Singing the City: The Bonds of Home in an Industrial Landscape

Singing the City is a celebration of a landscape that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial. Laurie Graham returned to Pittsburgh in the fall of 1990 after two decades of near cataclysmic decline in the city's steel and other heavy industries. She felt grieved at the loss suffered by the area's working- and middle-class communities dull distressed that, as a nation, we let our industrial places go with such equanimity.Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city's landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place.Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology -- the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles within the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day.Her account of the loss of the mills helps bring into focus the attachment workers felt not only to their jobs but to the furnaces themselves, to rolling mills and other industrial artifacts. And most important, she shows us how family history, tradition, and the engagement inherent in hard physical work can translate into aprofound engagement with the industrial landscape and a sense of home.Singing the City is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done -- both to people and to the environment, but she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart.