Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead

In 1986, with little warning, the USX Homestead Works closed. Thousands of workers who depended on steel to survive were left without work. A Town Without Steel looks at the people of Homestead as they reinvent their views of the home and the workplace, and details the modifications and revisions of domestic strategies in a public crisis. In some ways unique, and in some ways typical of other American industrial towns, the plight of Homestead sheds light on social, cultural, and political developments of the late twentieth century. Judith Modell has interviewed forty-five men and women - an array of voices and opinions that reflect the ways in which the mill closing affected the town across age, gender, and racial lines. Charlee Brodsky's photographs serve to document the visual dimension of change in Homestead.