The Foundry (United States region)

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The Foundry, according to Joel Garreau, is a coherent nation made up of the eastern seaboard of the United States except New England, though including the Connecticut suburbs of New York City, along with the Great Lakes region (including those parts of the Canadian province of Ontario which border the lakes) except for the Lake Superior shoreline, plus the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Virginia, and roughly the northern half of West Virginia, including both of the state's panhandles. Traditionally, this corresponds to the industrial core of North America. It is one of the Nine Nations of North America Garreau identified in his book of that title, published in 1981.

Garreau specifically excluded from his definition of "The Foundry" two small but significant areas that he termed "aberrations":

• The part of Manhattan lying south of Harlem.
• The District of Columbia proper and its immediately surrounding area, roughly bounded by the Capital Beltway.

He also had problems defining a proper region for Southern West Virginia, finally concluding, "In good times, southeastern West Virginia can be considered an isolated part of the Foundry. In bad times, it is an isolated part of Dixie."

Ten years later, a similarly-themed book, The Day America Told the Truth, was co-written by James Patterson and Peter Kim. In it, they essentially divided Garreau's Foundry into two separate moral regions (the book catalogues nine such regions across the United States) — Metropolis and the Rust Belt, with Metropolis encompassing Fairfield County in Connecticut; New York City; the Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk, and southeastern New York State up to and including Dutchess, Ulster and Sullivan counties; all of New Jersey; that part of Pennsylvania served by telephone area codes 215, 610 and 717, and 570 except for an eastward indentation that excludes the vicinity of Scranton (this excluded area, along with the remainder of the state, being classified in the Rust Belt); those parts of Delaware and Maryland not classified in the New South (one of the two moral regions into which Patterson and Kim divide Garreau's Dixie); Washington, D.C. and its northern Virginia suburbs; and West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle. The Rust Belt consists of the remainder of the Foundry, the southern and western borders of which were left basically unchanged by Patterson and Kim.