Dying Steel Town Asks State for Aid

This is the kind of town where life was once simple and just about everyone lived well.

This is a town that once was as strong as the steel it produced. But this also is a town the steel industry nearly killed, a near-death experience North Braddock is still trying to overcome.

Too many streets are in disarray, too many homes and businesses blighted and abandoned, the town’s tax base severely eroded. Built with can-do immigrant spirit--Czech and Irish, Polish and Italian--North Braddock serves as a test of whether that can-do spirit endures.

The townspeople have the desire to make it a vibrant place again. But no one knows whether they--or anyone--can do it; they have given up on their local government, and have put their faith in a state takeover.

“We don’t have nothing,” said Sarah McWhite, who operates the town’s boarding home for the ill and elderly. “We need more activity. We need, like, a supermarket. Somebody should put something here.”

“Take that building, make it a little mall,” she said, pointing across Sixth Street to an old red brick building.

Once, this was the Meyer & Powers Ice Cream factory, in the days when 13,000 souls lived in North Braddock, in the days when Westinghouse Electric and the U.S. Steel Duquesne Works kept the economy humming.

But the ice cream plant closed, and so did the larger factories, taking with them nearly 25,000 jobs. Assessed property valuation fell from $30 million to $13 million, and the town’s population dropped to 7,000.

The only visible signs of economic life are the white smokestacks rising from the Edgar Thomson steel plant of USX Corp. Even that plant is operating at reduced capacity from the days when steel was king, and it cannot make up for the other losses.

Robert A. Beauregard, an urban policy professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, notes that North Braddock and other distressed towns around Pittsburgh were highly dependent on a single industry--steel--and usually a single factory.

Beauregard says that in the early and mid-1980s the Pittsburgh region lost 700,000 jobs, and 100,000 of those were in steel.

“The steel industry case is quite unique,” he said. “It was an industry that was restructuring to a great extent and shedding labor and plants. . . . The small towns that are in the most difficult situation are those that are dependent upon manufacturing.”

In North Braddock, the declining tax base led to a mounting budget deficit. Ultimately, it reached $700,000--the city’s total annual budget is $1.6 million--and the citizenry came to believe the town council could not resolve the crisis.

So the people petitioned the state of Pennsylvania to declare North Braddock a distressed town.

Typically, a municipality itself asks for that designation, which is made when severe money problems could affect a town’s health, safety and welfare.

Pennsylvania put North Braddock on the distressed list, loaned it $700,000 to cover its deficit and appointed a consultant to develop a recovery plan. It will also get grants and other help.

Councilman Andrew Skladany says council members had been counting on collecting back property taxes owed the town and on amusement taxes from a new golf course to cut the deficit.

“We went out individually to people and tried to get them to pay, but we found out that the properties were abandoned and people had gone and we were stuck,” he said.

“We lost quite a few taxpayers, older people who weren’t able to pay. Most of them have left the borough. We thought we were in much better shape than being a distressed area.”

Marilyn Zoltak, a longtime resident who was among those who petitioned the state for relief, says her neighbors had only to look at

the ground for proof that North Braddock needed help. “North Braddock used to be a clean town,” she said. “We have no street sweeping. You start with basic cleanliness and sanitary conditions.”

Most of Pennsylvania’s 15 distressed towns are in steel country; most of them agree on the solution to their distress. “Obviously, the buzzword when you talk about solutions is economic development,” Beauregard said.

But Joseph M. Hohman, president of Resource Development & Management Inc., which was appointed by the state to develop North Braddock’s recovery plan, says the town is scattered and unsuitable for economic development.

He is looking at putting money into rehabilitating housing and cleanup work to make North Braddock attractive to first-time home buyers and increase the tax base.

“Try to turn the population over,” Hohman said. “As houses free up, have younger people come in. It’s a very difficult cycle they face. It will be a slow process.”

Skladany--who is 62, and lost his job at U.S. Steel in 1986--is not optimistic.

“You can’t get the young people anymore,” Skladany said. “Most of the young people moved out. The old-timers are dying off. We don’t have nobody. We have vacant properties and people that just aren’t here anymore. It just isn’t like it used to be.”

But North Braddock--with its cobblestone streets and pastel-colored, three-decker houses, with its friendly people who invite you into their homes to share what little they have--is a town with a big heart, and it is not giving up.

“I never had the urge to go anywhere,” said Edward Calabria, who has spent half of his 60 years as borough manager. “It’s my hometown.”