South Side
South Side melt shop
South Side melt shop. Ladle death, 1922
The Jones & Laughlin steel works on the South Side ran along the Monongahela for most of the twentieth century. The shop in this story is the open hearth, the shed where steel was melted in a broad shallow furnace and then poured into a ladle, a brick-lined pot large enough to hold tons of it. The shop is gone. The flats where it stood have been cleared and built over.
In 1922 a steelworker named Jim Grabowski fell into one of those ladles. Thomas White, a historian at Duquesne, asked men who had worked that shop what they remembered, and he published what they told him in Forgotten Tales of Pittsburgh. A foreman said that something like 30 or 40 percent of the men on the shift believed Grabowski had come back. Two of the men White talked to said they had seen him. The open hearth closed around 1960. On the night shift, the story outlasted the shop by decades.
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