The Monongahela Cemetery rests on the top of a steep climb in North Braddock. On a clear, sunny afternoon, the Mon Valley — cut by the Monongahela River — unfurls: below is the borough of Braddock, where puffs from U.S. Steel's Edgar Thomson Works emerge from smokestacks, then fade into the air; across the river, the curved outlines of Kennywood's rollercoasters line the horizon, sketching out West Mifflin, gliding into Homestead, then Duquesne.
U.S. Steel and its mills once lined the river and clouded the skies, providing jobs and sparking the region's economy. But when the steel industry collapsed in the late 1970s, the shops, restaurants and houses peppered throughout Mon Valley towns emptied. Unemployed workers left, taking with them their future families.
Since then, the Pittsburgh region's economy has diversified and rebounded, but Mon Valley municipalities have largely been beyond the reach of that prosperity. U.S. Steel's economic mark has largely faded, but the Clairton Coke Works, Edgar Thomson Steel Works and Irvin Plant still stand and help fill their coffers and shape their identities.
For the past 18 months, the fate of those remaining plants have been an open question, leaving Mon Valley communities caught in the middle of U.S. Steel's industrial saga once again.
When U.S. Steel announced a $14.9 billion deal to be acquired by Japan's Nippon Steel Corp. in 2023, Mon Valley residents watched from the front row as politicians debated and postured over the potential sale on the national stage. In January, then-President Joe Biden blocked the sale, citing national security concerns. During the 2024 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump also publicly opposed the deal. U.S. Steel warned that blocking the deal would put its facilities and jobs in the Mon Valley at risk.
Then, as president, Trump reversed course last week and announced he had approved a proposed deal that he said would form a "planned partnership" between Nippon and U.S. Steel, keep the company headquarters in Pittsburgh, lead to more than $14 billion in new investments and create 70,000 jobs. Details of the deal, however, were scarce, including the structure of the partnership and how the investments and jobs will be distributed across U.S. Steel's national footprint — which includes plants in Southwestern Pennsylvania and eight other states.
What is clear is that, for several Mon Valley communities, the stakes are high. For some, U.S. Steel represents a critical slice of their tax base, keeping lights on and garbage picked up. Now, the potential sale and its uncertainty has resurfaced memories of failed promises past, as local leaders seek clarity and a way forward in limbo.
"For the folks that live where I live, we don't really care in the sense that we want somebody who's gonna own it, who's going to do right by our community," said Lisa Franklin-Robinson, president of the North Braddock Borough council, who supports the Nippon deal. "Because when the doors close and people take all their cameras and their conversations away, we still have to live here."
Remnants of economic collapse
Manufacturing in the Pittsburgh region peaked in 1952 when it made up about 40% of all jobs in the region, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Taking into account all the jobs connected to the manufacturing supply chain or workers' spending, "you can say virtually all of Pittsburgh was a manufacturing, mostly steel, economy," said Chris Briem, regional economist at University of Pittsburgh Center for Social and Urban Research. Then, starting in the late 1970s, the steel industry collapsed. By 1990, manufacturing made up only 14% of jobs in the region, far below the national average.
What's left of steel in the Steel City is a very small fraction of what was once here — much of it concentrated in the Mon Valley.
"When steel collapsed in the Mon Valley, they didn't just lose the steel jobs themselves, but they lost all the other kinds of supporting companies and jobs that came with it," said George Dougherty, associate professor of public policy at the graduate school of public policy and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. "You need mechanics. You need folks to deliver everything to the steel mills. You had the parts shops that made parts that wore out and broke down."
As the local population declined, so did property tax revenue. Earned income taxes and property taxes are the two single biggest revenue sources for most municipalities, according to Dougherty. "We had fewer people, we had fewer jobs, we had fewer revenue coming in, but what was interesting for the municipalities themselves is that they had no fewer miles of street."
The fiscal distress in Braddock, North Braddock, Homestead, Clairton, McKeesport, East Pittsburgh, and Duquesne triggered a process called Act 47, in which the state of Pennsylvania steps in to help municipalities get their finances under control. All of these Mon Valley municipalities have since recovered from financial distress under Act 47.
As Braddock prepared to exit Act 47 in 2014, UPMC closed their Braddock hospital and the county reassessed the Edgar Thomson Works. That alone put a $250,000 hole in Braddock's $1.2 million budget, according to Dougherty, who served as the Act 47 coordinator for Braddock and Duquesne. For many of these slimmed down municipalities, "there's no fat to be trimmed," Dougherty said.
Nearly three-quarters of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works is located in North Braddock and contributes about "a couple hundred thousand dollars in tax revenue" to the municipality each year, according to Franklin-Robinson. U.S. Steel has also supported community events and funded improvements to the ball field.
Down the Mon in Clairton, U.S. Steel's Clairton Coke Works makes up about a third of the town's tax base, according to Richard Lattanzi, mayor of Clairton.
"We have no grocery store," Lattanzi said. "We do not have retail. We have a few dollar stores and pizza shops. Without the mill, I don't know if Clairton would ever be able to do any kind of renovations, street repairs, replace burned out street lights, keep our swimming pool going, recreation activities, even make payroll. I don't think the city would survive."
U.S. Steel is one of the major employers in West Mifflin, although the municipality has a broader tax base that includes Kennywood amusement park and the planned redevelopment of the former Century III Mall site.
"We would survive, if U.S. Steel closed up," said Chris Kelly, mayor of West Mifflin, who supports the Nippon sale. "But it would be difficult to regain that tax base. We would simply have to pass it on, or we would have to cut services."
'A weird dichotomy'
U.S. Steel plays a complicated role in these municipalities today. While they remain an economic generator, the facilities have racked up more than a dozen formal violations of air quality regulations in the past five years and millions of dollars in fines from the Allegheny County Health Department, which is responsible for enforcing federal air quality regulations.
"There is a weird dichotomy that we have with the mill," Franklin-Robinson said. "It's part of our history. A lot of the residents that I know, they've had a family member or their parents, somebody, their dad, their brothers, maybe even their sisters have worked in the mill. But yet there is pollution and we have poor air quality. We have lead that shows up in the soil, that shows in our houses, shows up in the air, shows up in our children."
Recent studies have shown that residents who live near Clairton Coke Works, for example, have high rates of asthma and respiratory problems. And, in the wake of a 2018 fire that wiped out the facility's air quality controls, these conditions worsened.
These plants are some of the oldest steel plants in the nation and have been under-invested in by U.S. Steel for many decades, according to Pitt's Briem. Their continuing operation will rely on a significant amount of reinvestment to keep these plants running.
"All the administrators from U.S. Steel, they've come to us over and over and said, this [Nippon deal] has to happen because we can't continue to go on like this," Franklin-Robinson said. "We can't make it. We don't have enough money to continue."
Kelly was skeptical about foreign ownership until he toured some of Nippon's plants in West Virginia. "I drove down and talked to some of the businesses there that were associated with the mill — all had good things to say," Kelly said. "Talked to the union workers — all positive things to say about management."
Franklin-Robinson also toured a Nippon-owned West Virginia plant "which was completely impressive. I asked them stuff like, 'Would you be willing to do a community benefits agreement with our neighborhood? Do you make clean steel? Will you help with cleaning up the air? They were, it was all positive. And yes, yes, and yes, and yes."
The main opposition to the Nippon sale comes from the United Steelworkers, the union that represents workers in the local U.S. Steel plants.
"Our concern from the very beginning has been about the long-term viability of our existing facilities," said David McCall, president of USW. They cited concerns about Nippon's record for dumping steel in the U.S. market — or selling below production value in the U.S. — violating trade laws and resulting in several federal anti-dumping charges or tariffs over the past decade.
"It's about what their plans are for the future," McCall said. "And their plans really, what we think, are harvesting our assets so that eventually blast furnace capacity will be reduced in this country. That's the national security issue."
U.S. Steel can survive without the Nippon sale, according to McCall. "They've been profitable and they've got $4 billion in liquidity," McCall said. "We will be bargaining with them next year and want them to make real commitments to our blast furnaces here in the Mon Valley and continue to upgrade our facilities."
Beyond steel
Investment in the Mon Valley's future cannot be limited to maintaining a few industrial facilities. "I've at least been in conversation with every county executive for 20 years, where they've all said the Mon Valley has been central to their economic development strategy," Briem said. "But the truth is there's not been the resources or the plan to make significant changes to the trajectory of the Mon Valley or to make it into something new or different."
But driving the streets of North Braddock, Franklin-Robinson sees progress. The neighboring councils of Braddock, East Pittsburgh and North Braddock, or BEN, have developed and adopted a joint strategic plan to guide development for the next 10 years. North Braddock has consolidated services such as police, sanitation and code enforcement.
Woolworth's is long gone, but a new identity grows along Braddock Avenue with an art gallery, a brewery, and some restaurants. There's a veterans leadership program in what was once a high school and an urban farm in the shadow of the mill. A former pharmacy has transformed into a co-working space that includes H.O.O.P. Alliance, an organization that supports those affected by gun violence.
"We do not lack vision in this area," Franklin-Robinson said. "We are not desperate. We're just under-funded and under-resourced."
The resources can be scarce. In 2024, U.S. Rep. Summer Lee earmarked $1.2 million for North Braddock in the congressional budget. The town has around 1,200 blighted properties, and demolishing a house can cost $20,000. This funding would have gone toward training community members to demolish these properties themselves, cutting costs while providing demolition training. However, the budget was not passed, and the money never made it to North Braddock. Lee's office said they plan to try again in the next budget cycle.
Franklin-Robinson said her work is about looking forward, not to the past. Her vision for the future of her town isn't conditional on a U.S. Steel sale. "I want a child that grows up here not to see these dilapidated buildings. I want them to be able to say, 'look, the people here turned this around.' I want to be able to see that things can change. And that people don't lie. And that people who put their energy into things bring forth life."
Copyright 2025 90.5 WESA