Lackawanna and the Age of Steel

The Lackawanna Steel Company arrived at the shores of Lake Erie in nineteen-oh-two, having relocated from Scranton, Pennsylvania in part to escape union organizers and in part to take advantage of rail and water shipping that the Buffalo lakeshore offered no place better. The company built a works covering roughly a thousand acres just south of the city in a new municipality that took the company's name: Lackawanna, New York.

The plant was one of the largest steel operations in the world. At its peak it employed twenty thousand workers and was, briefly, the second-largest steel company in the United States. To fill the labor needs, the company recruited across Europe and the Middle East. Polish and Italian and Irish immigrants came first. Later, Yemeni immigrants began arriving, finding work in the mills in the nineteen thirties and forming a community in Lackawanna that persists to this day, one of the oldest Yemeni-American communities in the United States.

The company changed hands in nineteen twenty-two, purchased by Bethlehem Steel. The plant kept working through the Depression and two world wars. It was essential, in the most literal sense: the steel that moved through this facility became ships and tanks and beams and rails.

The end came in the nineteen seventies and eighties, when foreign competition from Japan and Germany, using newer furnace technology, undercut American steel on price. Bethlehem Steel began cutting jobs at Lackawanna in the early seventies. By nineteen eighty-two, the main plant had effectively closed. More than twenty thousand jobs were gone. The surrounding communities, built entirely around the mill, did not recover.

The site today is a brownfield, partly remediated, partly still contaminated. What remains aboveground is a ruin: a few surviving structures from the original works, standing in a landscape of emptied lots where neighborhoods once were.