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Exhibition Reviews
| "America: Through Immigrant Eyes." The Frank and Sylvia Pasquerilla Heritage Discovery Center, 201 Sixth Ave., Johnstown, PA 15906.
Permanent exhibition, opened March 2001. Daily 10–5, closed New Year's Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. Adults $6, senior citizens $5, students $4. 7,400 sq. ft. Richard Burkert, executive director.
Internet: description of the exhibition, virtual tour, photographs, teacher resources, upcoming events, membership information, and museum store, http://www.jaha.org/DiscoveryCenter/virtualtour.html.
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| In 1905 Anna Szechenyi, an eight-year-old Slovakian girl, migrated to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, with her mother. In her diary, Anna wrote that she was grateful for the opportunity to go to school through the eighth grade. Because of her education she was able to get a job as a store clerk, and it was at the store that she met her husband, Vaclav Kalina. After Anna married, she became the bookkeeper for the Kalina family restaurant, and she raised six children—including two of her younger sister's children after her sister died in childbirth. |
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At the Frank and Sylvia Pasquerilla Heritage Discovery Center in Johnstown, Anna's story is one of eight used to organize the permanent exhibition, "America: Through Immigrant Eyes." When visitors arrive they choose one of eight "identity cards" and use it throughout the exhibit at interactive video kiosks. Visitors can follow the life of Anna Szechenyi; Josef, a twelve-year-old Polish orphan; Stefan, a twenty-one-year-old Polish farmhand; Prokop, a twenty-nine-year-old Slovak butcher; Adrej, a twenty-four-year-old Bohemian farmhand; Katerina, a thirty-year-old goose farmer; Maria, a nineteen-year-old Italian peasant; or Moshe, a thirty-six-year old Russian Jew, the richest of the eight immigrants—he arrived in Johnstown with $400 and opened a clothing store. |
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At first glance, the lush, quiet town of Johnstown, seems an unlikely place for a museum devoted to American immigration. Little remains of the industrial infrastructure that made Johnstown one of the most important steel-producing cities of the late nineteenth century. Johnstown was a coal mining center and home to the Cambria Iron Works (founded in 1852), and it became the model for the large-scale industrial steel production that emerged in Pittsburgh and Cleveland years later. By 1858, the Cambria Iron Works produced more steel railroad tracks than any other iron works in the country. Johnstown grew as the Cambria Iron Works prospered: from a population of about 5,000 in 1850 to about 30,000 in 1890 (and this after losing more than 2,000 of its citizens in the tragic Johnstown flood of 1889). In 1880, the population of Johnstown's immigrant ghetto, Cambria City, was 85 percent foreign-born. |
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The story of American immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is hard to make new. The conventions of the genre are cloying and overdone: photos of huddled masses on ships, photos of the Statue of Liberty, photos of dirty children and tenement housing, and, occasionally, stories of incredible success. The Discovery Center has moved away from some of those static conventions. This exhibition engages more of the senses through recorded sound, special light effects, video, and historical reenactment. At the entry of the exhibit there is a bank of phone receivers, and each receiver plays the voice of a different immigrant (played by actors) talking about their hopes, dreams, and fears as they prepare for their journey to America. Those bits of monologue, taken from letters and diaries, create the sense that the immigrants actually came from somewhere—that their lives did not begin when they first caught sight of American soil. |
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