All of the stories in the Steel City Series take place in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh is a spectacle of hills, rivers, nineteenth century buildings, and ethnic neighborhoods.  The tip of downtown Pittsburgh, called the Point, is where two rivers, the Monongahela and the Allegheny, meet to form the Ohio.  Tug boats ply the rivers, as they have done for more than a hundred years.  In the past, they ferried ore to the steel mills that lined the banks of all three rivers; now they haul coal to the power plants.  A hundred years ago particulate laden black smoke belched from stacks up and down a fifty mile length of riverfront.  Roofs made of red tile became black; white limestone darkened and finally blackened, and the massive stone and brick buildings of the 1900’s went from light to dark.  Now, brick masons armed with power washers and acid try to remove the stain of industry from the ornate Victorian structures built by the industrial magnates of another era. 

When steel was king, laborers from all over the world immigrated to Pittsburgh to work in the mills.  Smokestacks and rambling industrial sheds dominated the landscape and huge fires shot into the sky, pouring enough pollution into the air to cause the robber barons to change their white shirts in the middle of the day and housewives to abandon the thought of ever having a clean house.  Most people just pretended that the sparkly dust that settled on everything was normal. 

But if the grime of heavy industry was a blot on the landscape, it was also the source of great wealth for the Mellons, the Fricks, the Jones, the Laughlins, Westinghouse, Carnegie, and others.  The really big money built libraries and huge art collections and mansions, both in Pittsburgh and in New York.  Some of the robber barons were friends; some hated each other, some tolerated the others and they all lived in the Victorian opulence characteristic of their class. 

It was colorful era of strikes and deals, takeovers, vendors on the streets, ethnic bars and neighborhoods, Pinkerton agents sporting pump shotguns, and colorful figures like Thomas Scott, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who, during a rail strike in 1877 in which the workers demanded “bread,” replied, “Give them a rifle diet.”  And through it all, there was a large population of workers, grouping themselves in ethnic neighborhoods, who made the mills and the factories and the tug boats on the rivers hum with activity. 

Today, the big money is largely gone, though some remnants -- libraries and parks with famous names of the old families --  remain.   Occasionally, a descendant of a robber baron is mentioned in the news, but the factories, or what remains of them, are abandoned and quiet.

The steel barons, the railroad barons, the financial barons, the manufacturing barons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unwittingly, perhaps inexorably, set the stage for the modern city.  They were tough men, hell-bent on making fortunes, and their determination to become millionaires had as a necessary consequence that they would exploit their workers, that the workers would resist exploitation, that unions would eventually arise, and that various governmental bureaucracies would emerge to serve the interests of the industrial magnates and to create little kingdoms for themselves.  Today, the industrial revolution long-gone, the workplace is largely regulated by the federal government, the unions, and politicians.  Only the federal government, of the three, pretends it is not corrupt.

But the unions, after their initial inroads into Pittsburgh’s big industries, fast became bloated and greedy, and through their greediness, drove the steel industry to its knees.  By the 1970’s, steel making in Pittsburgh had started its decline.  Money that should have been used to modernize production facilities was used to pay high salaries, and the industry succumbed to mismanagement.  Now only the odd smokestack survives, and steel making is relegated to the collective memories of the survivors of those who worked the mills.

The ethic that built Pittsburgh survives.  It is alive and doing well. Local judges bow and scrape before vote-getting functionaries.  The police form alliances with the judges and lesser politicians and are accomplished in their to unbelievable display of arrogance.  Government officials strut their authority and charge dearly for favorable legislation or rulings, using their political connections to suppress any who disagree.  CEO’s, the direct successors to the robber barons of another era, rape the industries they work for and justify the rape by pointing out that other CEO’s are doing the same thing.  In sum, the people to be feared the most are the ones who have sworn to protect the public.

It is old-time corruption in new-time surroundings.  It’s in every city, but in Pittsburgh, it’s in spades, and it has spawned a lot of good stories.