the living room was used for all photos of significance — first day of school, proms, First Holy Communion, graduation, displaying Christmas gifts, sports uniforms, Halloween costumes. My parents clearly accepted the flash burst as one of life’s inconvenient realities, like death and taxes.
“Get your BB gun and stand in front of the paneling so mom can take a picture,” I can recall my dad saying on Christmas morning. “And don’t blink when the flash goes off. It costs money to process that film.”
It had to be my mom’s idea to snap the wrestling photo.
There’s no way the Old Man thought this one was a good idea.
It was an awkward year. My hair was long and goofy, and I had thick braces on my teeth. In the photo, I’m attempting to strike a menacing pose, but my body is bony and weak and screaming first period pin to any opponent.
The photo explains why my wrestling career was short and unsuccessful.
It would’ve been better if an aurora borealis of flashbulb had ruined the grappling photo as it had others of that era that came back from the Fotomat.
None of the photos found in my desk were particularly good, explaining why they were buried in a desk drawer. But, while all that is buried may not be treasure, something of treasure can be found in the buried.
As the 58-year-old version of me flipped through the past images of me, the overwhelming sensation was one of distant recognition.
Same face. Same vessel. But a different person in a different time and place.
I looked at the images and wondered what those days were like. What was the conversation before the flash bulb? What was I feeling, thinking?
We live multiple lives in one — never the same person that we were yesterday. Not only the body changes, so does the person, the spirit inside.
Our lives are one play but many disparate acts, often oddly unrelated.
It’s no different with communities, parcels of land or buildings. They are reused and reborn, sometimes related to their past and other times not at all.
Moravian farmland on the south side of the Lehigh River in Bethlehem became the iron foundries and steel mills of the industrial revolution.
Just as the Pennsylvania Dutch farm fields of the Macungies became a large, major food and beverage production center anchored by the likes of Boston Beer, Bimbo Bakery, Ocean Spray and Nestle.
I’m often asked what we are going to do when something goes away. Start over. As we’ve always done. Reuse, rebuild, repurpose.
The Lehigh Valley is good at this.
The steel mills went away. And 25 years later that land is repurposed with arts centers, technology centers, hotels, retail shops, a casino, and diversified manufacturing and industrial production. Some of it in the buildings of old and some in new ones.
The riverfront in Allentown is springing back to life with new buildings and repurposed old ones, just as Easton has found new, modern uses for a downtown built in the era of the Founding Fathers.
Progress is being made to reclaim the Dixie plant building in Wilson, to reuse the Lehigh Valley Dairy site on MacArthur Road in Whitehall, the PPL Tower in downtown Allentown, Martin Tower land in west Bethlehem, and former Mack Trucks buildings on Allentown’s south side. This is happening while Moravian Bethlehem has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site for its preservation of the past.
We know how to both preserve and move on.
Battlefields and places where history occurred forever fascinate me. Standing where others stood. Imagining those of another generation in the same location. Doing things of big consequence or of none, like posing in wrestling singlet.
We live in the present but often long for the past while our hope for the future gets us up every day.
Just as people pass through so do the places that employ us, and entertain us, and feed us and house us. The spaces we occupy as we pass through. The places where our past selves once stood.
I doubt the paneling remains in that ranch house on Washington Street. I hope not.
We can’t recapture the past but it’s in the foundation of those early acts upon which we continue to write the play.