The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This is one of the two remaining furnaces left standing at the Carrie Furnace ruins, here in Pittsburgh. Chatting with a member of the Rivers of Steel operation, which looks after the ruins of this steel mill and offers programming at this historic site, I was informed that ‘back in the day,’ being in this area during the active manufacturing era would have required specialized garments to vouchsafe your flesh against the heat that was being generated during the steel making process. Just being in this chamber without the protective material was life threatening.

The fellow whom I was chatting with had actually worked here, and he filled me in on the dangers of this profession prior to OSHA regulations and an era full before personal injury attorneys were a thing.

One task that he described as having a career lifetime of no more than 3-4 years, due to crippling lung injuries which were caused by inhaling a miasma of superheated chemicals. When the company had to let you go due from that position to being unable to work anymore at 20, you’d get a week’s pay and that was it.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Hell on earth is what was being described to me, essentially.

Back in NYC, I knew lots and lots of blue collar types who had incredibly dangerous gigs. Longshoremen, sailors, sewer plant employees. One of my pals is an engineer who digs tunnels, and I know another guy who builds elevators. Both have described their day to day to me, much of which sounds like pure nightmare fuel, to one such as myself.

Titanic forces are at work in certain trades, and one slip up can mean crippling injury or a horrific death (in some cases, you’re lucky if it’s the latter). Most of the boat people I knew back home were missing at least one joint of a finger.

Steel manufacture was, and is, one of those sorts of jobs.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Personally, I’ve had a lot of lousy jobs over the years, but nothing terribly dangerous. At one job back in college, I literally shoveled shit. At another, I was part of team of doofus’s who moved multi million dollar statues around from gallery to gallery and mansion to mansion.

A favorite work memory of mine was when I was an aquarium serviceman. On the surface it sounds nice, but then you aren’t thinking about carrying joint compound buckets full of salt water fish (and hand warmers) onto and off the subway (during the 1980’s), and traipsing around the city with 70-80 pounds of water on each arm and a diatom filter with all of its supplies in a bag on your back. The actual job wasn’t terribly hard… if you’ve ever kept a tropical salt water aquarium you know the routine. Rich people don’t like to get their hands dirty, which is where my boss and I came in.

My boss and I would start our day at a trade shop on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, then park his car somewhere in Downtown Brooklyn. We’d hop on the train with our gear and livestock for the day.

Y’know those giant salt water aquariums that used to occupy the entryway of every fancy pants Chinese restaurant in midtown? Yeah, that was us.

Never had to deal with air temperatures that had a comma in them, though. Can’t imagine the existential hell that the laborers here experienced.

Back tomorrow.

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