Carrie me back

Wednesday, 18 August 2010 13:23

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

I stopped at a convenience store just over the border from Rankin to Braddock today, hoping someone could direct me to the Carrie Furnace site. There was a media event being held there to announce the next steps toward making that hulking industrial ghost viable as a tourist destination.

carrie1 “How do I get to Carrie Furnace,” I asked an oldster. He looked at me as if I had loosened something in his heart.

He smiled almost tenderly and raised his arm to point and said, “I doubt you can get back there now,” but he told me how.

As I bumped toward it, I thought of Dorothy, Toto and their pals watching the Emerald City as they made their long way toward it. I followed weedy concrete and when the concrete ran out a trail that cars have made, with high weeds in the middle that scraped the car's undercarriage.

As I neared Carrie Nos. 6 and 7, my mouth hung open like some of the doors I would later see on a tour of the site.

I was overwhelmed by its magnitude and what it represents for Pittsburgh. One of our last industrial ghosts may be, maybe in my lifetime, a place that will pay homage to the legacy of people who are much more than the forbears of the Steeler Nation.

Their unmercifully hot behemoth of a workplace might become an historical park and museum, another stop in the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area. On each side of that site, in Swissvale and Rankin, people may be living someday, with bicycle trails and a little boat house.

Plans. Visions. History. Miracles .... and public tours!!! carrie2

The Steel Valley Heritage Corp., (which is kind of the same thing as Rivers of Steel), will be taking people through the site on Aug. 28, Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, at 8.30a, 9.15a, 10a and 10.45a.

I urge you to go. But first make reservations by calling 412.464.4020 x 32 or visit www.riversofsteel.com.

Climbing up into the furnace apparatus — a weird dreamscape of enormous pipes and vats and things I don’t know the names of, surrounded by the heft of our industrial silence, rust, artwork, graffiti, weeds, rubbly floor bricks and hanging things, I felt like crying... tears of joy.

Some people, specifically, Auggie Carlino, the CEO and president of the Steel Valley Heritage Corp., for quite some time have worked their passion and persistence on politicians who might otherwise have told a developer to go ahead and have his way with it (i.e., tear the old girl dahn 'n at).

carrie4 You can read more details in my story in tomorrow’s printed version of the Post-Gazette (don't hold me to that... it might be the next day or the next...be patient) and also see more on the Rivers of Steel web site.