McKEES ROCKS, Pa. — The streets are narrow and depressed, abandoned buildings as gloomy as the gray weather that winter has again brought this western Pennsylvania borough along the south banks of the Ohio River.
It’s a town of 6,000 working class folks that never really recovered from the collapse of the steel industry, never totally bounced back from the early 1980s and all-time unemployment rates, never knew much prosperity following the deindustrialization of the U.S.
The mills shut down and everything sort of died along with it.
Which makes this all the more significant: It’s here, at the top of a long, winding road off one of those narrow streets, in a place where more than 35 percent of residents live in poverty, where Marc-Andre Fleury decided to make a difference.