An Essay About the Present Status of my Hometown ☀
Braddock, Pennsylvania: Out of the Furnace and into the Fire
“Statistically speaking, Braddock is an outlier among outliers. I don’t know of any other place in the rust belt that had a 90 percent population loss,” Fetterman notes, on one of the countless tours he gives to anyone who will listen. He goes on, “Pittsburgh, for instance, still has an economy. So the powers that be there are trying to break the unions and reorganize the city’s finances. We don’t even have finances.”
Braddock’s existence is a legacy of the Edgar Thompson Steel Works, which in 1875 was the first major steel mill built in the country. Many more mills were subsequently built in the Monongahela Valley, making it the world capital of steel production. Today, however, the Edgar Thompson is the last one still running in the valley, a lonely survivor of the U.S. steel industry’s crisis in the 1980s. Though Braddock was originally built up to house the mill’s workers, none of the mill’s nine hundred odd remaining employees today still live there. “The mills’ principal contribution to the town at this point is, well, pollution,” says Fetterman of the steel plant, visible from the top floor of his home. He adds, “Braddock has the highest rate of child asthma in the region.”
The town has fewer than 3,000 residents left, according to the 2000 census (down from a peak population of 20,879), many of whom are elderly or struggling with health issues, addiction, or poverty. For those who remain, Braddock has little to offer in the way of work. Indeed, many of the town’s few remaining jobs are filled by blue-collar commuters from Pittsburgh or the suburbs.
Lifelong Pittsburgh resident and postal worker Leanne O’Connor describes commuting to work in Braddock: “The post office had transferred me to work out of the location on the far edge of Braddock. Taking the bus there to work up Braddock Ave. every day the driver would always tell me I should try to work somewhere different, that it was too dangerous for me here.” Leanne took him up on his advice, after being mugged at knifepoint on that bus the following week.
“When I was a little kid in the eighties, whenever my family drove through Braddock on our way somewhere I’d be amazed. All the abandoned buildings, I’d never seen anything like that,” O’Connor remembers. “My parents just told me, ‘this is a ghost town.’”
Actually, Braddock was my birth place and where I spent the first 10 years of my life. After my third grade of elementary school, we moved to a city suburb of Pittsbugh that was fairly close by. It was a tough urban community, and I remember (in an era before Circle K and 7-Eleven chains propagated) of three general stores within walking distance, only one at a given time was open, as the others would be boarded up after burglaries. It was also odd that I was a minority in a minority area — there was one other white kid in my class, but his parents plucked him out of public school and enrolled him in a private institution.
While it was rough edged back in my childhood, I drove through last year on my way to Kennywood (an amusement park on the other side of the Monongahela River) when we took a trip back to visit family (very few in my family have ever departed Pittsburgh). It looked like a war zone. The grafitti, abdandoned buildings, structures half torn down, crumbling roads — it looked like a CNN war report from Bosnia or Iraq.
My parents grew up in neighboring Rankin, PA which is even more economically distraught. My father, uncles, cousins, etc.… all worked in the steel mills. My own coming of age would see apex of the steel industry prominence in America eclipse, as beginning in the late 1970s, steelworkers fell on hard times, replete with layoffs and the end of an era. A period from post WWII where workers with nary a high school education could nab a job at the mill. A position that while by no stretch could be confused with the affluence of professional middle class, would support a family and enable the stay-at-home mom.
Family elders would reminisce on stories their parents, uncles and grandparents passed down to them — strikers attacked by robber baron Carnegie’s private armies, workers dropping dead on the job and then being heartlessly deposited on the home doorstep, the gains that the unions fought for, etc.…
A few years after graduating college, I spent a little time in Flint, Michigan area, not long after GM scaled back its employment there — cutting ~80% of its employees. It was the subject of Michael Moore’s first movie. And it reminded me of Braddock.
As the U.S. auto industry implodes, lots of places in America might end up looking like Braddock.
PBS Newshour also did a recent piece on Braddock, with online video on the rust belt attempting to attract green jobs.
