As you travel through the Rust Belt, you can still come across the remains of hotels and motels still touting marketing innovations such as "Color TV" or "Air Conditioning."

The ensuing years have not been kind to the former manufacturing hotbed. Seeing it now, it's hard to imagine the bright future that, once upon a time, seemed to await this growing municipality.

Ghost signs are nearly the equivalent of what cave drawings were to our early modern day explorers: signifiers of how previous lives lived, worked and maybe the kind of beer they drank or the cigarettes they smoked. While these ghost signs populate many towns in our country, they are in the process of leaving us. As the wrecking ball flies and mundane urban renewal efforts commence, we're losing more relics every day.

The old shot and beer joints were a mainstay in nearly all the Rust Belt mill towns. These places were the yang to the factories' yin and a big part of many a mill worker's daily routine.

It's easy to understand why the citizens of Detroit may feel offended by the large amount of attention that is paid to their abandoned factories, stores and homes. It must seem like there are people coming from all over the globe to trade on a city's agony.

A crew from TV newsmagazine Inside Edition recently visited the coal town of Brownsville, Pennsylvania to document the abandoned buildings of the dist...

There hasn't been much activity in Brownsville, Pa. in some years, but to visit the town, it's impossible not to be affected by its remnants and by its ghosts.

Today, Hollywood is alive again in the cities and valleys of Western PA and its surrounding areas.

Detroit and its history can't help but be a permanent and major part of the Rust Belt's rise and fall. Photographer Russell Marshall has lived through the good times in Detroit, as well as its industrial decline.

The following is a post from David Schalliol, the Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The pho...

Photographer Jeff Brouws has been photographing and studying the plight of America's inner cities for the past 15 years. Brouws' inner-city images acutely document the economic, social and environmental transition that has taken place in the years that have passed since America's manufacturing peak.