Site of the Pittsburgh Irish Festival

The Pittsburgh Irish Festival was held at the Riverplex at Sandcastle. But the site was once part of the mammoth Homestead Steel Works.

The steel works were started in 1881 and purchased by Andrew Carnegie in 1883. (Trivia note. Carnegie is pronounced ‘Car-NAY-gee‘ in Pittsburgh and ‘CAR-knee-gee‘ everywhere else on the planet.) It’s on the banks of the Monongahela River and near railroad lines and coal fields. At its peak, 15,000 people were employed at the works. It was closed in 1986.

The plant was sold in the late 1980s, and the buyer tore everything down (except the smokestacks) and sold it all for scrap. A decade later, it was developed as a shopping mall – with the smokestacks remaining as a monument to the plant.

The Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection’s William J. Gaughan Collection includes photographs of the steel works from 1892 to 1988. The steel works was the site of a bitter strike and labor dispute in 1892.

Carnegie Mellon University published a short, and fascinating, case study on the conversion of the steel works into a shopping mall and recreational area. It’s on the ‘waterfront’ pdf link below.

I still shudder to think about what may below the surface of Riverplex. I mentioned this to someone at the festival, and the response was: “Don’t ask. It’s best of if you don’t know.”

The photograph at the top of the page is of the smokestacks – all that remains of the old Homestead Steel Works. The smokestacks were used to vent heat from red-hot steel ingots waiting to be reshaped in the mill. Photograph by Linda McDonnell.

The photograph above is circa 1910, from Detroit Publishing Company.