TSPGH: Carrie Blast Furnace Open House

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 There was a black-smith demonstration, an interactive spray-paint station, and a musician (the fiddler had been replaced by a classical guitarist by the time my tour had ended).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.

Wednesday on the rails, Part 1

Monday we traveled to the Pocono Mountains. Tuesday was spent on the Lehigh River.

Wednesday dawned similarly sunny and hot for a daytrip to Scranton. We visited the Electric City Trolley Museum, run by Lackawanna County, and the Steamtown National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service. One of Scranton’s nicknames is “Electric City.” It had one of the first trolley systems in the country run on electric rather than pulled by animals or cables. These flourished in cities large and small until about the 1950s, when gas-powered automobiles and buses superseded them. Alas, we missed the trolley rides by a day, but we wanted to spend Wednesday out of the sun and heat.

"Get off the tracks!"

The museum is a semi-professional affair with an ancient (c. 2000) website and a collection of reconstructed trolleys, artifacts, newspaper clippings, and assorted signage. I thought it suffered from the amateur mistake of thinking "because we own 17 transformers, we should display 17 transformers" instead of choosing one representative and really explaining what it is and does. I recognize this is something of a philosophical question (is there truth in the one or in the many), as anthropology and natural history museums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries classically exhibited all their specimens, in order to let visitors draw their own conclusions from the many examples with their natural variations.

Above is "the greatest backyard train the local news has ever seen." When we got back to the cabin, we looked up the John Oliver segments that explain why his name and face were at the museum. Local news station WYEP 16 has an electric train and trolley set that play in the background during the weather report. HBO let Last Week Tonight use some of their "funny money" to create a large, interactive train set. And the city accepted the gift! Here's the dedication ceremony.

After a late-afternoon snack at a shady table with a moseying groundhog in the background, we visited Steamtown National Historic Site, a free museum. They show a reasonably well-done, “biographical” film of a boy who loved steam locomotives who grew up with the railroad from the 1910s to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when diesel engines took over hauling freight and cars and planes replaced passenger rail. We perused a timeline of rail in the United States, looked at a bunch of big trains, and appreciated the multi-media exhibit demonstrating how exactly a coal-fired locomotive works.

After two museums, it was time for lunch and then to explore downtown Scranton in Part 2.

The most quarantine things I did

I have been more or loss quarantined for the last three weeks. The last time I left my house for work was Friday, March 27, but I had basically stopped caring for patients in person the week before that, either because they did not show up at clinic, or because I went to the hospital but did my consults from a distance. Being relieved of clinical duties freed up significant time for me to do other work, when I wasn't managing the influx of COVID-19 related information from the news, social media, my three residency programs, hospital, clinic, and every medical organization that has ever gotten possession of my email. Ditto for a number of companies reassuring me they were ready for the pandemic, and oh by the way did I want to purchase something from them for delivery/to use in the future once I got out?

Like all the other pediatric residents at my institution, I was pulled from the elective rotations I so carefully chose for my last three months of residency for their diversity of experiences--and favorable work hours, I won't lie--to be kept at home "on jeopardy" 1/4 of the time, be off 1/4 of the time, and work 7 days in a row the other 1/2 of the time. The children's hospital is being maintained on a skeleton crew due to the low number of patients and high number of potential COVID exposures on the staff. Quarantine is a novel experience for me, as for so many of us, although I confess that the introverted workaholic who was already overextended is not so secretly grateful to be able to devote so much time to studying, teaching, sleeping, and the following activities:

Cleaned house, did laundry
Sent long email updates to friends and family (if you didn't get one, have you checked your spam folder?)
Never set an alarm in the morning
Alternated my outfits between couch potato and put-together, depending on my mood and whether anyone besides Dear Husband would see me via teleconference
Cooked: potato and bean casserole, tuna pasta, black bean and corn soup ("Pittsburgh soup")
Baked: scones, chocolate chip cookies, blackberry oatmeal bars
Took a walk everyday with my housemate while trying to remain 6 feet away from everyone else
Had a conversation from the sidewalk with friends on their front porch
Watched a lot of COVID parody songs, famous people reading stuff, and late-night comedians become day-time YouTubers
Listened to the entire soundtrack of Hamilton
Held a weekly disaster-themed film series

Things I used Zoom/Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts to do: listen to COVID updates multiple times per week; participate in live-streamed educational sessions about medicine and/or history; worship on Sunday mornings; teach college and medical students; participate in a hip-hop class; have "happy hour" with friends; celebrate my father in law's birthday; and eat Easter dinner "with" family. (We had ham, roasted asparagus, and black-eyed peas with spinach and onion.)

Portland: Oregon City

One day we rented a car to get out of Portland. First stop: Oregon City, which was the first capital of the Oregon Territory. Settled by a Mr. John McLaughlin of the Hudson Bay Company, it had the first courthouse west of the Rocky Mountains, which is why it was the end of the Oregon Trail (Dear Husband is sitting on the marker for the end of the trail). Not only did pioneers file their land claims there, but the original founding documents of San Francisco were also filed there. The town is crammed between some bluffs and the Willamette River (accent on the second syllable), eventually growing up and along both banks. 

This land was originally settled by the Clackamas and Kalapuya. They had a myth that two gods created the Willamette Falls by pulling a rope across the river. The drop is only 4 stories, but it is the second-largest waterfall in the United States by volume, behind only Niagara Falls. Because of all that hydraulic energy, the Falls became site of plants for timber, paper, wool, and electricity. Consequently, they are not scenic in the least, being surrounded by (mostly defunct) industrial buildings. There is a campaign to tear down the empty ones and build offices, homes, and a riverwalk instead. They reminded us of the theme of human interaction with nature from our Japanese Garden and Chinese Garden visits, albeit in the direction of making nature look worse rather than better.

 Although we stopped by the End of the Oregon Trail Museum in order to take pictures of the green and general store where pioneers typically ended their journey that had begun in Independence, Missouri, we chose to visit the decidedly less flashy Museum of the Oregon Territories, in an ugly little building from the 1980s across from the Willamette Falls. It was cheaper but offered 2 solid hours of education and diversion. The exhibits cover the earliest Native tribes, European settlement, natural resources as well as human industries, an old-time pharmacy display, and a rather thorough exhibit on early photography dedicated to both portraiture and documenting downtown Oregon City.

The blue globe is a hand grenade fire extinguisher. Yes, you read that correctly.

We also made a point of experiencing the United States’ only municipal elevator. It was originally built in 1912 of wood and required a 35-foot catwalk to get to the bluff across the railroad tracks. It was powered by water and took 3-5 minutes. There were a couple of scandals involved in its construction, including that Mrs. Clark didn’t want to sell the city access to her land, so they sued and won; the city also had to stack the water board in order to get access to the water system. As predicted, it significantly dropped the water pressure. In 1954, they rebuilt the elevator with steel and a tunnel under the railroad tracks. Now powered by electricity, the trip takes just 15 seconds each way. It’s completely free, and when we told the operator we were tourists, he gave us pamphlets and “I rode the Oregon City municipal elevator” stickers.

  

The building has a space-age feel, but it got a face lift just over a decade ago, with an old-timey map of the town on the floor tiles and lots and lots of holographic photographs on the walls that change depending on which angle you view them from. There were also helpful decals on the windows describing the views of Oregon City’s tiny but vibrant downtown and Mt. St. Helena and Mt. Hood in the distance. We used a coupon at Mesa Fresca for Peruvian/Mexican lunch before hitting the road. Destination: Multnomah Falls!