Braddock’s Rebuild Goes On Without Fetterman

The crowd at Braddock Community Day in early August never got dense. People moved in a thin but steady current between the vendor tables from noon to 6 p.m. Most of them appeared to know each other by name.

Among them were a staffer from the arts studio up the block, a former local football player who works at the high school, an 82-year-old auteur who has been filming the town since 1974, and an optician whose shop has been on the avenue since 1971.

U.S. Sen. John Fetterman was not at the event. Earlier in the day, he had been in Washington, where at roughly 4 a.m. that morning the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general by a vote of 50-49, with every Democrat opposed.

‘Keep your eye on us’

William Ferguson, known on the avenue as “Tutu,” is a third-generation Braddock native. He went to school and played football here and now works at the high school.

Asked what he would say to Fetterman, Ferguson began with thanks. 

“I would say this to the mayor, just keep your eye on us,” he said. “We still need help. Ain’t over now.”

He still calls Fetterman “the mayor” — and pointed out “the mayor” still has work to do.

“What we need right now is more programs for kids. Our kids have nothing to do after school is over. Our math and English grades could be better,” he said. “We can definitely benefit from more tutoring, man. Math and English, science would be the three subjects. If somebody can help us do that, I would greatly appreciate it.”

Asked where he thought Fetterman was on Saturday, Ferguson answered succinctly: “Golf.”

‘We’re trying to bring business’

Al J. Boss sells glasses at 634 Braddock Ave., a few doors up from the plaza. A-Boss Opticians, the family business he runs there, dates to 1971. He watched the avenue empty from behind the counter.

Boss said the remaining merchants along the block are “trying to bring business,” and he gave Fetterman credit for the start of it.

“The first thing that Fetterman did was clean up” the blight along the main drag, Boss said, so that people driving through Braddock saw something besides ruin.

Boss also backed Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel, closed in June 2025, which national United Steelworkers leadership had opposed in favor of Cleveland-Cliffs. Local union officials and Mon Valley residents broke with the international on it.

“If you see millions coming into the area, that’s why,” Boss said.

‘This is ongoing before Fetterman’

Tony Buba has made films about Braddock for 52 years, among them the 1988 feature “Lightning Over Braddock.” The New York Times once called him the Bard of Braddock. 

Asked whether the out-of-sight Fetterman was visible around town as mayor, Buba said he was, and then drew a line from that job to this one.

"He was pretty visible. But he never went to council meetings," Buba said. "It's similar to how he doesn't go to the Senate stuff."

In 2022, Mehmet Oz's campaign said Fetterman had missed more than a third of monthly borough council meetings while mayor. Fetterman has not held a town hall since taking his Senate seat in January 2023.

Buba said people who did not know Fetterman before his 2022 stroke now read every abrasive or inconsistent moment through it.

"He's always been kind of erratic," he said. "And now people just attribute it to the stroke."

He also pointed out that Fetterman has always held petty grudges. The clearest documented example came in November 2010, when surveillance video played at a borough council meeting showed the mayor rearranging the letters on the marquee outside Club 804, a bar he wanted closed, so that a message about reopening under new management read instead that the club would not reopen. Fetterman did not deny it and called the club "public nuisance No. 1 in our community." Council President Jesse Brown said he did not know why the mayor was so set on it 

"He's got a bad history of stuff like that," Buba said. 

What Buba does say was a significant change was his position on fracking, which Fetterman once opposed alongside him but now supports.

"He changed his position," Buba said. "The shift was a big deal."

Buba recalled a 2009 commercial in which Fetterman, then the mill town’s mayor, endorsed capping carbon.

"Whatever happened to carbon caps?" Buba said.

He said Fetterman’s career has come down to luck and timing.

"He's been one of the luckiest politicians. Truly, truly," Buba said, running through the one-vote 2005 mayoral primary, the 2018 race against a sitting lieutenant governor, and Oz. "He's really one of the most fortunate people around."

Buba said he had no idea where Fetterman could be.

“It’s Community Day in Braddock,” he said. “I haven’t seen him at Community Day in a while. He doesn’t come to these anymore.”

‘Change can actually happen here’

Three blocks up, Herman Pearl was giving tours of his studio.

Pearl, who records under the name Soy Sos, and his partner, choreographer Staycee Pearl, opened PearlArts Movement & Sound in 2024 on the entire third floor of the old Carnegie Cooperative Building at 818 Braddock Ave. It holds two dance studios with sprung floors and two recording studios whose floors were poured, cut into separate slabs and rebuilt with air gaps between them so sound cannot travel room to room. The console in the control room was built from floor joists pulled out of the building’s own rotted flooring during construction.

Pearl’s account of how the studio came together did not include any mention of Fetterman. Patrick Jordan of barebones productions, whose theater is down the street, introduced the Pearls in early 2020 to developer Gregg Kander, who had already converted the derelict eight-story Ohringer Building into 37 units of affordable housing for artists.

“We worked hand in hand with [Kander] to help get this thing to happen,” Pearl said. “We acted as the anchor tenant and sort of the poster child of, you know, this can actually happen.”

They hold a 30-year lease.

“Staycee and I will have to turn it over to somebody else at some point,” he said. “But the work is done. The space is built. It has to stay in use.” 

Braddock has many more buildings like the one the Pearls took over and renovated. Most are still empty, the sort of sad places that photographers showcase in coffee table books about industrial ruin.

‘Fetterman hasn’t helped at all’

Jim Phillips has organized Braddock Community Day since 2014. Vendors pay a non-refundable $50 registration fee, food trucks the same.

“I’ve been having this for 12 years, and he hasn’t helped,” Phillips said. Nor, he noted, has he made an appearance at the event in recent years.

He once went to Fetterman’s house and got a meeting.

“I want to thank him for that meeting,” Phillips said. “But he still never helped me.”

As for Fetterman’s attendance, Phillips shared an anecdote about the former mayor’s past participation. At the time, Community Day was running “three or four blocks down by the library” in those years, Phillips said, and Fetterman occasionally turned up.

“He had an ice cream truck,” Phillips said. “Everybody else” had registered as a vendor and paid the setup fee, but Fetterman, who parked outside the area designated for Community Day, did not.

Phillips said he has tried not to raise that fee, currently $50, in seven or eight years, and that he lines up the sponsors himself. U.S. Steel, he said, gives him $7,500 a year.

Braddock Redux, Fetterman’s nonprofit, did sponsor the second annual Community Day in August 2011 at Braddock Avenue and Library Street. 

‘I would like to see him out here more’

Dahlia Saenz works at PearlArts and lives four minutes away in Swissvale. She turns up at the Braddock cleanups on Saturday mornings.

“I haven’t seen him at a cleanup day,” she said. 

“I would like to see him out here more. We have a lot of events. We’re still trying to bring the arts community into Braddock,” Saenz said. “I think he could at least come to some of our performances if he doesn’t want to come to a class. Just kind of put the spotlight on what’s going on.”

Asked where she thought he was, she offered two possibilities. 

“Maybe he’s at home,” she said. “Or I’ve heard that people see him at Home Depot a lot. I’ve never seen him there.”

Asked whether Fetterman has her support in a 2028 Democratic primary, Saenz said he was “probably not my first choice,” and that she intends to research the field.

By the time the 2028 primary season rolls around, it’s entirely possible that Fetterman might have changed parties and Saenz, a Democrat, won’t get the chance to vote for him at all.

‘You can’t chalk it up to any one person’

Two women who work for Braddock nonprofits talked at length about the borough’s last 25 years. Both declined to be quoted by name, saying their jobs and their organizations’ working relationships made it difficult to speak on the record about a sitting senator. 

Neither would assign the town’s decline or its partial recovery to any single person, Fetterman included. 

“It’s the whole village. It’s everybody,” said the first nonprofit worker, who has lived in Braddock for 10 years. “You can’t chalk it up to any one person.”

The second nonprofit worker dated the decline earlier than the mill closings. “We started to decline in the 1950s,” she said. “So it’s 70 years of disinvestment.” Suburban development, and who was permitted to move out of Braddock, turned it into something beyond an economic story.

“It becomes a segregation issue,” she said.

She noted that a Pennsylvania borough mayor has limited authority in any case, since council controls the budget. Where the work came from, she said, was the library and the Mon Valley Initiative.

The first nonprofit worker was critical of the campaign to recruit artists to cheap Braddock housing in the 2000s, which she described as handing newcomers a blank canvas and telling them to do as they liked without asking the people already here what the town needed.

“Here’s a blank canvas, go for it. Don’t bother asking people,” she said. “It’s really insulting.”

Both women said that the loss of the hospital ensured that Braddock’s full revival was unlikely.

UPMC closed Braddock Hospital in January 2010, taking with it the borough’s largest employer.

“It would have really been an anchor,” one said. “Hundreds of people lost their jobs, and hundreds of people lost access.”

Braddock now has only an urgent care center that Highmark’s Allegheny Health Network opened in 2015.

‘Where is John Fetterman in all of this?’

The answer that Saturday appeared to be at home, resting.

Fetterman had said August 4 on Jon Stewart’s podcast that he would oppose Blanche. “If you’re going to bring up Blanche, I’m not going to vote for him,” he said. He maintained that position throughout a week in which Republican leadership scrambled for every last vote, and the roll call shows he was on the floor at 4 a.m. Saturday, indeed voting no.

He returned to Braddock after the vote. A person close to the Fettermans, who asked not to be named, said the tired senator was home sleeping while Community Day went on down the street. The Fettermans’ well-appointed loft is farther up Braddock Avenue, above the space that housed Superior Motors and now holds Braddock Public House, the Brew Gentlemen brewpub that opened there in 2024.

The Public House is a high-profile example of how Braddock has recovered in a handful of visible ways over the past two decades, though the people interviewed for this story traced most of the serious parts of that recovery to people other than Fetterman.

"The project that brought Braddock's Carnegie Library — the original Carnegie Library — back was ongoing long before Fetterman," Buba said.

The housing around the Civic Plaza came largely through the Mon Valley Initiative. It was built with money obligated by a 1994 federal consent decree in Sanders v. HUD, a segregation case brought by residents of a Braddock public housing complex.

That decree set aside a share of Allegheny County's community development funds for Braddock and six other communities, and the set-aside ran from roughly 1995 to 2002.

Pitt regional economist Christopher Briem wrote in June that Braddock remains the poorest community in Pennsylvania.

By one nonprofit worker's estimate, "nine and three-quarters out of every 10 people working in Braddock" on a given weekend are doing it for reasons that have nothing to do with Fetterman, and nothing he has done in the Senate has addressed their most urgent needs.

'Ain't over for us yet'

Late in the afternoon, "Tutu" Ferguson was still working the crowd near the plaza, three blocks down from the loft where the senator was sleeping.

"Please remember to tell people: it ain't over for us yet," he said, slapping my palm.

U.S. Rep. Summer Lee came through the plaza that same afternoon, greeting constituents.

Lee was born in North Braddock in 1987 and grew up there and in Swissvale. The borough sits in Pennsylvania's 12th District, which she has represented since January 2023, the same month Fetterman took his Senate seat. She has since secured $1 million for blight elimination in North Braddock and appeared alongside the Mon Valley Initiative at a housing rehabilitation in neighboring Rankin.

Asked what she made of Fetterman's legacy in Braddock, and what she made of his work in the Senate now, Lee politely declined to comment.

She kept moving through the crowd, doing the hard work of staying connected to what the people of Braddock want: someone who remembered it wasn’t over for them yet, and whose actions helped them keep their heads above water.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.