A Town without Steel: Envisioning Homestead Book

In the tradition of Walker Evans and James Agee, who depicted the ravaging effects of the Great Depression in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, anthropologist Judith Modell and photographer Charlee Brodsky combine words and images to document the heroism of ordinary people in the face of disaster. They take as their subject the closing of one of the world's most famous and productive steel mills, the Homestead Works, once the main employer of the people of Homestead, Pennsylvania. Documented at the turn of the century by Margaret Byington and Lewis Hine in Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, this town seven miles from Pittsburgh was "cluttered, crowded, smoky," and thriving. In townspeople's reminiscences, Modell hears the rough stories of mill work forged into near myth: "Like Paul Bunyan tales, these were tales of extremes: the heat, the size of machinery, the endless hours, the flaring tempers." By the late 1980s, citizens were nostalgic for the sooty skies that meant prosperity. "Once people were buying T-bone steaks," comments a disappointed shopkeeper, "and now they're buying jumbo [bologna]." Brodsky's photos record the dismantling of town life. Her images of the mill--demolished iron works and quiet smokestacks, the blackened bones of a factory raw and empty in the bright postindustrial sunlight--convey Homestead's painful idleness. Modell doesn't retreat from this state of affairs, but neither does she allow it to stand alone. She elicits from her subjects stories that include the work of women, the joy of weddings and births, and the traditions of the town's many ethnic groups. In these non-mill stories, Modell finds a source of hope. "Residents recreated a core of life apart from steel," she explains in closing, and "upon this core, a new community can be imagined." --Maria Dolan Read More