(erielack) Lackawanna Steel, Buffalo

[Todd Hollritt <thollritt_@_yahoo.com>]

Door closes on legacy of steel plant
By Donn Esmonde
COMMENTARY
Updated: December 20, 2009, 12:20 PM / 


He looks all cleaned up now, does Mike Haggerty. Friday he wore a blue crew neck sweater over a collared shirt. His silver-flecked hair is trimmed as neat as his mustache, and his fingernails are clean. Not like the old days. 
He looks different than he did back then. Just like Lackawanna looks different. Just like the two-mile stretch of shoreline that once was home to Bethlehem Steel looks different. 
Time passes. People and places change. There was a time when Bethlehem Steel belched smoke and made steel and more than 20,000 people worked in one of hundreds of buildings—most gone, the rest empty. Mike Haggerty was one of those people. 
You can look through the venetian blinds of the Woodlawn Diner, across Route 5 at the old bar mill, empty now. Two weeks ago, they locked the door at Mittal Steel. The shutdown officially ended the most gloriously muscular era in local history. 
Mittal was the last, connect-the-dots vestige of Bethlehem Steel. The coke ovens stayed after the main plant shut in ’83. ISG took over and then sold to Mittal. Haggerty, 66, was there recently when the last roll of coiled steel was loaded. It was a moment that deserves to be marked in time. 
Steelworkers are not by nature sentimental. Even so, Haggerty said, “There were a lot of tears.” 
He was 18, an eighth-grade dropout, when he started in the open hearth in 1962. He cleaned out the furnaces where they made molten steel out of magnesium and iron ore. Crane operators in buildings with cloud-high ceilings poured huge ladles of bubbling steel, 2,500 degrees hot, into molds in carts on railroad tracks. Guys working the floor wore wool shirts and coats to deflect the heat. 
“The danger was water,” said Haggerty. “If a mold was damp, it’d blow up like a cannon. Guys would get concussion injuries. My father’s friend got caught between the car couplings. He was crushed to death.” 
Haggerty was happy to bring home $69.50 a week, a big number back then. He did not care that, when he left the plant at day’s end, he was coated in soot and his spit was black in the snow. The plant was a hive, crisscrossed with roads and tracks, heavy with traffic. He worked in the bar mill and the blast furnace, following his father, who got the job at the old Lackawanna Steel from his father. Mike’s granddad was a casualty, dying young with soot-dark lungs. There were 20,000 more like the Haggertys. Their story is a big part of Buffalo’s story. 
It has been a long time since steel meant anything around here. But this was who we were, this was what we were and—in spite of the Dickensian workplace and damaged lungs and the perpetual ore-dust cloud hanging over Lackawanna— it was the best of economic times. 
Heavy manufacturers lined Lake Erie’s shore like generals with separate standing armies—Bethlehem Steel, Republic Steel, Ford, Donner Hanna. Haggerty remembers job-seekers lined up for a quarter-mile outside Bethlehem’s main office, a brick building of strong lines and solid character, still standing now in its haunted, roofless glory. Nobody got turned away. 
“For all of the money Bethlehem Steel brought to Lackawanna,” said Haggerty, “the streets should have been paved with gold.” 
Like the dinosaurs, they never saw the end coming. Cheaper product from overseas and mismanagement and outdated work rules cut American steelmaking from a torrent to a trickle. With the vanishing of heavy industry, Buffalo’s economy slid like slag into Lake Erie. Mike Haggerty bore witness, for 47 years. 
They shut the door at Mittal a couple of weeks ago. It was the last whimper, at the end of a mighty roar.




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