+1 to East End, and also check out Penn Brewery (just a hop+skip+jump across the Allegheny river) for craft brewed goodness and great German food.

Speaking as one who actually did work in a steel mill during college (like 30 frickin’ summers ago), I can tell you that no video can capture the enormity and visceral impact of going into a steel mill, especially for the first time.

You walk through an industrial environment which can be like something out of the chase scenes in the original Robocop, up to a huge, multistory metal barn of a building. Set on the wall is a single generic metal door of the type you’ve all seen. Grey, with a “danger” or “warning” sign or something similar, half peeled off, and a lot of grime on it.

You walk in, and as the door shuts behind you the darkness is an immediate, stark contrast to the sunlight outside. There is dust and steam and smoke everywhere. There are arc lights five stories or so above your head, casting both light and shadow across the floor. The floor is (or was, anyway) dirt and not concrete. Dirt absorbs those little meteors of molten steel or slag which spray at odd, but predictable, intervals from the ladles and the process. Concrete, they bounce off, then lay around to be slippery like sawdust on a dance floor. The heat smacks you across the face and the cold on the side not exposed to the hot metal feels arctic by comparison. Noise – across the whole frequency range but more toward the low end – bombards you through your protective gear. Sirens, flashing “whoopee” lights, bells, horns, you name it. Every one of them has a meaning but when you don’t know them it’s a cacaphony.

And then they pour a ladle. What was smoky, steamy, noisy, and hot before just gets turned up past 11. The occasional dust-fleck meteor of metal or slag burns through your shirt and leaves a little mark on you. “Stingers” we called them. After a couple days you no longer notice them.

You then get a sense that, when that entry door closed behind you, had there been a doorman he would have said “Welcome to Hell.”

I worked in a relatively modern plant. We used electric furnaces to melt scrap and make ductile iron pipe fittings. My job, most of the time, was either to grind off rough edges, or to slam them with sledghammers as they came out of the sand molds looking like so many model airplane parts, to break them apart into individual fittings. One guy, who had “anger issues”, spent weeks swinging a 5 or 10 pound sledge (depending on the size of the parts being made) to work through them. Kept him out of trouble. The grinders were either hand-held or big, floor-mounted units with 36 inch wheels spinning at 5000 rpm. You wore so much protective gear you felt like an astronaut or something. Hard hat, face shield, safety glasses, earplugs, dust mask, leather apron, long leather gloves, heavy boots. And it was always about 100 deg. F in there.

One night, they gave me a tryout on the pouring deck. I got aluminized coveralls, special insulated gloves, and a nearly-opaque dark green face shield to replace the normal clear one. The overhead crane would bring me a lidded ladle, about the size of a 10 gallon bucket, attached to a chain hoist. This ladle was full of molten steel. The heat would radiate from under the lid like one of those starship motors in the movies. Yellow-white, with a hint of pink. But this was frickin’ hot.

Molten iron is so hot, i.e., there is so much energy running around in there, that if you were to spit into it, the energy would disassociate the water into the constituent hydrogen and oxygen, which would then promptly explode back into water. So, you’d get a combination steam and hydrogen explosion. Invariably lethal – so you don’t spit.

And my job was to line the spout of the ladle up with the holes in the sand moulds as they went by on a conveyor belt and pour the steel into the moulds. In three dimensions, without reference marks. Then, I was to turn a wheel on the frame of the ladle, kind of like a ship’s wheel, and this would tip the ladle to pour. The stream of molten steel – in theory – then went into the moulds, cooled and congealed into pipe fittings or whatever we were making that night. And the next mould came on. And I was to pour again. For eight hours.

You have no idea how hot this was. I sweated off about 10 pounds that night.

My tryout was a one-night deal. I missed a little too much. About 2 or 3 cups in the course of the night. Molten iron is nasty stuff, but at least no one got hurt.

Prior to law school, I once thought about going back from construction to a possible job at a copper foundry. Second thoughts got the better of me when I heard that the labor force was so polyglot that no one spoke in words – it was all whistles and yells. At least in the iron foundry, we communicated pretty well. And, I remembered that I got the best grades of my college career the semester after working in that steel mill.

I just love it when wingnuts denigrate working in places like that mill as … whatever derogatory term they’re using. Yeah. Like they know.

One of my great-grandfathers had a glass factory for a while. (They supplied local sash-and-door companies, including one that made revolving doors.) Also hot and messy, but probably not as much as steel.

scribe @8

great writing and fun to read.

That was a beautiful, even poetic vision of a modern hell in a steel plant, scribe. Thanks for the memories.

Have fun in Steel-town, Marcy. Look how much we still depend upon the Industrial Revolution! Go Steelers!

Pittsburgh. I grew up there in the 1960’s when the late-night pouring of steel lit up the sky with an brilliant orange glow so bright that one could read the paper by it… and the smell of sulphur hung in the air well past daybreak, burning our nostrils as we waited for the school bus. Shortly after graduation from high school in 1976, the year of our nation’s bicentennial, I joined the dispossessed middle-class diaspora… who became the parents, promulgators, and promoters of the now-recognized Steeler Nation phenomena.

But it was necessary to leave that battlefield in order to gain the wider perspective and learn that Pittsburgh wasn’t the only battleground, perhaps not even the main one, in the long-running war between Capital and Labor… which is really just a subset of the larger war between Big Industry — which is to say Big Money — and ‘We The People.’ Numerous hometowns have been raped, pillaged, plundered, and poisoned — slowly and deliberately — all across this country. And the war rages on today on the healthcare front… Big Money vs. ‘We The People.’

The callous, deliberate decimation of Pittsburgh by the oligarchs of Big Industry — followed immediately by Reagan’s war on organized labor and the Middle Class generally — is instructive: by their actions we will know them.

“Them” are profit-predators first, foremost, and always… not citizens of a democratic republic along with numerous, diverse others. They recognize no bonds of civic, contractual, or even moral obligation so there is no negotiated agreement, regulation, or even absolute legal prohibition which can result in anything beyond a mere temporary restraint… a restraint which will last only until a way around it is devised and not one minute longer.

Bargain with unions? Comply with environmental regulations (etc., etc) ? Sure, sure… but only until we move these plants outta here to the Third World where there are no unions or regulations.

If you speak to now-elderly middle class folk — quite likely “formerly middle class,” actually — in Pittsburgh, they will blame the unions for for being too greedy, for being too confrontational, and for being corrupt. They will blame government for taxes and regulations, and (again) corruption. But they’ll voice no such blame to the corporations that made the decisions not to modernize — specifically because they’d already decided to relocate the entire industry overseas, while they continued to negotiate labor agreements in bad faith — and they’ll articulate no such criticism of corporate malefactors generally.

Pittsburgh is a fitting place for progressives to gather… one of the more emblematic “scenes of the crime,” as it were, where many of the witnesses — and victims — still reside… and where the evidence of how a Middle Class can live — did live, once upon a time — still remains.

I recommend the South Side, which was (obviously) formerly a working-class neighborhood of Eastern Europeans but now has a main strip (Carson St.) of enjoyable bars that have mostly only changed their clientele, from blue collar to college student (I liked Jack’s and Dee’s). The city as a whole is topographically dramatic, but the hills above that neighborhood are particularly interesting, a warren of stairways and alleys overlooking various Catholic and Orthodox churches, the Duquesne brewery and once, alas, those mills.