Diana Martin felt a gentle tug on her heart, not a thunderous boom, when three coke-making smokestacks underwent explosive demolition Wednesday morning at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works plant.
“Those stacks held a lot of memories for me,” said Martin, whose late father worked in the mill’s coke plant for more than 30 years.
The stacks, permanently idled since 2013, were once an integral part of the coke-making process at Gary Works. Coke is produced by heating coal at extremely high temperatures to be used later in blast furnaces, transforming iron into steel, and steel into buildings, bridges, vehicles and countless other products and structures.
“Seeing those stacks and smelling the coke as you’d drive by on the Indiana Toll Road, always hit it in my feels,” Martin said. “I loved that smell.”
It reminded Martin of her father, Harry Rudziewicz, and their earliest connections.
“When I was a little girl, he would often drive me the two short blocks to Glen Park Elementary School when it was snowing or raining. I always got a kiss and hug before leaving the car and his damp wool jacket smelled of the coke ovens,” she said.
This is a familiar sensory-memory for anyone who was raised near that flagship plant — in operation 24 hours a day, every day — for more than a century. My family lived just east of Gary Works, in the Glen Ryan subdivision, where the smell and haze in the air was as common as steel-toed boots and flame-retardant coveralls in our homes.
Those towering coke stacks served as landlocked lighthouses for tens of thousands of area residents, as well as for hundreds of thousands of motorists who drive past our smokestack skyline. Three coke stacks came down Wednesday morning, around 8:30 a.m., falling like dead trees in an industrial forest. The fourth stack was scheduled to be demolished Thursday, depending on weather conditions.
“Notifications have been made to relevant local and state agencies,” the Pittsburgh-based steel giant said in a statement this week. “Residents in the area may hear noises on these dates.”
Readers from across Northwest Indiana heard the noise. It sounded like rumbling thunder as the imploded stacks hit the ground, rattling pictures on walls, scaring pets and catching the attention of kids waiting for school buses, I’m told.
“It sounded like a wall of bricks collapsed, then my house shook,” said Christina Rodriguez, who lives two blocks from the Hard Rock Northern Indiana casino in Gary.
“I heard it in Lakes of the Four Seasons,” said Kimberly Piazza, who lives south of U.S. 30.
“I heard it in Portage,” said Ruth Parks.
Martin, a Gary native who lives in Portage, wanted to experience the rippling echoes from her youth, but she didn’t hear a thing. Even so, the demolishment of the old coke stacks affected her in a way she didn’t expect.
“For some reason, this hit me harder than Lew Wallace being demolished,” she said, referring to her former high school in Gary that was razed last year.
Martin’s unexpected feelings touch on the broader aspect of gritty steel mills and dirty factories in our lives. Also, the generational conundrums that pump out of all those smokestacks every year: private-sector jobs versus public-safety concerns; long-term health versus short-term wealth; environmental protection versus corporate profits.
This mixed-use industrial park called The Region has forged our steel-girded identity since the turn of the 20th century. At the southern tip of Lake Michigan, U.S. Steel was formed by some of America’s most legendary businessmen, including Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab. Its principal architect and first chairman was Elbert H. Gary.
They built the foundation for what was once called the Miracle City, and the Magic City. Its steel mills and related plants offered people with any socio-economic status a shot at middle-class comfortability or upper-class attitude. No college education required. Just sweat, hard work and the willingness to spend too much of your life in a gated but gritty community on a Great Lake.
“I had high school friends who went to work at the mill following graduation or military service and they’d tell me, ‘My locker is near your dad’s. He’s such a great guy. He was the best,'” Martin said. “My dad was a special man. A good man. And the best dad ever.”
She was raised on Connecticut Street in Gary, a few doors down from where my late grandparents once lived. Her father, nicknamed Harry Rudd, worked at U.S. Steel following his release from the U.S. Army in World War II, retiring in the late 1970s. He died in 1991, long after he moved out of the Steel City.
He was one of many who drove to work each day, greeted by those coke stacks and their continual belching. Every steel mill along our shoreline has familiar landmark stacks, blending into the landscape like skyscrapers in Chicago.
“Where nature and industry meld on the shores of Lake Michigan,” states a souvenir poster I received at ArcelorMittal’s Burns Harbor plant.
In 2014, the plant celebrated its 50th anniversary with on-site tours for families and guests. Most of my family has worked inside that plant at some point. The poster’s rendering of that mill is colorful, sanitized and even glamorized, purposely omitting the smokestack-polluting bleakness of a steel mill. This is how most of us tend to view these smokestacks, by not noticing them and their pungent smells.
The same can’t be said for longtime residents like Martin, whose connection to those coke stacks rises higher above all the fumes and fuss.
“Some people might consider it to have been an odor,” she said. “I think of it as a scent. It’s tied to my dad, and to love.”