Brownsville, PA
Updated October 3, 2022
By Matthew Christopher
When I first visited Brownsville, PA in 2011, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. “Post-apocalyptic” is an overused descriptor, but it was hard not to think of it when viewing the downtown. Vacant, crumbling buildings lined block after block of the town’s main road, Market Street. Banks, a hotel, a five-story train station, storefronts, and the church were all boarded up and in various stages of disrepair. While many Rust Belt towns struggle to maintain businesses and are peppered with abandoned buildings, the sheer volume of properties was overwhelming. It seemed as though nothing was open save for a second-hand store and a pharmacy, and there was no one in sight. As it turned out, Brownsville has an incredibly strange story that remains shrouded in mystery and conjecture to this day - one that has cost the town much of its architectural heritage and may take decades to repair.
Located approximately 40 miles south of Pittsburgh in Fayette County, along the Monongahela River, Brownsville’s location is generally believed to have been a hunting ground for the Five Nations of the Iroquois. The first European outpost was a fort built in 1759 to command the river’s crossing point. It known as Redstone Old Fort or Fort Burd (after Colonel James Burd, who established it), and it became a prominent outfitting destination for anyone traveling west. The town of Brownsville was formally founded in 1785 by land speculator Thomas Brown, who it is named after. In 1789 a trading post was built by Jacob Bowman, whose original log cabin was later incorporated by his ancestors into Nemacolin Castle and stands to this day.
Bird's Eye View of Brownsville, PA in 1883 by Beck & Pauli Lithographers
Brownsville’s location on the waterfront gave ships easy access to the Ohio River and led to the growth of industry, commerce, and transportation. In the early 19th century the town’s steamboat construction business flourished and between 1811 and 1888 roughly 3,000 steamboats were built there. The National Road, which began construction in 1811, ran through Brownsville and it was an important supply stop for wagon trains heading west. As with many western Pennsylvania towns, coal and steel became a major industry in Brownsville. The 1900s were a prosperous time, with the town’s population peaking at 8,000 in 1940. In the 1970s, however, the slump in the steel and coal industries erased jobs in Brownsville, and the area’s economy declined. Additionally, the downtown suffered as malls drew patrons from their stores. This set the stage for the bizarre and inexplicable events to come.
Though many of the facts in the story are uncertain even to those who know the area best, in the early 1990s entrepreneurs Ernest and Marilyn Liggett began buying dozens of properties in the town through a variety of companies including Brownsville Group Ltd. and Brownsville Group and Manor Improvements Inc., often for as low as a dollar at tax sales. They were initially viewed as saviors by many of the residents, and seemed to have big plans for redeveloping Brownsville. By the end of their buying spree they had spent an estimated $2 million dollars on over a hundred properties, including 75%-95% of the downtown. Among the properties were the former Brownsville General Hospital (later the Golden Age Nursing Home), which closed in 1985, the Horner Memorial Nurses’ Home, the five-story Union Station building, the Monongahela National Bank building, the Second National Bank, the Towne House Hotel, the Plaza Theater, an Odd Fellows Lodge, and dozens of stores, restaurants, and homes.
The facade of the abandoned Monongahela National Bank in Brownsville, PA
There is no information online or in newspapers that I've located about the Liggetts save for articles about their dreams for the town. They moved to Brownsville from Churchill, PA, and Ernest described himself as self-employed and working in finance, but their background and true motives are maddeningly opaque. Based on the newspaper articles about them that began appearing in the early 90’s, they had several plans for the town, and none of them materialized. A plan for a wharf and marina was nixed after the Waterway Association of Pittsburgh complained that boats would be too close to the hazardous wake of towboats already traveling the river in 1993-94. By 1999, the couple’s ambition to bring riverboat gambling to the area was making the rounds. The idea was shot down by the Pennsylvania State Senate in 2011, perhaps in part because representatives for project partners the Six Nations of the Grand River Tribe in Ontario reportedly never showed up at the planning meeting. The reason for their absence may be explained by a 2012 article describing how tribal council members discovered that the tribe had spent more than $400,000 for legal and lobbying expenses related to the project, which the council had never authorized and had no knowledge of.
Aside from a small piece about the Liggetts trying to keep Conrail from demolishing three stone/brick arches in the town that they owned, the next series of redevelopment ideas was made public in a 2012 Triblive article that outlined efforts to bring a velodrome, or a bicycling arena, to the town for USA Cycling. However, USA Cycling’s commitment to the project is ambiguous at best, as is the Liggetts’. Their attorney stated they had a new development plan underway since 2005 but declined to elaborate. It's generally believed that the Liggetts had plans for turning the city into a tourist mecca, with an outlet mall, bars, boutiques, and restaurants, but hope was wearing thin. Chamber of Commerce member Ray Koffler complained, “"Brownsville's known not for any attraction, but because (Ernest) Liggett owns it, and it's falling in."
I'm pretty sure this meeting room in Union Station is where the casino idea died; there were still a few placards for state senators, and a variety of architectural plans and promotional material were in the next room.
Part of the problem was that even in 1993, Mayor Robert Bakewell was quoted in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article saying ““I can’t tell you what he’s doing here, but I’m grateful. I’m just hoping Brownsville will prosper from it.” Nobody really knew what all of the plans entailed, and the Liggetts didn’t point to any other redevelopment projects they had completed. While they waited for approval for the gambling license, they didn’t maintain the buildings and their condition worsened. In a rare 2001 interview Ernest claimed property buyers were “circling like bees”, and he continued to raise money from investors with redevelopment plans and for costs to pay taxes, prevent forbearance, and stabilize the properties. To outside observers, though, it seemed he was just letting them crumble.
The town of Brownsville found it increasingly difficult to get Liggett to pay local, school, and real-estate taxes, and he quit paying them altogether in 2007. When the city started citing him for code violations, he ignored them and didn’t pay the fines. He was sued by his investors, but even after winning in court, they were unable to recover money from him. The town sued Ernest, and Ernest sued the town. He was mostly described as a recluse at this point but would show up to fight the town’s efforts to seize the properties in court, and ultimately filed for bankruptcy, thwarting the town’s attempts to recover and sell them. When he did eventually put them up for sale, the minimum bid prices set by Liggett were unrealistically high, which prevented them from being sold.
A steamboat model left behind in Ernest Liggett's office
Brownsville was in dire financial straits: one year they had to lay off police and municipal workers for several months, and federal redevelopment funds were hard to acquire when the buildings were on the National Register of Historic Places and the town was seeking money to demolish them. The town’s population had declined to about 2,300 in 2020, and fighting costly legal battles drained what little money the borough had.
Bit by bit, though, the government of Brownsville reclaimed properties. After years of neglect, they were in terrible condition. Though I’ve heard that Ernest Liggett may have died and this is why efforts have finally progressed, I’ve found no obituary, so even that is unclear. Free of the Liggetts’ ownership, though, many of the properties are being demolished. Brownsville General Hospital and the Horner Memorial Nurses’ Home (galley link here) were torn down in 2020-2021, and a segment of Market Street stores and the Plaza Theater were razed also. In the place of the Market Street buildings, a senior housing development was built. Hope Park also recently opened there, and provides a green space for the community, a walking path and benches, and an outdoor movie screen. Photographer Stephen Beckman opened a gallery and the charmingly retro Maria’s Lovers House in a restored rental home that was used as a filming location for a movie of the same name filmed there in 1983. Local students successfully initiated a plan for an outdoor performance stage in the downtown, and retired teacher Joe Barantovich started Perennial Project nonprofit to plant flowers, create art installations, and organize volunteer work.
The abandoned Kart's Fashion Center on Market Street in Brownsville is one of the properties that has been demolished for Hope Park.
As of this writing, many vacant properties remain, but they’re disappearing swiftly. Restoration of the Union Station building is estimated to cost between $5-7 million and its fate remains in limbo. The Brownsville Area Revitalization Corporation operates across the street in the Flatiron Building and has a fantastic museum where you can find out more about the area. Things are improving, but much work remains to be done. Efforts to reclaim the downtown for the townspeople are a welcome sign, however, and a sign of the community’s resilience and determination.
As for the Liggetts, so many unknowns remain. Had their plans been sincere, and simply the victim of too much misplaced ambition? Did they just give up when the town and investors started making demands, or had it been a con to get investors’ money all along? Why fight the town to hold onto properties, many of which had been bought for a single dollar each, when it was clear that their value was gone? Why was there so much secrecy about planning? Why did they reject help from the townspeople to get grants for the buildings? Considering the economic plight of the town and the fact that some of the buildings bought by the Liggetts were vacant when they were purchased, was it realistic to even hope that they could deliver?
It's quite possible nobody aside from the Liggetts will ever know. My podcast interview with former Brownsville Mayor Norma Marcolini-Ryan answered many questions but left me with many more. As time goes on, with luck, it will matter less and less to the people of Brownsville as they rebuild. Nonetheless, the scars from the three decades where the townspeople were, as they described it, “held hostage by the Liggetts" will remain. Even looking right at it, it's hard to imagine that so much devastation could be wrought on one town, all for a pile of empty promises.
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