“Archives are not only about memory, but about the work of the imagination.” -Arjun Appadurai, Archive and Aspiration
In a basement in Grand Rapids, Michigan, there lies an autumn town of factories, railroads, and low-slung rooftops nestled among Western Pennsylvania mountains. Workers stand frozen in time, in the middle of lifting something. Pedestrians walk alongside storefronts, their feet glued to the ground. When the model train is turned on to go along the tracks, it weaves through a town that stands stock-still, perpetually in the world of October 1960.
The creator of this impressive model train layout, 64-year-old John Matlak, grew up three blocks from the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock as the grandson of steel mill workers and the son of a worker at the Braddock Locks on the Monongahela River. After he left Braddock, Matlak spent the majority of his career as a broadcast journalist, but always maintained a love for Braddock and a keen interest in history, specifically the history of locomotives and railroads. When Matlak was three years old, his grandfather gave him a Lionel train set for Christmas. It was a small circle of track, with a button to push for a whistle and lights. Such a toy was common in Braddock during that era, and Matlak attributes his affinity for trains to his proximity to them growing up. From the time he was two years old until the time he moved away from college, he lived “in sound and in sight” of multiple rail lines. Trains rumbled along the Pennsylvania railroad just one block north of his home and one block south on the Baltimore-Ohio track. Towards the Monongahela river, trains on the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad passed through. At thirteen years old, he used the money from his paper corner to buy a small, basic train set from Sadowsky Brothers, a general store that displayed a train layout in their front window at Christmastime. This set has stayed with Matlak up until this point, and has become the cornerstone for an elaborate and loving way of preserving the memory of the Braddock of his youth.
When Matlak first began building the large train layout that he maintains today, he had no particular focal point, era, or location in mind. “I used what I had and gradually added little things,” he explains. “Over time, I started to refine it to be historically accurate to when I was growing up. Arbitrarily, I picked 1960. I chose autumn because it’s my favorite season. Everything that I did in terms of the locomotives, rail cars, cars, on the street, buses, trucks – everything on the layout had to be historically appropriate for 1960. For probably 25 years now, I’ve been very definite in terms of the historic aspect. The Internet has helped. I take a look at what the architectural style of a small manufacturing plant in 1960 would have been. They were all up and down the street in Braddock.”
With his layout, Matlak aims not to specifically duplicate Braddock but rather to “mirror” the architectural and industrial style of the time and place. “Anything that I used [on the layout] could very well have been – and sometimes was – in Braddock.” On Matlak’s layout are vintage-style billboards for the Steelers and Pirates, as well as one that features an old publicity picture of the Kennywood merry-go-round. Buildings and signs are sanded down to look weathered and historically accurate. An Isaly’s ice cream store and the Heinz ketchup plant are present in the town. Two of Matlak’s aunts worked for Westinghouse for years, so the Westinghouse plant on the layout is “sort of an ode to them,” he says.
In his mind, John Matlak remembers Braddock as “a great place to grow up,” the stereotypical picture of small-town America where everyone knew each other and where Halloween nights yielded bags full of candy from friendly neighbors. There were parades for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Matlak fondly recalls watching city workers going up and down Braddock Avenue to hang Christmas lights. The heyday of the Braddock Avenue shopping district came shortly before the introduction of massive indoor shopping complexes like the Monroeville Mall. The rise of the automobile came around the same time.
“Malls thrived,” Matlak explains, “and Braddock and Homestead dried up. Clairton dried up; Wilkinsburg dried up.” Over the course of about a year, the Edgar Thomson Works laid off 3,500 of its 4,000 workers. In a very short time, Braddock went from being a vibrant, safe town where everyone knew each other to, as Matlak says, “oh my God, lock your doors and don’t look at anyone when you’re walking down the street.”
Matlak, who still has family in Braddock, remembers driving his three young sons down Braddock Avenue one day in the late 1980s. His oldest son, looking out the car window at the decrepit and burned-out buildings, said incredulously, “Dad, you didn’t really grow up here, did you?” Matlak wishes his children could have grown up in the Braddock of his own childhood. The Braddock that they saw, and the Braddock of their memory, is markedly different than their father’s. There were still some stores up and running during the years he brought his children to visit, but it was nothing like when he was growing up, when “from where we lived to the other end of town a mile away, you could buy anything you needed: a chunk of bananas, a diamond ring, a Christmas tree in the wintertime. Everyone had money from the steel mills…the Braddock that I remember was fantastic.”
Until Matlak was twelve years old, his family lived in a second-floor apartment above a tailor shop. Every year after Thanksgiving, a truck pulled up in front of a nearby fruit market and unloaded Christmas trees. Matlak and his two brothers, watching from the window, knew it was almost time to go downstairs and put their name on a tree. It’s things like these, he says, that just don’t exist anymore – and it’s things like these that are memorialized on the layout.
A small river runs through the layout, which Matlak dyed a muddy-green color to roughly match the color of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. The hillsides and tunnels that are so ubiquitous across western Pennsylvania are also mirrored in this landscape. Matlak aimed for accuracy right down to the color of the exposed rock, which was built with plaster, carved, and then dyed to correspond with the color of western Pennsylvania limestone.
“The color of the rock is one factor that a lot people look at but don’t think about. It replicates the cliff on the hill near where I lived,” he says. Again, the goal was not to exactly copy the landscape of his memory, but to recreate it in a way that captured its spirit.
The model train layout is a unique archive, not only in its form but also in its blend of collective and personal memory. Symbols like the Westinghouse and Steelers logos are recognizable by anyone, but the landscape is filled with personal memories and references. Matlak’s family and friends are represented in companies and businesses across the town. A store named Tom’s Outdoor World never actually existed in Braddock; rather, it exists on the layout as an ode to his brother Tom, a hunter and fisherman. Matlak’s wife, Donna, a nurse, is represented by Donna’s Medical Supply; her parents who were farmers are spoken for by Baltes’ Feed and Grain. Within months of Matlak’s grandchildren’s births, a building or industry named for them appeared on the layout. Even all of the family’s dogs have buildings. Other buildings are named more generally for the region, like Monongahela Storage, Pittsburgh Hardware Supply, and Allegheny Printing.
“I don’t usually think of the layout as an archive, though it probably is,” says Matlak. “Archives are about keeping things from the older days safe, secure, and available for your use. I’ll see a particular building on the layout and think of my brother, or my dad, or people I knew when I lived in Dayton.” Many references on the landscape are certainly pieces of the public archive, the collective memory – the old publicity photo of the Kennywood merry-go-round, for example, was a landmark of childhood recognizable by almost anyone who grew up in or around Pittsburgh. But there is another dimension of this archive that not just any Pittsburgher would recognize or connect to. Matlak’s own life, and his own experience of Braddock, is reflected in what he chose to include in his layout. Memories of his family, and childhood memories of going down to the tracks to watch the trains are woven into the landscape. These connections are beneath the surface to the ordinary observer, but obvious to him.
“I never set out to do this historically at first, or to remember my aunts, or my mom and dad,” says Matlak. But it seems that he has accomplished all of this with his layout.
Each lived story and each experience of geography is unique, a criss-crossing map of memory. Though tens of thousands of workers and their families lived and worked in Braddock over the years, each and every person has their own Braddock. They went to different schools; they came from different ethnic groups; they worked at different companies; they patronized different stores and bars. The story of Braddock, while it is a story of steelworkers, immigrants, and, ultimately, a nation, is not singular. Memory of place stops being collective the moment there is more than one experience of it. John Matlak’s train layout, a beautifully crafted integration of creative imagination and meticulous historic accuracy, is an invaluable example of an archive that blends collective memory and personal history to pay homage to a place, to people, and to a way of life gone by.
Work Cited
Matlak, John, and Margaret Baltes. “Interview with John Matlak.” 12 Nov. 2017.