"Flood's over!"

That's the hook for Johnstown's current campaign to lure visitors to the site of the notorious disaster that struck the town more than a century ago.

It's a reassuring motto, but not an entirely accurate one. After torrential rain, the neglected South Fork dam burst on May 31, 1889, unleashing a crushing wall of water that claimed 2,209 lives and leveled the bustling Conemaugh Valley steel town, tucked deep within southwestern Pennsylvania's Alle- gheny mountains.

Because of its biblical scope and the stature of those held responsible, the deluge instantly took its place in American mythology and, like the events of Sept. 11, will never truly be over.

Johnstown has embraced its epic story as a commodity, and that's a good thing. In a place where steel once ruled, heritage-based tourism is now a key industry. The town of about 24,000 has become a popular destination for those who like their history up close and personal.

For many of Johns-town's citizens, whether or not they're banking on tourism dollars, the flood continues to play a vital role in daily life.

Sally Lou Taylor, a retired schoolteacher who volunteers at the Johnstown Flood Museum, remembers stories told by her grandmother, who not only survived the flood but proceeded with her plans to marry even though her home and trousseau had vanished in the cataclysm.

The newlyweds "went ahead and started a family and I'm very glad they did," Taylor says, eliciting a chuckle from a group of out-of-town visitors.

But Taylor also speaks of the flood as "an accident that didn't have to happen." For her and others, it remains an emotional issue.

When I arrived in Johnstown on a stifling Saturday afternoon in late June, the town was already shut down. Emerging from the Holiday Inn, I glumly noted the empty streets and closed shops. There was little indication that during the next two days, the economically depressed town would yield an eloquent object lesson in the American experience.

During my stay, I would visit numerous sites, including the Johnstown Heritage Discovery Center, the exuberant Back Door Cafe and the Inclined Plane, a steep railway built in 1891 for transporting blue-collar and upper-class citizens to their homes in Westmont, a shady community on a bluff above Johnstown proper.

I would also tour Grandview Cemetery, where hundreds of unknown flood victims are buried. Each stop, in its own way, enriched my sense of Johnstown and why the flood remains an indelible part of its psyche.

In preparation for the trip, I read David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood: The Incred-ible Story Behind One of the Most Devastating 'Natural' Disasters America Has Ever Known. It was an invaluable primer that also offered uncanny parallels between the flood and the World Trade Center tragedy.

It would be a stretch to say that the wealthy members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club who allowed their dam to deteriorate were terrorists on par with al-Qaida. But when the dam gave way, survivors and the media minced no words accusing Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie and other club members of class warfare.

McCullough described a post-flood cartoon that appeared in the Chicago Herald in which millionaires swig champagne at the clubhouse while the flood annihilates Johnstown.

As with Ground Zero, hordes of people arrived in Johnstown after the flood, to help and to gawk. Newspapers across the country published extra editions, and filled thousands of column inches with vivid accounts.

The first books about the disaster appeared almost immediately, even sooner than they did after Sept. 11. An auction of flood relics raised money for victims, foreshadowing displays of mangled World Trade Center relics. Squabbles over relief money occurred, just as they did after last year's attacks.

In The Johnstown Flood, McCullough's descriptions called to mind images of shell-shocked survivors and the kin of terrorist victims so ubiquitous after Sept. 11:

"Across the whole of the valley the dead were being found in increasing numbers. And as the morning passed, more and more people came down from the hillsides to look at the bodies, to search for missing husbands and children, or just to get their bearings, if possible. They slogged through the mud, asking after a six-year-old boy 'about so high,' or a wife or a father. They picked their way through mountains of rubbish, trying to find a recognizable landmark to tell them where their house or store had been, or even a suggestion of the street where they had lived. Or they stood silently staring about, a numb, blank look on their faces. Over and over, later, when the day had passed people would talk about how expressionless everyone had looked and how there had been so few people crying."

These parallels helped me to understand the power, magnetic and repellent, of Ground Zero for those who have gone there.

As the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks approaches, Johnstown also affords an understanding of how such painful touchstones serve a purpose, even against the backdrop of commerce and sensationalism. Those who are collaborating on the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan might do well to see how Johnstown has tackled its dark history.

Devastated towns

The flood's legacy can be traced from Johnstown, built on a floodplain at the fork of the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek rivers, to the dam site 450 feet above in South Fork, 14 miles to the northeast. The commute between the two locations emphasizes the distance traveled by the water as it roared through the valley toward the doomed communities of East Conemaugh, Woodvale and Johnstown, where a total of 30,000 people lived.

I began my history lesson that Saturday evening, map in hand, touring the town's flood landmarks on foot. On Main Street stands Alma Hall, which in 1889 was the tallest structure in Johnstown and a refuge for 264 people escaping the flood.

Around the corner is the Tribune building where George Swank, editor of the local newspaper, watched from the second floor as the water swiftly rose. He lived to write about it.

Within walking distance is the First Methodist Episcopal Church, which held against the flood, splitting it into two waves, perhaps sparing other buildings. Morley's Dog, a cast-iron statue recovered from the flood, is surrounded by petunias and a chain-link fence, a monument to the flood's terrible caprice.

I tried to imagine the landscape that confronted reporters after the flood, as described by McCullough:

"Upturned houses, gangs of laborers carrying shovels and axes and threading their way through huge dunes of rubbish, like a drab, derby-hatted army moving through the remains of a fallen city, the jerry-built shelters on the hillsides, farm women in poke bonnets working at the commissaries, they all made splendid subjects."

Later that night, I found my way to the Back Door Cafe, a rehabilitated tavern in Cambria City, a Johnstown historic district where Eastern European immigrants built homes, churches and ethnic clubs.

By evening's end, I was at the bar, chatting with restaurant owners Denise Thompson and Thomas Chulick, content after a delicious dinner and a glass of wine. Johnstown wasn't as gloomy as I first thought. And this resourceful couple were doing their part to rescue Johnstown from its doldrums, creating feasts from their Westmont garden, locally grown poultry and Chulick's forest- foraging finds.

The dam that failed

The next day, I drove to the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, which overlooks the dam site and incorporates the home of Elias Unger, manager of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Unger is remembered as the man who did too little too late to hold the dam.

Inside, the memorial is dominated by the replication of a famous, much-photographed flood scene: that of a colossal tree trunk rammed through an upturned house.

Nearby is the hair-raising, sculpted figure of Victor Heiser, who survived the flood by clinging to a barn roof and riding it to safety. Heiser, who later became a well-known public health physician, spoke to McCullough in the 1960s, and his astonishing oral history, on a tape loop, brings the exhibit to life.

An impressionistic and downright creepy film that gets to the heart of the flood's horror adds a haunting note to the memorial. Like other Johns-town history sites, neither the film nor the memorial's exhibits soft-pedal the complicity of club members, who as a group ignored requests to repair the dam. All were later acquitted of wrongdoing in court.

After the film, a slide show of life at the lake, drawn from photos discovered in a New England attic in 1889, reinforces the contrast between gritty Johnstown and idyllic South Fork.

Outside the memorial, I surveyed the site of Lake Conemaugh and the grassy abutments that are all that remain of the dam. Then I joined a group for a guided tour in a van.

Our first stop was the rural hamlet of St. Michael, to visit the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club's clubhouse, now in severe disrepair. The preservation group that manages the site hopes it will eventually be acquired by the National Park Service.

From the clubhouse, though, it was easy to picture the former lake's boardwalk and boat houses. Nearby, the defunct club's Victorian cottages have become permanent residences. While some of the cottages have been restored to their previous rustic grandeur, others, covered in siding and missing porches, are unrecognizable.

Our guide, Duquesne Univer-sity student Libby Peterman, grew up in Johnstown where, in school, flood history was "drilled into our heads." There are residents who still speak of the "horrible people at the clubhouse," she said. "They get pretty angry and hostile about it." Peterman thinks the club members were too removed from the club's operations to understand the gravity of the situation.

We drove to the dam's south abutment. In one of the alterations that led to its demise, the dam's breast had been lowered to accommodate carriages coming from the train station where Pittsburgh-based club members alighted.

Peterman's tour included the Heritage Discovery Center, back in Johnstown, where visitors assume the identity of immigrants to get a sense of what life was like for women, miners, mill workers and children.

The 1905 memory of one immigrant speaks for many: "I came to Johnstown, so dirty and awful, but I was already here, so whether it pleased me or not, I had to go at it and make the best of it."

While not specifically flood-oriented, the center's interactive exhibits add rich context through depictions of class struggle, labor strife and the pecking order that pitted an older generation of immigrants against those newly arrived from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Community reclaimed

In the van, we climbed to Westmont, and from Yoder Hill, beheld a panorama of Johns-town, where we could envision the seething, 30- to 40-foot-high debris-clogged deluge crashing through the valley below.

As it passed the Gautier wireworks, the flood took with it miles of barbed wire, which bound victims, furniture, machinery, homes and trees into a ghastly mass. The view from Westmont includes the original Pennsylvania Railroad stone bridge, where 30 acres of the trapped debris caught fire. Eighty people died in the inferno.

We continued to Grandview Cemetery, where 777 plain marble stones mark the graves of unknown flood victims. Other, more elaborate monuments speak of entire families that perished. Some Johnstown families later acquired plots in proximity to the buried unknown, hoping that after death, they would be close to loved ones whose bodies they never found, Peterman said.

I returned to Cambria City that afternoon with a map provided by the Johnstown Area Heritage Association. Within a cluster of 15 blocks, Johnstown immigrants built a thriving community of churches, homes, businesses and schools that served Eastern Europeans shunned by others who had also sought their living in the sooty industrial town.

The community is now a rich source of architectural and social history, as well as the venue for the annual Johnstown FolkFest, a free Labor Day weekend event that in the past has attracted as many as 120,000 music lovers.

I had a filling dinner of pierogis and coleslaw at Our Sons' Family Restaurant, a friendly place that specializes in fried chicken and home-baked goods, including what is known locally as gobs, but are called whoopie pies elsewhere.

Johnstown folklorist Susan Kalcik theorizes that the term "gobs" hailed from the surrounding coal mines where "lumps of coal refuse were called gob piles." Alas, Our Sons' was out of gobs.

That evening, I rode the Inclined Plane, recorded as the steepest of its kind in the Guinness Book of World Records, back to Westmont. On top, there is an ice cream stand and a souvenir shop. As dusk fell, I took a walk around the most exclusive part of the neighborhood, watching kids play soccer barefoot on luxuriant lawns.

Country remembered

The next day, I was the first visitor to the Johnstown Flood Museum, in the former library built by Andrew Carnegie after the flood. I watched Charles Guggenheim's Academy Award-winning documentary, which eloquently describes the town built by the Cambria Iron Co., the flood's path and Johnstown's staggering losses.

After the flood, "No one questioned that a new city would rise," notes the film's narrator. Johnstown was not only resurrected; it became, for a time, one of the nation's largest steel producers.

The museum's most fascinating display examines the flood's role in popular culture.

"Journalists and promoters transformed the flood into sensational news and popular legends," one exhibit panel explains.

Coney Island in New York and Atlantic City, N.J., built flood attractions. There was a silent film based on the flood and even a Mighty Mouse cartoon, both of which can be viewed at the museum. (An ABC television movie about the flood is scheduled to begin production at the end of the year.)

The museum also features an authentic, furnished "Oklahoma house," one of the temporary houses erected to shelter some of the thousands left homeless by the flood.

Perhaps most evocative of the flood's tragic proportions are the relics on exhibition: the lock of a victim's hair, a cardboard poker chip commemorating a company of Johnstown firefighters who drowned, a bottle of flood water collected by a woman on a sightseeing excursion.

I returned to Cambria City for a sandwich at the Phoenix Tavern, built in 1890 as a hotel, then went back to Our Sons' for a gob.

On the three-and-a-half-hour drive home, I nibbled on the gob and thought about the lessons of Johnstown. It was a calamity that still speaks to timeless struggles: class against class, labor against management, skilled against unskilled, old immigrants against new immigrants.

The flood's not over. And it never will be. With grace and courage, Johnstown tells us why.

When you go

Getting there: From Baltimore, take I-695 to I-70 west to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Take Exit 10 to Route 219. Then take Route 56 into Johnstown.

Attractions:

Johnstown Flood National Memorial, 733 Lake Road, South Fork, PA 15956

814-495-4643

www.nps.gov / jofl / home.htm

* Explore the origins of the disaster at the dam site, through displays and film. Open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, Memorial Day to Labor Day. Admission: $3 for adults; free for those under 17.

Johnstown Flood Museum, 304 Washington St., Johnstown, PA 15901

814-539-1889

www.jaha.org

* The flood and its aftermath are vividly re-created through compelling exhibitions and a film. May 1 to Oct. 31: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday through Thursday. 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Admission: $2.50-$4.

Heritage Discovery Center, 201 Sixth Ave., Johnstown, PA 15906

888-222-1889

www.jaha.org

* Learn about the lives of Johnstown's immigrants. May 1 to Oct. 31: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Admission: $4-$5.50.

Johnstown Inclined Plane: 711 Edgehill Drive, Johnstown, PA 15905

814-536-1816

www.inclinedplane.com

* A great view of Johnstown, and there's ice cream at the top. Hours of operation vary. Admission: $4 for adults round trip; $2.50 for children ages 2 to 12.

Events:

* The Johnstown Folkfest takes place Aug. 30 to Sept. 1 in Cambria City. For more information, contact the Johnstown Area Heritage Association: 888-222-1889; www.jaha.org.

* The Cambria County region offers many other attractions and events. For a comprehensive guide, call the Johnstown & Cambria County Conven-tion & Visitors Bureau: 800-237-8590; www.visitjohnstownpa.com.

Dining:

Back Door Cafe, 402 Chestnut St., Johnstown, PA 15906

814-539-5084

* Classic cuisine with a twist in an enchantingly decorated former tavern. Open for dinner, Tuesday through Saturday. Entrees range from $16 to $24. (The cafe is closed during Johnstown FolkFest.)

Our Sons' Family Restaurant, 800 Broad St., Johnstown, PA 15906

814-536-6554

* Inexpensive fried chicken and other family fare in a homey storefront restaurant.

Lodging: For accommodations, including hotels, resorts, bed and breakfasts and campgrounds, contact the Johnstown & Cambria County Convention & Visitors Bureau.

An ideal day

8 a.m.: Begin with a walking tour of downtown Johnstown. Even though much of the town was lost in the flood, numerous important landmarks still stand.

10 a.m.: Visit the Johnstown Flood Museum, where a documentary film and flood relics graphically resurrect the tragedy.

Noon: Choose from one of the various local restaurants catering to Johnstown's lunch crowd.

1 p.m.: Drive to the Johnstown Flood Memorial. After viewing the exhibits and film, visit the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club's former clubhouse and walk through the 1889 Historic District. Continue to the south abutment of the South Fork Dam and picnic area, for a close-up view of where the flood started.

4 p.m.: Return to Johnstown and drive through Grandview Cemetery, where hundreds of flood victims, known and unknown, are buried.

6 p.m.: Dinner at the Back Door Cafe. Reservations are suggested.

8 p.m.: Ride the Johnstown Inclined Plane to Yoder Hill and survey all of Johnstown and the valley in which it rests.

-- Stephanie Shapiro