Pittsburgh’s steel towns: Site, film, photography and the urban imaginary

The industrial mill towns of Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River were once celebrated as America’s ‘Steel Country’ and its ‘Arsenal of Democracy’. However, the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s and the subsequent deindustrialization of the region left the towns in ruins. This article turns to a diverse set of cultural artefacts to explore the narratives of industrial heritage, deindustrialization and post-industrialism that in the twenty-first century have emerged from the towns of Rankin and Braddock, PA. These cultural texts include the promotional material for the Carrie Blast Furnaces (a National Historic Landmark) in Rankin, Scott Cooper’s film Out of the Furnace (2013) set in Rankin and Braddock, and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photos about living in the shadow of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Braddock. These texts tell divergent stories of the region, which underscore the racial and class struggles over the industrial past and deindustrialized present in the urban imaginary.