Group: Downtown Donora worthy of preservation
The heart of downtown Donora, viewed from Fifth Street and McKean Avenue
The faint remnants of an old, hand-painted Montgomery Ward department store sign on a building along McKean Avenue in Donora.
DONORA – The once-mighty steel town of Donora suffered a huge economic loss with the closing of a U.S. Steel mill in the 1960s.
“Now, we’re taking a second punch with the closing of the Donora-Webster Bridge,” borough council President Karen Polkabla said, referring to the 116-year-old span that will be imploded before next summer.
“We keep coming back fighting,” Polkabla said, reacting to an announcement Tuesday that the Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh deemed Donora’s historic McKean Avenue worthy of saving.
Each year, the association names its top 10 list of endangered sites in the region as one tool to draw attention to preservation being key to revitalization.
“We visited Donora and thought it was cool-looking and has neat architecture,” said Ellen Kitzerow, chairman of the association’s board of directors.
“A lot of downtowns have missing buildings and big gaps in them,” Kitzerow said. “Donora is in great shape,” she said, adding the downtown survived well even though it doesn’t have a lot of retail.
The downtown and the village of Webster across the Monongahela River are eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Districts because of the infamous Donora smog that killed more than 20 people during a Halloween weekend in 1948. The tragedy became the impetus for the nation’s first clean air laws being enacted.
“It has a great story and reason for people to be paying attention to Donora,” Kitzerow said Thursday.
The Donora Smog Museum operated by the local historical society in the downtown is also worth visiting, she said.
Polkabla said she appreciated the attention the preservationists were drawing to Donora.
“We have worked hard to preserve what is there,” she said. “If they have any suggestions on sending people our way, we’d be interesting in talking to them.”