HAVE YOU SEEN ME: Open Hearth - Youngstown, O. 2016
Where did this legendary Steel Street bar’s sign end up? 💰 Reward if found, maybe I can have one of the faces and donate the other one to the steel museum. Is it under the new sign? Down the basement of the bar? BFI landfill? I called a buddy of mine that knows the new owners when it was renamed but never wound up hooked up w them. The new bar might be done, I think the city was trying to close it as a nuisance.
I think had a shot and a beer at every bar on Steel Street. Haven’t been to the one at the corner on Mahoning since it’s been Sons of Italy but was when it was My Way. Had the lamb at Dubic’s, had the Saturday chicken at the OH once on a solo trip. Been to the Catholic War Vets and the AMA club with Smitty, been to Cedar’s plenty. A fraction of the bars there back in the day I think.
Lake Erie and Eastern RR // Youngstown Sheet & Tube Brier Hill Works circa 2008 give or take.
Curious about what purpose this rail spur that ran off the LE&E over to Sheet & Tube served. On the Sanborn map (fig. 4) it looks like it was an elevated trestle that ended at the pump house [pump house intake (fig. 2)]. Maybe the “DS” sign (fig. 5) is a clue?
ORIGINAL CONTENT: New Castle Refractories Co. - New Castle, PA 2016. The plant was built in 1910, photographed a week before they knocked it down. Looks like they almost made it 100 years, see below. “NOTICE TO ALL EMPLOYEES
March 5, 2009
The decision has been made that effective March 5th, 2009 the New Castle Refractories Plant will be permanently shut down. There will be limited production during the month of March and those employees immediately affected will be notified by mail.
John A. Castilano
COO
Resco Products, Inc. Refractories Co. - New Castle, PA
POPS: My steel haulin son of a steelworker dad gave me the Youngstown Sheet & Tube pipe flag that hung from the rafters in the center of our garage growing up. It’s where his dad worked for 35 years. I’m trying to step up my dad game and since we don’t have a garage (or a driveway - they weren’t thinking big picture in 1898) the basement will do.
The white sign on the left is from Copperweld Steel where my mom’s dad put in 33 years.
The other pipe flags I got off of @steel_valley_artifacts with the exception of the Armco one.
SHARED: The Business & Media Archives of the Mahoning Valley Facebook page posts some real gems sometimes. They shared this color video of cars being humped from ‘66 shot at the P&LE Gateway Yard across the river from the Sheet & Tube bar mill. The yard stretched from Center St down to Lowellville, 200 acres according to the Internet.
There is no sound to the video, but I was sitting on my porch watching it, listening to steel wheels squealing against the rails a couple blocks down at the CSX Queensgate Yard where they do the same damn thing.
ORIGINAL CONTENT: Carnegie-Illinois Steel Co. Upper Union Mills - Youngstown, O. circa 2004
ORIGINAL CONTENT: Weirton Steel Corp., Weirton, WV circa 2008.
Towering over me on my right in the foreground is a small part of a clamp system that helped hold together the steam engine that powered the 45” blooming mill.
This 25,000 horsepower engine was built in Youngstown 100 years ago by the United Engineering & Foundry Co. at the former Wm. Tod Co. plant using Tod designs. The engine, the Weirton Steel blooming mill, and the United Engineering plant are all in a scrap heap or melted down by now. The Youngstown amphitheater now stands where this engine was built.
Most of the details I got from a Youngstown Steel Heritage video, same people that let me tag along down Weirton and photograph this engine before they scrapped it.
SHARED: I wrote some words for the second edition of Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology. Few sentences, couple two three paragraphs.
ORIGINAL CONTENT: Bethlehem Steel Corp., Bethlehem PA.
A steelworker’s farewell message written in one of the blast furnaces at the flagship mill in Bethlehem that at it’s height in 1943 employed 31,523 people.
Facebook says I posted this ten years ago, probably took the photo 5 years before that.
ORIGINAL CONTENT: General Electric Youngstown Lamp - Youngstown, O. circa I don’t know when, 2012 maybe.
GE announced this week the sale of what is left of their lighting division. The American plants left, one in Logan, O., one in Bucyrus, O., and the Nela Park facility in East Cleveland, O. are supposed to stay open. We’ll see.
The Youngstown Lamp plant on Market Street I photographed during demolition was one of six in the greater Steel Valley area. Ohio Lamp in Warren is demolished, Trumbull Lamp in Warren I’m not sure if it still stands, Niles Glass partially demolished, Austintown Coil is still there, and there was a plant in Ravenna I’m not familiar with.
SHARED: If you don’t follow @steel_valley_artifacts you’re missing out. They shared this series of photos Ernie Mastroianni shot the day they shut down the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Brier Hill Works - many more on their page.
The signs in these photos and the looks on the steelworkers’s faces speak volumes. Merry Christmas! Now pack your shit and head down the unemployment office.
VINTAGE: Babyface version of me checking out an overhead crane cab that wasn’t over head anymore at the tin mill in Niles. Not sure who took this photo, my cousin I think. Republic Steel Corp. Niles Works - Niles, O.
ORIGINAL CONTENT: US Steel Ohio Works - Youngstown, O. circa 2004
These might be the first photos I ever took, this was right after I got my first camera. Funny story how I got that camera, ask me about it if you know me and know how to keep your mouth shut.
Figure 1: In plant railroad
Fig. 2 - Fig. 5: Outbound truck scale
Fig. 6: Signage on Salt Springs Road gate
Fig. 7: Utility tower - unsafe safety railing
Fig. 8: Bridge Street - This abandoned street ran from Salt Strings along the Ohio Works property across a long gone bridge over the Mahoning River to Crescent Street.
According to a press photo @steel_valley_artifacts preserved, in 1972 a steel hauler with a 25 ton load was trying to cross the bridge that had a 10T limit. He hit the bridge and his load and the bridge went into the drink. Never rebuilt.
The road is so overgrown past the roadblock you wouldn’t know it was a street once. I don’t know if they changed it, but the exit sign on 680 northbound for this area used to say Exit 4B - No Services Salt Springs Rd. Bridge St. but there ain’t no Bridge Street.
ORIGINAL CONTENT: Quick video from a few years ago cruising up Mason Street, Niles, O.
The plant that is now the Cleveland Steel Container Corp. was originally the Niles Car & Mfg. Co. - makers of opulent street cars. Cleveland bought it from Republic Steel when it was part of their Container Division.
The Army & Navy Union Garrison out front of the container plant was a Sons Of Italy lodge in 1948.
If I would have panned to my right at the end of the video you would see the backside of D’Urso’s bakery that is built off the back of a frame house. Too bad you couldn’t smell them baking those sausage rolls mmm mmm.
Had I kept going up another block up Mason St. I would have passed the vacant lots where the Jennings Athletic Club stood - a dance hall / boxing venue / alleged speakeasy / alleged casino. The Jennings family (Americanized from DiGenero) was central in running the KKK out of town in 1924 when they tried to have a lil parade protesting Catholic immigrants, specifically Italians. Klan would up getting stomped, stabbed, shot, thrown in the creek, and having their lil costumes snatched. Ha. Ha. Ha. #🇮🇹 From an interview with Joe Jennings Junior: “I remember they captured some Ku Klux Klan uniforms and had them tied to the bumper of my dad’s Studebaker and ran them through town as a trophy, like we would have done with German uniforms.”
ORIGINAL CONTENT: Boiler shop - Republic Steel Hazelton Works 2015
Half a wall’s worth of brick pushed into the inspection pit.
PRESERVED: Norman Rockwell for Sharon Steel. One of the prints from the full set I snagged. Still in the original envelope sent from Sharon to the president of Consarc, “an Inductotherm Group Company with over 50 years of technical experience specializing in design, and manufacture of a wide range of advanced vacuum and controlled atmosphere furnaces for the processing of metals, specialty alloys, and engineered materials. These furnaces include:
Vacuum Arc Remelting (VAR)
Electroslag Remelting (ESR)
Vacuum Induction Melting (VIM)
Vacuum Induction Melting Inert Gas Atomization (VIM-IGA)
Vacuum Precision Investment Casting (VPIC)
Induction Skull Melting (ISM)
Induction Vacuum Ladle (IVL)
Vacuum Brazing
Vacuum De-Oiling
Vacuum Heating
Vacuum Furnaces for melting and solidifying solar grade silicon
Custom Designed Vacuum and Controlled Atmosphere Furnaces to suit unique processes and applications”
FAMIGLIA: Certificate of accomplishment in safety presented to my great grandpa, who was a blaster in a limestone quarry that in the 50s “annually supplies US Steel’s Pittsburgh and Youngstown District plants with 1,200,000 tons of high calcium limestone for metallurgical uses in iron making blast furnaces and steel making open hearth furnaces”. He raised his family in that quarry for some years, making his home in a one of four company owned duplexes not far from the crusher (fig. 2)
Certificate from the Department of the Interior Bureau of Mines “For his help in achieving the winning safety record in 1955 at the Hillsville Quarry United States Steel Corporation Michigan Limestone Division New Castle, Pennsylvania Quarry Group national safety competition”. How they misspelled the simplest Italian last name is beyond me. Pinche gringos.
ORIGINAL CONTENT // SHARED: Carnegie-Illinois Steel Co. offices. Lower West Side/Steelton - Youngstown, O.
Fun facto: this farm house was moved from the farmland that became the Ohio Steel Co. to Butler Ave, just west of Steel Street. The newspaper clipping (fig. 2 & fig. 3) states it was Carnegie’s offices and likely was the predecessor’s as well. I assume Butler Ave is named for Joseph Butler, VP of Ohio Steel Co. Butler went on to co-found the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. after Carnegie’s take over of the mill - later the US Steel Ohio Works.
The first heat of steel made in Youngstown was made in a bessemer converter at Ohio Steel and poured on Feb. 4 1895.
The newspaper article was sent to me by Rick from Youngstown Steel Heritage. My buddy Trillions’s mom lives on this block and I was telling Rick how I saw the deed to the house and the original owner was listed as Carnegie Illinois Steel so he filled me in.
Another friend of mine lived on Midland between Steel Street and the mill. She said the old timer down the way told her the houses on that block were built down the mill and moved to their foundations by truck. Prefab housing or an urban legend, who knows.
ORIGINAL CONTENT: Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. Struthers Works - Struthers, O. 2003
I watched some YouTube video on Black Monday the other day and saw this super low res photo in the beginning. I knew it was mine because it was still at the same wild angle as when I posted it not knowing anything about editing other than how to make something black and white. I’ve seen a bunch of random videos with my photos floating around in them.
Me and my cousin Chris walked all the way down here from Walton Street in Campbell not knowing you could drive right up to the mill. Or that our family worked right here. My grandpa, uncle/godfather/Chris’s dad, and two great uncles worked in this department up until the shutdowns. This was the now demolished billet warehouse, the bar mill where they worked would have been on the backside of this building had it not been tore down by the time I made it here. See figure 2.
