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Dark angel towing1/1/2024 ![]() The Atlantic put him in its “Brave New Thinkers” issue of 2009. He was dubbed America’s “coolest mayor” by The Guardian and the Mayor of Hell by Rolling Stone. With appearances this past year or so on “The Colbert Report,” CBS News Sunday Morning, PBS and CNN, John Fetterman has become the face of Rust Belt renewal. Then Lynn Goldsmith, a photographer known for her portraits of rock stars, asked if she could take his picture, and in the shade of the building, the mayor struck a pose, unsmiling, arms out. “It’s the same as 4,000 people moving into Pittsburgh,” Fetterman said, not offering a real number. ![]() A man asked how many people had made the move to Braddock. “We use art to combat the dark side of capitalism,” Fetterman replied. “Whatever you’re interested in, we have projects up the wazoo,” he said. ![]() A woman from a foundation in Dallas wanted to make a grant. When the applause died out, people swarmed the mayor. And this one,” he said, switching arms, “are the dates of the five people we lost to senseless violence in Braddock since I took office.” The audience clapped again. “This one,” the mayor said, holding out his right forearm, “is the Braddock ZIP code, 15104. But as of - knock on wood - today, we are now 27 months without a homicide.” The audience began to clap and didn’t stop for a long time.Īs the event wound down, Gioia asked Fetterman to explain the numbers tattooed on his arms. “What was Braddock like before we took office? Braddock was a notorious community that was steeped in violence. Here was a guy in biker boots bringing the Park Slope (Aspen, Marin, Portland, Santa Fe) ethos - organic produce, art installations, an outdoor bread oven - to the disenfranchised. “They bought this house for $4,300,” Fetterman told the crowd, “and put in a lot of sweat equity, and now it looks like something you’d see in a magazine.” And, I don’t know if you consider it arts, exactly, but I consider growing organic vegetables in the shadow of a steel mill an art, and that has attracted homesteading.”įetterman displayed a picture of a furniture store, which the nonprofit he founded bought in 2009 for $15,000, and an abandoned church, which is being turned into a community center, and former building lots that are now green spaces, and an outdoor pizza oven, made with bricks from a demolished building, and a house belonging to two of the homesteaders who have moved to Braddock from “all over the country.” We created the first art gallery in the four-town region, with artists’ studios. “Ninety percent of our town is in a landfill. “We’ve lost 90 percent of our population and 90 percent of our buildings,” he said. Then he turned to Braddock as it is today. Its main street was packed with shoppers, its storefronts filled with wares. Fetterman projected pictures of old, bustling Braddock, which steel made until the middle of the 20th century and unmade throughout the rest. At the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado last July, John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, a small Pennsylvania town 10 miles upriver from Pittsburgh, was introduced by Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, as a man who demonstrates “how ideas can change the world.” It was four days into the weeklong festival, and Fetterman, a 41-year-old, 6-foot-8 white man with a shaved head, a fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other, was presenting a slideshow about how art could bring social change to a town where one-third of its 2,671 residents, a majority of whom are African-American and female, live in poverty.
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