05/08/2006
05/03/2006
Blast Furnace Gas
I will be making a return to Behtlehem Steel and will have some new photographs posted within a week or so. <a href=\”http://www.oboylephoto.com/steel\”>Bethlehem steel photographs here.</a>
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03/26/2006
03/22/2006
03/21/2006
Blast Furnace
One of my favorite shots from the Bethlehem Steel series, you can see the <a href=\”http://www.oboylephoto.com/steel\”>entire essay here. </a>
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03/20/2006
03/19/2006
03/18/2006
03/17/2006
03/15/2006
1-4
Handles used for raising and lowering the skimmers that divert slag to the slag pots when the blast furnace is tapped. For a full read on how a blast furnace works <a href=\”http://www.steel.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=How_Steel_is_Made&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=12305\”>check this link. </a>
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03/14/2006
piping, blast furnace
There is a complex wrapping of piping around the blast furnaces, adding air and directing cooling water in the complex workings involved with smelting iron.
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03/12/2006
Locker Room, Bethlehem Steel
Locker room, the personal spaces at Bethlehem such as the locker room are few and far between, and they are always in strange places, next to a welding room, or tucked behind the parts room. It is an industrial environment which didn\’t seem to bend to accomodate many comforts.
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03/11/2006
Wash Room, Bethlehem
Clothes baskets, rather than lockers, were used in some of the shower rooms for hanging and containing the workers clothes and personal items while they were on shift, and while showering after their shift. They would load them up and pull on the cable to raise them to the ceiling out of the way.
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03/03/2006
Carrie Furnaces, Monongahela River
The Carrie Furnaces, still standing along the Mon river. They are a relic of the Carnagie Steel era, and were the site of the standoff between the newly forming workers unions and the company, when the pinkerton security forces were called in to break up the strike by force. Latest news is that the furnaces will be preserved in some form for a heritage site and development, certainly a positive thing, the once massive Homestead mills that used to be across the river from the Carrie Furnaces are now the site of a home depot.
03/02/2006
Bethlehem Blast Furnaces
The massive blast furnaces at Bethelehem still remain today, and the plan is to preserve them in an industrial history museum, which will include rennovations to parts of the remaining building on the site. The #2 Machine Shop will house the exhibition part of the museum.
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03/01/2006
Fascade, #2 Machine Shop
While walking around the Bethelehem Steel site, I am constantly aware of the layers of access that were in place when the plant was in operation, the company was divided in a multitude of shops for the different trades represented, and you weren\’t allowed to visit other areas of the plant unless it was part of your job to do so. Many of the workers spent their entire lives working in one area of the plant but did not see other areas. Its strange to wander the abandoned site now, transgressing all these old invisible boundries, and to wade through the spaces that were so heavily stratified with union and personal heirarchy.
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02/28/2006
Entry – Exit
Entry and Exit door to the #2 Machine shop, likely the largest machine shop in the world.
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#2 Machine Shop
#2 Machine Shop, at 1/3 of a mile long, was one of the largest machine shops in the world. Empty as it is now, it has the grandure of an abandoned cathedral, and the quiet and stillness is only broken by the sounds of the wind blowing through this vast room.
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