Deep items from a shallow mind:
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Duquesne High School Booster Club: This couldn't have come at a better or worse time, depending on your perspective:
Two juveniles face multiple charges after a stabbing outside a convenience store in Duquesne. Police said two groups were fighting Tuesday night on Grant Street.
Lariia Sloan, 39, who works at a nearby convenience store tried to break up the fight. Sloan was stabbed in the back. She is expected to make a full recovery.
The suspects are being held in a juvenile detention center and face multiple charges, including aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy. (WPXI-TV)
We have a nationally famous tourist attraction in our midst.
It isn't the arboretum in Renzie Park, or the marina, or the Palisades or the Viking Lounge, where Governor Rendell once ate his weight in pierogies. I'm not even talking about Kennywood. (I said "nationally" famous. Kennywood is the one and only roller-coaster capital of the world.)
No, it's the old Fort Pitt Steel Casting Co. on 25th Avenue in Christy Park, also known as that giant lump of rust covered in poison ivy and "jagger" bushes next to the bike trail.
Google keeps emailing me "blog alerts" for sets of photos taken inside the abandoned foundry. Poorly secured and left largely intact since closing in the mid-1980s, Fort Pitt has become a mecca for urban explorers --- people who look around inside vacated industrial and commercial structures.
Unlike "midnight plumbers" --- thieves who break into empty buildings to steal the wire and copper pipes --- most urban explorers don't take anything but photographs. And unlike graffiti "artists" (for whom I have little patience) and vandals who destroy things indiscriminately, they don't cause damage. It's industrial archeology --- but instead of documenting things 200 or more years in the past, they're looking at our recent history.
That doesn't make what urban explorers do legal (it's still trespassing and unlawful entry) but arguably they mean no harm. Whether it's smart to be tramping around inside old factories full of rusty metal, broken glass, and grease pits is left to you to decide.
Anyway, as one of the remaining abandoned steel plants in the Mon-Yough area not torn down, Fort Pitt is exerting an almost magnetic attraction on visitors, some of whom are quite talented photographers. Here's a portfolio of Fort Pitt photos from Mon City native Brian J. Krummel (who also got inside the old Eastland Cinemas before they were demolished); here's another collection from an anonymous group of explorers taken just last month.
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I'm kind of ambivalent about these pictures. On the one hand, I'm glad someone cares about these places. And as a kid who was too young to get inside most of the mills around here before they closed, it's fascinating to finally look behind the scenes.
On the other hand, I get depressed looking at the personal effects people have left behind. Every steel-toed boot, coffee cup, or calendar once belonged to someone who was laid off and out of work for months or years.
I remember touring Carrie Furnaces in Rankin about 12 years ago with an officially sanctioned group and coming home completely and utterly miserable. It brought back a flood of unhappy childhood memories of unemployment checks and government cheese.
The Fort Pitt photos hit me particularly hard, because my dad worked at Fort Pitt from 1972 until a strike in 1978, the same year my brother was born and the year after my parents had bought their first house, committing them to a 30-year mortgage. Then the conglomerate that owned Fort Pitt announced at the end of the year that rather than negotiate, it was closing the plant permanently.
Christmases in the Mon Valley in the late '70s and early '80s were freaking holly-jolly ho-ho-ho laugh riots, let me tell you. My stomach is knotting up just thinking about it.
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After looking at the different Fort Pitt photos, I tried searching the web for information about Fort Pitt Steel Casting Co. or Condec Corp., the company that owned it. Other than a few citations in legal documents, and various galleries of Fort Pitt ruins, I found almost nothing.
That's wrong. Too many people devoted their lives to places like Fort Pitt to have them be forgotten --- or remembered only for their declines.
So I've finally started something I wanted to do a long time ago. I'm going to document the history of the steel mills and steel industry around McKeesport. (I used to have some articles about steelmaking on Tube City Online, but they were so short and thin that I took them down, and never put them back.)
Obviously, the big kahuna is National Works, and I haven't even figured out how I'm going to tackle that monster. Instead, I'm going to start small, and I've started with a history of Fort Pitt Steel Casting Co.
It kicks off the new Steel Heritage section of tubecityonline.com. I'm going to try to add something at least once a week, but be patient.
Think of it this way: Now you get to visit the Mon Valley's old mills without needing a tetanus shot or a time machine.
A 1972 Yellow Pages ad for Ed Sigmund Moving ... not Sigmund Transfer, which has been a McKeesport institution since 1910. Ed Sigmund Moving was a separate company; I suspect that Ed Sigmund was a member of the same family and struck out on his own.
By the way, I swear that Ed Sigmund Moving had a pink truck. In fact, I can remember ads in the newspaper and phone book saying "Look for our big, pink truck." Can anyone confirm that, or have years of Stoney's consumption finally killed my few remaining brain cells?
Anyway, all of this is a complicated way of saying that the transition to the new URL at tubecityonline.com is underway. There are still a few bugs in the system, and for now, all content is being mirrored on the Dementia server. We'll get it worked out eventually.
Make sure to visit tomorrow for a big announcement about another cockamamie project exciting feature that I'll be developing at Tube City Online in the months ahead. It includes some new, exclusive content.
Please try to hold your excitement in check.
Michelle Wardle is excited about her new job as executive director of the McKeesport Heritage Center.
"The volunteers here have done a great job, and my goal is to keep that momentum going," says Wardle, who will oversee day-to-day operations of the historical society, genealogy library and museum in the city's Renziehausen Park. She was hired by the Heritage Center's board of directors and will ultimately report to them. Wardle's first day on the job was Tuesday.
A native of Schenectady, N.Y., Wardle holds a master's in public history from Kent State University in Ohio and previously served as curator of the Kelso House Museum in Brimfield, Ohio, and as a archivist at the Sandusky, Ohio, public library.
The Kelso House is a very different museum from the McKeesport Heritage Center, she says, mainly because Brimfield is a very different type of community from McKeesport. Where Brimfield was a rural farming town before becoming a de facto suburb of the Akron, Canton and Youngstown metropolitan areas, McKeesport has been urbanized since the 19th century, and its story is one of rapid industrialization, not agriculture.
Nevertheless, Wardle says, local historical societies and museums have some things in common, no matter where they're located. "You have to pick stories you can illustrate with what you have in your collection," she says.
Created in the early 1980s and initially located in one room of Penn State Greater Allegheny Campus' J. Clarence Kelly Library, the Heritage Center has grown fairly rapidly since moving to a new building near the Renzie rose garden. It currently functions as an official repository for historic city and school district documents, U.S. Census and cemetery records, and thousands of other items ranging from a scale model of the U.S. Steel National Works to bottle caps from Menzie Dairy Co.
A large assembly room was added a few years ago for receptions, classes and other events, while another wing surrounds and protects the city's first schoolhouse, built Downtown in 1832 and moved to Renzie Park in the 1950s. More than 700 people from across the United States are currently members.
Besides city history, the Heritage Center also collects material related to all of the Mon-Yough communities that adjoin the McKeesport Area School District.
Wardle moved to the Pittsburgh area nearly two years ago when her husband Matt took a job at the corporate headquarters of Dick's Sporting Goods. They have a 1-year-old son, Scott.
Her initial tasks --- after becoming more acquainted with Center's operations and people --- will include organizing and cataloging the collection, much of which is not yet in a searchable database or index.
In addition, Wardle's also focused on storing and preserving archival documents and historic items in the collection. And she's looking forward to working with volunteers on the Heritage Center's educational and cultural programming, which now includes an ongoing series of workshops on genealogy. "Community outreach is important," Wardle says.
Right now, a handful of volunteers is indexing and databasing the Heritage Center's collection, but Wardle says more help is needed. If you can help or would like to join the Heritage Center, call (412) 678-1832 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, or 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays.
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Full Disclosure: The Heritage Center administered a grant from the G.C. Murphy Co. Foundation that has paid for some travel and research expenses related to the forthcoming G.C. Murphy Co. book.
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In Other Business: In case you missed it, Donna Pfister of the Tribune-Review had a great profile last Sunday of the three mayors of the Steel Valley communities, Homestead's Betty Esper, Munhall's Ray Bodnar, and West Homestead's John Dindak.
You couldn't ask for three people who cared more about their communities than this trio. Frankly, they're all characters, too.
One thing jumped out of the story, though:
"The Homestead Carnegie Library is in Munhall. Homestead Park, where 9,000 people live, is in Munhall. Homestead Cemetery is in Munhall," Bodnar said. "The tail wags the dog half the time."
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