Johnstown, PA
In Cambria County, PA, named for longtime congressman John P. Murtha who secured federal funding for the airport over decades. Sits in the Allegheny Mountains 70 miles east of Pittsburgh. The 7,003ft runway and ILS approach reflect Murtha-era investment that outpaced the field's commercial traffic. Closest GA field to the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, 12 miles east, and Johnstown — site of the catastrophic 1889 flood that killed 2,209 people when the South Fork Dam failed.
The crash site of United Flight 93, the fourth hijacked aircraft on September 11, 2001 — and the only one not to reach its target, brought down in a Pennsylvania field after the 40 passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers. The plane impacted at 563 mph into reclaimed strip-mine land near Shanksville. The memorial design is restrained and powerful: a Tower of Voices with 40 wind chimes (one per passenger and crew member), a curving white marble Wall of Names along the flight path, and a black slate boulder marking the impact point. Visitor center opened on the tenth anniversary.
A 220-degree railroad curve completed in 1854 to get the Pennsylvania Railroad over the Allegheny Front without using a tunnel — the line wraps around three sides of a natural amphitheater, gaining 122 feet of elevation in 2,375 feet of track. The curve made it possible to ship freight from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and on to the Midwest, cementing Pennsylvania as the industrial spine of 19th-century America. Norfolk Southern still runs 50-plus trains a day around the curve. The Nazi sabotage plot Operation Pastorius (1942) had Horseshoe Curve on its target list — three German agents landed by U-boat with explosives, but turned themselves in before getting near it.
Frank Lloyd Wright's 1935 house cantilevered directly over a waterfall on Bear Run, in the Laurel Highlands southeast of Pittsburgh. Built for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh department-store fame as a weekend retreat, Fallingwater is widely considered the finest American house of the 20th century — a horizontal stack of poured-concrete terraces that float over the stream rather than facing it. Smithsonian named it one of "28 places to visit before you die." The cantilevers were already sagging by the late 1990s; a 2002 structural restoration added post-tensioning cables to save the house from collapsing into its own waterfall.
The small western-PA town where, every February 2 since 1887, a groundhog named Phil emerges from a stump on a forested knoll called Gobbler's Knob to forecast six more weeks of winter or an early spring. The tradition descends from German immigrant folklore (Candlemas Day, badger weather-forecasting) brought to Pennsylvania in the 18th century. The 1993 Bill Murray film made the town a worldwide brand. Punxsutawney sits on the edge of the bituminous coal fields that powered Pittsburgh steel. The Knob itself is two miles outside town, an unassuming wooded hill the rest of the year.