Poverty and unemployment still plague these towns. In 2000, the last year U.S. Census figures are available for Johnstown, it had a poverty rate of nearly 19 percent, more than double the state’s.

“What is often missed in the study of American industrialization is that there was a vast heartland that was created ... that involved smaller towns and cities,” said Walter Licht, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “They really were responsible for the great growth of American industry and we have forgotten them and these are the communities that are tremendously suffering today.”

To recover, Johnstown is using the few incentives it has available to woo businesses to the financially strapped flood zone.

“We now can do things from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that you used to have to go to a big city to do. We now have those wireless capabilities, we have those abilities to go worldwide from here,” Davis said.

Richard Idem Somiari exemplifies the new type of businessman Johnstown can attract.

He looks at the slow-paced town he lives in today and longs for his Nigerian hometown Port Harcourt, where oil refineries spew smoke alongside peddlers hawking wares from headborne baskets.

But then he recalls the $1.8 million in low-interest loans, grants and aid he received from Johnstown to bring his promising ITSI Biosciences company to the city’s business district. He thinks of the money he is saving running his enterprise from Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands rather than from London or New York.

“In Chile and Brazil ... life science businesses are located in three-bedroom flats. Some of them you think they are not companies, they don’t have signs. They’re churning out millions,” Somiari said. “That’s the kind of role Johnstown can play.”

In the seven years Somiari has been in Johnstown, he has watched the slow transformation.

Pre- and post-World War II buildings have been renovated. Scaffolding on others bodes well for the future. A new bank is going up on a main drag. An old downtown department store is home to government offices and one of Johnstown’s best restaurants.

Downtown lofts have nearly all sold out at about $120,000, pricey for Johnstown, where a good-sized Victorian can be bought for $90,000 or less.

Somiari’s business is part of this push. The new building his company is constructing will be ready in June. The idea is to attract other life science companies to the area and create a corridor of similar businesses.

But within walking distance of Somiari’s new headquarters is an imposing 10-acre brick complex of steel mills. One-third has been converted to other industrial uses; the rest stands empty. A few blocks away is the remains of the Cambria Iron Works, abandoned in 1992. Davis said nearly 90 percent of the space is now in use.

In some neighborhoods, industrial sites share space with homes that have battered porches, broken windows and overgrown weeds. The worst are being demolished, part of a battle on blight.

State and federal grants are helping to clean up Johnstown’s brownfields.