Black History Month 'Wiped away' by 56 Bypass: Once-prominent Johnstown business corridor gone, but not forgotten

Feb. 18—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Ricky Britt still recalls Chubby Checker's rich baritone belting out "The Twist" through the jukebox at his old teenage hangout in Johnstown.

It was Frank Elder's place.

Even 60 years later, Britt still remembers spending Friday nights there with friends, dancing the "Shing-a-Ling" and other fads of the day, or leaning against Elder's sleek soda counter, hoping to catch a pretty girl's eye.

For a teenager, the soda shop on lower Bedford Street was a key part of a lively Black-owned business corridor that stretched from downtown Johnstown to Menoher Boulevard in Kernville.

Today, the stories evoke a mix of happiness and heartache, he said.

"I've got a lot of great memories of those times — those places," said Britt, now 76 and a member of Johnstown City Council, recalling several blocks of barber shops, corner stores, social clubs and a billiards hall. "But they're all gone. Even the buildings are gone."

At a moment when Johnstown's business sector is seeing a new wave of diverse entrepreneurs working to revitalize downtown, the neighborhood's old Black district won't get the same chance.

Time and "urban renewal" efforts — including the demolition of 278 buildings or homes to make way for the $7.8 million construction of the Route 56 bypass — wiped almost all of it away, The Tribune-Democrat articles from the era show.

But today, community members with the Cambria Memory Project are working to put those Black-owned businesses back on the map, digitally speaking, in an effort to preserve what's gone.

Two centuries of stories

Through ongoing efforts to preserve downtown's Ludwig House, its onetime owner Pauline Gordon has been celebrated as downtown Johnstown's first Black businesswoman, magistrate and, later, city councilwoman. She will be posthumously inducted into the Cambria Business Hall of Fame this spring.

But traces of history show the late mortician and local civil rights leader was following a path blazed by others who carved out a living as business owners in the Conemaugh Valley for almost a century prior, dating back to the 1830s, census data and other records show.

There were men such as Wallace Fortune, who opened a Clinton Street barber shop in the mid-1830s, a time when the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal powered the town's economy.

Fortune, who sold his shop in 1837, was one of at least six barbers who made a living in the trade before 1850, records show.

There were also blacksmiths, shoemakers and a master stonemason.

There was Elmer Brown, whose mother's Laurel Hill family settled above the West End by 1825, records show. According to some 1890s-era Johnstown Tribune articles, Brown's family arrived in the area perhaps as early as 1776, 15 years before Joseph Schantz settled in the valley below and started establishing a town there.

The son of a Civil War veteran, Brown had a wagon business that supplied timber and other goods to what became Bethlehem Steel.

By the early 1900s, Bethlehem's eyes turned to the segregated South to fill labor jobs.

That trend only grew once World War I erupted in Europe and the wave of incoming European immigrants waned, according to Florence Hornback's 1941 publication "Survey of the Negro Population of metropolitan Johnstown, Pennsylvania."

Black people were recruited from Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas to support the mill directly by fueling the coke ovens and taking on other grueling jobs.

"The mill operators thought they'd be better suited to working in those sweltering jobs because they were supposedly used to the heat in the deep South," Johnstown Area Heritage Association President Richard Burkert said.

Those people found homes in Kernville, Rosedale, Franklin and other working-class neighborhoods. In time, businesses popped up alongside them, including McSwain's Restaurant in East Conemaugh, a borough that was home to a row of wooden "company houses" for decades when the steel industry was thriving.

Britt grew up in that neighborhood.

"My grandfather would always be in McSwain's, sitting next to a big jar of pigs' feet on the bar," Britt said.

'Got rid of it'

The businesses might have been tidy and welcoming inside, but the buildings themselves were often old, deteriorating stock, historians say.

"There were many businesses in that little enclave of Bedford Street, but there also would have been undesirable ones," said Burkert, who recalled stories of Bethlehem Steel executives or young Johnstown natives detouring new visitors to the city miles out of the way to avoid driving them past a well-known Bedford Street brothel.

By the middle of the century, many America cities were showing their age. Funding that was funneled to them in the 1950s and '60s was meant to help them adapt, modernize and expand.

But rather than invest in lower Bedford Street, city leaders flattened it.

"Just like Pittsburgh with the Hill District, Johnstown did what many, many cities across the country did when the concept of 'urban renewal' became a trend," Burkert said. "They took a majority-Black neighborhood and basically got rid of it."

The Tribune-Democrat articles from the era show that hundreds of buildings were leveled for the chosen path of the "Kernville Expressway" before work was completed in 1972.

Britt recalled returning from the Marine Corps to see the old Bedford Street neighborhood bulldozed.

"I could go anywhere in Johnstown — whether it was a white or Black business, I always felt welcome," he said, describing days spent at the "Teen Canteen." "But that Bedford Street neighborhood ... was special. The people (who owned those businesses) had a lot of pride in what they did and where they came from."

NAACP Johnstown Branch President Alan Cashaw also spent his youth visiting places such as the Frederick Douglass VFW Post in the lower Bedford Street neighborhood.

While he was back home for summer break in the early 1970s, he took a job with an area construction company to help build the multi-million-dollar bypass.

Johnstown spent much of a decade trying to get the four-lane highway bypass through the heart of the town, making it a historic moment. But today, Cashaw realizes he was unwittingly erasing his community's history, too.

"Everything got wiped away," he said.

Britt said the worst part is that no one ever took the time to document those days. If there were photographs, they could be long-gone by now, Burkert, Cashaw and Britt all said.

That's why organizations such JAHA, the Johnstown-based African American Heritage Society and Pennsylvania Highlands Community College's Cambria Memory Project have been working hard in recent years to preserve what has survived from the county's more than 200 years of Black settlements.

"Especially with our declining population, as people get older, we're losing more and more of that, and if we don't capture what we can now, it'll be lost," said Penn Highlands' Barb Zaborowski, who launched the Cambria Memory Project to collect and digitize local historical information.

There are stories that need to be told to educate future generations and to dispel false narratives that make it seem like Black people are relative newcomers to the Johnstown region, she said.

Part of that effort includes the Cambria Memory Project's interactive map, which she hopes to continue to develop as more businesses, social organizations and churches are verified.

The map enables users to see the locations of current and long-gone landmarks, including McSwain's, and view any compiled information about them.

Zaborowski is hoping Johnstowners, both past and present, might have stories, documents or photographs that can be added to the page's small collection.

"Any little tip, even a vague memory, we can trace back through deeds and city directories," she said. "But we need help."

Britt said the community's history must be preserved for younger generations to understand. It has gotten to the point where there aren't many people left he can call to verify something about "the old days" if he doesn't know it himself.

"These stories got to be told," Britt said. "If we don't preserve our legacy, if we don't pass on where we came from, it goes with us."