Robert S. Dorsett Captures the Lost Steel Plants of the monongahela RIver valley

摘要

Pittsburgh's Monongahela River is named after the Lenape Indian word Menaonki-hela, meaning "where banks cave and erode." The name is fitting: for more than a century, these riverbanks were lined with steel plants and railroads that have now "caved and eroded" away. By the 1880s, Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh, Pa., USA, was the world's largest manufacturer of coke, iron and steel rails. However, in the 1970s, cheap foreign steel flooded the market. Following the 1981-1982 recession, Pittsburgh plants laid off 153,000 workers. 1985 saw the beginning of demolition; by 1990, seven of nine major steel plants had shut down. Duquesne, Homestead, Jones & Laughlin and Eliza Furnace are gone; only the Edgar Thomson Plant remains as a producer of steel. While these steel plants are lost today, the legacy of their workers is not forgotten.