The South Works of U.S. Steel has been a city unto itself for most of its 112 years of existence.
The lakeside complex boasted not only steel furnaces and mills but also hospitals, stores, its own telephone and postal services, a separate security force and a railroad system with more than 100 miles of track. Men who worked there say being ”inside” often meant forgetting the outside world altogether.
But sweeping changes in the outside world finally overcame South Works, and after April 10, it will be a city no more.
Instead, it will become a crumbling museum of a different industrial age, a time when red skies and open-hearth furnaces meant prosperity and not pollution, when men died to form unions to stop other men from dying from a lack of even rudimentary safety procedures and when a high-paying mill job seemed a civil right for the younger generation.
USX Corp., the parent of U.S. Steel Group, will close down the Works for good and concentrate operations at the company`s still-massive and much-modernized Gary Works. It`s a sensible decision for the company, beset by the ills of the embattled U.S. steel industry. It`s the end of an era for Chicago and for those living and gone who worked there.
Eric H. Brokop retired from South Works with 25 years service in 1967, but he has kept up relations with fellow employees. A few weeks before the January announcement of the closing, his former superintendent asked Brokop, now 80, if he would like to go back for a look around.
”The superintendent took me through the whole plant, and we found the place where I used to work,” says Brokop, who conducted interrogations and wrote reports for plant security. ”It was a shambles. Where I sat was just a bunch of rubble. My God, my head shook.”
In a short while, anybody who ever worked at South Works will know, as Brokop does, that their old work station has gone to rubble. That`s a hard thought.
But South Works always was a hard place. Old-time foremen were chosen for the size of their fists, a different notion from today`s ideas about how to create meaningful interpersonal relationships in the workplace.
”Before we got rights under the union, they`d knock you down on your bucket,” says Frank Stanley, 70, a 40-year veteran of South Works. ”I asked them, `How do you get away with that?` They`d say, `Who`s going to stop me?`
”
For some, it got too hard. Stanley`s son, Robert, 44, worked more than 10 years in steel mills, then decided to look elsewhere for employment.
”One winter we had maybe 30 days in a row of subzero temperatures,”
Robert Stanley says. ”I was outside those days mending the pipes that broke. ”Working in the mill was dirty. It was hot, cold, dangerous. I was dirty by the time I got my work clothes on in the morning. I had to wash my hands to go to breakfast. I don`t do that anymore.”
The Works turned out the structural steel that built Chicago and beyond. South Works steel holds up McCormick Place, Sears Tower, the Amoco Building, the John Hancock Center, the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower. It built the Cape Kennedy assembly structure and the Birmingham, Ala., Municipal Airport parking structure.
”Take the buildings out of Chicago that South Works built, and you`ve got a cow town on your hands,” says Thomas R. Ferrall, director of public affairs for the U.S. Steel Group.
Take the people out of Chicago and its suburbs who have personal or family ties to South Works, and something of a similar void would exist.
The remembrance of South Works should be kept hard, like its history, part of the basic structure of what Chicago is and where it came from. In its greatest days, during World War II and after, it was Chicago`s single biggest employer with more than 20,000 workers. When the announcement came of its closing, it employed only a few more than 700.
The South Works began life on March 22, 1880.
On that date, Orrin W. Potter, president of the North Chicago Rolling Mill Co., broke ground on 73 acres of land in South Chicago for a steelmaking plant intended to build railroad tracks. The site on Lake Michigan and the Calumet River assured access for deep-draught ore boats. Chicago`s rail hub guaranteed transport for finished product. Deep seams of coal in Illinois and Indiana promised cheap energy. Immigrant labor abounded.
Ethnic newspapers bannered in a polyglot: 2,000 workers wanted in South Chicago for a plant to produce 1,200 tons of steel a week. Average monthly wage: $41.66 for six days a week, 12 hours a day.
Prospective laborers stepped off the train in South Chicago and found a swamp. People laughed about a woman wearing a hooped crinoline skirt who toppled from a raised wooden sidewalk and disappeared into the mud ”under full sail.” Men waded to work in fair weather and rowed when it rained.
In June 1881 the first two blast furnaces began production. A year later a Bessemer converter began producing steel, the mills rolled rail, and two more furnaces went on line.
In 1901 South Works became part of what was then the world`s largest private enterprise, the United States Steel Corp., created by the great industrialist J. Pierpont Morgan. To make U.S. Steel, Morgan merged the Illinois Steel Co. (formed in 1889 and including South Works), the Carnegie Steel Co. and nine other steel companies.
U.S. Steel began a vigorous expansion, making everything from nails to structural steel and introducing new technology such as electric furnaces. It regularly built new slabbing, bar, plate and blooming mills. The Works eventually grew to more than 600 acres.
World War I brought a labor shortage, which was filled by Mexicans who set up a still-thriving community of their own.
The Great Depression brought labor wars, which amounted to civil war in the closely knit communities on the South Side. When police killed 10 strikers in the Memorial Day Massacre in 1937, involving nearby Republic Steel, it pitted neighbor against neighbor.
”Every one of us guys was ducking when we heard the bullets go by,”
Casey Kilmowski, a survivor, said in a newspaper interview nearly a half-century later. ”We knew these cops, or some of them at least. Later, when I`d see one of them, they`d go: `We had orders. Look, we had orders.`
” `You dirty SOBs,` I said. `You know me all your life. Am I a commie?
Am I a communist? You know me all your life.` ”
That same year, U.S. Steel became the first to recognize the Steelworkers Organizing Committee, now known as Local 65 of the United Steelworkers of America.
World War II brought the headiest days at South Works. Employment swelled to a peak of between 20,000 and 21,000 in 1944. Employment doors opened for blacks as they had for Mexicans during World War I.
South Works knew several decades of prosperity after the war, before the mid-1970s, when decline began in earnest.
James R. Talamonti, 52 grew up in the shadow of the mills, watching with fascination at night when white-hot slag was poured off the sides of railroad tracks in a brilliant ”fireworks” display. After working his way through Loyola University, Talamonti interviewed with the hometown company and landed a management-training position.
”It was a plum; I couldn`t have been happier,” Talamonti says. But he quit in 1972 after only 11 years. ”There were a lot of reasons. You just knew it couldn`t go on forever with those work rules and pay rules. And we were building a 32-foot furnace, but the Japanese had 40-foot furnaces, and they were 50 percent more efficient. We were behind and actually planning to stay behind.” Talamonti now runs his own firm making in-store display advertising. Management saw the efficiency gaps. And so did some workers.
”It was wide open when I started in 1957. I was never laid off a single day, never collected a dime of sick pay,” says John E. Edwards, 79, who worked nearly 19 years at South Works.
”I retired early, when I was 63. I came home one day and told my wife it wasn`t fun anymore. You could see the change in the attitude of the workers. Everybody seemed to say, `It ain`t my job.` ”
It wasn`t just workers` attitudes that changed. Orders fell. Small non-union steel mills began producing good steel at cheap prices. Imported steel cut into market share. Even when output stayed the same, employment fell.
South Works could not stay isolated from that world. In 1983 U.S. Steel reneged on a proposal to build a new rail mill after long, bitter negotiations with the steelworkers union and the city and state governments. An employee buyout scheme failed last year. And in January the closing was finally announced.
Curiously, Ferrall, the company`s public affairs director, says company officials did not expect the final announcement to get anywhere near the attention it did. For the company, the handwriting on the wall had been visible for a long time.
Those whose lives are part of South Works didn`t want to see the obvious. The city that steel built had been their fortress, a complete world finally overcome by forces greater than even its seemingly limitless power.
But South Works will remain a presence-anonymously, in the hidden steel that supports buildings, bridges and factories; and personally, in the lives of those with a connection to the roaring melting pots that turned iron ore, limestone and coke into prime steel, and likewise turned Scots, Irish, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Mexicans, blacks and others into generations of Americans.
