Levi's Boosts Braddock's "Do it Yourself" Revitalization Efforts

With Braddock's population reduced by 90%, and its main street devastated, its Mayor John Fetterman set up a non-profit agency -- Braddock Redux -- to help steer the community back on track. Now the town is being featured prominently in a new Levi's campaign, and the company is helping to fund the town's revitalization efforts.

"With appearances this past year or so on "The Colbert Report," CBS News Sunday Morning, PBS and CNN, John Fetterman has become the face of Rust Belt renewal. He was dubbed America's "coolest mayor" by The Guardian and the Mayor of Hell by Rolling Stone. The Atlantic put him in its "Brave New Thinkers" issue of 2009. In contrast to urban planners caught up in political wrangling, budget constraints and bureaucratic shambling, Fetterman embraces a do-it-yourself aesthetic and a tendency to put up his own money to move things along. He has turned a 13-block town into a sampling of urban renewal trends: land-banking (replacing vacant buildings with green space, as in Cleveland); urban agriculture (Detroit); championing the creative class to bring new energy to old places (an approach popularized by Richard Florida); "greening" the economy as a path out of poverty (as Majora Carter has worked to do in the South Bronx); embracing depopulation (like nearby Pittsburgh). Thrust into the national spotlight, Fetterman has become something of a folk hero, a Paul Bunyan of hipster urban revival, with his own Shepard Fairey block print - the Fetterman mien with the word "mayor" underneath. This, the poster suggests, is what a mayor should be.

Levi's Braddock ad campaign had its debut in movie theaters across the country on July 4 weekend. That same weekend, billboards with Braddock, Pa., along the bottom appeared in Times Square and across the country [featuring] the urban-pioneer motif...of the Braddock revival story."