Ghost Town

If tumbleweeds blew down the deserted 500 block of Church Lane, the bored business owners wouldn't even blink. Foreacre's Florists closed after Christmas. The parking lot at the once bustling 7-Eleven is empty. And the take-a-number-to-be-served sign at Pageant Hosiery is covered with dust. Since the crumbling, 64-year-old Church Lane Bridge over SEPTA's R-3 rail line was closed for replacement at the end of October, business in the commercial strip of about 10 shops has dropped off dramatically.

Carol Glenn waits for this day all year. It's her chance to eat egg rolls, pork lo mein and fried rice at a nearby buffet with her two daughters. Her husband, Mickey, hates the stuff, but on this day he heads north to the mountains to hunt for deer. "My husband can't stand the smell of Chinese food," Carol Glenn said yesterday behind the cash register at the Oxford Sunoco, of which the Glenns are co-owners. "I'm not big on the taste of venison. I usually give whatever he shoots to our Amish neighbors.

Urged to stay away from downtown during the frenzy of the Democratic National Convention, Bostonians did precisely that yesterday. "It's like a ghost town, like there was a mass exodus," said Laura McNally, a waitress at the Harp Irish Pub, located right across from the FleetCenter and separated from it by tall metal barricades. At noon yesterday, instead of serving lunch to her regular dozens of office and construction workers, McNally found herself outside smoking a cigarette, watching the out-of-towners amble by. The same was true at the 5 North Square Italian restaurant in Boston's North End, where lunchtime came and went with just two dishes served, one grilled chicken, one meatball and ziti.

Sometimes, he stands on the edge of the runway here in the late evening, just watching the planes coming and going. With the darkness cloaking the Millville Municipal Airport, he's free to conjure up the past. The roar of the engines, the wash of the propellers, the faces of his comrades at an old P-47 fighter base here. "I can picture the night flying we used to do and the kids that are no longer here, the young guys who never made it," said Bill Rich, who once flew P-47s, known as Thunderbolts.

Imagine Philadelphia as a modern-day ghost town, its streets lined with crumbling buildings and vacant lots overrun by weeds and trash. It shouldn't be that much of a stretch. Some sections of the city already fit that picture. The number of abandoned properties in Philadelphia may have more than doubled in the past decade, says a newly completed audit of Southwest Center City by the Philadelphia Office of Housing and Community Development. Roughly 16 percent of the houses are vacant or abandoned in the area bordered by Broad Street, Grays Ferry Avenue, Lombard Street and Washington Avenue.

Joseph Miele sat in a living-room chair by the front window of his Lower Merion home and waved his hand toward St. Charles Borromeo Seminary across the street. "We've been here since 1954," Miele, 86, said. "All my four boys growing up, we used the grounds for playing ball. " That was years ago. He might have been upset then if there were no open space, "but not now," he said. Miele's serenity is just as well, considering the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's announcement last week that it would sell or lease the 45 acres of the 75-acre campus closest to City Avenue.

GIMME FIVE "The Last Song" wasn't a blockbuster, but it was Greg Kinnear's highest-grossing movie in a while. His last five outings: 1. "The Last Song. " (2010) $62 million. 2. "Green Zone. " (2010) $35 million. Plays a Pentagon Special Intelligence officer in Baghdad. 3. "Flash of Genius. " (2008) $4 million. Kinnear takes on Detroit over the invention of intermittent windshield wipers. 4. "Ghost Town. " (2008) $13 million. He's a ghost, meddling in his widow's affairs.

To maintain the aura tourists look for if travelers are to bring money to this city, attention must be paid to NewMarket, which is beginning to look depressingly like a ghost town. Empty stores and neglect do not bring tourists. Rents are high and storekeepers are probably not finding it viable. For the good of the city, rent subsidies should be considered for NewMarket, where rents are formidably high. Either shut it down or make some pragmatic efforts to maintain it - by the city government, if trade is to flourish.

A deadly wait for international aid has begun along Iraq's borders with Iran and Turkey. More than half of Iraq's four million Kurds are fleeing the regime of Saddam Hussein. Some have crossed the border. Most have not. Two- thirds of the Kurdish dead are children, many killed by diarrhea. About 240,000 Kurds are in or near the town of Panjwin, 15 miles from the Iranian border. Until six weeks ago, Panjwin was a ghost town, little more than rubble. That's because in 1983, Hussein ordered the Kurdish town blown up and bulldozed.

The ghosts of this city's past live underground, below downtown streets, along dank, lonely corridors, in ruins that are as different from the glittering city above ground as night is from day. In that netherworld frequented now only by vagrants seeking shelter lies a ghost town that has lived three lives and died three deaths. Now Underground Atlanta, as it is called, this city's only physical link to the town that existed before the Civil War, is trying to rise again. The question being asked here is whether the only section of the city that survived the fires set by the Union Army, a section that thrived at the turn of the century as Atlanta's revived commercial heart and once again in the 1970s as a bustling entertainment district, can survive what could prove to be the most devastating blow of all - the decades-old flight of Atlanta's people and businesses to the suburbs.