In early 2014, colleagues in the media relations department at the University of Pittsburgh forwarded to me a voicemail they said was from an independent journalist looking for information on the communities of Pittsburgh’s Mon Valley, once one of the primary centers of steel production in southwestern Pennsylvania. The query was common; the unending plight of the former industrial region defined by the lower Monongahela River remained a recurring topic for writers after it became the nexus of US deindustrialization in the 1980s. Once the most concentrated steelmaking region in the United States—where serial entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie began his last and most successful business commodifying steel production—the Mon Valley saw the bulk of its heavy industry shut down over just a few years in the early 1980s. Recurring stories of the area’s collective plight have evolved into a distinct literary genre: ruin porn, or maybe a more apropos description for greater Pittsburgh and its environs: rust porn. Writers looking for background information on the history and current conditions in Pittsburgh’s most struggling communities were often redirected my way.
Listening to the message, I quickly realized the request was from someone who definitively did not need any basic primer on either the decline of the steel industry or the history of the Mon Valley. From the 1950s through the 1980s, John Hoerr was one of the nation’s preeminent labor reporters—a beat that has become virtually extinct in the modern era. His professional career covered the critical decades that transformed the US steel industry from the dominant global leader to a chronic patient struggling to revive. His 1988 book And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry remains for many of us the authoritative history of the breakdown in labor-industry relations and its destructive impact on the competitiveness of the US steel industry. John was also a native of McKeesport, the Mon Valley’s largest city and the second-largest municipality in southwestern Pennsylvania for the bulk of the twentieth century. The trauma of McKeesport and its neighboring mill towns was embedded within his broader narrative tracing the contraction of the steel industry, which Hoerr had chronicled as it was taking place.
Hoerr was cycling back, intending to write again on the ongoing plight of the region where he grew up. He was seeking an answer to why revitalization and redevelopment had failed to come to his hometown a generation past the steel industry’s regional nadir. I was fortunate enough to begin a conversation with him in the year before he passed in 2015, unfortunately too soon for him to complete his project. Our conversations broadened to a far more universal topic: Why do some communities, or even whole regions, sustain growth while others do not? In recent years, Pittsburgh has garnered ever more headlines proclaiming that it has successfully transitioned from industrial anachronism to a paragon of technology-based economic development, a hagiography that simplifies a far more conflicted path. What John knew better than most was that headlines fail to tell a complete story.
And the Wolf Finally Came suggests to some a counterfactual—that if relations between labor and management in the steel industry had not devolved so completely in the decades leading up to the 1980s, the US steel industry could have maintained its competitiveness. Even if true, the corollary many assume that Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley could have simultaneously retained the corpus of their legacy steel production begs a harsher economic reality. Pittsburgh’s competitiveness as a location to produce steel had been in decline long before the 1980s.
Southwestern Pennsylvania has long since been passed over as the region best positioned for new investment in steel production. Today, future prospects for greater Pittsburgh are decoupled from the prospects of the steel industry, a reality that remains difficult to accept for a region identified for so long with the once monolithic industry.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, I saw the collapse of the region’s heavy industry reach its apogee when I was a young teenager in the early 1980s. Before that decline arrived, I spent some of my earlier childhood on Pittsburgh’s South Side, an entire neighborhood that existed literally in the shadow of the massive South Side Works of the Jones & Laughlin Company. For over a century, a vast steel complex had spanned both sides of the Monongahela River within line of sight of Downtown Pittsburgh. As I was growing up, no living resident could have had any memory of the neighborhood’s existence independent of the plant. For me, an almost daily trip involved crossing the river as a passenger on the Port Authority’s 54C bus, traversing the Brady Street Bridge, and crossing the Monongahela River into the center of the city. The bridge’s midpoint provided the optimal vantage point to view the still-extant orange glow emanating from blast furnaces hugging the riverbanks. If only J&L’s South Side had shut down, it would have been a devastating blow to the economy of both the city and region of Pittsburgh. When it closed in the mid-1980s, the shutdown of steel production at J&L, by then fully absorbed into the LTV Corporation, was only one small part of a far vaster contraction of the regional steel industry.
On the ground, the rapid collapse of so much of Pittsburgh’s industrial core early in the 1980s was a shock so unexpected it was disorienting. Only decades later, in graduate school, I learned of research completed in the 1960s predicting the future decline of heavy industry in Pittsburgh with fatalistic accuracy. What seemed a complete surprise was predicted in the Economic Study of the Pittsburgh Region, a four-year project taken up by University of Pittsburgh economists Edgar M. Hoover and Ben Chinitz between 1960 and 1964. That Pittsburgh had the opportunity to alter its seemingly predestined trajectory long before it arrived remains a muted point in Pittsburgh’s history, as if the region wants to forget that it failed to heed the dire warnings. Trying to understand why repeated prognostications of steel’s future decline in the region were so consistently ignored was the genesis of my book.
Pittsburgh’s transformation is incomplete, uneven, and ongoing. Every story of technology-based resurgence is matched by an underreported story of the failure of many of the region’s former mill towns, unable to rebuild past prosperity. Despite oft-repeated stories of how Pittsburgh worked collectively to shed the occluded air that gave it a multi-century description as the “Smoky City,” the region regularly registers some of the most polluted air in the nation. Pittsburgh has likewise failed to find any solution to deep and exceptional levels of racial disparities, a blight that has persisted through both periods of economic growth and decline, suggesting causal forces that go far deeper than the story of steel’s rise and fall.
The region’s economic implosion of the 1980s was a moment of reckoning that forced Pittsburgh and its environs to address compound dysfunctions simultaneously. Loss of industry begat a loss of population and workers that would reshape regional demographics for decades into the future. At the same time, the region was left with a surfeit of heavily polluted industrial land needing reclamation and repurposing on an unprecedented scale. New jobs would eventually be generated across a range of industries, but they would not appear quickly. Resilience came slowly but steadily across a range of industries, most notably in educational and health industries. Then, early in the twenty-first century, new technology was applied to ancient shale deposits in Pennsylvania, jumpstarting an energy revolution and recreating for Pittsburgh yet another boom generated from extractive mining industries.
These vectors of change have converged to define modern Pittsburgh. Any transformation that has come to Pittsburgh first required moving on from a steel-dependent economy, a shift far more difficult than is commonly believed today. Today, the battle between visions of old and new Pittsburgh has reemerged with vengeance, as debates rage over where the region will find prosperity in the future. Many of Pittsburgh’s old battles are new again.
Reprinted with permission from Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation by Christopher P. Briem, published by Kent State University Press. © 2026 by Kent State University. All rights reserved.
