‘We’re Just in Trouble’ : Steel Towns’ Mettle Tested as the Industry Staggers

The ambulance is gathering dust. The keys to the three police cars are locked in a safe. The jail doors are open. Many street lights are dark. Potholes are everywhere.

“It’s sad when a town goes broke,” said Pauline M. Branik, city clerk in the nearly empty town hall. “It’s sickening. And it’s going to get worse.”

Up the valley in Homestead, only six police officers--a third of the former force--still patrol. Only two of 10 firemen are left. Boarded-up shops and “for sale” signs dot the streets. Come October, this town too may go out of business.

“We’re just in trouble,” said borough council President Joseph R. Little. “We’ve been going down, down, down.”

Over in West Homestead, the four new car dealers are gone. The elegant 84-year-old municipal building has been condemned. Taxes are up 25%, property values down by a third.

But there is hope: The borough won $776 last week in Pennsylvania’s $1-million lottery.

“When we win ($1 million), the first thing I’ll do is give employees a raise,” said West Homestead’s $78-a-month mayor, John J. Dindak. “No one has had a raise in five years.”

Such are the financial woes and social throes of America’s dying steel towns. Once these communities were the prosperous homes of a mighty industry. Now many are struggling to survive, as mill after mill cuts back sharply or closes forever.

For mile after mile along the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers around Pittsburgh, dozens of once-booming foundries and furnaces stand silent and empty, giant rusting relics surrounded by tall weeds and debris.

This is the buckle on the Rust Belt. With less tax revenue coming in, town after town desperately slashed services. Unemployment skyrocketed. So did local taxes. Young people fled. Schools were shut. Downtowns became ghost towns.

“It’s about as bad as it could be,” said Michael Weber, an urban historian and dean of the graduate school at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. “And I don’t think there’s any hope. These towns are essentially dead. It’s just a matter of time before they close.”

100 Towns ‘Hit Hard’

“At least 100 municipalities have been hit hard,” said James Cunningham, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied the region’s blue-collar river communities.

“If there’s a dominant characteristic of this region, it’s shrinkage--population, public revenues, students and schools, high-paying jobs and full-time jobs,” Cunningham said.

Steel is to blame. The industry has been battered since the late 1970s by foreign competition, non-union mini-mills, dwindling domestic demand, antiquated equipment and inefficient production.

Steel workers were once the nation’s highest-paid industrial workers, but half of them have lost their jobs since 1980. The toll is worse here around Pittsburgh--five out of every six steel workers lost their jobs; more than 100,000 have been idled in all.

A Bitter Dispute

Many of the survivors are now manning picket lines in a bitter 10-day-old labor dispute between the United Steelworkers Union and the USX Corp., the nation’s largest steelmaker. The second-largest steelmaker, the LTV Corp., filed for protection in bankruptcy court last month.

On Friday, USX announced that it was cutting salaries for its non-union workers by 10%; the day before, LTV and smaller Armco Inc. announced the closing of six steel plants in the Midwest.

The picture here isn’t all bleak. Once famous as the “Smoky City,” Pittsburgh switched successfully from smokestack to service industries. Universities and hospitals are now the largest employers.

Several hard-hit smaller towns like Aliquippa and Duquesne have organized to attract new businesses by offering tax incentives and state grants. And many towns use volunteers from local churches to help trim grass, pick up trash and answer phones. But the long-term problems persist.

Major Disruption

“Mill towns, acting alone, are simply unable to effect the changes needed to capitalize on their resources and provide for their citizens in these times of major economic disruption,” a recent study of 32 west Pennsylvania mill towns by Carnegie-Mellon University concluded.

About 10,000 steel workers once worked at the Edgar Thomson steel works in Braddock, east of Pittsburgh, for example. Only a few hundred jobs are left, and the borough now “suffers from 37% unemployment,” said borough secretary Hyman Haffner.

Braddock’s elaborate stone Carnegie Library, built in 1889 and the oldest Carnegie Library in the nation, is boarded up except for a single room open four hours a week. The downtown is deserted: In one block alone, Mary Ann’s Used Furniture, Zephyr Cleaners, Cuda’s Foods, Wong’s Laundry, Jean’s Pizza and Beyer TV are shut.

“Most of the people here are either pensioners or kids waiting to leave,” said Kerry Fritzius, 39, a Braddock mailman.

Only 600 Jobs Left

In nearby McKeesport, only 600 jobs are left of about 9,000 at two steel plants. Nearly half of the homes are owned by retirees. And nearly half of the city employees have been laid off.

“Our public works department is down from 66 in 1980 to 27 today,” said James G. Humanic, town administrator. “Our fire department is down to 37 from 54. We’ve got 42 police, about half what we had before. “

“It’s devastating,” said Dennis K. E. Pittman, community development director. “You do more with less. But at some point you can’t operate.”

A federally funded free lunch and breakfast program for children begun last year will serve 100,000 meals this summer.

“The need is tremendous,” said David G. Donato, head of both McKeesport’s school board and recreation department. “We’re not even sure these kids are getting one meal a day.”

‘A Gravy Train’

Across the Monongahela River, the giant Homestead Works once employed 20,000. One of the world’s largest steel plants, Homestead fired steel for America’s bridges and dams, rolled armor plate for her wars, and forged girders for the Empire State Building in New York and the Sears Tower in Chicago.

“This was the steel capital of the world,” said Homestead Mayor Steve Simko, 63, a steel worker for 43 years. “We were blessed by having 65% of our taxes paid by U.S. Steel. Plus, we sold half a million dollars of water to them every year. It was a gravy train.”

No longer. The last few Homestead steel workers were laid off last month. And USX (the new name for U.S. Steel) has asked the town to cut its property taxes in half--now about $353,000, down from about $700,000--because the plant is closed.

“Council says by October there won’t be any money to pay policemen,” Simko said. “How they can lay off police when there are 52 bars, I don’t know.”

‘We’re All Broke’

Borough officials said one hope is for struggling towns to merge to combine services. That doesn’t sit well with neighboring West Homestead Police Chief Chester A. Wrobel. He believes beggars should be choosy.

“Why merge with them?” said Wrobel, 49, who does double duty as building inspector. “We’re all broke. You put 10 zeros together, you still got zero.”

West Homestead officials say they have lost $300,000 in annual taxes since the giant Mesta Machine Co., a world-famous maker of large equipment, closed in 1983. About 4,000 people lost their jobs. Only a fraction of the plant is working today, under a new owner.

“I remember when it was so smoky at noon, you couldn’t see the sun,” said Dick Jenningo, 55, a West Homestead steel worker for 33 years. “And at night, the mills lit everything up. It was never dark. Those were the happy days. Everybody had a buck in their pocket.”

Waiting for Jackpot

It was Mayor Dindak’s idea back in December, 1984, for West Homestead to play the state lottery. Each borough employee was encouraged to kick in $2 a month, and officials now buy $24 worth of tickets a week. They’re still waiting to hit the million-dollar jackpot.

“It’s OK--we’re a gambling town,” explained Wayne Cunningham, 31, council vice president. “I once streaked down Main Street on a bet.”

Few are betting on Clairton, a gritty river city of 10,000 dug into hard-scrabble hills about 15 miles south of Pittsburgh. The town ran out of money last summer after U.S. Steel closed most of its huge Clairton coke works.

“This year we’ll probably make it to October before we run out,” said City Clerk Branik.

All 12 Clairton police officers were dismissed last September. Their offices and jail are empty, their squad cars locked in a garage. Six state troopers now enforce state law in the town. No one is empowered to enforce local ordinances.

“The whole town’s just going to hell,” said state Trooper Earl Lash, 43, before patrolling the downtown. “I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

What they’ve done is cut to the bone. Ambulance service was eliminated. Crossing guards were fired. Public works, public safety, recreation--all gone. Street lights were turned off. Two dozen firemen, clerks and streets employees were protected by contract and couldn’t be fired.

“We just didn’t pay them,” Branik said.