Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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cleared, the rivers cleaned, and many of the mills demolished, the process of interpreting, reenacting, and symbolically consuming the “Steel Valley” helped forge new connections between communities and among residents. At the same time, however, the obvious inequities of celebrating a lost blue-collar world through participation in a service-driven economy called into question the sustainability of a post-industrial Pittsburgh.27
When employees first erected the Homestead Works’ mammoth 12,000-ton forging press in 1903, they stood at the heart of the world’s greatest steel-producing area. Though built upon an earlier foundation of riverine cities including Pittsburgh, Wheeling, and Steubenville, by the early twentieth century heavy industry formed the core of the region’s civic, cultural, and political life. After being rebuilt in 1944, U.S. Steel’s 12,000-ton press went on to produce armor plates for the great shipbuilding program of World War II and later for the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. During the 1950s, however, the fortunes of Pittsburgh’s steel industry had already begun to decline, and in the late 1980s Cleveland-based Park Corporation began demolishing the once fabled Homestead Works and selling its equipment for scrap.
In 1991, the press, still standing in the same spot, was left exposed to the elements, presiding over the economic and environmental problems left in the wake of steel’s collapse. But this is not solely a tale of decline. In 1997 a private development corporation announced plans to remake the site along the Monongahela into an upscale riverfront shopping mall. The Waterfront, as its developers dubbed the site, catered to metropolitan Pittsburgh’s middle-class consumers, many of whom worked in universities, hospitals, and other service sector industries. By the end of the century, the refurbished 12,000-ton press had once again assumed a position of prominence, with its hulking mass and freshly painted exterior serving as a backdrop of industrial heritage for the shoppers milling at its base.28
This story of rust and renaissance is an apt metaphor for the broader transformation of metropolitan Pittsburgh during the course of the last century. Mills and malls both became integral parts of the area’s social and physical environment, though continuing tensions over competing land uses reveal the simultaneous existence of multiple regional identities and geographies. At its core, then, Beyond Rust is about understanding the ways in which Americans interpreted common social and physical landscapes, mobilized local and nonlocal resources to reshape their regional environments, and conceptualized themselves in spatial and historical terms. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Homestead’s press no longer stood at the center of the nation’s steel industry, but its presence continued to provide meaning, whether for the tourist snapping a photograph, the former steel worker toiling at a retail job in its shadow, or the software engineer bicycling by on her way home from work.
PART I
The Steel Valley
IN THE SPRING of 1894, four “pilgrims”—historian Reuben Gold Thwaites, his ten-year-old son Frederick, his wife Jessie, and his brother-in-law William Turvill—set off from Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on a 1,000 mile journey down the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers. Thwaites said he “wished to know the great waterway intimately in its various phases [and] to see with my own eyes what the borderers saw; in imagination, to redress the pioneer stage, and repeople it.”1 Through Thwaites’s 1898 memoir, we, too, can recapture the past and a vision of a region in transition. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Upper Ohio Valley had already passed through at least two distinct phases since its time as a colonial frontier in the 1700s—a “Gateway to the West” superseded by a riverine culture of steamboats and mercantile exchange—and it remained in the throes of an industrial revolution, the signs of which were ever-present from the travelers’ riverfront vantage.
Thwaites and his companions deliberately eschewed the comforts of the steamboat (“there are too many modern distractions about such a mode of progress”) for camping and travel by raft “alert to the whisperings of Nature.” As a result, one can learn a great deal about turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh’s landscape from the published account of their journey, Afloat on the Ohio, even as the natural and cultural often blurred together in the descriptions. The Monongahela “comes down gaily enough from the West Virginia hills,” they reported of their launch from historic Redstone Creek at the western terminus of Braddock’s Road, until it was converted into a mere millpond at Brownsville by the four navigation dams between there and Pittsburgh. Henceforth the stream, Thwaites declared, was lined with mill towns that were “literally abutting one upon the other all of the way down to Pittsburg.” “Often,” he concluded, “four or five full-fledged cities are at once in view from our boat, the air is thick with sooty smoke belched from hundreds of stacks, the ear is almost deafened with the whirr and bang of milling industries.”
As the Pilgrim (the name chosen for their skiff) made its way downstream, the visitors frequently bore witness to the changing industrial landscape of the region. The transformation of the Upper Ohio Valley into the Steel Valley had been so rapid in the closing decades of the nineteenth century that “both banks of the [Monongahela] river were lined with village after village, city after city … not recorded on our map, which bears the date of 1882.” Indeed, while the purpose of the voyage may have been to recreate the past, much of their account focused on the process of steel making, railroad building, and coal mining at the heart of the new regional economy. By 1894 “the iron horse has almost eclipsed … the steamboat,” Thwaites journaled early in the voyage; “Either bank is lined with railways, in sight of which we shall almost continually float.” Similarly, “tipples of bituminous coal-shafts are ever in sight,” lining the riverbanks to fill the waiting trains and river barges headed to towns and cities downstream. At the other end of the line, “factories and mills … sewer-pipe and vitrified-brick works, and iron and steel plants abound on the narrow bottoms.”
One can also get a sense, flavored by the travelers’ particular class and ethnic background, of the region’s culture, communities, and residents. In the spring of 1894, the fledgling United Mine Workers union had just called for a walkout, and Thwaites duly noted the “miners loafing out the duration of a strike” when they set out on May 4. Less than two weeks later, company guards near Uniontown, only fifteen miles from Brownsville, armed with carbines and machine guns, held off an attack by an “Army of Intimidation” composed of 1,500 strikers, killing five.2 At Homestead he contrasted “the famous great bank of ugly slag at the base of the steel mills, where the barges housing the Pinkerton guards were burned by the mob” less than two years earlier, with his views of “the electric cars, following either side of the stream as far down as Pittsburg, crowded to suffocation with gaily-attired folk … enjoying their Sunday afternoon outing.” On the other end of the spectrum, west of the city (and thus upwind of the factory smoke) where “the hills are lower, less precipitous, more graceful,” the city’s merchants’ and manufacturers’ “beautiful villas occupy commanding situations on hillsides and hilltops [with] spires and cupolas … peeping above the trees; and now and then a pretty suburban railway station.”
Perhaps most fascinating about Afloat on the Ohio was the way the multiple stages of metropolitan Pittsburgh’s history existed simultaneously as part of the region’s social and physical landscape. For all their attention to the urban-industrial development, the travelers also observed “small rustic towns in plenty.” Despite the decline in importance of the rivers as transportation arteries, the cities all had broad wharfs with “steamers … closely packed,” while they frequently met fishermen “setting their nets,” as well as “houseboats, dozens of which we see daily.” That said, the ability to use the rivers as anything other than industrial canals and urban sinks was rapidly fading due to “the appalling havoc which … industries are making with the once beautiful banks of the river.” “Fifty years hence,” Thwaites predicted, if these enterprises multiplied, “the Upper Ohio will roll between continuous banks of clay and iron offal, down to Wheeling and beyond.” This dire vision of a region crippled by the environmental consequences of an extractive economy was already foreshadowed in 1894 in the form of the deserted mining villages the pilgrims passed on their journey—“the shaft having been worked out, or an unquenchable fire left to smolder in neglect. Here the tipple has fallen into creaking decrepitude; the cabins are without