A Fourth Ekphrastic Essay About Our 2022 Road Trip: Ways of Making Steel

 

Riverbank, Steel Mills by Al Bright 

While we were in Youngstown, as we drove around to look at the city, I was very much aware of a notable absence: the conspicuous lack of the steel mills that once lined the river. Those mills, when they were still in operation, affected our surroundings enormously, added grit and sulfur to our air, lit up the sky at night, and drove every living thing from the river. Now the mills are gone (except for the Vallourec Star plant, a latecomer), and so are the sounds of train cars coupling in the night and the smoky mill town atmosphere.

Since my last visit to Youngstown, my creative essay about the Mahoning River was published. It’s called “A Dozen Images Made in or Near Youngstown, Ohio, That Show Why People Need Both Jobs and Fish,” and while I was working on it, I spent a lot of time looking at art made in and about Youngstown and thinking about the days when we called the Mahoning Valley the Steel Valley. (Those were also the days during which the Mahoning River was considered by some to be the most polluted river in the United States.) Among the art works and photographs that I really wanted to include in my essay was a painting by Al Bright, not because his abstract canvas illustrated the conflict between ecology and economy but because he was Youngstown’s quintessential artist. He taught art there. He made art there. One reviewer described Bright as a "third generation Abstract Expressionist," and he created many of his canvases in response to live jazz. I was impressed that these paintings were improvised while musicians were in the process of making improvisational art of their own, and though I wasn’t sure exactly how to work such an abstract, nonfigurative painting into my essay, I knew I wanted to try. But before I could do that, Bright died, and I didn’t think there was a respectful and reasonable way to ask to use an image of one of his paintings while his family was in mourning.

Early this year I heard that an exhibit called “Al Bright—the First Federal Years” was being mounted at Youngstown’s Butler Museum of American Art during Black History Month. Online I was able to see a picture of the most representational work I’d ever seen by Bright, “Riverbank, Steel Mills,” and I couldn’t help but think of how perfectly it would have fit into my essay. Of course, this painting didn't quite have the same memorable origins as Bright’s jazz-response paintings because it was commissioned, along with eight others, by a bank for their corporate headquarters. And it was painted in 1986, nearly ten years after the announcement that the Campbell Works of US Sheet & Tube was shutting down. Deindustrialization was well underway by that time, and Youngstown was no longer the Steel City. Maybe because it was painted during that time, “Riverbank, Steel Mills” shows the river and the mills in an unusual relationship to each other. Because the exhibit was extended, I was able to see the painting while we were in Youngstown. 

“Riverbank, Steel Mills” is a landscape, or more properly, a river landscape, and considering that the river is flowing through an area of concentrated industry, it appears surprisingly clean and peaceful. The river is in the foreground – full of cool-looking grey-blue water and so unlike the trickle of hot brown slime the Mahoning was said to be in the early twentieth century. The mills are receding into the background (into the past?); they are not smoking and flaring, and there are birds flying over them. Bright appears to be acknowledging the mills’ significance even as he portrays an almost idealized space in which the mills do not overwhelm the river. Smokestacks rise into the sky like sentinels or monuments, not polluters, and etched into the body of the river are just a few rust-colored patches. These may represent low-head dams, but they also show what water will inevitably do to iron. It’s hard to know if this is also a prediction of economic decline. In any case, the composition of the painting is striking, and the perspective is remarkable – the mills are at the top and the water is in the foreground, so both seem significant. This isn’t the way things were in the 1950s, when industry always came first, whereas in Youngstown today the Mahoning River is actually doing very well, and it’s the economic well-being of the city that’s been undermined. But Bright’s painting could be viewed as a visual affirmation that people do need both jobs and fish, work and a clean environment.

General View of the Republic Iron and Steel Works, Youngstown, Ohio, early 1900s, public domain image, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RepublicIron%26SteelWorks_YoungstownOH_1900s.jpg

Today, as our deindustrialized country faces the problem of climate change and we slowly begin the transition to renewable energy, the steel industry may seem like nothing more than an indistinct memory. Yet it’s still very much a part of our world. Steel production presently accounts for somewhere between 7% and 11% of greenhouse gas emissions, and because an increased need for steel will coincide with the infrastructure changes necessary to reduce carbon emissions, many experts say that we need to find ways to make steel greener. The two most challenging parts of the steel-making process from this point of view are the use of coal in blast furnaces and the use of coke to make pig iron; these processes are still used in about 70% of the world’s steel production. 

Coke, which is made when coal is “baked” at high heat for long periods of time, has long been a source of toxic emissions harmful both to the workers involved in making it and the surrounding environment. While we were in Ohio, we went to an old, abandoned coke-making facility, and what I saw there gave me a visceral sense of the long-standing ways in which making steel caused damage to the earth. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, coal was heated in brick ovens that were partially buried in the ground, and the resultant coke was used to make pig iron, then a necessary part of the steel-making process. The Cherry Valley Coke Ovens in Leetonia, Ohio, contain the remains of 200 such ovens, and I had read about them when I was working on my essay. We visited the park where the remains of these ovens can still be seen, and though the surroundings were pleasant, with lots of trees and grass, the rows of brick ovens prompted me to think that when they were burning 24-hours a day this place must have seemed like a small but intense corner of hell. Though the ovens were shut down during the Great Depression, they are a sobering reminder of one of the region’s earliest conflicts between economy and ecology. 

In a place like Youngstown where steel was once produced in abundance and now is made by a limited and highly specialized industry, it's tempting to think that this iron alloy is no longer essential. And if steel is an outdated material, it can easily be replaced by some other more environmentally friendly substance, right? But nothing could be further from the truth. Youngstown may no longer make much steel, but steel is still very much needed as the world moves toward carbon neutrality. Steel is a material that can be recycled again and again, and it will no doubt be part of the wind turbines and solar farms that will be built during the move toward renewable energy. Because this transition is still so important, the race is on to find ways to produce green steel (see Justin Mikulka on Democracy Now). It may, for example, be possible to replace coal with more environmental-friendly hydrogen. Though I have my doubts that industrial production, or even the processes by which renewable energy is produced, can ever be truly green, it’s a step in the right direction to work to eliminate the toxic emissions that once polluted the Mahoning Valley. And, to me at least, Al Bright’s painting hints at a possible future in which industry doesn’t harm the natural world the way that it once did but manages to co-exist with it.