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 There was a black-smith demonstration, an interactive spray-paint station, and a musician (the fiddler had been replaced by a classical guitarist by the time my tour had ended).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

Family Vacation at the Lake, Part 2 of 2

This year for family vacation we congregated at Lake Wylie, a 12,455-acre lake created by a hydroelectric dam on the Catawba River at Fort Mill along the North-South Carolina border. In 1904, the Catawba Power Company built the first dam, which was razed by the Southern Power Company (now Duke Energy) in 1924. It was named for one of the original power company founders, W. Gil Wylie, in 1960. There are both coal- and nuclear-powered stations on the lake today.

Two traditions on these trips are renting boats for tooling around the lake, swimming, and fishing, and shooting off model rockets.

To the left, Dear Husband caught me reading the book I am reviewing this summer, on the history of diabetes and race. Below, my mother watches the other boat. We lost an anchor and never did find the sandbar that was supposed to allow for wading in the middle of the lake, but it was a gorgeous day to be on the water any way.

ME made colorful t-shirts for the rocket launch that took place on some empty ballfields at a public park. This year as last year, we lost 2 rockets into the trees. But we missed all the planes flying overhead to and from the nearby airport, so not having traffic control call the feds on us for invading their airspace was a definite plus.

It's the "outlaws"! (Not pictured: Dear Husband or DH.)

And then there was miniature golf on a well-maintained course.

(Yes, they dye the water blue.)

It sprinkled on us a little, but that was a lot better than the hot and/or crowded trips we've had previous summers. Plus, there were all these benches with umbrellas if you wanted shelter.

It rained a little bit every day we were there. The last evening there was a rainbow.

What a good-looking family!
These visits are never long enough.

Click here for Part 1.

Family Vacation at the Lake, Part 1 of 2

For the last 5 years or so, my father's side of the family has started vacationing together again, like we did every other year when I was growing up. We've been renting houses at various lakes in Virginia and North Carolina for swimming, fishing, boating, cooking, doing puzzles, playing games, shooting off rockets, competing at miniature golf, and watching movies together. Here are some older posts: 2019 at Smith Mountain Lake, 2020 at Lake Anna, 2021 at Lake Anna.

We all stayed in this massive house with 7 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, a pool, a jacuzzi, and a double-decker boat dock. The fish weren't biting (except for the big one that got away the last night), but several of us kayaked and/or paddle-boarded for the first time. We completed 3 puzzles and watched 3 movies (Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2 and Blazing Saddles).

One of the nicer features of the house was a collection of hummingbird feeders off the back deck, so we could watch the birds flit around and feed. Unfortunately, I never could get a good picture of them.

There were engagement and housewarming gifts for NE and CC. And we celebrated C(LR)E's birthday with cupcakes and ice cream cake.

We played so many games: Code Names, Train Dominoes, Monopoly, Exploding Kittens, and Unstable Unicorns. We also did a "mystery box" that involved a series of logic puzzles to figure out who was committing murder on an island in the middle of a nor'easter! 

Stay tuned for Part 2.

The Furniture Wedding Anniversary

Dear Husband and I have just celebrated 17 years of marriage. Did you know that on the 17th anniversary you are supposed to buy each other furniture? That means we've celebrated many times over since we moved into our new house in late March! God blessed us with beautiful weather to have some church friends over for a cookout/potluck on our anniversary this year. Beforehand, I went through the memory boxes in the attic to pull out items to show them.

I found the Feng Shui for the perfect wedding book that my maid of honor got us!

(We got married on the auspicious date of 8/6.)

I still had an old Baltimore Sun Travel article on Denver, and the whole issue from August 8, which is the day we left for our honeymoon. (Why? I don't know anymore and recycled them both.)

This was our invitation set; the seashell stands out better

on the stone engraving one of his relatives got us as a creative gift.

I consider this beautiful blue buffet our anniversary gift to each other.

Here is a page from our wedding album and handwritten

"Sweet Memories" of our engagement on July 19, 2004, at the Outer Banks.

We still have a copy of the wedding program in Howard Nash's inimitable style.

We were even in the newspaper! DH's mother put an announcement in their local paper

and laminated a couple copies for posterity.

I still have several dozen custom party favors: a paper with our names and the name with the edges cut like driftwood, a seashell, some paper "bear grass," real baby's breath, and a loop of ribbon. Thank goodness for SH's design and hot glue-gun skills! I encouraged our guests to take one.

At the last minute, I grabbed my wedding dress and draped it over the bed. The only thing that got a better response all night was opening the door to the full-sized cedar closet!

My bridesmaids decorated the door of our hotel room in the middle of the night! 

I found it stashed at the bottom of a box and put it on the front door of the house.

We honeymooned in Denver and Estes Park, Colorado. DH had wanted to travel to Spain, and I wanted to visit Italy, but we didn't have time to cross the Atlantic and still get back to pick up the keys to our apartment, so we chose Denver in order to "collect" Coors Field, where the Rockies play baseball. This trip started the tradition of visiting a botanical garden and an art museum on vacation. We also toured the State Capitol, Mile High Stadium (we touched the grass!), and the aquarium.

This is the photo collage my grandmother made that hung in her house until we bought our own.

No one who celebrated with us knew us back then, so it was really wonderful to share this part of our lives with them. Just like it took a small army to put on the wedding and its associated events, so these are "our people" now. We had a lovely time grilling, sharing salads, and finishing DH's birthday ice cream cake with them.