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Rusted grate on catwalk on abandoned railroad bridge.
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The east end of the rolling mill with Pittsburgh in the background.
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Upper catwalk to water intake building.
J&L Steel was created in 1886 by the merger of Jones Steel and Laughlin & Co, Ltd. The Pittsburgh plant was huge: the Aliquippa mill was even larger, with about 10,000 employees at the former and more than three times that many in Aliquippa, downstream on the Ohio River. The Pittsburgh works is largely demolished and redeveloped now. What is left is a 157 acre strip extending along the right bank of the Monongahela River from the Hot Metal Bridge linking the newly developed commercial section of shops and restaurants known as the South Side Works with the Oakland section, from there, upstream to the foot of Hazelwood Avenue.

My interest in this and other mills in the Pittsburgh vicinity began in 1970 when a friend and colleague and I began a project to force environmental cleanup in the area by stopping the discharge industrial pollutants into these beautiful rivers. Our tool was the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 (also known as The Refuse Act) that encouraged citizen enforcement action and required the cooperation of regional US Attorneys.
The photo below is a close-up of the keystone of this brick lined outflow.
In 1970, there was another intake building, downstream near the Hot Metal Bridge, with an unusual appearance. It sucked in river water below the water line and discharged from an unusual opening high above the river level. Today, the superstructure is gone but part of the discharge structure is still there, visible even from the current Google Earth satellite view.
As of this writing in June, 2008, the largest remaining structure is a rolling mill. Even in its present state, it provides a reminder of the scale of the former operation. It is about 400 yards in length. Though it is pretty much hollowed out it is very impressive to walk or drive down the length of the central space.
Another fascinating building still remaining on the site is the upstream water intake. Outside, its light blue coat has become a target for graffiti artists. Inside, its a little spooky in the half light that filters down, illuminating the huge pipes and valves near the bottom floor, now covered with more than a foot of semi transparent water.
The downstream intake as it appeared in 1970.
Another set of structures that receives special attention here is the round- house. The J&L mill had its own railroad, The Monongahela Interconnecting Railroad. The MIRR would haul hot metal and other cargo from one side of the river to the other and from one part of the mill to another. It had its own employees, kept its own records and was conducted largely as a separate operation from the mill itself.
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The engines needing maintenance or repair, or even just to be turned around, would approach from the far side in this photo, pull onto the turntable which would rotate to line the track up with a bay in the roundhouse where the engine would then pull inside for needed work. The small brick buildings in the background are the offices and employee quarters of the MIRR.
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Another view of the turntable with round-house bays around the periphery.
In this shot from 1970, I caught just a small portion of the J&L Pittsburgh Works. None of these furnaces or other buildings are standing today. The Hot Metal Bridge would be just to the left.
More images from 1970
Finally, I reserve a place on this site for the general area, the acres of demolished furnaces and buildings that have been chewed up and plowed under; the catwalks and barge tie-ups along the Monongahela River; the access roads, bridges, tracks - the still used and the abandoned: all of it filled with patterns, textures and color that make it a great place to be if you have a camera in your hand. And everywhere, reminders of thousands of people who made their livelihoods here and are here no longer.
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J&L Pittsburgh from downstream
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Before and After
2008
1970
Thumbnails: mouse over to see large image and caption. Not all captions have been written yet.
In 1970, the mills were going strong and my photos from that year provide a contrast with the images I'm collecting now.

One of the early photos documents, better than is possible now, a structure that predates J&L Steel.
J&L Steel Pittsburgh 1970
This pair of high volume discharges really had us stumped until we figured out the anchor and rope trick described in the comment to the left. At a weight of more than 8 pounds per gallon, a discharge like either of these would shred a canoe.
This is a moderately high volume discharge that tended to be low pH and have high solids.

As the volume of a discharge increases, it becomes more difficult, even dangerous to sample: the effluent, plunging into the river, creates a surface current that could pull a canoe right into the discharge, swamping it instantly and making it difficult to swim away from. To get these samples, I'd drop an anchor and pay out rope until John was close enough to get the sample from the bow, then use the rope to pull us away to a safe distance.
Nearly identical to the photo above it but, again, a great one to look at, in my opinion: different day, similar angle, same result. Does that make me an effluvophile? Be nice.
Photogenic pollution? Like a model that can't take a bad picture, this discharge always looked good from a distance, especially on a cloudy day. The composition is made by surrounding objects and the reflections of those objects in the water forming an X over the steamy effluent. It was hot because it had just been poured over red hot coke in the quenching tower, seen belching chemical laden steam into the atmosphere in the background.
River water would be dumped on hot coke, straight from the ovens, becoming a steaming liquor and would be allowed, as here, to run back from whence it came. But it had been transformed in the process: frequently with a pH less than 4, that's very acidic for us non-chemists. Sometimes, analysis would show high fixed and volatile solids that would stick together, or aggregate, into fluffy masses, called floc. In such cases, the sample would be milky or appear to have snowflakes that would tumble about inside the bottle. More than anything, these samples were hot, too hot to be grasped with bare hands. Thermal pollution was common from this and other steel mills. In extreme cases, especially farther up the Monongahela River, as we drew close to outfalls, our aluminum canoe would become too hot to touch at or below the water line and we'd have to lay pads on the bottom to protect our knees.