East Meets Midwest: Braddock

I am sitting on a spread of plywood in a vacant, windowless art studio in what had been a catholic school. (I'll be crashing here for the next couple nights).

Outside, the ding, ding, ding of decending barricades announces a train going or coming from US Steel across the street. The three or four story school building is now lived in by one person. Jeb holes up in a large classroom on the top floor. There is more space in that one room than he knows what to do with and then of course there’s the whole rest of that floor. Below that is a floor of artist studios and below that is a sizable gallery and below that…

You could say Braddock PA is a wasteland and you’d be right, and you could say it has tremendous up-side potential and you would also be right. 90% of the structures are gone and a good number of those remaining are shells or nearly so. But there are still gems to be found and in all that new open space where buildings had been, lots of things could happen. Anything seems to be possible here and so now and again some young thing with lofty ideas and a lot of enthusiam comes and buys a church or a bank for next to nothing.

Typical Braddock

The Transformasium Crew's current abode with mini greenhouse in the foreground,
U.S.Steel in the background

My history with the place is long and strange. These days it’s a place where I have friends and it’s a place where interesting things happen that I like to be a part of. Specifically, there is a group of four women working on building a community space from a former church. They are unflaggingly enthusiastic, committed to the idea of community, they are creative, kind, funny, quirky, industrious and pretty brilliant. Invariably, when I show up in Braddock they are in the middle of something that I find completely engaging. So I keep showing up to see what they are up to and to help out with the project du jour. Today, the project du jour was a presentation on building deconstruction.

In the rustbelt, tens of thousands of building are slated for demolition. The Church that the four have been working on (what they call the Transformasium) would have been one of them. Instead, the Transformasium crew got the Borough of North Braddock to sell them the place for $20,000. In exchange, the Transformasium crew will take care of the structure and has agreed to demolish the residential wing that was destroyed by fire several years ago.

Inside the Transformasium (and you thought your house was a project!) This is the area that will be the arts/community space, not the part that the crew has been deconstructing.

Not wanting to waste resources, the Trans-crew opted to deconstruct the building rather than demolish it and to encourage other people to do likewise they documented the process and shared their experience. After deconstructing for three days a week for six weeks they fired up the community bread oven, made a dozen or so pizzas and presented to the community.

Part of what impresses me so much about the group is that they are living in such an open manner. None of them has deconstructed a building before but none of them hesitated to present on it. If it's a success they will present that, if it is a disaster they will present that too. It has nothing to do with self-promotion and everything to do with getting information out there to facilitate the revitalization of the area.

The presentation under way