Rust Belt Icons

My recollections of the other night, about my Steampunk childhood, took on yet more life recently with 3Muses "Rust" challenge. Looking at those old photos of the Pittsburgh mills is so awesome--you expect to see the god Vulcan lumbering from behind a Bessemer converter, or Jupiter hurling thunderbolts into a vat of molten steel. I remember stories that when a steelworker fell into a vat of molten metal, the entire thing would be decommissioned, disconnected,  and buried. Because of course, no iota of a body would be left to retrieve. Apocryphal, I have no doubt (how could any local cemetery bury something the size of a tank?)

I offer my own take on the mills as icons of their era, as is the lady in the picture. I scuffed her up a bit in tribute to the hard, relentless, unimaginable lives of thousands of steel workers who created another sort of Renaissance in American industry. We can be thankful that the era of unbridled industrialization, with its accompanying pollution, exploitation, disease and early death, is behind us. Or is it? We still face its modern-day counterparts, with devastating consequences on an even greater scale than anything the steel mills ever produced.  Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose.

For some truly remarkable urban archeology photographs of the defunct mills, please visit Sean Posey's blog, http://seanposey.blogspot.com/