ABSTRACT
Uniontown, PA, may eventually be transformed from a place where many who drove down Main Street would roll up their windows to what will soon be a showplace, a catalyst for the renewal of Fayette County, among the poorest of Pennsylvania’s sixty-seven counties. Since 2005, the town that almost died in the 1950s and 1960s with the coal mines and the birth of the strip malls, has been receiving a makeover of dramatic proportion: the State Theatre has been renovated and there are now cultural events held there; more than twenty store fronts have been repaired and reopened; three churches have been whitewashed, and the derelicts seem fewer. Local professionals who lived for years in the suburbs of Uniontown, seldom venturing downtown, now gather with town residents, as they would have in the 1950s.1
