A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead (review)

Everytime I see another project that focuses on Homestead, the Monongahela River town which once was the linchpin of Andrew Carnegie’s empire of iron and steel, I’m reminded of a Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson. Glancing out his window, a native notices outsiders approaching and shouts “Anthropologists! Anthropologists!” while two of his tribesmen hurriedly hide their television, VCR, and telephone. Homestead has been so scrutinized by scholars, filmmakers, journalists, and activists that its residents have developed an extraordinary level of self-consciousness about themselves and their town They seem to anticipate the soundbytes or anecdotes their interrogators seek. Their relative sophistication as the subjects of scrutiny poses a number of problems for an outsider trying to understand the trauma caused by the steel industry’s collapse. Not the least of these obstacles is the tendency to romanticize Homestead’s past now that the mill which dominated its landscape and their lives has disappeared.

Armed with a tape recorder, camera, an understanding of Homestead’s recorded past, and a commitment to listen, Judith Modell and Charlee Brodsky spent the better part of a decade, beginning in 1986, attempting to understand the complex ways in which steelworkers, their families, and townspeople responded to the crisis wrought by deindustrialization By asking people to pull out their family snapshots and talk about their lives, by walking around the town’s different neighborhoods, and by photographing their subjects, Modell and Brodsky elicited a complex, sometimes jarring, and above all brutally honest set of responses.

These interviews and photos, as well as Modell’s probing discussion of them, form A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead. Whatever self-consciousness, reticence, or inclination to dissemble people in Homestead might have initially displayed, Judith Modell and her collaborator, photographer Charlee Brodsky, ultimately overcame these barriers. They did so by their straightforwardness, persistence, and willingness to listen as people poured out their anger, despair, hopes, joys, and perceptions. Rather than hide their VCRs and televisions upon spotting these anthropologists, Homesteaders welcomed them into their homes. In the process, they revealed more about themselves than they probably realized or intended to upon their first encounters.

Modell and Brodsky used Margaret Byington’s Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974) and the wonderful photographs by Lewis Hine which documented her findings for the Pittsburgh Survey in 1908 and 1909 as a point of comparison. These two collaborative projects are separated by over 80 years, during which the steel industry which defined Homestead reached its peak and then collapsed. While Modell and Brodsky worked on their project, the mill came down, replaced by a wide open space filled with weeds and debris. Both pairs of investigators sought to understand not only the men who made steel, but the community it created and especially the women who were invariably missing from portraits of work in the mill. Both respected the dignity of these men and women while appreciating their often desperate vulnerability to industrial forces beyond their control.

Modell and Brodsky used photographs, those belonging to Homesteaders and the ones Brodsky took, to help people move beyond the familiar saga of steel and the work of men, to a larger, more variegated set of stories in which women and the hearth come into focus. By asking people to talk about their reaction to the mill’s closing, they sought to explore how people felt and thought about themselves and “the core aspects” of their town’s and their own identity. People responded, exposing their own fears in conversations that must have been cathartic. Given the chance to talk and reflect about themselves and their community, they presented a set of often conflicting personal, neighborhood, and workplace histories.

Modell lets them explain these inter-related histories in their own words. But she doesn’t accept them at face value. She challenges and questions their remembrances, confronting the idealized Homestead constructed out of memories, wistfulness, and anxiety as the years recede with the messier and more...