BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

I heard they're filming the next season of LOST in pittsburgh.

I can't tell for sure, but they kind of look like raw steel ingots, the rough block of steel that is poured into a mold straight from the furnace. From these shapes the steel would be reheated and rolled and forged into useful shapes like plates, "I" beams, and tubes.

Obviously they're being considered as art now, but I don't think they were originally created that way. The oxidation is deep & they really seem quite old. Also very solid. Pretty large (expensive) chunks of iron. I figure they must be relics of industry, but I just don't know what.

Will they look good with graffiti too?

I heard it's a memorial for steel workers who were trapped in ingots during the dedication of the new South Side park. This is on the South Side right?

ingots. spooky.

that IS freaky - does that really mean there could be dudes inside them?!?!?! isn't there something they could use to figure it out?

maybe someone should just try to fly with one... TSA will be on it in no time

Reminds me of the Shiva Linga of Golden Gate Park.

[edit] There's more to the story than seen in the video. Apparently this is one of the many objects collected by Wm Randolph Hearst (Jr or Sr?) on his travels and the city of SF somehow ended up with it without realizing its origins or what it actually was. I think it got moved to somewhere near Mt Shasta eventually.

I recognize that baskety-thing in the foreground. It's definitely a trash can.

@salty, you could use the Archimedes method, if you could put one in your bathtub.

I'm pretty sure if someone fell into a ladle of molten steel, they would be incinerated pretty quickly, maybe even explode like a microwaved hot dog. Some teeth might survive, but it wouldn't be anything like the whole Han Solo thing. Or Hoover dam http://nsla.nevadaculture.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=663&

Have a nice day!

In "Meet You in Hell" the author describes how, when a laborer fell into the pot (of molten steel), it ruined that pot, and so they poured off a casket-sized ingot.

The book makes it sound as though it would give the family something to bury, but I'm guessing that would have been a little impractical because the laborers were so poor, and those ingots would have been very, very heavy (which may also explain why so many went "unclaimed.").

Apparently before the southside works became the south side works, bunches of these were found on site (I know that from a friend who worked for the city.).

WOW!! Spooky indeed! Thank you for the steel-folklore-history lesson!

I'm gonna have to go look at them closer now.... just wow.

If they are those ingots, they should also be stamped with the workers name or initials and maybe a date. I think.

There's no technical reason why an ingot containing human remains could not be re-smelted. The steel would only have been temporarily "ruined" by the introduction of a bit of excess carbon, calcium, and phosphorous. If such ingots were left unused, it was out of a humanitarian impulse -- which I rather doubt the mill owners had.

With square ends they are more likely old rollers rather than ingots. But to keep the thread interesting, my dad and uncles always talked about a ghost in one of the (former) J&L buildings close to the hot metal bridge

"In a brief moment of inattention, Steve McBain's steel-toed workboot landed squarely on the radioactive banana peel. With a swish of displaced air, a splash of molten iron, and a muffled Eastern European-flavoured curse, the superhuman ironworker Steely McBeam was born."

Maybe that's the ghost that kept taking down the "no bikes on sidewalks" signs.

Here's a photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trainplanepro/746742964/

of ingot molds. This photo is from Homestead up river, but the sizes and shapes look right on.

Ok, I just got back from dinner with dad - retired after 42 years in the mills. He said the pic's look like ingots to him. He remembers a guy 'falling-in' sometime back in the 50's but not any specifics about what happened afterward. And the ghost was in a building directly over the RR tunnel by the stamp shop. There was also a little 6 foot by 6 foot coffee shop in the area that was really a squatter that didn't work for J&L, but just snuck in and set up shop one day. I guess her baked goods were good because she was there for a couple of decades. I love old mill stories!

@Marko82 That sounds like some really fascinating stories! While I love how much cleaner & pristine Pittsburgh looks now, I would have loved to see the dingy-furnace blasting steel mill Pittsburgh of day's past. I've seen many old photographs but I'm sure it doesn't compare

I went and did some light online-news perusing, and it looks like the ingots and their connection to Pittsburgh's steel past was in-mind when planning the almost-finished new South Side Riverpark:

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2011/03/29/finishing-touches-being-put-on-south-shore-riverfront-park/

The article below is about the Homestead Steel Mill and its closing -still interesting, I think n@:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06211/709449-28.stm

And here! A book called "The Death Ingot", by a local Pittsburgh writer, and which is a sort-of account on the history (and curse!) of death ingots!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0533161045/ref=aw_d_detail?pd=1

From the comments on the first link:

if a worker did fall in a small amount of steel would be drawn out and given to family and steel was poured into ground .

That, I believe -- a small amount, that maybe you might keep on your mantel in place of an urn full of ashes. And a small amount into the ground to appease the spirits.

If you're looking for a good story and a picture of life in the mills, try "Out of This Furnace" by Thomas Bell. It's a great book about three generations of the same family in Braddock, beginning in about 1880.

if you wanted to find out if there is a void / consolidated non-steel substance inside those ingots, without moving them, you could do a UT inspection (ultrasonic). It's NDE, but it needs a smooth surface - so you'd have to clean up a patch on one face then clean up a patch on the opposite face.

But a void would only be created if somebody fell in as it was cooling and it cooled faster than the body would be carbonized (not sure that could happen for steel). Otherwise the weight of the molten steel would collaps the void, and any movement of the steel would stir it all up, leaving no evidence other than /perhaps/ molecular composition of the steel (as previously mentioned). But I doubt that this steel was of the type to be a specific mollecular composition - specific enough to notice the changes due to the presence of a body. Steel that carefully prepared would be worth a hell of a lot.

I toured one of the few places in the world where they make steel forgings large enough to become our reactor vessels (S. Korea, other is Japan), and it was scary - lose focus for one second and you're done. I like having seen it but I never want to go back into that building again. Standing beside a red-hot mass of metal the size of a small house while cranes carry hot metal the size of minivans overhead is slightly nifty once. Mostly just frightening.

All sorts of impurities get mixed into vats of molten steel- the mills were not exactly sterile sorts of places. There was thick dust everywhere! But since virtually none of it was more dense than steel or iron, it floated to the top- which is what slag is, which is what the piles are made of in 9 mile run and many parking lots, roads, and filled in areas contain.

Got to see the ingots / obelisks up close today. They're enormous. I can't imagine a family taking one of these as a keepsake.

Where is this. I haven't seen them but would really like to.

DBL, this is at SouthSideWorks, the new trail segment along the river, relatively on the north side of SouthSideWorks (or in other words, west bank of the Mon, abeam REI).

It's not formally open, looks like it should be soon and then this will be part of the new/permanent alignment of the trail.

They've done a lot of nice work. There's another picture of the plaza here.

btw, my compliments on your blog. Vannevar.

Ran into some cops loitering on the South Side last week and asked them about the trail. They said that it looked done but then they took down a lot of fencing and put it up again the next day. It seems they are having troubles with the fencing lining up nice and neat because the fence segments are rectangular and the poles they are connecting to are not on level ground.

And I thought I may have heard that the ingots were found on site and it was decided to keep them in the area as historicart rather than paying to have them hauled away.

This whole new-trail-on-both-sides-of-the-river thing will make my commute from Oakland to the T more interesting. (Well, more interesting than my nearly-every day “is today an up-Brosville day? no, probably not” decision.)