Alexander Kronemer

Originally Published: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA) January 22, 1995

By Alex Kronemer
During the early1980s, journalists from news bureaus across the country came to Western Pennsylvania to report on how the decline of the U.S. steel industry was devastating small steel towns. They walked through places like Monessen, which lost 35 percent of its population when the mill closed, and the images
they described of abandoned storefronts and desolate parking lots led someone to coin the phrase "the rust belt" to symbolize life, or lack thereof, in these towns. The phrase became a journalistic shorthand for
towns where people were being forced by mill closures to move away and abandon unsold homes, old school buildings and bankrupt businesses. And that
certainly described many localities in Western Pennsylvania during that period.

But what about today? At least at the bar of the Belgian Club in Charleroi, the small town across the river from Monessen, people were recently talking
about job opportunities and of the sense that the community was beginning to grow again. One man, a 35-year-old former machine repairman named Sammy, offered several names of people he knew who were back working somewhere in town, just as he himself returned to the area about four years ago after a decade of working outside the state. True enough, amid the obvious signs of industrial decline and economic collapse, there are unmistakable signals of
revitalization. In Charleroi, on the same street as a boarded-up movie house, two franchise restaurants and a video store have opened to brisk business. State grants for economically distressed areas are funding the construction of industrial parks that have attracted small manufacturing companies to the towns. The retail and service sectors are expanding. In the words of one local merchant, the mill has been "shaken out" of the town and a new economy is taking its place. Already the area is more economically diverse, dynamic and white-collar than before. And it will likely become more so, as the region forms a stronger economic link to nearby Pittsburgh.

In the future, towns like Monessen and Charleroi will never again be so dependent on one industry, or be as vulnerable to economic catas-trophe. That is why it is such a surprise to discover that many residents are not
too happy about these changes. Some of the shoulder-shrugging and facetious comments prompted by mention of these developments can be attributed to a certain level of cynicism about the future. But there is more to it than that. There is deep ambivalence about the direction the local economy is taking. And among some, there is active opposition to such concrete change as the proposed expressway to Pittsburgh that would accelerate and strengthen this economic metamorphosis. Clearly, for many, this economic
transformation is not without its own costs. In any area dominated by a single industry or company (it doesn't have to be steel, it could be fishing or coal mining; it could be Boeing or IBM), the people living there are shaped by the same economic forces. They generally have the same economic opportunities and possess similar futures. People can know who they are and what their lives are about by looking at their neighbors; they can chart the direction of their futures by how their parents lived. This is part of what is lost in the region's new economy. While Sammy names some of the jobs that are now available in town, noting who is trying to get in at one place or another, one retired steel worker recalls that "it once was that a few weeks after you graduated from high school, you got up one morning, went out, bought yourself a lunch pail, walked over to the mill and got a job, and that was it. You were set." In those days a person's fate was predictable and commonly shared. Everyone's fortunes rose and fell with steel's. And those ebbs and flows had a discernible rhythm. People not only had a place in the community, they knew where they fit in the universe. With a new local economy based on small manufacturing firms and service-oriented businesses, people now have different and uncertain futures. One neighbor might prosper with his job, while another struggles. And who knows when either one of their situations might reverse? Fear and envy enter hearts that previously regarded one another with feelings of communion and continuity. And with an expressway taking people to jobs in Pittsburgh, thisseparateness is increased. Neighbors will not even see where other neighbors work, lengthening the psychic and economic distances between them even more.

The new economy that is replacing steel means that the people are leaving well-worn paths to futures unknown and unknowable, and that they are going there alone. When the mills were running, sons followed their fathers to work; daughters followed mothers into a way of life. This gave order, cohesion and dignity to both generations and kept families together year after year. One of the reasons Sammy left the area 15 years ago was because there were no jobs for him in the mill -- neither the Monessen mill, nor the steel mill five miles up the road where his father worked. Sammy found jobs in the West and South, and did well. But he missed his home. When the improving local economy offered him a chance to come back, he jumped at it.

After a couple of tries at different jobs, he finally found himself in the same mill where his father had worked. But Sammy was not there to make steel. He was on a demolition crew that was tearing part of it down. One day while he was cutting pieces into scrap metal, an iron bar struck him in the head, and he was partially blinded, making it impossible for him to work
anywhere for the last few years. Sammy's damaged eyesight is more than a personal tragedy, however. Another native son, one who is working in one of
the small manufacturing companies that have come to the area, voices a common feeling when he comments about his job. Like Sammy, he too left Western Pennsylvania in the early 1980s to find work elsewhere, and has only recently returned. "It pays seven dollars an hour," he says and shrugs indifferently. "That business though ... " he makes an exaggerated shaking motion with his hand. ''I'll give it a try, but where I'll be a year or two from now, I don't know ..." If Western Pennsylvania's small steel towns are moving out of the "rust belt," then perhaps Sammy's dimmed vision best symbolizes the current situation. The mills came down on the heads of all the sons and daughters of steel, now many of them have difficulty seeing very far ahead.

Copyright (c) 1995 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette