The Struggle to Rebuild After Big Steel Moved Out : A whole region was almost ruined when the mills closed.

HOMESTEAD, Pa. —  As you cross the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh into Homestead, first and foremost you see the mill.

The mill that made the steel for the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. The mill that produced two-thirds of the armor-plating used to crush Hitler. The mill that once provided jobs to 15,000 steelworkers.

It is--or, more accurately, was--the Homestead Works of U.S. Steel. Once, it was one of America’s most important industrial assets. Today, three years after it closed for good, the plant stands silent. In place of steelmaking, one edge of the property is used for a waterslide amusement ride.

What is left of the Homestead mill stands guard over the northern entrance to the Monongahela Valley--the “Mon Valley”--a collection of grimy Western Pennsylvania river towns that once were the heart and soul of the American steel industry.

But today, it is a Steel Valley no longer; most of the mills--and the jobs that came with them--are long gone. The steel industry’s slump in the late 1970s and early 1980s brought on the virtual destruction of the Mon Valley as a major steelmaking center.

In the process, the region suffered the most severe case of industrial dislocation, proportionate to its size, experienced by any metropolitan area in the country during the last recession, economists say.

“These towns have just been devastated,” says Tom Croft, executive director of the Steel Valley Authority, an economic development group in nearby Rankin, Pa.

Some 40,000 steel and basic manufacturing jobs were lost; U.S. Steel, which employed 26,500 in the valley in 1979, has just 4,000 workers left in the valley today and has shut three mills. The company’s steelmaking capacity in the valley has plunged from 8.5 million tons a year in 1979 to 2.3 million now.

Big Steel Won’t Return

So for people here, the recession that has faded into distant memory for the rest of the nation remains the defining moment in history for an entire region.

“I don’t think things could get much worse short of a nuclear bomb dropping on the valley,” says Mike Stout, a former steelworker who now runs a small printing business in Homestead.

Now, a decade after the recession began, the people of the valley have finally come to accept the hardest fact of all--that Big Steel will never return. “The mills are down, forget it, it’s over,” says Joe Gallagher, a retired steelworker in Clairton, Pa.

But with that has come a new willingness to look ahead for the first time since the recession. Even as the demolition crews still work to knock down the mills, community leaders and ex-steelworkers are beginning the process of figuring out how a valley totally dependent on the same manufacturing base for nearly a century can enter the post-industrial age.

“There’s basically a sense of resignation that nobody will help the Mon Valley but the people of the valley themselves,” notes Gary Hubbard, a spokesman for the United Steelworkers union in Pittsburgh.

That’s a hard concept for people who grew up believing that the mills would always be there and who became dependent on U.S. Steel and the Steelworkers union.

‘Dresden After the War’

“People here didn’t have to practice independence because they had been dependent on the mill and the union,” notes Mike Bilcsik, a community activist and a former local union president at U.S. Steel’s now-closed Duquesne, Pa., mill. “We have to change that attitude of dependence to one of taking responsibility for putting things back together.”

Yet patching up a valley that some here compare to “Dresden after the War” remains a daunting task.

Just the physical presence of so many massive mills, some three or four miles long, sitting idle and taking up much of the riverfront of the valley, presents a serious obstacle to economic development. Good water transportation was what attracted the steel industry here in the first place, but now steel’s detritus blocks access to the rivers.

“People have lived in river towns all their lives and never knew they had a river,” says Bilcsik.

But now that the demolition of some mills has begun, new ideas about how to use the riverfront are under study. One plan has called for the mills to be torn down to make way for the valley’s first interstate highway. Even if an alternate route now under review is accepted, it would still provide the first modern freeway link to Pittsburgh from the mountainous and isolated region, making it easier for area residents to commute to newly created service jobs in Pittsburgh’s booming downtown.

Others are now hoping instead to turn the valley’s steelmaking past into a tourist attraction, transforming remnants of the Homestead Works and the nearby Carrie blast furnace, which is also closed, into a steelmaking museum run by the National Park Service.

Manufacturing Base

Modeled after the popular textile industry museum complex in Lowell, Mass., the Homestead museum would show how steelmaking was done in the Mon Valley and would celebrate the famous Homestead Battle of 1892, when striking Homestead workers were attacked by company-hired Pinkerton guards.

“A lot of people here are ashamed, they feel they were part of something that failed,” says Bilcsik, who is promoting the museum project. “But I think a museum would help people regain their esteem and help them realize we were part of something to be proud of.”

But not everyone is ready to gentrify the valley; some think a downsized manufacturing base is still needed to provide jobs for at least some of the masses of unemployed blue collar workers still in the valley.

In one such effort, the Steelworkers union and several community groups are backing a $120-million project to restart an idle LTV Steel plant at the edge of the valley and operate it as a “mini-mill” providing 250 to 300 jobs.

“These towns won’t experience a recovery without some manufacturing,” argues Croft, who is helping to develop the project.

“We have to look to small manufacturers to provide jobs,” agrees Joe Kirk, executive director of the Mon Valley Progress Council.

Yet the modest revival of a small industrial base won’t do much for the bombed-out, financially strapped towns of the valley, or the lost generation of steelworkers left behind when the big mills closed.

As the mills shut down, young workers moved away, dramatically reducing the tax base of the region. During the past decade, the valley has lost 30,000 people, or 10% of its population; those that stayed behind were often middle-aged steelworkers who couldn’t find new jobs--or pay taxes.

Cruelest of All

That loss of jobs and productive people has left some Mon Valley towns in an indefinite state of municipal bankruptcy. In Clairton, for instance, the entire 13-member police force has been laid off since 1985, and all emergency calls are handled by a state police post in another town. A state-appointed trustee still handles the town’s financial affairs.

But cruelest of all has been the continuing impact from the recession on the older steelworkers, those who found they were virtually unemployable when the mills shut down.

While the young workers were able to leave town or find lower-paying service sector jobs in downtown Pittsburgh, many of the workers who were in their mid-40s or older when the mills closed have never adjusted.

A new union-sponsored survey of nearly 30,000 laid-off workers in the valley has found that a majority of older workers remain either unemployed or underemployed in part-time, low-paying jobs. Community activists and former steelworkers say that mental and physical problems have haunted many of them ever since steel left town.

“You are talking about people who built this country, and now they feel like no one will ever hire them again,” says Jim Kraus, a former Homestead worker who helped conduct the survey.

“Twenty-two people I knew in Homestead died either of heart attacks, strokes or suicides in the year after the mill closed,” adds Stout bitterly.

But now, the valley must move forward, Bilcsik and others argue, and so it’s time to stop mourning over such losses.

“I think the Mon Valley will come back, but there is a whole generation of people who can’t make the transition,” says Bilcsik. “We have to accept as a fact that there’s a group who will never get back to where they were before.