” A long time ago, things got broken here.”

“People got sad and left.”

“Maybe the world gets broken so we can have some work to do.”

“People think there aren’t any frontiers anymore. They can’t see that there are frontiers all around us.”

-Braddock, Pennsylvania

This is the script from a relatively new Levi’s commercial.

Video after the jump.

Braddock Mayor John Fetterman has been named to The Atlantic’s list of “Brave Thinkers.”
Fetterman and his efforts to revitalize Braddock, attract artists and businesses, and advocate for forgotten places like Braddock, have gained national media attention.
Sadly, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center announced last week it will close UPMC Braddock, the community’s hospital. It’s another blow to a community that has suffered greatly, just as there were some positive things happening.
Thanks to Rust Wire reader Alex Parker for bringing the Atlantic cover story to our attention.
-KG

If you own a home in Ohio, you’re almost four times more likely to undergo foreclosure than if you live in Pennsylvania.
That is the finding of a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, based on an analysis of foreclosure rates in Cuyahoga County verses Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County.
The report examined foreclosure rates in Greater Pittsburgh’s Braddock and Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood, two areas with similar demographics as well as socioeconomic statistics.

They found that in 2007, North Collinwood was reeling under a 20.75 percent foreclosure rate …

Despite some criticism and a tough campaign, Braddock’s unconventional mayor won in Tuesday’s primary, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
He captured 294 votes to his rival’s 103 votes.
“Mr. Fetterman’s detractors were vocal in their criticism of him, accusing him of trying to become ‘Braddock’s landlord,’” the Post-Gazette reported.

It looks like Braddock, Pa. Mayor John Fetterman is shaping up to be a national spokesman for the Rust Belt region.
Or, as this story puts it, “the pissed-off avenging angel of the Rust Belt.”
He recently spoke at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, so this article focuses on his message for cities in Michigan.

It looks like Braddock, Pa. Mayor John Fetterman is shaping up to be a national spokesman for the Rust Belt region.
Or, as this story puts it, “the pissed-off avenging angel of the Rust Belt.”
He recently spoke at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, so this article focuses on his message for cities in Michigan.

Braddock, Pa. and its unconventional mayor, John Fetterman, have gotten quite a bit of national press in recent months, from Monthly Review, to The New York Times, to the Colbert Report.
Some in the Pittsburgh region have known for awhile about Mayor Fetterman and various projects to help revitalize Braddock, a steel town in the Monongahela Valley. As reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, there’s the community oven, public art, sustainable agriculture…I could go on.

Braddock, Pa. and its unconventional mayor, John Fetterman, have gotten quite a bit of national press in recent months, from Monthly Review, to The New York Times, to the Colbert Report.
Some in the Pittsburgh region have known for awhile about Mayor Fetterman and various projects to help revitalize Braddock, a steel town in the Monongahela Valley. As reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, there’s the community oven, public art, sustainable agriculture…I could go on.

The Environmental Defense Fund has launched a new ad with Braddock Mayor John Fetterman, claiming carbon caps could offer relief to former steel towns.

Wow.

This Monthly Review story tells about the post-industrial devastation in Braddock, PA, and describes the efforts of its unconventional mayor at revitalization. Mayor John Fetterman is a Harvard Graduate who looks like a professional wrestler. He’s taken up the task of trying to revitalize this  city of 3,000 outside Pittsburgh, which has lost 90 percent of its population since it was imagined as a neighborhood for employees of  Edgar Thompson Steel Works in the late 1800s. Mayor Fetterman is working to establish artists’ spaces and urban gardens.
http://monthlyreview.org/081222straub.php

(Full disclosure: I’m friends with …