Category: History, Mon Valley Miscellany || By

Does this scene look familiar to anyone? Not the helicopter --- I'll explain the helicopter in a minute --- but look closely at the landscape in the background.

It should seem familiar to most McKeesporters, though it doesn't look very much like that any more. That's the old "slag pile" in West Mifflin, now the site of Century III Mall, Wal-Mart, Century Square and dozens and dozens of stores that couldn't survive without steady supplies of Chinese-made shi- ... I mean, surely, surely quality merchandise.

When rock containing iron ore is melted in a furnace, the non-ferrous minerals and impurities separate from the iron and are poured off. The resulting molten rock is called "slag."

. . .

For decades, U.S. Steel mills in Braddock, Clairton, Duquesne, Homestead and McKeesport poured the red-hot "slag" into special insulated railroad cars, which were hauled to West Mifflin in trains run by the Union Railroad, a U.S. Steel subsidiary.

At the slag pile, the slag cars were tipped over and the molten rock poured out like lava. At night, generations of Mon Valley teen-agers used to park on the roads around the slag pile and watch the red-hot slag glow and pulse. (When they weren't watching the submarine races, that is.)

Smoke and steam rose from the pile both day and night. Pilots looking for nearby Allegheny County Airport used the unearthly red glow as a navigational landmark.

In time, uses were discovered for slag --- particularly in manufacturing concrete. Crushed slag can also be used to ballast railroad tracks.

The slag became too valuable to just dump, and as steel production in the Mon Valley declined, the mills output less slag anyway. Eventually, U.S. Steel stopped dumping slag in West Mifflin.

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And as the land along busy Route 51 became more valuable, U.S. Steel began leveling off the moon-like landscape and selling the property for commercial development, including Century III Mall, which opened in 1979.

But the slag pile's heritage is still evident around Century III Mall; the leftover iron ore in the slag has rusted, leaving red-brown streaks down the hillsides.

Incidentally, several companies continue to recover slag from the West Mifflin pile, including LaFarge Inc., which grinds the rock for use in concrete and other building materials, and Glassport-based Tube City IMS, which is removing the remaining metals from the slag.

. . .

Now, about the picture: The helicopter is lifting an air conditioner onto the roof of Murphy's Mart No. 808, the eighth discount store constructed in the early 1970s by McKeesport-based G.C. Murphy Co. The store, which shared the building with a Giant Eagle supermarket, was adjacent to Southland Four Seasons Shopping Center, which had opened nearly two decades before.

The Murphy's Marts, a response to S.S. Kresge Co.'s Kmart stores, eventually operated in virtually all of the states east of the Mississippi. At the time of the hostile takeover of Murphy's in 1985, the company was in the process of upgrading the merchandise and the look of the Marts; the remodeled locations wound up looking remarkably like present-day Target Stores.

The former Murphy's Mart in West Mifflin is almost unrecognizable now, but is presently home to DSW Shoe Warehouse, Value City Furniture and Best Buy.

The photo was taken for the G.C. Murphy Co. (possibly by longtime company photographer Jack Loveall) and loaned to me by Ed Davis, Murphy's former head of public relations.

. . .

All this is just a sneaky way for me to mention that the G.C. Murphy Co. website is still being regularly updated. If you go there right now, you can read a story about Store No. 217, located in the tiny central Pennsylvania town of Mercersburg, Pa.

(P.S.: I don't know if you've noticed this, but sometimes it takes me a long time to get to the point.)