Johnstown

We came to Johnstown for a festival and decided to stay. Blue Ribbon Team set up shop as the publishing arm of the Cernunnos Foundation here in the fall of 2025, and the city has been working its way into our pages ever since.

This page collects that work in one place.

The Man Made pieces are here: City Hall, St. John Gualbert, the Franklin Street bridge, the old Tribune building, the Mansard on Vine Street, and the stone bandshell in Roxbury Park. These are buildings people pass on the way to somewhere else. We stopped the car, took pictures, and wrote them up.

The Bright Meadow Group concept briefs are here too. Each one starts from a vacant building, a closed plant, or an overlooked stretch of riverbank, and asks what Johnstown could do with it. The answers include a music venue on Ohio Street, a promenade at the Point, a municipal garden, a labor history museum, a recycled-glass works, and a local ownership model for data centers.

Some of the reading is heavier. The flood is part of the story here, and so are the decades after it, and a few of these pieces sit with that for a while before they get to the hopeful part.

Then there are the smaller things that make a town feel like home: a bakery, a home inspector who does the job right, a DIY gallery show, and a kid from the West End who grew up to draw Spider-Man.

Silas Corvin checks in from the District 13 desk when the county paperwork needs reading.

New pieces land here as they publish.

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