Still Here

I am still here, though I’ve haven’t been doing as much posting as I once did on Barnestormin.
I’m no U.S. Steel, but in some ways, we may be alike—out of sight and out of mind. U.S. Steel once was the global giant of the world steel industry, but now it’s a small fry compared to its former self. But it is not gone, neither from Pittsburgh, nor from America.
I bring this up because Pittsburgh’s young mayor, who has every reason to know nothing about the steel industry’s preeminence in Pittsburgh since he was born at the end of it, apparently doesn’t realize that the steel industry still exists in Pittsburgh. Sure, it’s a shadow of its former self, but it’s still hanging. But Mayor Luke is apparently afraid to admit this fact, since he, like many Pittsburghers, has a sort of industrophobia that makes him deny that Pittsburgh has any current connection to steel.
Letterman asked the young mayor, “Is steel all gone [from Pittsburgh]?”
“It’s all gone,” the mayor replied, as if the Mon Valley works didn’t exist, or as if the Steel Building still isn’t headquarters to U.S. Steel.
The Edgar Thompson Works, in Braddock, is state-of-the-art and was built in 1875. U.S Steel employs 4,000 people locally and 45,000 globally, and the company’s growing.
The 105-year-old company produces 4 million tons of coke annually at the Clairton works, and 2.9 million tons of raw steel each year in Braddock.
Steel is still here, young mayor.