If there's anything That's So Pittsburgh, it's an iron or steel mill. August is the season of community days around here, so an open house at the Carrie Blast Furnaces was par for the course. Turnout was excellent despite or because of the hot and sunny weather. Free attendance included snacks, water, a guided tour, and making a poured-iron keepsake. There was a black-smith demonstration, an interactive spray-paint station, and a musician (the fiddler had been replaced by a classical guitarist by the time my tour had ended). The Carrie Blast Furnaces were started by two brothers in the 1880s and named for their younger sister, Carrie. Naming a furnace for a woman in the family was considered less self-aggrandizing and better luck than naming it for the man who owned it. See also: Dorothy, Isabella, Joanna, etc.
This is #7. You can see that it is partially torn down. After the mill closed, Park Corp. acquired the land in 1988 and started razing everything for a development, but in 2006 Allegheny County purchased it, and now Rivers of Steel maintains the site.
Historian Jaquan Carter explaining how it took 4 tons of iron ore, coke, and limestone to make 1 ton of iron. The big tan tents in the background are left over from a movie about a prison that was recently filmed there.
The furnaces were 1,400 degrees inside (hot enough to combust nature gas), and 150-300 degrees outside, depending where you stood. Certain tasks required wooden clogs, because rubber shoes would melt.
Carrie made iron for about a century, from 1882 to 1978. The iron became steel that went into the Empire State Building, the battleship Missouri, the Sears Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Alaska oil pipeline.
Urban adventurers love the place. Some of them tagged the buildings. Rivers of Steel now commissions graffiti artists to produce works of art.
In 1898, Andrew Carnegie acquired the iron mill as part of the vertical integration for his steel mill across the river. Carrie became part of U.S. Steel in 1907.
If the paint job on that locomotive looks new, that's because it is!
This contraption was built in 1927 to empty a train core of ore in minutes to hours. It used to take men with buckets and shovels hours to days to do the same by hand. This mechanization cost some jobs, but by the 1960s, 3,000 men per day worked 12-hour shifts to maximize efficiency.
Abandoned empty can of pop. There were some impressive spider webs; the photo doesn't do it justice.
The so-called "money shot" of the furnaces; I like mine from below with the swirling clouds above better.
This is a shot of the famous "Carrie Deer," which was NOT commissioned. Back in 1997, a group of 7 artists used materials found on the site to construct an owl. Locals apparently thought it was part of some satanic rite (?!) and tore it down. The artists then made this stag head, which has not only been allowed to stand, but some people rent the courtyard to get married under it.
When the furnaces finally cooled, Nature came back to the site. Rivers of Steel offers "iron garden" tours with a botanist about the plants and animals that now live here. They tolerate some "invasive" species because those help clean the air and soil. This is a rocking horse statue.
Photographers love to come take photographs of the old machinery. The light is very interesting: the blue photo was taken without a filter. Then I walked around the oven to take the next photo, which is probably my favorite of the day (it is lightly touched up with a Honey filter).
I knew that the closure of the steel mills was an economic travesty for Pittsburgh, but I hadn't fully realized how preventable it was. The reason these ruins stand as a national landmark to pre-WWII iron-making technology is because U.S. Steel stopped upgrading the plant after the 1930s. The heroic and dangerous work done here fed families and generated hundreds of supporting businesses, but it claimed an average of 1 life per day, destroyed the environment, and was 2 generations out of date by the time Germany and Asia became major producers of iron and steel.
More cool metal working; part of the alarm system of sirens and lights that alerted the factory and the neighborhood that the furnace was about to be opened. It went off every 4-6 hours around the clock, when the foreman peeped inside and determined that the mixture was mature. At the mill's busiest, each furnace made ~1,000 tons of iron per day.
The molten iron flowed out of the hole in the center down these channels into "torpedo cars" (named for their shape), which transported it over the Hot Metal Bridge* to the steel mill across the Monongahela River. *There are two of these in Pittsburgh, only one of which is still in use for cars, bikes, and pedestrians. This one isn't connected to anything anymore.
Hephaestus, the Greek God of fire
I noticed this little VW bus sitting among the scrap.
Old rail and bricks in a storage shed.
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