The City of Johnstown has very rich immigrant and industrial history. Shelley Johansson, Director of Marketing and Communications of the Heritage Discovery Center says the building was built in 1903.

“It was built as a brewery in 1903. Of course, we all know what happened to breweries very quickly after that. Prohibition came along, and they were not breweries, and basically it became several other things until my organization bought it. The first phase of the exhibit opened with America through immigrant eyes. If early industrial America is your story, and it is, it's an amazing building to have. It tells a story of what it was like to be an immigrant coming to this area around the turn of the last century. It's kind of a national story told in a local context, because that is the period of great immigration from Europe.”

The first-floor exhibit of the Frank & Sylvia Pasquerilla Heritage Discovery Center, America:  Through Immigrant Eyes, tells a national story in local context.

“The exhibition focuses on telling the story. When you come to the exhibit, you get to choose one of eight immigrant cards that has a different nationality, an age, and a gender. This is a young Polish boy. This is an innate. At different points in the exhibit, you plug the card into the exhibit, and the exhibit talks to you as though you were that character. It kind of puts you in an experiential position to learn what happened. The other thing about this building that I failed to mention, it is located in Cambria City, which was Johnstown's most important immigrant neighborhood during this period. This is where these people, who were largely from southern and eastern Europe at that time, were settling and they didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. I mean, one of the themes in the exhibit is about the prejudice that people encountered when they got here.”

 

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