Nick Flueras came from Warren, just over the Ohio border. He was driving through New Castle on a Sunday night in 1948 when he crashed his car into another car that was waiting for the lights to change at the junction of Atlantic avenue and West Washington street. A city physician determined that Nick was under the influence of liquor but another physician, engaged by Nick himself, said that the symptoms that had been attributed […]
Morgan Fobes, the young man who would become the father of Martin Fobes, grew up on the old plank road to the north of New Castle, in a log cabin that his grandfather had built when he arrived from Württemberg in 1868. He ran away from home in 1908 when Katy Blews, the crippled girl next door, fell pregnant. The police were ordered to find him, but he eluded detection for almost the entirety of […]
The men and women in these mug shots are nobody special, but they saw things that none of us will ever see. They were all arrested in New Castle, a small town in western Pennsylvania, right over by the Ohio border. It was once one of the most industrially productive towns in America, but all that’s gone now. At the beginning of the 20th century, New Castle was a boom town — its population almost […]
Small Town Noir 