Category: default || By jt3y

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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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.