ABSTRACT
Recent literature on memory has focused on the physical and material bases for ‘remembering’. 1 In the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, the physical structure of an enormous mill dominated images of the town for nearly a century. In 1986, the USX Homestead Works closed, and several years later a development company began to tear down the buildings that lined the Monongahela River. What disappeared then, we suggest, was not only the central source of economic and social life in the community, but also the framework for memories. Around the image of the mill, people constructed their own identities, incorporating work-based ideologies of gender. Thus, destruction of the mill altered the cultural and psychological as well as the social and the physical landscapes of the town.
