Steel Mills of Pittsburgh

For over half a century the Pittsburgh region was the largest concentration of steel making in the world. Its collapse was spectacular. The mill towns strung along the Monongahela Valley have now suffered forty years of decline. Much of their shabby infrastructure and buildings (at best homely even in their prime) has decayed, most of their population has fled to the metropolitan suburbs or left the region, and those that remain, for the most part poor, struggle or live off memories. Regeneration is a continuing problem for public policy makers as the mill towns struggle on life-support systems вЂ" public welfare for individual households; funding from federal, state and local agencies for public services, projects and a plethora of `initiativesÐ'Ò'. Re-born they are not.

The local response вЂ" divided, rarely ambivalent вЂ" is fascinating to the outside observer. Old and not so old men hang on to memories or fight old battles in bars, greasy spoons, and ethnic clubs. Others (perhaps most, though `mostÐ'Ò' have died so itÐ'Ò's hard to say) escape to the hills and suburbs and pay little attention to the now dangerous towns in which they were raised unless a shopping mall, complete with the chain restaurants, turns their bad memories into nostalgia.The great steel cities of the past- places like Pittsburgh and Birmingham in the US and Sheffield in the UK- have all experienced the painful shock that occurs when the invisible hand of the market withdraws its support. What has happened since to people of these regions is both a reflection of the legacy of steel production and of the extreme social uncertainty created by its absence.

The extraordinary power of the steel industry to shape the life of its communities and the people in them remains palpable years after the last blast furnace cools and the last slab rolled. The mill town, the mill itself, the workers, the owners, the wealth and the poverty, the unions and the police, the solidarity and the conflict are all indelibly inscribed into the worldview of those who lived in the world of steel. A deep sense of pride and a corresponding sense of mourning is easily found in the inhabitants of any former steel city. There is also a profound fear of the future and a corresponding desire to find a new path into it.

As in other famous social dislocations and up-rootings, in the end, whatÐ'Ò's left in old steel towns are those people who have stayed there and the institutions they keep alive. Sometimes they stayed because no other option was available but often they remained by choice to stay among family, friends and the remains of familiarity. Some feel defeated, but others struggle forward. In either case, itÐ'Ò's these people who are the old steel cities greatest assets for the future.

Unfortunately, one of the legacies of steel is an environment, both social and physical, where the needs of production often subjugated the health and well being of the people, just as the markets invisible hand eventually subjugated entire cities. The struggle to overcome this negative legacy- to use instead the positive legacies of community and willingness to work hard and to tap into the resources created by the production of steel-At former steelmaking centers in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Bethlehem, PA campaigns to preserve significant structures and artifacts are now subordinate to commercial redevelopment projects. In the wake of plant closings that began accelerating during the late 1970s community groups and public agencies had aspired to conserve significant portions of the industrial landscape associated with a unique occupational subculture. However, the political economy of U.S. industrial heritage preservation policies has proven inadequate to sustain such visions. Southwestern Pennsylvania was the steel making capital of the world for more than 100 years, yet the people of this region вЂ" after the collapse of the nationÐ'Ò's steel industry in the 1980s вЂ" are only beginning to once again express their pride in the regionÐ'Ò's achievements that helped to literally build our nation. Other regions in this country and abroad now look to southwestern Pennsylvania as an example of the entrepreneurial spirit of steel and the pride it created in all those whose lives it touched. This paper examines the intersection of material culture, identity, commemoration of the past, and domestic spaces. To illustrate, I draw on the example of ceramic plates which memorialise coal mining in the form of decorative ornaments for the home. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a former coal mining village called Dodworth twenty miles north of Sheffield, I consider the ways in which the owners of these plates explained and described them. Such explanations are embedded in narratives of working lives, family history, local identity and loss, demonstrating how the plates serve as channels for narrating memories that are at once individual and collective experiences.

Unlike the monumental commemorative architecture that Westerners are most attuned to as sites of remembrance, these plates are an example of how significant domestic spaces can be in carving out sites of social memory. These plates are a form of memorialisation that simultaneously hold national, local, and personal meaning. They also highlight some of the difficulties people in various parts of South Yorkshire are working through in their everyday lives: that of being of a place which is known for what it no longer does and that of grappling with the in-betweenness of post-industrial rupture. In this respect, my paper also seeks to open up space for thinking about the threads that contextualise Sheffield as a Steel City within a wider locale of South Yorkshire in which it is located. Beguiled by a hidden past, my eyes become fixated on it. An old wearied steel mill no longer in use. Sitting and staring out into once a familiar territory, it back on the north end of Carson Street in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. . It can be said that Pittsburgh steel mill have practically built America. From the Golden Gate Bridge to the Empire State Building that we can see the evidence of a widespread industrial constituency that traversed America like the early mighty railroads, literally and figuratively. The steel mills on the south side of Pittsburgh specifically have heavily influenced and shaped lives and communities over the past century. These steel mills represented a hard life of working in thick black smoke all day for 365 days a year claiming lives due to cancer and other lung diseases with low pay and a less than desirable standard of living. Immigrants primarily from Eastern Europe settled in Pittsburgh and without a higher education and/or language base, consequently