I grew up about 30-35 miles north of Pittsburgh. At night you could always tell which way was south because the southern sky glowed red from the mills. In the winters you could also tell you were near Pittsburgh because within 3 days of any snowfall there was a coating of soot on the snow at even that distance. Sometimes, even in the daytime, there was a black wreak in the southern sky. We really didn't think much of it. A lot of us ended up making a living for young families by working for fabricators and other suppliers of those mills that produced that glow. My generation was the last. That's a different issue.
As a boy, sixty years ago, we used to go to Pittsburgh to visit my Step-Dad's family and neighborhood. It was a cool trip most of which you can still make though the mills are gone along with their pyrotechnics. The route is a little different now but you still go on Crosstown Blvd to Second Ave. That brings you under the bluffs Duquesne University occupies. There was and is this huge, concrete retaining wall. They just refurbished it last year. It's got to be well over 100,000 yards of concrete. I was amazed by the thing then and I still am today. I'd be surprised if the refurbishment didn't take longer than building the thing originally. I can find no date for it's construction. It's gotta be shortly after WWII. I will say the reading trying to find a date is interesting. Or, I get bored so you don't have to. I enjoyed it.
Second Avenue brought you to the old J and L Steel works. I know this section of Second Av was redone in 1954 because the B&O railroad overpass still bares that date. That graphic is done in blue tinted concrete. I wonder how they did that? It hasn't faded or changed in 60 years I can think of.
The Jones and Laughlin Steel works sprawled across the Monongahela River. The Southside Works stretched for over two miles. The two sections were connected by the Hot Metal Bridge. It was spectacular at night. It carried crucibles filled with molten iron from the blast furnaces along 2nd Avenue to the Southside Works. It was flat cars drawn by steam locomotives. The crucibles would glow red from the heat of the iron. The bridge carried up to 180 tons an hour. It's safe to say it will be there for quite some time. To a young boy it was fascinating and I often wondered if it wasn't what hell must look like. Later in life I worked in a bronze foundry. I didn't like that much and it certainly seemed like parts of that employment were paying the wages of sin. My joke was, the time cards weighed 40 pounds. The pay check wasn't bad really but the foundry itself was pyrotechnicly spectacular as well.
Then you came to the blast furnaces themselves. Just amazing! From the outside you saw these four 60-80 foot stacks. At the top they flared off stack gases in 25-35 foot plumes. Enough in one hour to heat every home in the Pittsburgh area for a year or longer and they burned 24 hours a day every day for nearly 80 years. There's a carbon footprint for ya. I do have to think they should have created a wasteland extending to Three Mile Island but they didn't. Think about that.
Then you made a left and got Dahn the Run. Saline Street. It was a little world unto itself. The language was a patois of Slav and English as were the customs. It was a neighborhood made up, in those days, of post WW I immigrants from eastern Europe. They came to work in the adjacent steel works and they brought their culture with them. The center of that culture was and is St John Chrysostom Byzantine Rite Catholic Church. It's an impressive place. Outside it's more than ordinary but inside the illuminations, iconography and frescoes are just eye-popping. The pageantry of the services for the various holidays is something to behold. When you come in the door you see banks of votive candles and on the wall behind and above is a life size, realistic Crucifix. It's inspiring and absolutely brutal in it's depiction of the suffering of Christ. The guy looks dead. I read somewhere that second and third world religious art was so often brutal in it's depictions because day to day life was so brutal the art had to be almost gruesome to make a dent. Think about that.
In those days that church operated on the Julian Calendar. That made us the luckiest of children. Our parents who had moved away and become assimilated celebrated Christmas with the rest of the country on the Gregorian Calendar and then two weeks later we went to their childhood homes and did it all over again. Two Christmases a year! And Dahn the Run, in those days, it was full on Christmas . Carolers, Midnight Mass and best of all, a second crop of aunts and uncles placing a second crop of gifts under the tree. Avarice doesn't occur to someone confronted with copious plenty. That might be a lesson worthy of wider teaching.
There was another feature. After barely staying awake thru Midnight Mass you returned for Holy Night Dinner. Because Christmas Eve was a Black Fast, very often the adults had not eaten all day. The dinner consisted of a ritual procession of delicacies. It was summed up with a taste of honey to keep you sweet, a piece of garlic to keep you healthy and a dram, even for the children, of whiskey to keep you happy in the coming year. It wasn't until 30 years later I learned the whiskey of choice in that household was rye. I was always a bourbon drinker until I tasted rye again. I drank rye for 10 years after I re-tasted it. There's a mystic cord of memory for ya.
So massive architecture, heavy industry, religious illumination, ritual, family tradition and just a wee taste. I recommend the journey.
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