Jan 23, 2024 By Paul Paterra 6 min read

Two Monessen residents are working to tell the story of the effects of the urban renewal program on the city.

Urban renewal was a federal initiative spanning from 1949-74 that reshaped neighborhoods across the country by seizing and demolishing large swaths of private and public property for the purpose of modernizing and improving aging infrastructure.

Beverly Novak, a graduate of PennWest California, and former Monessen mayor Matthew Shorraw are focusing on the city’s implementation of the program, specifically the clearance of the Westgate neighborhood.

Novak, originally from Washington, D.C., has lived in the Rust Belt (Southwestern Pennsylvania and Detroit) for the past decade.

While at PennWest, she majored in geography. She discovered a love of historical research and archiving and gained a deep appreciation for the history of Monessen.

“I want to preserve local history in areas that have undergone massive changes due to factors like deindustrialization, urban renewal and population decline,” Novak said.

Her paternal side of the family has been in the Mon Valley since the early 20th century, something she said she learned five years ago, around the time she found out Shorraw was her cousin.

“In connecting with my family, getting acquainted with the area and falling in love with it, I became fascinated in local politics,” she explained. “I was really inspired by Matt’s political career and I thought it was just crazy that there was this underdog, young, progressive mayor in this little Rust Belt town.”

Shorraw is working on his master’s thesis at Harvard University on Rust Belt Urban Renewal programs and recognized the significance of mapping Monessen’s Westgate neighborhood before and during urban renewal.

“I’ve always had an interest in this part of town,” Shorraw said. “My graduate work has kind of led me down this path.”

Westgate, which stretches from Eighth Street to the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge, saw the demolition of hundreds of homes, churches, ethnic clubs and businesses during the 1960s and ’70s.

“We found it both appalling and fascinating about what happened there and how there was so much money pumped into places like Monessen and Johnstown and the Hill District and all of these places that got all of this federal money to basically remove neighborhoods and in a lot of these cases they were never rebuilt, like in the case of Monessen,” Shorraw said. “We thought what if we attempted to map it, what if we can show what it looked like when it was fully constructed, integrated and functioning. That’s kind of the path this started on with her research.”

That prompted Novak to initiate the “From Morgan Avenue to Westgate: Remembering Monessen’s Third Ward” archival project, which provides information on the Westgate urban renewal project accessible through Google searches. Several local newspaper articles on the project can be found at the site. Previously, a Google search provided no results on the subject.

“I want to show that there was life there, despite its seedy reputation, being a red-light district and the condition of the houses, people lived and died there,” Novak said. “I think it’s important to show that. People were displaced there and it was all done based on racist and classist ideals that we had at the time. People lost livelihoods and lost generational wealth, homeowners were displaced and eminent domain gave them pennies on the dollar.”

She said it started as mainly a mapping project, but evolved as she began researching local newspaper articles from that time.

“I started realizing that a map is important and will come but first and foremost, it’s important to see what exactly am I mapping and what exactly happened,” Novak said. “I can build a map of this former neighborhood, but I think it was important to see exactly how many people were displaced and what happened.”

Novak said her research revealed that about 1,100 people, many non-white (which included those of Greek, Ukrainian, Italian and Mediterranean descent) were displaced from the Westgate neighborhood.

“It’s all the more reason why this work is important,” she said. “A lot of people were displaced and, socially speaking, were disadvantaged because of race relations in this area in the late 1960s.”

Drawing on his research, Shorraw identified common threads in small communities participating in urban renewal, linking it with redlining, disdain for dense urban areas and a lack of respect for diverse cultures. He highlighted the tendency to isolate these neighborhoods from others, often through the construction of highways or major roadways.

Shorraw also shared how the election of Hugo Parente, who served as mayor of Monessen from 1946-71, had an effect on Westgate.

“The bulk of his votes came from Westgate, Monessen’s Third Ward,” Shorraw said. “There were people on council who did not want Parente to continue being mayor. There was a block of people who were trying to take away Parente’s vote by demolishing one of his biggest precincts. Parente died in office. Those who opposed him either lost or died and then there was this mess because federal funding dried up at the end of the ’70s.”

Novak’s project will eventually incorporate community input, actively seeking newspaper clippings, photos and personal stories from individuals who recall the vibrancy of Morgan Avenue and its surrounding neighborhood.

“There are so many things we need to delve into and so much to uncover with this,” she said. It’s going to be a long time until I get to a point where I feel that I’m finished, and even then, I don’t think we’ll ever be done. It’s an ongoing project.”

The actual mapping of the former neighborhood is planned for later this year. Those interested can follow the progress by visiting the website morganavenue.omeka.net or by visiting the Facebook group, “From Morgan Avenue to Westgate: Remembering Monessen’s Third Ward.”

“The people who lived in these neighborhoods, their stories deserve to be told,” Shorraw said. There are a lot of younger people who don’t know this neighborhood even existed. You look at it now and it looks like a hillside. Pittsburgh is finally having a reckoning from what’s happening in the Hill District, and I think there’s a lot of focus on Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit, but people don’t realize that a lot of this urban renewal happened in small towns like Monessen.”