The Steel Collapse

Between nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty-three, Pittsburgh and its surrounding river towns lost approximately ninety-five thousand manufacturing jobs. The number is so large it barely registers. What it meant, in human terms, was this: in Braddock, where Carnegie had built his first great mill, the population fell by more than eighty percent over the following decades. Entire blocks were abandoned. Young people left. The tax base shrank to almost nothing. A generation of families that had worked in the mills for thirty and forty years found themselves unemployed in their forties and fifties, with skills the new economy did not want.

The causes were a long time coming. Pittsburgh's steel industry had invested little in modernization through the nineteen sixties and seventies, relying on aging open-hearth furnaces while Japanese and German mills rebuilt after World War Two with the newest technology. When global steel prices fell in the late nineteen seventies, American producers could not compete on cost. United States Steel, Bethlehem, Wheeling-Pittsburgh, and the other major companies began closing plants one by one.

Homestead Works, the same mill where the great strike of eighteen ninety-two had been fought, closed in nineteen eighty-six. It took seven thousand jobs with it.

The human geography of the Monongahela Valley was permanently altered. Some towns never recovered. Braddock today has fewer than two thousand residents; it had twenty thousand at its peak. McKeesport, Clairton, Duquesne, and the other Mon Valley towns all lost between half and three-quarters of their populations.

Pittsburgh the city, as distinct from its surrounding towns, eventually stabilized, because it had universities, hospitals, and corporate headquarters that the smaller river towns did not. The city reinvented itself. The smaller towns lived with what remained.