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Johnstown to open a heritage center about immigrants A history lesson in survival Sunday, February 04, 2001 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
JOHNSTOWN -- Some were recruited from their homes in the east and south of Europe. Others came with no coaxing, figuring that fine pay was waiting, even in bottom-rung jobs at the local steel mills.
Welcome to America. Welcome to Johnstown.
They won citizenship, but mostly second-class citizenship. They landed jobs that came with high risk, low pay and dim prospects. As fast as these first arrivals pulled into Johnstown more than a century ago, the immigrants were shunned by the local mainstream, herded into their own neighborhoods, mistrusted and belittled.
"If one didn't work out, you'd fire him and get a new one," local historian Richard Burkert said.
It's a callous story of immigration that old industrial cities across the Rust Belt could tell.
But on March 24, Johnstown will start telling it in a new, $6.5 million history complex, The Heritage Discovery Center. Planners say the marriage of theater and technology will send visitors off on a walk into a different era.
"It's not just a story of ruthless exploitation. It's a story of survival," said Burkert, executive director of the nonprofit Johnstown Area Heritage Association, the umbrella historical group putting the project together. "It's the successor story to Ellis Island."
"Everybody tells this story, to some extent, but not to the extent that they're discussing it in Johnstown," said Erin Cooley, marketing director for Westsylvania Heritage Corp., a federally funded tourism agency stretching across the southwest quarter of the state. "It's actually very unique."
That doesn't mean flag-waving, tub-thumping and a lusty chorus of "God Bless America." The Heritage Center's story line casts the visitor as the arriving immigrant. And the tour -- about two hours for those who step lively but see everything -- is an odyssey through a hardscrabble world of confusion, austerity and naked hostility.
From speakers, video screens and special stages, snatches of the turn-of-the-century immigrant's life are played out.
"Why don't they learn English?" one voice asks.
Says another, "You just can't trust them."
From one screen comes the figure Burkert christened The Busybody Lady.
"She has eight ways of telling you that you don't belong," he said.
Across what's supposed to be a cramped back yard, video silhouettes play out a series of vignettes in the windows of an apartment house. Meager pay is tallied. Parents discuss whether a 12-year-old is too young to pack off to the mines. Two Slovakian immigrants ponder returning home after a pal is killed at work.
At one stop, a runaway coal car has killed a child miner.
Across the way, stands an ethnic social club. A few steps away, there's a spot to eavesdrop on religious services -- a Ukrainian wedding, a bar mitzvah and a funeral for a child, not uncommon in 1907, when tainted water and dirty air helped drive infant mortality here to 51 percent.
"Except for the Jews who were fleeing persecution, virtually none of these people planned to stay here. They planned to make money and go back home," Burkert said. "But we're making the case that, as harsh as conditions were, the reason that nearly two-thirds of them stayed is that they felt they were better off here. They ate better, they had better clothes. In their terms, life was better."
The Heritage Center figures on drawing 60,000 visitors a year at top ticket prices of $5.50 -- a conservative forecast and enough to keep the museum in the black if it rents out meeting space, Burkert said.
"There is interest. This is a theme that really affects people where they live, who they are," he said.
Johnstown, a city of 24,000, will tell the story in a three-story brick building -- a 94-year-old local landmark that came into this world as Germania Brewing Co., went on to become a packing house and later a paper products warehouse.
The Heritage Association got all 62,000 square feet for $65,000. Then, it painted "Heritage Discovery Center" in yellow and white, like a huge label wrapped across the building's outsides.
Not coincidentally, the building is a piece of Johnstown's Cambria City neighborhood. It's a place rich in ethnic churches, designated an enclave for Eastern European immigrants back when Johnstown was growing up to become a driving, smoky steel center, its population nearly threefold what it is today.
The city -- "historically rich," Burkert said -- doesn't shy from talking about itself.
At both a downtown museum and a federally operated historic site six miles east of town, the region recounts the 1889 flood that crashed through the Conemaugh Valley, killed 2,209 people and washed away the heart of the city.
Sometime in the future, Johnstown plans to go into depth about the days when 18,000 people made steel in the sprawling local mills, back when Johnstown bred experts whom Andrew Carnegie's lieutenants recruited for his Edgar Thomson Works.
For now, though, the focus is on the Heritage Center.
Contractors are assembling displays and video and computer gear that's all supposed to be delivered by Feb. 20.
Fund-raisers are capping a drive that has included foundation support, $3.3 million in federal and state donations and $1.5 million on behalf of the late Frank and Sylvia Pasquerilla, major local benefactors for whom the building will be named. Frank Pasquerilla was chairman of the Johnstown-based shopping mall developer Crown American Realty Trust.
The Pasquerillas are children of Italian immigrants who came to Johnstown.
"I'm looking forward to seeing the place," said the Rev. George Johnson, pastor of St. John the Baptist Orthodox Church, a local parish formed 93 years ago as a Russian Orthodox congregation for many of those immigrants "I would hope it functions the way the Carnegie Science Center functions for the natural sciences."
It has the subject matter with which to work.
The immigrants who became the muscle of both the local mills and the area's mines grew, by rough estimate, to become a full third of the local population. Cambria City alone -- 10 blocks long, four blocks wide -- was home to about 11,000 people before redevelopment and the local steel industry's extended near-death experience cut the population to about 500.
Ethnic communities offered their own brand of job networking.
"Priests often acted in the role of job procurer then," Burkert said. "For instance, if you were Polish, you got in touch with the priest at St. Casimir's, the Polish Catholic church, and he'd talk to the hiring boss. Then, church dues might be docked from your pay."
And at least once, an ethnic community was crippled by the tragedy that went with the high-risk work. In 1902, an explosion tore through Cambria Steel Co.'s Rolling Mill Mine, tunneled into one of the hillsides bordering Johnstown.
The blast killed 112 workers.
"Forty were Polish," Burkert said. "It decimated the Polish community."
For the Heritage Center, the epilogue to the immigrants' odyssey comes in a 14-minute video in which children and grandchildren of immigrants -- including religious philosopher Michael Novak, the local product of Slovakian parents -- share their takes on the local melting pot.
"It gets quite emotional," Burkert said.
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