1
In 1977, at the time I came back to photograph the area where I grew up -- the mills and mill towns north of Pittsburgh, along the Ohio River and its tributary, the Beaver -- I didn’t know that way of life would soon go away. My intention was to portray the people who lived here, not by showing the people themselves, but by showing the objects on which they left their imprint. I thought of the images like stage settings after the players had exited, the lives themselves seen in afterimage. In a way it became prophetic, prescient, because in 10 years the mills were shut down and often leveled, the towns were struggling to survive, many of the people had moved away. A way of life gone, like smoke.
2
After I took the negatives, I put them away because I was unhappy with the prints I made from them -- too glossy, too Black & White. When I thought of Western Pennsylvania and the mill towns, I thought of gray, the heavily overcast days of autumn and winter, when the sky fits over the valleys’ hills like a lid, and all the colors are shades of gray: red-gray, blue-gray, green-gray. On gray days, the objects of the world stand in their own light, wrapped in their own shadows; things appear to glow with the intensity of their individual being. On gray days, the world has a luster, like steel. Rediscovering the negatives 25 years later was like finding the contents of a time capsule, artifacts from a defunct civilization. Which, in many ways, they are.
3
I remember growing up here, the ever-present smells of sulphur and fuel oil and coke. I remember the thick black smoke drifting through the streets, soot gathering in your outstretched hand or swirling in little whirlwinds along the sidewalk. I remember the constant rumble of machinery, the sounds of metal dropped on metal ringing like bells across the back yards, the heavy trucks straining with their loads through the narrow, tree-lined streets. I remember terms such as lunch pail and swing shift and blast furnace. I remember having to be quiet during the day if I went to Eddie’s house because his father was asleep; I remember the weariness like shellshock in Bill’s father’s eyes when he walked home from the mill, dirt etched into his face.
4
I remember growing up here, the ever-present smells of sulphur and fuel oil and coke. I remember the thick black smoke drifting through the streets, soot gathering in your outstretched hand or swirling in little whirlwinds along the sidewalk. I remember the constant rumble of machinery, the sounds of metal dropped on metal ringing like bells across the back yards, the heavy trucks straining with their loads through the narrow, tree-lined streets. I remember terms such as lunch pail and swing shift and blast furnace. I remember having to be quiet during the day if I went to Eddie’s house because his father was asleep; I remember the weariness like shellshock in Bill’s father’s eyes when he walked home from the mill, dirt etched into his face.
5
Once, as a teenager, I was led through a bar in West Aliquippa and down a back stairway to an unfinished basement, a few bare bulbs the only illumination along the dirt walls and exposed floor beams. Here the men of the Panthers Club chose sides and confronted each other in two long lines across the room. Tension was in the air as they sized each other up. Then one man from each side met in the center, staring into each other’s eyes, circling slowly. At some unseen signal or sign of advantage, each raised a clenched fist and threw it down, exposing a certain number of outstretched fingers as they shouted out their guess at the total.
“Quat-tro!”
“Cinque!”
“Se-i! Se-i! Se-i!”
I remember it was no game.
6
When I came back to photograph the area in the mid-70s, the mills and the mill towns were much the same as I remembered. As was the Panthers Club. My first day, after walking around “West Aliquip” for 15 minutes or so, I found myself surrounded by a group of middle-aged men. I explained I was a photographer, and mentioned the people I used to visit here; they decided I was okay, and even invited me down to the Club. One man, a little older and nattier than the rest, told me if anyone gave me trouble, I was to say “I’m a friend of Bananas.” And no one bothered me after that. Later, I found out the Panthers originally had me pegged as an FBI guy, looking for numbers runners
7
One evening I sat with Ted Krzemienski, my old high school buddy, downing beers at the Owls Club while we watched a pre-season Steelers game on television. Between plays Ted asked me again why the hell I was back here and what the hell I was trying to do. I tried to explain again about wanting to photograph the towns along the valleys, the places where people live and work here, the mills.
“I want to try to capture what’s special about this area, the way I remember it.”
Ted, who was working ten-hour days, six-day weeks at the B&W Tube Mill, kept his eye on the television, on a Terry Bradshaw-to-Lynn Swann pass, and said “I wouldn’t be in any hurry, Snots. This place ain’t going nowhere.”
Maybe what Ted was saying was that he wasn’t going anywhere. Because to all our surprise the place as we knew it did go somewhere. It went away.
8
While I was photographing that gritty world, it was easy to think of the mill as something of a monster, sucking the life out of its workers and spitting out the husks. Yet the older people I met usually spoke of it with reverence, as if the mill was their protector and benefactor -- which for many it was. Early one Sunday morning, photographing on the main street of Aliquippa, a stocky older woman named Stanka, dressed in a raincoat and babushka, waited patiently for me to finish what I was doing. She wanted to know why I went to so much trouble to take pictures of old buildings. When I told her I also took pictures of the mill, she beamed and touched a knotted hand to her heart…
9
Stanka came to America as a child and worked all her adult life in the tin shop at J&L. She never learned to read or write because there wasn’t time, though she was thinking of learning. She lived now, alone, on a pension in a little room, but she was happy: she could see the smoke stacks of her beloved mill above the top of her air well. When it came time to say good-by, she said “God bless you.” I joked, embarrassed, that I needed all the help I can get. She gripped my hand and said intently but without self-pity, “Oh, we all need help, life is very hard, very hard.”
“God bless you,” I said, wishing I thought that would help.
“God bless our J&L,” she smiled.
10
The camera was a Deardorff wooden view camera named Maggie Mae, mounted on a heavy tripod. Over one shoulder I carried a bag of film holders, and I wore the focusing cloth -- black on one side, white on the other -- like a shawl. It was certainly not a sneaky operation; in fact, it was something of a spectacle. But I went about the business that brought me here, the large cloth draped over Maggie and me, watching the images of my childhood hang upside down on the groundglass, while beyond the darkness of the cloth the world went by in the form of shoes and ankles and the occasional upturned face of a dog or child. I felt like Matthew Brady on the fields of Gettysburg; I suspected I looked like a five-legged ghost.
11
I photographed all the towns up and down the valleys, but I often found myself back in West Aliquippa because it seemed the embodiment of a mill town. It was a small shoebox of a town, eight blocks long and four blocks wide, surrounded on three sides by the Aliquippa Works and on the fourth by the embankment of the railroad tracks. When I first came here as a teenager to visit relatives of my Italian girlfriend, there was only one way in and one way out, a dark tunnel under the railroad tracks; 20 years later the tunnel had been replaced by a highway bridge over the tracks, but the result was the same: one way in, one way out. Unless you were headed for work at the mill.
12
Five years earlier, I had tried photographing in West Aliquippa, but it didn’t work out. I wore a long raincoat and blue Breton cap, trying to evoke the spirit of the great photographer Paul Strand. But the first time I set up my camera, half the men in the bar across the street came out after me, yelling in broken English that they didn’t want no foreigners around. It was understandable; it was Sunday afternoon and the Steelers were losing in the playoffs. This time I was more low-key: work boots and Levi’s, windbreaker, and watch cap. One day a street sweeper adopted me after hearing I was okay with the Panthers Club. He even offered me 10 bucks for film or wine. “But if you don’t take good pictures,” he said, taking my arm in an iron grip, “I’m coming after you.”
13
Walking around the streets of the mill towns yielded more than just photographs. One day a retired steelworker joined me on the curb in West Aliquippa, a small, bent old man named Pete. His face was permanently wrenched off-center from the time a load of steel fell on him and he could barely hear; he was dressed in his best windbreaker, because he set out purposefully that morning to talk to the “photo-grapher” he had seen around town. He told me about his long-time job in the blooming and slabbing mill, the way he used to catch a red hot bloom with a pair of tongs after it squeezed through the rollers, flip it over and send it back for another pass in the opposite direction. And he told me about the people....
14
Pete told me about his “old gent” who came over from the old country to work in the mills, and what it used to be like to live in “Aliquip” -- the company store and the whorehouses, the bootleggers and the strikebreakers and the Street of the Seven Oaks along the river. Among other things, he also provided a telling commentary on the different ethnic groups in the area and the attitude toward immigrants in general -- an attitude that evidently refused to die -- when he talked about the people who worked in the mill.
“You had your Hunkies like me, and your Eye-talians, your Slavs and of course your Polacks.” He cocked his mangled head to think if he left anyone out. “Oh yeah, and you had your Americans, too.”
15
Growing up, I learned what little I knew of ethnic origins when, as the teenage son of a well-to-do Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, I dated the daughter of a not-so-well-to-do Italian Catholic. At Christmas time I was led into her dining room to meet her eight uncles, mostly steelworkers, who sat around the table; they gave me my first three shots of straight whiskey to see if I was a man, and were less surprised than I was when I didn’t throw up all over them. Later on, her family took me to weddings and gatherings in West Aliquippa where I learned that national heritage is only unimportant if it’s not held against you. For reasons I never quite understood, I was known to her relatives as a "cake-eater" it was never said with humor or particular kindness. In turn, from the number of voices that sang along every time it played, I wondered facetiously if “Volaré” was the Italian national anthem.
16
One day as I lined up a picture with Maggie Mae in an alley in West Aliquippa, a man came out of his house to see what I was doing; after a few minutes, he remembered me from when I used to come here as a teenager with my girlfriend. He peeled an orange and asked me questions about the view camera and what I did for a living. Finally he said, “So, you’re still just kicking around, huh Dick?” But I pushed on and got myself invited inside. His wife plodded around the kitchen in an old house dress and bare feet, alternately stirring spaghetti sauce and ironing a shirt. Twenty years earlier she was like an aunt to me, but now she didn’t remember me. Or didn’t want to....
17
I tried not to appear too obvious as I looked around the downstairs of the house for images. They had remodeled the place in plastic and veneer, taking all the old country out of it, but I thought it might be interesting for my series on the area, if only for contrast. The mood was wrong and so were my intentions; they knew it better than I did. When I asked if they would mind if I took some pictures, the woman flew at me, clutching her dress about her, almost in tears: “What you do here? What do you want, to laugh at us? What you do here?”
As I drove out of town, sullen teenage boys stood on the street corners, watching my California license plates go by.
18
Oblivious as anyone else at that time that all I’m seeing will soon go away, I set up Maggie Mae on the main corner of West Aliquippa, at 10 o’clock on an overcast morning, and became not only a spectacle in the little town but an event. Welders on their break from a construction site at the mill piled out of the bed of a pickup truck and headed across the street to the Coffee Cup Restaurant, discussing in loud voices for my benefit whether or not I’m a surveyor. I demanded their attention with an upraised finger, showed them there was nothing up my sleeve, and whisked away the dark cloth to reveal the camera: Ta Da! They stood on the curb and applauded....
19
…Housewives scurried past, smiling shyly and patting their hair, saying things like “Be sure to get my house” and “Get them to tear that one down.” Old men came up one-by-one, showed me their retirement watches with the years of service on the back, and told me stories. A guard from the mill stopped me and, instead of a reprimand, said, “Weren’t you down on the main street last Sunday taking some pictures?” When I said yes, he grinned and said happily, “Wait till I tell my wife I met the nut!” A steelworker my own age parked his clunker of a Ford directly in my way, dared me with a look to say anything about it, and went inside the corner bar. My people.
20
Pittsburgh works to reinvent itself with robotics and software. The area remains the specialty steel center of the world, but smoky skies no longer apply. Neither does the phrase “Hell with the lid off,” nor the favorite catch phrase of out-of-down sportscasters, “The Steel City.” People who come here are surprised at the blue skies, the beautiful city, the clean air. Outside contractors and relocated businesses are amazed at the work ethic; to the people who remain, hard work is their heritage. The towns and the way of life I photographed no longer exist as they did. But their afterimage remains. Haunts those of us who choose to live here. Drifting ghost-like along the rivers, vaporous against the hills. Refuses to die. Surprisingly, can fill us still with pride.
21
In his book on the decline of the American steel industry, And the Wolf Finally Came, John Hoerr says, “It takes a curious empathy for smoke, fire, dirt, roaring machines, and the people who tend them to become fond of a steel mill.” I never worked in the mills, my family wasn’t part of the mills; but the mills were a part of me. The mills were mystical places, sitting like castles along the rivers, looming over the little towns that huddled at their gates; or they were facts of life, dominating the surrounding towns like mountains or an ocean would. At night the mills twinkled with galaxies of lights, the furnaces glowed as if the world had split open to show its molten core. The mills were unrelenting, demanding as a dream.
|