Whatever Happened to the Place Where America was Forged?

Image by Sean Perry

Just outside Pittsburgh, the borough of Homestead is an ocean of parking lot—a string of monolithic warehouses, Big Box islands collectively called The Waterfront: Macy’s, Target, Best Buy, Lowes. Coming down the bridge to this strip of asphalt that lines the Monongahela River is like landing in a plane. In this Anywhere, U.S.A., what remains of America’s most powerful steel mill is just 12 towering brick smokestacks lined up in a flowerbed next to the Longhorn Steakhouse. At night, they are lit up with spotlights.

If U.S. history could be made up of a material, this is where that material was made. The steel forged on this land became America: the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, the Chrysler Building, the U.S.S. Maine (which would trigger the 1898 Spanish-American War) and the U.S.S. Missouri (the battleship that was used as a location for the signing of the Japanese surrender that would end WWII).

By the turn of the 20th century, the United States produced 10 million tons of steel a year, more than Britain, France and Germany combined. America became an economic power for the first time. The Homestead Works was the largest manufacturer of steel in the country—and some will say this land is the symbolic cradle of American capitalism. Those who were living in Homestead when the hydraulic forge press was functioning say it sounded like thunder, like something rolling deep inside the earth, “like God’s hammer.” The tremors could be felt all across town; it shook glasses on Formica tabletops. It was the sound of battleships being made.

Today, whatever used to be here is buried somewhere between T.G.I. Friday’s and Pier 1.

The Waterfront was built on cleared industrial land in 1998. Its fabricated “town center” features wide walkways, a water-fountain and 19th-century lamps, just like hundreds of developments exactly like it across the nation. It is such a big, flat acreage of land that I find myself driving and re-parking as I go from one store to the next because I am lazy and it seems too far to walk. If this place holds clues about the nature of power, then I am disappointed. It looks like anywhere else, and these shopping excursions at chain stores hardly “count.” But I have only recently moved to Pittsburgh from Seattle, where I was born, and I want to know: What is really at the core of this place? What does this place have to say—about America? About our history?

At least two men made their names here. In 1883, when this land was still surrounded by farms, Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie purchased the failing Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Co. and created the Homestead Works steel mill. The mill shut its doors more than 100 years later, in 1986, and in 1995 Frank Kass, a self-described “deal junkie,” bought the 265-acre swath of abandoned industrial land for $20 million, a fraction of what it is now worth. (A large chunk has already been sold for nearly $200 million to a developing company in Chicago.) Both Carnegie and Kass had the foresight to recognize opportunity. Kass took a business risk just like his Jewish-immigrant father who sold office supplies out of a car.

Even though The Waterfront’s parking lots are packed on any given day, Homestead has been in Pennsylvania’s Act 47 program for distressed municipalities for the past dozen years. Most of the millions of dollars the development earns in tax revenue does not go to Homestead. What Homestead gets is jobs, with pay starting at minimum wage: $5.15 an hour. In Carnegie’s time, his immigrant workers likewise toiled for 12 hours a day, making just enough to get by, while lines of immigrants stood ready to take your job if you ever asked for a raise.

Despite the fact Kass lives in Ohio, in 2001 he was named Pittsburgh’s Top Business Leader by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He told the newspaper that he was able to see the site’s potential because he was not a native, “not weighed down by memories of Homestead as a steelmaking center and the site of a famous labor battle.” He continued to say that, “a lot of the times, when you go to another city, you have a different perspective than the people that are already there who have taken it for granted.”

Down the bridge into Homestead, if you do not follow the blue sign to the shopping development, you’ll end up downtown, where boarded-up buildings run just behind the windowless cinder-block walls of The Waterfront. Some of the store signs from another era still hang above the dusty papered windows advertising products long ago gone.

* * * * * * * * *

I am the only one at the Rivers of Steel Heritage Area museum in Homestead, and the guide, a woman my age, says I should track down Ken, the man whose steel industry objects and antique photographs are what make the one-room rotating exhibit.

“Ken is a third-generation steel industry worker,” she tells me. “He started working at the mill in 1966, his father started in 1937, his grandfathers in 1906.” He is a supervisor at the U.S. Steel coke plant in Carlton (coke is combined with iron ore and limestone to make steel, I am informed). His father was First Helper, working the Open Hearth. Both his grandfathers worked in steel mills, and they came from Poland and Croatia, and they worked the hearths and the locomotives. Perhaps he can tell me what used to be here.

Ken is wearing a red sweater, jeans and old velcros when I meet him. He adjusts his engineer’s glasses on his wide nose with thick fingers. He lives in a suburb 11 miles from Homestead, on the same side of the Monongahela River. It is a brick split-level home, and we sit on a wicker sofa together. Ken says, “You should have some iced tea. Linda makes a wicked iced tea. Not the alcoholic kind,” and his eyelids flutter and he adjusts his glasses with those thick fingers. Linda brings us iced tea in blue wine glasses.

“If you asked me what I’d want to do in my free time,” Ken says, “I’d be at a library.” An amateur historian and astronomer, he has published two books about steel and trains. His most recent article, in History Magazine, is about standardized time and how it was first established in Pittsburgh. We are listening to Pictures from an Exhibition, a piano suite by Modest Mussorgsky. And somewhere out there, Pittsburgh’s aptly named football team, The Steelers, are winning the playoffs, heading to the Super Bowl, and Ken is here talking about the first steel—used in swords, in Damascus—about the Crucible Process of making small batches of steel, about the fabled invention of the Bessemer Process. He is reciting recipes for alchemy.

“Steel is made from iron,” he says. “The only difference is the amount of carbon so, see, steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. If there’s too much carbon, it’s not steel.” Ken’s words are round, and his talk always loops back to the making of steel, the different processes. Every now and then, Ken stops and shakes his head. “It gets kind of complicated, I guess. Kind of technical.” He continues, “You can’t talk about this without getting technical. You’re not just melting metal. It’s a chemical reaction that happens.”

When he was young, Ken lived less than 10 blocks from a steel mill. “I could see the mill from my house,” he says. “I could see the sky brighten on a regular basis from dumping slag, tapping furnaces, blowing the Bessemer. When I was 16, I made my dad take me inside the mill and that’s when I tapped my first furnace.”

Linda peeks from the kitchen, concerned. On the phone she had warned me. “I’m gonna tell you,” she had said. “Once my husband gets going, it’s kind of hard to get him to stop.” Linda’s own hard hat from her accounting days at the mill is the star object of Ken’s collection back at the museum.

Ken tells me about the First Helper, how he was in charge of the furnace. He tells me there were Second Helpers and Third Helpers also. There were charging men, guys who filled the furnace with scrap, guys who worked the locomotive, pit men, laborers, crane men. “If you worked there, I could be screaming at the top of my lungs, holding my hands around my mouth, next to your ear, and you probably wouldn’t hear anything. It’s the sound of all that air blowing, diesel locomotives, really loud, screechy, screamy. Real high-pitched.”

But there is still something reluctant about Ken, restrained. At the end of two hours, he shows me the books he’s published and stacks of black and white photographs that show steel being made. The pieces are spread out on the glass coffee table.

“I know many immigrant steel workers, and they were proud to be steel workers, very proud,” he says. “My grandfather couldn’t spell his name, and he was mistreated. Thirteen years of time was taken away from him after a strike one time. They could do things like that. But he still loved the mill.

“My dad, on the other hand, would never say he loved the mill, always said he hated it. It was this and that or the other thing, but my dad loved the mill. When my dad died, he died of cancer. He died of cancer of the esophagus. And, when he was dying, when he was in the hospice, they put a pump on him that would shoot morphine into him every so often, and he carried his pump around with him and when he’d be sleeping, he’d be doing stuff with his hands, like this.” Ken makes motions with his two hands, twisting his sausage-like fingers around imaginary dials in the air in front of him.

“I was watching him when he was dying once and the doctor came in and I was looking at my dad and he said, ‘You know, we see him doing that with his hands.’ And he saw that I was watching him and he said, ‘We see him doing that all the time and we wonder what that is,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I know what he’s doing: He’s operating the furnace.’ I said I could see him opening the door, closing it… adjusting the oxygen… This man is dying and what are his dying dreams? Of the mill. That’s how I know he loved it. He didn’t really care about his family, he liked booze; but I know he loved making steel.”

* * * * * * * * *

At this point, I would really like to visit a steel mill, this clue to the valley’s past—this thing that will make it unique, that will make it exist. But there’s only one still functioning. Ironically, it’s the first steel mill Carnegie opened—named after the benefactor who allowed him use of a personal library when Carnegie was still a poor boy, the man who inspired Carnegie to make libraries his philanthropic hallmark. It is the Edgar Thomson steel mill, functional since 1875, called “E.T.” by anyone who is familiar with it.

E.T. is a five-minute drive from Homestead up the river and across the Rankin Bridge, in a borough called Braddock. You can see the mill and its opaque white smoke from far away. The streets of Braddock are even more destitute and dilapidated than those of Homestead, and at the end of the street there is always the view of the mill, its furnaces and its many industrial lights. Carnegie’s first public library is here, its blackened sandstone walls flanked by churches on all four sides. Across the street, a banner hangs over the busted stain-glass windows of the First Presbyterian Church: “Restore Library Street. Restore Braddock.”

Nearing the steel mill, I hear the turbines, as if jets are taking off inside the gargantuan, soot-encrusted buildings. An unnatural fire burns at the top of a tower, the eye of a cyclops. The plant is surrounded by a concrete wall topped with barbed wire. Signs hang on the wall every 20 feet or so: “Warning. Dangerous Conditions Within.” I see piles everywhere: dunes of black coke, gray limestone, hills of rusted things. At the end of the plant is a barren land with heaps of mangled metal; no longer in need of many of its buildings, the mill is cannibalizing itself with its own scrap, an essential binding ingredient for all new steel. In the old days, tracks crisscrossed the mill yard, locomotives pulling truck beds with ingots and pig iron, products like I-beams and ship armor. I am told the working conditions inside are hot, with molten iron up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. There are sparks and sinister machinery. A single drop of skimmed slag gone awry can burn its way through bone. There are 10 thousand ways a steelworker faces danger.

“When I first started,” Ken Kobus had told me, “in the Open Hearth shop, there were about 1,000 people working to produce what, today, would take 10 people to turn.”

And then I see him, a human movement: A man wearing a green jumpsuit is walking slowly to the turnstile that leaves the mill grounds. I can see him carrying his own clothes in a bundle, his own flannel shirt. He is trudging, his head down. I have caught him in that intimate moment when a person knows his work day is over and his own life begins. He pushes through the turnstile out onto the street and there is nobody to meet him, no fanfare. I suddenly become aware of myself sitting in my car. What am I doing? What have I become? I start the engine, stub out my smoke, the hot creeping up my neck.

* * * * * * * * *

People like Ken Kobus say they love The Waterfront, but Ken still worries sometimes. “The reason why I’m still working at U.S. Steel is because my company, Jones & Laughlin, went bankrupt. I lost most of my pension, my health care. I still go to work at 5:30 in the morning.”

U.S. Steel is the world’s ninth largest steel producer today. China is now the leader in producing the world’s steel, and the labor is cheap.

I decide to visit the museum one more time.

The exhibit is on the third floor of the Bost Building, formerly a hotel that once served as headquarters for the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers during one of the most violent labor strikes in history. The workers had asked for raises, and the mill responded by locking them out of their jobs and hiring scabs. The Battle of Homestead, in which the men fought to keep their jobs, resulted in 10 deaths and the end of the union for the next 50 years.

I look at Linda Kobus’ white hardhat in the glass case in the middle of the room. I take my time at the photographs of the egg-shaped Bessemer converters. Then I see that there is a smaller room in the back that I missed last time.

My footsteps creak on the old floorboards. The smaller room is wallpapered green, has wood trim like a home, and there is a glass case at the head. Inside the glass case, resting on black cloth, are two clubs, one smaller than the other. The plaque below states they are clubs that were “allegedly” used in the Battle of Homestead. The larger club is no longer than my forearm, not by any means the weapon of death I imagined. I look closer at the slender brown artifacts, heirlooms handed down by generation.

The plaque reads: “Family legends give unique twists to each. The smaller was reputedly made by a laborer in the mill, while the larger is traced to a Homestead blacksmith who took the club from a Pinkerton agent.” Each boasts fight, treasured proof. The smaller club has scrapes on it, dents where the dark varnish was gouged away on impact, the pale flesh of wood blinking through.

I think about the inscription as I cross the street to A & B Donuts, where the pastry shelves and racks are mostly empty and the paint on the wooden sign is faded and peeling. Inside, rows of donuts on doilies sit in only one of the glass cases, and the plump woman behind the faux wood-paneled counter does not yield, tying string bows around paper boxes, donuts to go. The fluorescent lights glint dull off the empty baker’s racks, the tiered trophy on top of the dusty cabinet. Brown patterns of ships sail on the yellowed wallpaper; an American flag hangs on the fridge in the back.

The woman behind the counter finally turns around. She has big glasses and big breasts, and she looks shy and worried when I ask her which donuts are best. “I’d say these chocolate cream-filled ones,” she points, stuttering. I tell her I’ve been to the historical museum across the street. She says softly, maybe to herself, “I should go there one day, too.”