ABSTRACT
Chapter three follows structural steel from one riverside to another in the 1930s: from United States Steel Corporation’s Carrie Blast Furnaces on the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh to Riverside Park on the Hudson River in Manhattan. In the early 1900s, the steel industry exemplified the strategies of monopoly capitalism by capturing, integrating, and reorganizing massive holdings of ore deposits, infrastructure, and labor across the country. At the same time, steel materially reorganized the modern city-spanning infrastructure, structuring concrete, and supporting towers-but also immaterially through speculative real estate development in Manhattan. New Deal legislation stimulated a lagging steel industry through massive steel infrastructure investments (in places like New York City), but also new labor legislation that enabled the struggle towards collective bargaining (centered in Pittsburgh). This chapter looks at the role that steel and progressive legislation played in the construction of the new modern public landscape, and in the support of organized industrial labor. It also examines the inherent tensions between industrial development and the environmental risks born by residents-and the ways in which landscape architects mediate between them.
