Braddock is the poorest town in Allegheny County and Fetterman, 39, its chief executive, presents himself quite differently than do most mayors. Among the first things that strike you about this young white mayor of a largely African-American town are his 380 lbs., his six feet eight inches of height, his bald head, and the town’s zip code, which is tattooed onto one of his enormous arms.

Knowing, as we did before we met him, that he had an MBA from the University of Connecticut only made the first moments of our encounter even more of a jaw- dropper. The setting for our meeting – the space between an abandoned storefront on one side and an empty lot serving as a garbage dump on the other– was also unusual.

Three young men, two black and one white, were cleaning up debris in and around the storefront. A young white woman dressed in a Goth style black skirt and knee high boots worked with a young African-American woman digging up and turning over soil in a section of the lot that had been cleared of debris.

The mayor started talking right away about how pleased he was with the decreasing homicide rate in Braddock. “Prior to this year a person or two was killed here every six months,” he said. “No one has died here this year.”

For we who live in big cities a murder rate like that doesn’t seem, at first, to be so bad. But Braddock, once home for 20,000 people, has only 2,800 living in it today.

Once an envied example of what U.S. industrial prowess could do for the lifestyle of workers, Braddock’s main street is now a stretch of boarded up storefronts and crumbling houses, lots filled with garbage and ghosts of warehouses and factories that stopped humming long ago.

While Fetterman took a moment to talk with the young men at the storefront I spoke to the young woman in the Goth style skirt. She said that all the way down at the end of the street was the first steel mill founded by Andrew Carnegie and owned now by U.S. Steel. A block and a half away, in the other direction, she said, was the only store in town where you could buy something – the Family Dollar Store.

She said the mill, which continues to operate today, belches out a sooty black haze that often settles on surfaces all over town. “It doesn’t show up on my dark clothes,” she said.

The 700 workers at the mill produce 3 million tons of steel a year – about 15% of the total domestic output of steel in America. “The problem is that none of the workers live here in Braddock,” the young woman said. “They high-tail it out of here as soon as their shifts are over.”

Fetterman says Braddock’s descent into Hell parallels the de-industrialization of America.

Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley was where factories, for a century, churned out the steel that became the building blocks of America. It was the place where workers in struggle built a vibrant labor movement that spread across the entire nation.

Today the poverty rate in Braddock is three times the national average, with half the town on public assistance and a murder rate, up until a few months ago, that was at least six times the national average. And while you can buy a house in Detroit, on average, for $19,000, in Braddock homes go -- if they go at all -- for $6,000.

Shannon Gustafson, 30, was walking along the town’s Main Street when I spotted her. She moved to Braddock in Nov. 2008 with her “starving artist” husband from Chicago’s Rogers Park section. There, the couple was finding it increasingly difficult to pay their “ever increasing” rent and where the cost of purchasing a home was “just way out of reach.”

Gustafson had heard about what was going on in Braddock on the internet and responded to an invitation from Fetterman to “visit” the place. “We were hooked,” she said, “about the idea of moving here and becoming urban pioneers. We bought a house for $4,500 from a senior citizen who was leaving to move in with her family.”

Shannon works with Americorps, where she coordinates youth activities including the clearing of lots and dilapidated buildings and the planting of organic farms in the midst of the urban blight. Her husband conducts a small, still-struggling art business on the Internet, refurbishes the house they bought, and is “very involved in helping the effort to bring back this town.

“We see building a new Braddock for the people who live here and for the many more who will come in the future,” she said. “This is not about gentrification. You have to believe in our dream if you come here and want to stay because you couldn’t turn around a property for a profit here even if you were the cleverest real estate dealer.

“This is about re-claiming and even increasing the resources that inner city life
can offer to ordinary people but, the way things are now, it will take a long time.”

Shannon was pleased that because of Americorps the town could hire 100 young people for the clearing and planting effort this summer. “Actually, the president’s economic stimulus program made some of that possible because, without the stimulus, we would have only been able to hire 70. That’s 100 youth we were able to get off the streets. Doing the equivalent in a city like Pittsburgh would have taken 10,000 off the streets. This is why the sale and use of crack is going down in Braddock and this is why the level of street violence is finally going down.”

Shannon said a couple from Alaska just bought another house down the street from her. “They came pretty much for the same reasons we came -- except perhaps with the extra motivation of having found a good way to get away from all the Sarah Palin stuff,” she comments. There are about 12 other urban pioneer families in town, having come from places like Kansas City, St. Louis and Brooklyn.

I asked Shannon about how well the various groups living in town were able to work together, given the differences in racial, ethnic and social composition. Braddock has unemployed African-American and white steelworkers, minimum wage workers who earn their livings as security guards and store clerks on strip malls, single mothers on public assistance, young people -- many of them unemployed -- and now the homesteaders, often called “the artists,” by their neighbors.

“People here are united around an idea that is really exciting,” she said, “and almost everyone feels deep inside that we will all rise or we will all go down together.”

In the Family Dollar store, the African-American woman at the register answered the same question. “Look around. We’re all in the same boat here, it don’t matter how you got here or where you came from. Mayor John understands this better than any politician I ever met. We are trying to make things work around here and I don’t really know if they will, but we try. I’ll go down trying. Things can only go up from here.”

Fetterman talked about de-industrialization and the ensuing destruction of the working class economic base in the Mon Valley. He said Braddock was a poster child for what can happen when you don’t have a vibrant well-paid working class, able to purchase a variety of goods and services.

And he warned many more Braddocks could be in America’s future if the foreclosures continue and things are not turned around. He lists additional massive stimulus programs, reform of health care and expanding the size and strength of the ranks of organized labor as high priorities in the longer-term struggle.

Fetterman, himself, does not have health care coverage and his wife gave birth to their first child earlier this year at home in the loft apartment they have in an
abandoned church they purchased.

“Look at Braddock to see what happens when you destroy the labor movement,” he said. Surveying and pointing to the damage along his town’s main street, he ticked off some figures. “We had 13 thriving furniture stores along here, now we have none. There were 15 jewelry stores, now we have none. There were 45 bars and now we have none. All that has dwindled to a pawn shop and the Dollar Store.”

The first of the urban pioneers to come to Braddock, Fetterman was the son of an insurance executive in York, Pa. After he earned his MBA he spent 15 months working for his father’s company. But, at age 25, he had his “quarter life crisis.”

He went to work for Americorps when it was a new program initiated under Democratic President Bill Clinton. His job: Finding jobs for homeless youth in Pittsburgh. In 2001 he moved to Braddock because, he said, “There was more opportunity to do what I was doing. It was Pittsburgh times 100.”

Once in Braddock, he began to register all the youth he worked with to vote and won a 1-vote victory in a 3-way race for mayor. Four years later he won in a landslide.

Fetterman smiled proudly as he watched the young people cleaning up the storefront and turning over the soil in the urban garden-to-be. “Most of these folks are the only members of their families currently employed,” he said. “Do you know what that means to them?” He believes a major WPA-type program will be needed to help create the kinds of jobs that will sustain life in the Mon Valley over the long term.

He thinks the efforts of the Steelworkers and other unions involved in a major push to build a magnetic levitation rail system in Pennsylvania are also important because “they can create the needed green industrial jobs that are so critical if this country is to have any kind of future at all.”

The labor journalists left Braddock with some important lessons. First was the obvious. There is no future for our country without a vibrant working class leading the way. Health care, Employee Free Choice and a massive second stimulus program are critical first steps in that direction.

But we left with another, perhaps more important realization, and with a feeling of pride. When you look at what they are doing in Braddock you can’t tell for sure how it will all turn out. But what you can say for sure is that this multi-racial, multi-national American working class of ours is the most productive, resilient, determined, and imaginative bunch of people in history. We have a lot to be proud of.

John Wojcik writes for the People\'s Weekly World in Chicago. He was among some 75 journalists who reported on the people, history and issues facing working people in Pennsylvania as part of the International Labor Communications Association convention. View all the reports at the special ILCA website.