Pittsburg, PA
Sale of US Steel kicks up a political storm, but Pittsburgh isn't Steeltown USA anymore
PITTSBURGH — Generations of Pittsburgh residents have worked at steel mills, rooted for the Steelers or ridden the rollercoaster at Kennywood amusement park, giving them a bird’s eye view of the massive Edgar Thomson Works, the region’s last blast furnace.
Now, Steeltown USA’s most storied steel company, U.S. Steel, is on the cusp of being bought by Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel Corp. in a deal that’s kicking up an election year political maelstrom across America’s industrial heartland.
The sale comes during a tide of renewed political support for rebuilding America’s manufacturing sector and in the middle of a presidential campaign in which the politically dynamic Pittsburgh region is a destination for President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and their surrogates.
The deal follows a long stretch of protectionist U.S. tariffs that analysts say has helped reinvigorate domestic steel. And it is eliciting complicated feelings in a region where steel is largely a thing of the past after people, particularly those 50 or older, watched mills shut down and their Rust Belt towns wither.
“The fear is that these jobs went away once, and the fear is that these jobs could go away again,” said Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic campaign consultant whose grandfather lost his steel mill job 40 years ago.
U.S. Steel is no longer a major steelmaker in an industry dominated by the Chinese. But its workers still carry political heft in what some see as a larger symbolic fight to save what’s left of manufacturing in the United States.
With the United Steelworkers against the deal, Biden — a Democrat who has made his support for organized labor explicit and has won the union’s endorsement — has all but vowed to block U.S. Steel’s sale, saying in an April rally with steelworkers in Pittsburgh that the company “should remain totally American.”
Trump, a Republican who as president opposed union organizing efforts but describes himself as pro-worker, has said he would block it “instantaneously.”
Biden’s White House has indicated the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States will review the transaction for national security concerns. The committee can recommend that the president block a transaction, and federal law gives the president that power.
In the meantime, the Department of Justice is reviewing it for antitrust compliance, and the steelworkers union has filed a grievance over it.
In a rare flurry of bipartisan unity, the sale has drawn opposition from Democratic Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio and from Republican Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, on both economic and national security grounds.
Nippon Steel has scheduled the deal to close later this year.
Once the world’s largest corporation, U.S. Steel was the world’s 27th-largest steelmaker in 2023, according to World Steel Association figures. It reported just under $900 million in net income on $16 billion in sales last year.
The deal includes all of U.S. Steel’s ore mining, coking, steelmaking and processing plants around the country, including the Edgar Thomson Works, which looms over the Monongahela River just south of Pittsburgh and still churns out steel slabs 150 years after it was built. U.S. Steel employs 3,000 people at its four major Pennsylvania plants, including the Edgar Thomson and the nation’s largest coke-making plant in nearby Clairton.
Nippon Steel — the world’s fourth-largest steelmaker in 2023, according to association figures — and U.S. Steel are now in the midst of a broad public relations effort to promote the sale.
Their ads are on social media, TV screens and billboards, as the companies promise to protect jobs, move Nippon Steel’s U.S. headquarters to Pittsburgh from Houston and invest in the badly aging Pittsburgh-area plants to make them cleaner and more efficient.
Flyers landing in Pittsburgh-area mailboxes tout the “future of American steel” and urge residents to contact their elected officials to support the companies’ “partnership.”
And, they say, “U.S. Steel remains U.S. Steel.”
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh is a changed place.
It is no longer a destination for new steel investment. Gone are the 20 or so miles (32 kilometers) of contiguous iron and steel mills from downtown Pittsburgh and up the Monongahela River that helped the U.S. industrialize and wage wars.
Now, Pittsburgh is seen as an “eds and meds” city in which universities and hospitals are the major employers.
Allegheny County, which surrounds Pittsburgh, just began growing again, after decades of population decline. Some city neighborhoods have emerged from a long period of struggle and are thriving, and a younger generation is attracted to the city’s growing high-tech industry.
Younger residents or transplants don’t necessarily want steelworkers to lose jobs, but they care about the environment, too. Local elections are increasingly elevating insurgent progressives who take a dim view of fossil fuels and heavy industries — such as U.S. Steel’s plants — that use them.
Edith Abeyta, an artist and California transplant who lives near Edgar Thomson Works, keeps an air monitor at her house to check daily for air quality.
For her, Edgar Thomson Works is a massive eyesore and a health threat.
“Not every place you go smells like rotten eggs or burning metal or you see big plumes of red smoke or black smoke or flares that are burning all night long,” Abeyta said. “Not everybody lives with that.”
Steelworkers have changed too.
The union still endorses Democrats, but rank-and-file blue-collar union members, like the steelworkers, are no longer viewed as a bedrock of the Democratic Party’s coalition, in part because of shrinking union numbers but also because there were defections to Republicans. In 2016, Trump became the first Republican to win Rust Belt states Michigan and Pennsylvania since 1988.
Christopher Briem, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research, estimated there are 5,000 steel mill jobs in the region, a tiny percentage of the number of mill jobs when steelmaking there was at its peak. He puts the region’s competitive steelmaking peak in the 1920s, before technological advances rendered the region’s metallurgical coal unnecessary for steelmaking and gave rise to electric arc furnaces that don’t require coal.
And while Pittsburgh has recovered from the collapse of steel, some smaller neighboring towns haven’t.
“And that’s what got people so concerned, is the fact that we’ve been through this before and it changed the region and it devastated people’s lives,” said August Carlino, president and chief executive officer of the Rivers of Steel Heritage Corporation, based in Homestead.
Tony Buba, a filmmaker who lives near the Edgar Thomson plant and whose father worked for 44 years at a steel mill, sees a misplaced nostalgia around Pittsburgh’s steel industry.
Mill jobs were dangerous work that didn’t pay decent wages until shortly before steel’s collapse in the early 1980s, he said. “Sirens would go off when someone got hurt, and mother would start praying,” he said.
Regardless of who owns them, Buba expects that Pittsburgh’s steel plants will be gone in 30 or 40 years — and that political support will be fleeting.
“It’ll be interesting to see after the election,” Buba said, “how many people are opposed to the sale.”
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Follow Marc Levy at twitter.com/timelywriter.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
You don’t need to have your eyes checked, you are seeing things right – the Cincinnati Reds have won a second straight game against a National League Central division opponent. The win in a back-and-forth game came down to the 9th inning and down to their last strike the Reds got a 3-run home run from Eugenio Suarez and they held on to beat the Pirates and pick up a series win in Pittsburgh with one game left on Sunday.
| Final | R | H | E |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cincinnati Reds (39-42) | 9 | 10 | 0 |
| Pittsburgh Pirates (41-42) | 7 | 11 | 2 |
| W: Ferguson (1-0) L: Soto (4-2) SV: Petty (1) | |||
| Statcast | Box Score | Game Thread | |||
After a delayed start due to some rain, the game started about 40 minutes after the originally scheduled time. Cincinnati didn’t take much time to grab a lead. Sal Stewart took the 4th pitch of the game and went the other way for a solo home run. Chase Burns had to work around two singles in the bottom of the inning but he got out of the jam to keep the lead.
Two innings later the Reds offense got back to it when Jose Trevino led off with a ground-rule double and later came in to score on a 2-out hit by Stewart as he picked up his second run batted in on the day. The Pirates put together a rally of their own in the bottom of the frame. Back-to-back singles got things started and then Brandon Lowe came through for the home team with a 3-run home run to put Pittsburgh in the lead. In the 4th inning they would tack on another run on a single by Jared Triolo that made it 4-2.
Cincinnati got back in the game in the 5th with plenty of help from the Pirates. Dane Myers walked and then took second base thanks to a balk. A wild pitch moved him to third base and he would later score on a double by Edwin Arroyo. A second wild pitch in the inning moved him up to third and then he scored when Brandon Lowe failed to come up with a grounder cleanly at second base with two outs and that tied up the game.
The next inning the Reds would take the lead. They would load the bases with one out thanks to a walk and two singles. That set things up for Jose Trevino who came through with a 2-run single that made it 6-4.
At 90 pitches on the day, Chase Burns headed back to the mound for the 7th inning with a lead but he gave up a leadoff double that just missed being a home run off of the top of the wall in right field. That ended his day and manager Terry Francona called on Sam Moll from the bullpen. He would get a groundout, but it moved Jared Triolo up to third base and he then came in to score on a sacrifice fly that made it a 1-run game. Moll then walked Bryan Reynolds and Nick Gonzales, bringing up left-handed hitter Ryan O’Hearn and he came through with a game-tying single into right field. Tejay Antone then entered the game and struck out Marcell Ozuna to end the inning.
Pittsburgh would see a new reliever to start the 8th inning as Caleb Ferguson took over for Antone. He got a line out to begin the inning but then Esmerlyn Valdez took the first pitch he saw and hit it into the seats in right field for a go-ahead solo home run to give Pittsburgh the lead.
Cincinnati entered the top of the 9th down by a run but they got the tying run on base immediately as Edwin Arroyo lined a single into right field. Elly De La Cruz was called out on strikes, but he challenged the call and it was overturned and turned strike three into ball four and the Reds had two men on with no outs. After Sal Stewart grounded into a double play, moving Arroyo to third base, JJ Bleday worked a walk to put runners on the corners for Eugenio Suarez. He came through in the biggest way as he took a 2-2 97 MPH fastball and went the other way for a 3-run home run to put Cincinnati up 9-7.
Now holding a lead the Reds sent Chase Petty to the mound. The first pitch he threw turned into a groundout. It took four pitches to get Bryan Reynolds to pop up for the second out. Petty fell behind the next hitter and wound up walking Nick Gonzalez, bringing Ryan O’Hearn to the plate as the tying run. He pulled a line drive down the line but Spencer Steer was standing right there to catch it and end the game.
Key Moment of the Game
Eugenio Suarez hitting a go-ahead 3-run home run in the top of the 9th inning.
Notes Worth Noting
Cincinnati had just two wins against the NL Central when this series began. They’ve now doubled that and have a chance at a sweep on Sunday.
Sal Stewart, Jose Trevino, and Edwin Arroyo all had 2-hit days.
Eugenio Suarez had been in a big slump, going 1-22 from June 16-23rd. But since then he’s been heating up a bit, going 4-11 with two doubles, a home run, and two walks in the last three games.
Chase Petty picked up his first career save.
Up Next for the Cincinnati Reds
Cincinnati Reds vs Pittsburgh Pirates
Sunday June 28th, 1:35pm ET
Brady Singer (3-6, 4.81 ERA) vs Mitch Keller (5-5, 4.89 ERA)
The Pittsburgh Penguins got what they wanted.
Friday night was life-changing for Pittsburgh Penguins’ first-round pick Liam Ruck of the Medicine Hat Tigers. The organization selected him with the 22nd overall pick. Saturday morning was life-changing for his identical twin brother Markus Ruck as the Penguins used the first of their second-round picks to select him.
And the twins and teammates in Medicine Hat, who have spent only four days apart in their first 18 years, got what they wanted, too. They’re both Pittsburgh Penguins.
Penguins general manager Kyle Dubas told reporters Friday night, following the conclusion of Round One, that it appeared more likely in the days leading to the draft that the team would not be able to trade up and that Liam Ruck would be available to them.
There were credible rumors emanating from the league side that some teams considered taking Markus to spur trade talks with the Penguins, but eventually, the other half of the WHL’s high-scoring duo was available Saturday morning with the 39th overall pick.
While Liam had 45 goals and 104 points in 68 games, Markus was the slick playmaking center who kept him fed. Markus Ruck had 108 points with 87 assists. Both brothers need to both add bulk but also improve their skating, which scouts consider a weakness.
Liam is the slightly larger twin, at 6-foot, 177 pounds. Markus weighs in at 6-foot, 167 pounds.
The story is developing, and Pittsburgh Hockey Now will update the story after Markus Ruck speaks with the media.
Categorized:2026 NHL Draft Pittsburgh Penguins
The South Side Street Fest added additional metal detectors and ID scanners, plus a dedicated line for locals, to help people get in faster after long lines were reported for the event’s first outing last weekend.
There were no lines at 11 p.m. on Friday, the event’s second night, but an organizer said Saturday, when they usually see larger crowds, will be a better test of the new measures. While attendees praised the event’s first night from a safety standpoint, with no arrests and an average number of citations issued, some criticized how long it took to get in on June 20.
“It’s a little overkill. I kind of had to wait 30 minutes,” Justin McCord said. “The line was just startling to me.”
John DeMauro, a business owner and member of the South Side Hospitality Partnership, which is working with the city to put on the event, said leaders have heard the feedback.
“We got more people than we thought there [would be],” DeMauro said. “There was a little bit of a wait to get into the entrances.”
They’ve since added four ID scanners and two more metal detectors, he said.
“We should be able to move those lines along fairly quickly this week,” DeMauro said.
The event is restricted to people 21 and up, but anyone under 21 who lives within the footprint can still get through. They’ll be escorted to their homes, a police commander told KDKA-TV, adding that few kids live inside the event’s footprint.
They also have a new solution for South Side residents to enter the footprint faster: a local lane pass. Acting just like a fast pass at an amusement park, those who have it can go through a dedicated entry line.
“Wanted that to be quicker, wanted that to be not as cumbersome,” he said.
Anyone who lives in the 15203 zip code, which covers the entire South Side, can register for the pass online, he said. At the 18th Street security checkpoint on Friday, residents had to show their ID with the 15203 zip code to go through the local lane.
Because the zip code is used, it means it’s not just for people who live inside the footprint. Anyone who lives on the South Side can enter using the pass, for instance, if they want to grab something from a corner store. Fifty people had registered as of 7 p.m. on Friday.
The line also helps to get delivery drivers through, Zone 3’s police commander said.
A bar owner within the footprint told KDKA-TV last week that during the fest’s debut, they saw a lot of people on the street but fewer in bars. But because it’s so early, they said they weren’t concerned.
“I think that’s the general consensus,” DeMauro said. “It was a really good start to it, but our intention is to make it grow. I think that’s the biggest thing we want people to understand.”
He added that the intention moving forward is to keep listening to feedback and making changes to improve the festival. He also encouraged people to come down to test the improved security measures themselves.
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