In the 1980’s it was Homestead that staked out the emotional heart of the Rust Belt miasma. Outside of Detroit in recent years Braddock has cornered the PR market for as Jim R. would put it: “Rust Belt Porn”. Yet then and now the city of Duquesne has declined as much and suffered as much, just with much less notice.
So now the news comes with the outcome both inconceivable and inevitable that the state is likely to shut down the Duquesne school system completely. The city’s school district has already abdicated secondary education with its high school students shipped to nearby West Mifflin or East Allegheny. This is all more epilogue than news sadly. Still feels like a story from the worse off parts of the third world. In security studies if you anonymized the name it would in part be indisinguishable from case studies in failed states and feral cities.
But that news story highlights again how little we understand our own problems.. how myth overtakes reality. The section and quotes that caught my attention was the almost de rigueur logic on the impact of the steel industry. It goes by formula exactly like this:
Chepanoske points not to any person or government entity but to the loss of jobs and subsequent sharp population decline.
Census figures show Duquesne was home to 11,410 people in the 1970s when steel mills provided good-paying jobs. Today 5,565 people live there.
“When the mills were running full blast, things were really good,” Chepanoske said. “It started to deteriorate in the 1980s when people moved away.”
In other words.. it’s nobody’s fault. Steel left. Blame ’steel’. Whatever that means. That seminal year 1970 is the only horizon that matters it seems.
Did the decline of manufacturing cause Duquesne’s decline? Did it accelerate the population decline even? When was the last time things were really ‘good’ in Duquesne? Here is the city’s population over the century. Can you identify any meaningful break in trend in the 1980s? But if the problems are caused by the loss of steel jobs, and the decline in steel jobs are somehow beyond our control, then ergo.. this just isn’t anyone’s fault.
Is Duquesne’s plight unconnected to manufacturing? Of course not. But the heyday of Duquesne came long ago at this point. The workers in the mills along the rivers started abandoning those towns long before there was any conception steel was ever going away. The first hand memories people have of a growing or even stable Duquesne can only be among those receiving Social Security. If we misunderstand our problems we can’t ever fix them and attributing the plight of many of the barely existing.
I have not even gotten into the joke that Duquesne with barely 5K population in 2010 is still a ‘City’ according to the laws of Pennsylvania. Upper Darby Township in Delaware County, PA clocked in at over 82K residents in 2010. Makes sense somehow. Goes back to what the real problems are in Pennsylvania. Saddest part of the Duquesne story is that they just didn’t have any large bond payments to default upon. If only they had been so irresponsinle as to build a garbage incinerator, the Commonwealth apparachiki might have paid some real heed.
If you want to obsess on on the stylized Duquesne history, don’t recereate the wheel. Just jump over to DuquesneHunky. It would do the neighboring Tube City Almanac proud. I actually can’t believe it’s author is not Jason’s alter ego.
I’m guessing the article writer did not actually live in Duquesne PA or any steel town and makes some wrong assumptions. Myth overtakes reality?
The Duquesne Steel Mill did close in 1984 (which resulted in no more mill jobs) and people did move out. This is not a “myth” this really happened. I was there.
It sounds like Christopher Briem is saying the people who lived in the declining steel town communities are the problem or created the problem decades ago.
The reality is there are many outside factors Mr. Briem did not bother to explore in his article.
But the real problem is he is misinterpreting the facts and data.
No city or town can grow forever, population growth will eventually stop due to lack of space. At some point in the 1940’s there was no space left to build new housing. The existing housing was limited housing (few for sale) or the existing housing was substandard or too small to accommodate the start of the baby boom in the mid 1940’s.
In the 1940’s, growing families in Duquesne needed and wanted to move to bigger homes with a car garage, more bedrooms and bigger yards in the nearby new suburb development of West Mifflin. This was what my grandparents and parents did.
It’s misleading to look at the above chart (population decline) and assume moving from limited-sized home/land space of Duquesne to the nearby suburbs with bigger homes and yards was or is a problem.
From the 1950’s to the 1970’s Duquesne had real prosperity and its English speaking US born generations of children and grandchildren were more likely to go to college or trade school and were encouraged not to work in the mills, but get nice office jobs and move to even more prosperous areas of greater Pittsburgh.
So the 1950’s to 70’s population “decline” was the smart and educated moving out becoming teachers, doctors, business people and living in bigger and better homes and cities. This upward mobility was not a bad thing.
Another reality not mentioned in this article is an increase in the college educated since the 1960’s. We have many top universities nearby in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne University, University of Pittsburgh.
If you go from the 1900’s steel towns with many non-English speaking immigrants to the 1950 to 80’s college graduates who didn’t want to do hard labor industrial work, college grads moved out to the big cities for better pay and better jobs.
I did just that in 1990, leaving Mckeesport area for the more prosperous Pittsburgh area. By 1997 I did even better and moved to Florida with its warm weather and No-State-Income-Tax.
What myth overtakes reality?
I’m not getting Social Security (not for at least 20 years) but I do have some first hand memories of living in the “Mon Valley” steel industry area in the towns of Duquesne, West Mifflin and McKeesport in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.
My father was actually still working in the steel mill (Irvin Works) as a well paid welder till the early 1980’s. I got to tour the plant as a kid. In fact it’s still operating and you can even apply for a job today with benefits, and yes, even a pension. http://www.ussteel.com/corp/people/employees/benefits.asp
Around the 1970’s cheaper world labor (such as China) was becoming more available to make cheaper steel. But also, there was probly a reduced demand for steel since much of the country’s infrastructure, train tracks, and big city skyscrapers were already built. Hence the decline in steel jobs in Pennsylvania. So if there is less work, people will move to where the work is.
But the real problem is when a city has just one main big employer it sinks or swims with that one main big employer.
Because of the changes in the steel industry by the 1980’s, my father was given the options of “retire” early or be “laid-off”. My father decided to retired early with a pension (around $800 a month) and was also able to get Social Security in 1982.
I was born in McKeesport PA (near Duquesne) in the mid 1960’s. As a child in the early 1970’s – McKeesport was still a nice functioning city with park fountains, it’s own city newspaper, several large bank buildings, three large multi-story department stores, a movie theater, restaurants, a diner and even a Five & Dime store plus a hardware stores and other shops.
I had many relatives in the “Mon Valley” area, that we would visit on the weekends seeing them in Duquesne and West Mifflin.
Duquesne PA, was one of the smaller towns, in the Mon Valley, but was never a “rich” area but still, it had decent, nice, modest houses, a small shopping district and some nice churches.
Since it was built out in the 1930’s, West Mifflin was always the “nice suburbs”, and for the most part still is. Many houses have pools and manicured lawns. I lived in West Mifflin in the 1980’s.
I was still in grade school in the 70’s when I started seeing the shutdown of many steel mills when my family traveled outside my suburban neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Duquesne, Clairton.
My generation knew being a “steel worker” wasn’t an option anymore.
We made other career plans for the future.
If you want to know the real reason [smarter] people moved out of the small cities like Duquesne, Braddock, Rankin is the housing was and is still poor. It was/is too small, too out-dated, no parking (garage) for a car which my generation had, no yards and no well-paying jobs or any jobs.
Because the chart shows a population decline starting in the 1940’s it does not mean it was some ghost town with boarded up stores and vacant houses. Far from it.
When I was in the Mon Valley in the 70’s it was still a financially functioning area. A functioning strip mall, a KFC, bowling allies, Isaly’s Chipped Ham Deli, Rexall Pharmacy/Soda Fountains, etc.
And it’s true that things started to deteriorate in the 1980s.
I think Mckeesport is the only town I know of that had a McDonald’s and a Burger King close. Even the not-yet-famous Rush Limbaugh who was a 70’s DJ at WIXZ, a small AM radio station in McKeesport left the area by the 80’s.
The people left behind probly can’t leave because they can’t sell their homes because there is no real demand for the area and the selling price would probly so low they couldn’t afford to buy in a better neighborhood.
But then again, where else can you buy a 3 Bed, 1 Bath for $8,300?
http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Duquesne_PA?source=web#sortby-1