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Believe In Braddock

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The New York Times

The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 1, 2009

BRADDOCK, Pa. - As Americans wonder just how horrible the economy will become, this tiny steel town offers a perverse message of hope: Things cannot possibly get any worse than they are here.

Hunched on the eastern edge of the Monongahela River only a few miles from bustling Pittsburgh, Braddock is a mix of boarded-up storefronts, houses in advanced stages of collapse and vacant lots.

The state has classified it a "distressed municipality" - bankrupt, more or less - since the Reagan administration. The tax base is gone. So are most of the residents. The population, about 18,000 after World War II, has declined to less than 3,000. Many of those who remain are unemployed. Real estate prices fell 50 percent in the past year.

"Everyone in the country is asking, 'Where's the bottom?'" said the mayor, John Fetterman. "I think we've found it."

Fetterman is trying to make an asset out of his town's lack of assets, calling it "a laboratory for solutions to all these maladies starting to knock on the door of every community." One of his first acts after being elected mayor in 2005 was to set up, at his own expense, a Web site to publicize Braddock - if you can call pictures of buildings destroyed by neglect and vandals a form of promotion.

He has encouraged the development of urban farms on empty lots, which employ area youths and feed the community. He started a nonprofit organization to save a handful of properties.

In an earlier era, Braddock was a famed wellspring of industrial might. The steel baron Andrew Carnegie put his first mill in the town, the foundation of an empire that helped build modern America. With the loot and guilt Carnegie piled up, he also built a library here, the first of more than 1,500 Carnegie libraries in the United States.

Immigrants came to work in the mill, and through ceaseless agitation won union representation that enabled their children - helped by the library on the hill - to achieve a better life.

This year, the town will be featured in the film version of another work of art, Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Road."

A town whose story has evolved from building America to making Americans to eating Americans for dinner might seem a hard sell. So Fetterman, who is paid $150 a month, also promotes Braddock as a place to buy extremely cheap real estate.

Fetterman's official powers are limited, partly because of Braddock's "distressed municipality" status and partly because it is technically a borough overseen by a borough council.

Mostly, the mayor offers encouragement, ideas and energy. One of Fetterman's biggest coups was convincing a small alternative energy company, Fossil Free Fuel, to secure a warehouse on Braddock Avenue.

"This is a very welcoming place for a business, because it has so few," said Fossil Free's co-owner, David Rosenstraus.

All this is movement in the right direction, but the uninhabited buildings are still falling down. Dozens are scheduled for demolition. "If struggling communities don't preserve their architecture," Fetterman said, "there's no chance of any resurgence down the line."

Sometime soon, he worries, Braddock will pass the point of no return.

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