Cultural Life in Economic Death

Creative Resistance in Pittsburgh's Age of Deindustrialization

Our guest post today is written by Patrick Koroly. Pat is lifelong Pittsburgher and recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh. He is the lead writer and co-founder of the Vocation Project, which is a a collaborative of philosophy and business professionals developing a deeper, more thoughtful approach to finding happiness, meaning, and purpose. He writes their Substack newsletter.

My family has lived in the City of Homestead, just outside of Pittsburgh, for more than a hundred years. Like most Homesteaders, they were drawn in and kept there by the promise of steady work in the steel mills. The Homesteads Works, once the largest steel mill in the world, had a popular nickname among locals: “13^th grade.” The vast majority of men in town would be knocking on the door of the mill the day they finished high school.

By the time my father graduated in 1984, the 13^th grade was done accepting applicants. Deindustrialization came fast for Pittsburgh: From 1974 to 1984, the region lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs, about 40% of the total manufacturing in the region. Major mills closed down and moved overseas. The Homestead mill, where generations of my family had worked before, closed down in 1986. In the blink of an eye, the Steel City saw its namesake disappear.

Aaron Gorson (1872-1933), Pittsburgh Steel Mills at Night,

As deindustrialization made its way through the region, city leaders called for an economic rebrand. Through the course of this era of deindustrialization, the self-proclaimed Pittsburgh Renaissance II was underway. This economic revitalization was led by the Pittsburgh’s elite business community, The downtown skyline rapidly changed, moving to accommodate new developments in finance, education, and healthcare in hopes of finding a new economic identity. As of 2025, the largest employers in UPMC (our major health system), the University of Pittsburgh, and PNC Bank.

An economic rebrand of the city meant a cultural rebrand as well. Regional planners expressed a need for “high cultural and professional opportunities.”[1] A new Pittsburgh had to be built to bring in the highly educated workers needed for the new service economy. The old Pittsburgh was too much associated with dirty air and those uncultured hunkies, as Slavic mill workers were unflatteringly called. It didn’t fit the vision of a “modern” Pittsburgh that could finally move past steel.

This cultural rebrand was headlined by massive financial investments in the downtown region. The Stanley Theater received a $43-million restoration to become the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts in 1987, now home to several theater and dance companies. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra received a $70-million-dollar increase to its endowment.

The Savage Collective has been thinking a lot about culture making recently. Recently, Grant argued that culture making, as opposed to militant resistance, is a hopeful and productive form of resistance against the Machine. But what shape should culture making take? What should it mean to “lead” or “begin” cultural making?

For Pittsburgh, this cultural revitalization began as a top-down process. Starting from board rooms and donor meetings, Pittsburgh’s planners intended to create cultural revitalization through investment and policy. The cultural rebrand largely has its intended effect. Pittsburgh has consistently ranked among the top 25 cities in the nation for “arts vibrancy.”[2] Success in this kind of abstract metric was the precise goal of the cultural rebrand. Pittsburgh’s planners managed to develop the high culture necessary to fit into the educated service workers.

This method of top-down culture making almost necessarily creates a culture centered around consumption. You can’t simply order people to participate in creative forms of culture the same way you can build a theater and invite a performer. Pittsburgh’s planners certainly didn’t prioritize cultural participation, though it’s unclear just how they could’ve done so. When culture begins in board meetings and committees, the standards must be created and defined before anyone can join in. This form of culture making we might call “cultural management.”

Certainly, the Machine is an incredibly efficient manager. The work that defined the Second Pittsburgh Renaissance required this bureaucratic efficiency. Though a grassroots symphony or opera might be possible, it’s clear that it’s incredibly difficult and verging on impossible.

If the Machine does this management so much better than any individual possibly can, then what’s left to be done at a grassroots level? What sort of cultural progress can we make beginning from the individual instead of the planning committee?

In his essay “The Work of Local Culture”, Wendell Berry discusses the practice of “sitting until bedtime” in which friends and neighbors would sit together and tell stories or play instruments after their workday was done, exercising the creativity and agency necessary to entertain themselves.

This offers an obvious contrast to top-down cultural management: Culture emerging as a bottom-up process from the “consumers” themselves. But “consumer” does not seem to be the right term here. Bottom-up culture begins from creation and participation. In industrial Pittsburgh, working-class culture meant coming together to cook, play music, or play sports, or “sitting until bedtime.” Perhaps this was just for pragmatic reasons: Most workers simply lacked the resources to define themselves by consumption. Regardless, this meant that culture began with creation. We can think of this as a “cultural life” contrasted with cultural management where persons preserve their own stories, values, and capacities for creation.

John Kane (1933), Scotch Day at Kennywood

In the midst of deindustrialization, this preservation was more key than ever. But with existing social structures rapidly disappearing and new cultural management threatening to erode old cultural identity further, what did cultural preservation look like? What did cultural preservation look like for the millworkers and their families?

I’d like to offer one example. The Mill Hunk Herald was a small publication based in Braddock collecting poems, stories, and essays by local steelworkers, and one of the most fascinating attempts to create a cultural life in the midst of Pittsburgh’s cultural management. Over the course of its run—much of it coinciding with the peak of deindustrialization throughout the 1980’s—the Herald gave Pittsburgh workers a chance to speak for themselves.

The magazine was still concerned with the events of deindustrialization and made concrete attempts to keep manufacturing in the region, ranging from strikes to legal challenges. But, as they soon learned, “no court can or will overrule the law of maximum profit. There is not a court in the country that will take a steel mill away from a company.”[3] The millworkers couldn’t challenge industry in its own arena. Their resistance would have to be different.

The Herald’s editor, Larry Evans, put it very simply: “The purpose is to give people a chance to write who don’t usually get a chance to write.”[4] While much of the top-down cultural development of the era tried to offer people something to see, Larry and company offered people something to do.

Many of the magazine’s poems mourn the loss of the steel plants. “Steel 1980,” a poem by Youngstown worker John Martin published in 1980, talks about the feeling of placelessness many workers suffered:

or has it all gotten so sick

that men and women must walk

these streets in despair

told the hideous lie

that we don’t need them?[5]

More than just sadness, many in the magazine write with existential terror for the future of their class. An essay by William Welsh entitled “Endangered Species” asks whether the blue-collar worker can survive in the environment of rapid technological and economic change—and, beyond that, shows indignation towards trade unions trapped in denial of “what looms on the economic horizon as [their] inevitable demise.”[6]

At its simplest, this resistance meant finding a way to preserve a cultural future. The Herald offered a cultural opportunity that was nowhere to be found for a group that had been historically excluded from writing in journals and magazines. It offered real cultural participation for workers who had no opportunity to do so.

For a group of workers who felt totally abandoned by the withdrawal of steel from the region, the poetry and songs of the Herald were an opportunity to contemplate their struggles at the end of the steel era. Beyond that, it serves as a rebellious cry that says that we are still here. In a city that hoped to get rid of its identity as the town of smoke and hunkies, the Herald cries out that these people will not go away so easily.

Larry Evans and the rest of the Herald often compared themselves to the Polish Solidarity movement. In Tony Buba’s short documentary on the Herald[7], one member says, “Lech Walesa—he’s crazy enough to organize in Poland. We’re crazy enough to organize here in Braddock.”[8] In a story by Evans, “If Walesa Came to Pittsburgh,” he suggests that if Walesa organized in Braddock like he did in Poland, he’d be deported from the United States before long.

For the writers and editors of the Herald, this was more than just a fun little hobby or a good way to build community. This was necessary for a new social movement, one with the same gravity and power as Walesa’s Solidarity. Evans called the magazine “a fast vehicle on Blue Collar America’s slow and hopelessly potholed road to working class solidarity.”[9]

Comparing their movement to Solidarity shows that this was more than just a means of entertainment or enjoyment for the Herald’s readers and writers. This was a new way of resisting tyranny. In the face of radical change with deindustrialization and economic redevelopment in Pittsburgh—change that radically threatened these people’s very existence as blue-collar Pittsburghers—the Herald was a new way to fight back.

The Herald lasted a decade, which is roughly a century in self-published-art-journal years. In 1989, the dedicated Larry Evans (who passed away in 2014) left his work at the Herald to get a degree at Rutgers’s Labor Studies program. I don’t blame Evans for leaving unemployment and instability in Pittsburgh to look for something more reliable. Like every millworker, the end of steel left him as essentially an economic vagrant. Much like the city, when the economic opportunities of the mills dried up, he moved to education.

But I can’t help but wonder if the Herald could’ve stuck around and offered real hope for cultural resistance. Something like this is exactly what we need to not just criticize the Machine but to build something new that can exist away from it.

One of the fundamental commitments of the Machine is that persons do not matter. Or, to put it better, persons are interchangeable in the same way that the parts of a literal machine may be swapped out. The forces that dictate change in the world are too large for any one person to control.

Perhaps this is true at a global level. But creative resistance does not begin at a global level. Creative resistance is not and cannot be that same sort of top-down cultural managemnet. It must begin locally, and it must begin with persons.

Buba, in an introduction to the collected Herald writings, says that the philosophy of the Herald “instilled courage into individuals who normally pick up a shovel, picked up dirty dishes, picked up after their children, to pick up a pen. This philosophy made people realize what they said was important.”[10] It’s just this sort of courage that we need to build a culture where we are not just made to consume but made to create. It’s this philosophy that we need to move from cultural development to cultural life.

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[1] Roy Lubove, 20^th Century Pittsburgh Vol. I, p. 136

[2] https://www.wesa.fm/arts-sports-culture/2023-11-01/pittsburgh-arts-vibrancy-report

[3] Anonymous, “Into a Genuine Utility,” in Overtime, p. 29

[4] “The Mill Hunk Herald” directed by Tony Buba, 1981

[5] In Overtime: Punchin’ Out with the Mill Hunk Herald, p. 9.

[6] Ibid. 56

[7] The documentary consists of conversations with Larry, his wife Leslie, and others at a local social club, one writer playing accordion and dancing around while everyone shoots pool and drinks Iron Cities, and a parade around Braddock with much more music and dancing still. This is about as simple of a summary of the Herald as you can get.

[8] “The Mill Hunk Herald,” 1981

[9] Overtime p. viii

[10] Overtime p. ii