Hey, aspiring Johnstown entrepreneurs, it’s time to stop opening up more small food joints, coffee huts or overpriced specialty merchandise/service outlets – some of you serial offenders on this front – then lamenting the failure of said business due to lack of demand, competition or the fates.
The answer is as clear as Myopia 2025’s agenda. Buy into the reality of what Johnstown has to offer.
At least one San Francisco resident has gotten that sort of message: When all you have is lemons, make lemonade.
That once picturesque, cosmopolitan California city, which has devolved into a hellhole of drug use, rampant crime and homeless types using the streets as public toilets, has one clever soul looking to capitalize on it all by holding Downtown Doom Loop Walking Tours.
There are reports that the maiden tour, scheduled for Aug. 26, already is sold out. This 90-minute, 1.5-mile tour will hit all the high (low?) points such as abandoned tech office buildings, closed stores, open-air drug markets and the regal headquarters of the “non-profit industrial complex.” Any of this sound familiar, Johnstown?
Speaking of sounding familiar, I proposed a similar tack for Johnstown entrepreneurs on this very blog months back. That April 27, 2023, offering, headlined “Swallowing The Johnstown Tourism Blue Pill” advised sellers of the tourism sizzle as Johnstown’s economic salvation to move beyond hikers and kayakers to embrace what we have an abundance of, that being violence, drugs and decay.
I proposed Moxham Ninja tours nightly to give tourists the chance to hear shots fired in-person.
Tours of abandoned houses and larger structures, scavenger hunts for crime souvenirs, rappelling down our concrete riverwalls in an attempt to utilize those waterways as tourist attractions, all were among additional tourism ideas mentioned and summarily ignored by the community.
I find it sad that no locals have seized the reality tourism opportunity, the sort that one San Franciscan has recognized and acted upon.
Then again, growing up in Johnstown, we often were described as being 10 years or so behind the times. On occasion that was a good thing, with crime spikes and neighborhood degeneration slow to hit us.
But now, baby, it’s all here, helped by a strong influx of out-of-town bad actors and behind-the-scenes plans to turn that river of incoming into yet another flood, which would be the fourth mammoth deluge to hit the city in our history and quite possibly the one that finally obliterates our way of life.
While we wait, there is a buck or two to be made off tourists eager to get an up-close-and-personal look at civic malfunction. What capitalist will see this niche and act to fill it?
Sam Ross Jr's site 