Robinson Township Historical Society: Interstate 79 project divided Moon Run
Many of us who routinely use Interstate 79 assume it has always been there. But it hasn’t.
In 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act authorized the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) to construct a highway to connect Route 70 in Washington County to Erie, later designated as I-79. Surveying began, and by the mid-1960s, properties were acquired for demolition, making way for the mammoth highway construction project.
The community of Moon Run took the hardest hit, as it was virtually cut in half to make room for the highway. Because of the community’s valley topography, engineers deemed that it would make the best route. Dozens of homes and businesses were demolished, and roads were rerouted or turned into dead ends.
Moon Run, once bustling with large coal mining families and small businesses, ceased to exist as it had for more than a century. People who had lived in the same home for generations were suddenly given a heartbreaking choice -- watch that home be destroyed or move it to a new location.
The Caristo family was one of the families forced to decide.
Audrey Caristo Schrecengost was just 14 years old at the time, but she recalls it vividly. The year was 1967. She remembers a beautiful neighborhood on Windhaven Road (which the highway divided into East and West Windhaven) with family all around. Her grandparents lived right next door in a big old house filled with a lifetime of memories. It was in that house that her parents first met and where she, her brother and sister, and many cousins often gathered to play. It was where, every Christmas Eve, her father, his brothers and other relatives gathered around the dining room table and played cards into the wee hours, and where Santa Claus sat in his special chair to the delight of all the children.
Audrey’s aunt lived in her grandfather’s house, and an uncle also lived nearby. Add many kids and neighbors who truly cared about one another, and you had an idyllic place to grow up. Then suddenly the safe, happy environment Audrey knew so well was going away forever.
“We had such a beautiful street and neighborhood,” she said, “and they just tore it all apart.”
The decision to move the family home was painful for Audrey’s mother, who had just lost her husband a few months earlier in a tragic traffic accident. Audrey remembers, “Since my dad and his brothers had built that house with their own hands just 13 years earlier, there was no way she was going to have it demolished.”
The families who chose to move their houses saw them jacked up and loaded onto tractor trailers to be laboriously eased to their new locations. Sadly, Audrey’s grandfather’s house next door was too old and fragile to move. To the heartbreak of the entire Caristo family, it was bulldozed out of existence in just one day.
To save two other homes slated for demolition, Audrey’s aunt bought one and an uncle bought another. For the three homes in the Caristo family, it was a short trip; a new little street, still on Caristo property, was created just for those three houses. When the homes reached their new destination, they were jacked up again, where they remained while foundations were built underneath.
Once the homes were finally established, blasting for the highway continued nearby for months. Audrey remembers the stress of it all.
“We were so relieved that our houses survived the moves, and then we had to deal with those awful blasts,” she said. “It was just so scary.”
Compounding that stress was the sea of mud they had to traverse to get to and from their homes, always requiring boots. Audrey got so frustrated one time when her boots got sucked into the mud for the umpteenth time, she struggled out of them and walked home barefoot!
Today, life goes on in Moon Run, but it will never be the same cozy community it once was. Audrey still lives in the neighborhood she grew up in, but she misses the old one. In her words, “It was a very sad, frustrating and frightening time of our lives. We were pushed to the limit, but we survived.”
The demolished homes lie in silent graves beneath the concrete highway, and the moved homes show no signs of their dramatic history. The pain brought about by the introduction of I-79, however, will live on as long as there are those who lived through it. And wherever new highways are built, the story will repeat itself -- leaving behind homes, neighborhoods and memories forever changed.
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