Thanks for the memories.These old videos are sometimes hard to watch. I grew up under the shadow of these old mill towns. I never had a steel job, as they were fazing out when I entered the work force. Maybe that's good, who knows? But one thing for sure. If you didn't work back in those days, you had no one to blame but yourself.
You should have seen this in the 1950s when those smoke stackes belched orange smoke or at night when the mill was lit up at night next to Westinghouse Electric jiust down the road.
My grandparents Spud and Stella Spuntak lived close to Dipcraft on Fleet street for over 50 years. Had fun as a kid in the 70's every summer we visited. God rest their souls.
No it is not that simple. Removing the decay and abandonment yes but just planting trees at random isn’t going to solve this town’s socioeconomic problems. Braddock and other old factory towns need to reinvest and reinvent themselves.
Braddock like many rust belt industrial cities became an unattractive and unprofitable place for business and industry. There was little to no progressive forward thinking among business and civic leaders. As deindustrialization and Reaganomics both sunk their damaging teeth in these smaller industrial cities saw their economic base rapidly vanish before their eyes. Little was done to replace the lost industry and all these blue collar locales deteriorated and became among the most impoverished communities in the country. Lackawanna NY just south of Buffalo is very similar. Once a prosperous industrial city that was home to the world’s second largest steel mill and a city population of 30,000, Lackawanna today is quite similar to Braddock, impoverished, struggling, and somewhat frozen in time. It is the same sad songs throughout Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, all of West Virginia, most of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and sizable parts of Missouri.
