Abridge, Pennsylvania: The Color Of the Rust Belt

This struggling steel town was a blue dot in a red county in 2016. What hue will it turn this year?

- By Shawn Donnan

One afternoon in June, Mike Mikulich led a masked visitor into the empty chambers of the Ambridge Borough Council and dropped his mobile phone and thick forearms worthy of a former steelworker onto a table. As council president he’d been wrestling with one crisis after another for months. He confessed that after spending 32 of his 74 years helping run this former Pennsylvania factory town of 6,600, he was thinking of calling it quits.

Covid-19 had claimed Ambridge’s police chief in April and the owner of its leading funeral home just a few days later. Two of its biggest employers had closed up shop, laying off some 300 workers between them. Within weeks, a third business would suffer a devastating fire.

A few days before our meeting, Mikulich had presided over an acrimonious virtual council session: Town leaders had been trying to figure out how latenight rumors of an Ambridge-bound bus filled with Black Lives Matter protesters had ended in members of a far-right militia with sniper rifles taking to the roof of a downtown gym.