Cup of Inspiration

Erika Svensson
http://erikasvensson.com/

Todd Hido
http://www.toddhido.com/

Justin James Reed
http://www.justinjamesreed.com/

I am thinking about incorporating color photographs into my show. Yes, no?

On Getting Fired

I am home, in New Jersey.
Lately, I've had the funny idea to write small vignettes about the people who I had encountered in Bethlehem regarding how I understood them in the context of work, jobs, employment, whatever, or how they understood themselves in such situations. It seemed natural to start with my boss from the Hard Bean, Dan. So here's an excerpt, rough, unpolished and truthful to my point of view.

------

Outside the shop are fliers written in bold, black capitals: “RESTROOMS ARE FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY” or “NO LOITERING OR SOLICITING.” Dan speaks like his signs: loudly in your face and bordering on rude. I used to tell him he needed more signs. Like how about one that plainly says “NO COFFEE, NO INTERNET” or “DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT YOUR RELIGION; I DON’T CARE.”
The coffee shop is Dan’s money making venture, not his curiosity, passion or project. It shows. He almost threw a guy out who asked for a glass of water. When Dan told him bottles of water sold for a dollar, the guy (who was actually just a kid in the evening’s band) took a friend’s empty coffee cup and filled it from the bathroom tap. He snuck upstairs with his checkered cap pulled low over his brow.
“I don’t care if fuckin’ Jesus Christ walked in here! Water’s a dollar!” Dan hollered, his voice dampened by the ska/punk band screaming and thumping upstairs.
“They’re just kids, and it’s just water,” I cajoled, leaning my arms against the counter as several syrup bottles clinked tops.
“Yeah but my cups ain’t fuckin’ free, y’know?” he answered somewhere between whining and demanding.

When Dan fired me, he told me in response to my prompting question. “Am I fired?” He hadn’t called me that whole week. I left him several messages asking for my hours, and when I got him on the phone on a Saturday, he mumbled that he was busy and would call back with my schedule. Never an answer. I was in Vermont at the time, wholly thrilled with flora, fauna, red wine and blueberry picking. I rushed to get back like sap ran to greet the roots of a maple.
When I came in a few days later, Dan handed me an envelope with check for two hundred and sixty-eight dollars.
“Yeah you’re fired,” he said, rifling through his drawers, rearranging his pens. “You know the hours. You didn’t come in.”
Petty or not, I took the money and stayed for the night’s show. (The band that played for honking cars, some stragglers, and this one guy who looked like Hyde from That Seventies Show.) I told myself, “hey this might be useful for my project,” and “well at least it’s more money than I thought,” or “well this just goes to prove that turnover is expected and people replaceable in this town.” (But maybe the latter is a bit sinister.)

Page 100

..."how, looking thus into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other and whose existence is all measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I to speak of you as 'tenant' 'farmers,' as 'representatives' of your 'class,' as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends and as I 'know' you?  Granted - more, insisted upon - that is all in these particularities that each of you is that which he is; that particularities, and matters ordinary and obvious, are exactly themselves beyond designation of words, are the members of your sum total most obligatory to human searching of perception: nevertheless to name these things and fail to yield their stature, meaning, power of hurt, seems impious, seems criminal, seems impudent, seems traitorous in the deepest: and to do less badly seems impossible: yet in withholdings of specification I could but betray you still worse..."

"...The heart, nerve, center of each of these, is an individual human life."

-James Agee

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In 1941

Excerpt from an interview with Mary Stolysiak by Andrew Krause for Beyond 

Steel:  An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture on March 

30, 2006. 

JOHN:  He was a big union man. 

MS: He started the union down at the steel. 

JOHN:  He was a staff man. 

MS: Yeah, he was a staff man. 

AK: So he worked in the offices or the plant? 

MS: No, he worked in a plant but then when he became a union man, 

then he got the union job and he quit the steel. 

AK: Oh, I see.  So he was involved in 1940-41 with the strike and 

everything? 

MS: Yeah, yeah.  Big strike.  In all of that.  Yeah 3930. 

AK: What do you remember from the strike?  What are your 

recollections of that? 

MS: Well, I remember when the strike was because it was 1941.  We 

got married in 1941 and then I became pregnant.  And I was like 

four months and we went, and my brother come running up and he 

came running up here to get a baseball bat because he said-- 

JOHN:  I went with him. 

MS: Yeah, you went with him.  My brother came up here and he quick 

got a baseball bat and he took my husband with him because he 

said the police are coming down.  There’s a strike down, at the 

steel.  So I went down with them, you know.  But I was pregnant, 

like four months.  And here when we got down on Third Street, 

there was a colonial, a hotel right on the corner, colonial.  There 

was a hotel there.  I was standing on the steps there and here the 

police on the big horses, they came right for us.  Oh, I ran. 

JOHN:  Yeah, yeah.  There was a bank down there on Third Street that 

[unclear] Gustonies. 

AK: Gustonies.  Yeah. 

JOHN:  I was walking along there and one of them Cossacks hit me right 

in the behind with a club at Gustonies.   

MS:  Oh, they were mean.  With the horses and all. 

JOHN:  They had a big gas tank, I remember.  

MS: Yeah.  Yeah. 

JOHN:  Hundreds of thousands of people were milling around.  And 

them Cossacks--  

AK: Cossacks. 

JOHN:  And one was amongst the crowd and it was a guy about my size.  

He couldn’t take it no more.  The Cossack was walking [unclear] 

That guy had a lot of nerve.  You know what he did?  He hit that 

cop right underneath the chin and the cop’s helmet fell off and he 

went down the line.  They never caught him.  If they had caught 

him, they would have killed him. 

AK: Wow. 

MS: The strike was real bad at that time, ’41.  That was a bad strike.  

The cars, they were turning cars over and everything. 

JOHN:  [Unclear] was the worst. 

MS: Yeah. 

JOHN:  What was the name of that marathon that was up there? 

MS: That was-- 

AK: Was it Smodishes? 

JOHN:  No, no. 

MS: Well, Smodishes was up there, but, Eagle.  Wasn’t it the Eagle? 

JOHN:  Right near the steelworks, it was.   

MS: Hoffage. 

JOHN:  Hoffage.  Yeah.  That’s where it--  

MS: Hoffage, yeah.  That was a beer garden, yeah. 

JOHN:  So Jack Thurner, remember he was a police when he come up 

with a car. 

MS: Yeah. 

JOHN:  And oh, he’s a wise guy.  When he come up, the cops, no the 

strikers. 

MS: The strikers turned him over--  

JOHN:  The strikers got a hold of the car--  

MS: And turned it over. 

JOHN:  No, wait.  Didn’t turn them over.  They were ready to turn him 

over and he got away. 

MS: Yeah.  Oh yeah, he got away, oh yeah.  And then a little girl was 

on the steps and remember the horse went right for her.  They 

knocked her over.  She’s all bloody and everything. 

AK: A little girl? 

MS: Twelve year old. 

AK: Twelve year old, oh my. 

JOHN:  They didn’t care what they did. 

MS: They were bad, real bad.  The strike was extra bad.   

JOHN:  I remember at that time the Governor was Governor James. 

MS: Yeah. 

JOHN:  The reason that I can remember that is because they gave him a 

nickname.  They called him Jesse James.   

AK: Because he was so forceful. 

JOHN:  That’s why I remember that. 

AK: And were you in the pickets, John? 

STOLYSIAK 30 

JOHN:  I was, sure. 

MS: There were scabs too.  A lot of guys that went in.  They jumped the 

fence and went in. 

JOHN:  Did they climb ladders?  I’ve heard that story that they climbed 

ladders --  

MS: Yes, they did. 

JOHN:  I climbed over the fence to get in my pay [unclear] during the 

strike.  Yeah, I climbed in.  And the superintendent came over, and 

what do you want?  And I looked down and I said, all the scabs, I 

seen them.  I said, I came in for my pay.  Well, he said, you don’t 

get it unless you stay here.  I said, no, I’m not going to stay here. 

MS: Yeah. 

JOHN:  So I left without it. 

AK: So you left. 

JOHN:  He wouldn’t give it to me. 

MS: There were a lot of scabs, you know.  Like now, you know.   

Courtesy of Lehigh University

http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/beyondsteel/

The Right To Strike

C.I.O. HEAD INSISTS ON RIGHT TO STRIKE

Labor Should Not Be Asked to Give Up Method of Fighting Wrongs, Murray Says

PLEDGES PEACEFUL MOVES

Award of Defense Contracts to Alleged Wagner Act Violators Is Criticized Anew

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 - Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, declared today that labor should not be asked to lay aside the right to strike during the defense emergency for redress of wrongs perpetrated by employers, but he gave a pledge that his organization would do everything possible to adjust disputes by peaceful means.

In the last few days, the metal trades and building trades unions of the American Federation of Labor have announced a o-strike policy on defense projects, stating that they would abide by arbitration in those cases wherein direct negotiation and mediation by government agencies failed.

Mr. Murray's statement today came at a press conference after a meeting of the general executive board of the C.I.O.  He had reiterated his organization's grievances against the award by the government of defense contracts to violators of labor laws.

A reporter inquired whether the C.I.O. would be willing to forego the right to strike during the present period if the newly created central defense organization should side with the labor view and adopt a policy to withhold defense contracts from concerns violating the Wagner act and other labor statutes.

In declining to agree on a ban against strikes at this time, Mr. Murray said that the C.I.O., "operating intelligently and constructively, by the use of reason, logic, and sound judgment." would do everything possible to end disputes before strikes were called.

"We are not prepared and we are not going to yield the right of the workers of the nation to strike to remedy a definite act of injustice," he added.

The C.I.O. president, who is also chairman of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, reiterated previous assertions that the Bethlehem Steel Corporation had received contracts which it could not fill for three years, and that contracts were still being awarded to the Ford Motor Company.  Both organizations, he said, had been held to be Wagner Act violators.  The Steel Workers' plan for maximum utilization of the steel industry by farming out contracts to companies lacking them, he said, would be given to President Roosevelt and the defense authorities in ten days.

Mr. Murray declined to express a definite opinion on the four-man defense set-up in which W. S. Knudsen and Sidney Hillman have coordinate powers with Secretaries Knox and Stimson.

The New York Times

January 9, 1941

A Prior Shutdown

BETHLEHEM UNION STIRS PLANT CRASH

Stoppage of Work Is Called 'Demonstration' by C.I.O., 'Sit-Down' by Company

BETHLEHEM, Pa., Jan. 24 - A "shutdown" of the plant here of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, holder of more than $1,185,000,000 of national defense contracts, was predicted tonight by Howard T. Curtiss, director of the C.I.O.'s Steel Workers' Organizing Committee for the plant, following a "demonstration" this afternoon.

The "demonstration" was described by a spokesman for the company as a "sit-down strike" involving 250 to 300 men.  Mr. Curtiss asserted that as a sequel to the "demonstration" there was a lockout involving 4,000 workers.

Mr. Curtiss asserted that company police resorted to brutal tactics, "threw" workmen out of the plant and bruised six of them, with one, Frank Wihalka, requiring medical treatment.

Bittner Aid In Charge

The company's spokesman insisted that only a small number of men in the billet yard, the toolshop and the bridge shop were involved, that they had "quit work" and that work on tonight's shift was "virtually normal."

A few hours after Mr. Curtiss had made his "shutdown" forecast, John Riffe, assistant regional director of the S.W.O.C., declared that there would be no strike or picketing of the plant.  Mr. Riffee was left in charge by Van A. Bittner, the regional director, who spoke tonight at a union mass meeting on "S.W.O.C. Cooperates in National Defense."

Mr. Bittner advised the union members to not get "too far out on the limb."

"Stop as often as you want for a s long as you want, but we don't want any general strike in these plants," he said.

"That is just what the company wants.  We Expect in the next few weeks that the steel workers in Bethlehem Steel will be in a position to demand contracts or will go to the government and demand that Bethlehem comply with the National Labor Relations Act and meet with the S.W.O.C. and sign wage agreements."

Explains "Demonstration"

According to the union, which for a long time has been seeking to unionize Bethlehem employees, the demonstration was planned in protest against working conditions.

The New York Times

January 25, 1941

The Final Vote

UNION VOTES STRIKE IN BETHLEHEM UNIT

C.I.O. Chiefs Threaten to Shut All Plants Unless Demands Are Met at Lackawanna

BUFFALO, N.Y., Feb. 25 - C.I.O. workers at the Bethlehem Steel Corporation's Lackawanna mill set a strike deadline for 9 P.M. tomorrow and heard a leader assert that the union was well enough organized to "close every plant Bethlehem has."

The employees voted unanimously at a mass meeting to walk out unless the company, which has $1,500,000,000 in defense contracts, reinstates those who have been "indefinitely suspended," agrees to a collective bargaining agency election among the plant's 14,000 men and grants a 25 per cent wage increase to all workers.

John Riffe, assistant to Van A. Bittner, regional director of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, who is in Washington, told the meeting that the union was unable to reach Bethlehem officials "even through the highest officers of our country."

He said telegrams were sent to President Roosevelt, the Defense Commission, Secretary Perkins and Governor Lehman asking them to intervene and bring about a peaceful settlement before a strike occurred at Lackawanna and "all other Bethlehem plants."

Sunday midnight the union members completed a sixty-hour ballot authorizing the strike, 6,411 voting in favor of it and 1,001 against it.

Mr. Riffe, who said earlier that C.I.O. workers at the three Pennsylvania mills had authorized a strike, declared that the union would bargain only with the heads of Bethlehem and not with company representatives at Lackawanna.

Mine Stoppage Is Threatened

"We are willing to submit our problems to President Roosevelt or any representative he may select and let them decide," he asserted.

Mr. Riffe declared that the Bethlehem coal and iron mine workers were organized and that if Bethlehem did not come to an agreement with the steel workers, "we are going to close those mines."

He added that stewards and committees of every department in Bethlehem plants at Johnstown, Pottstown, and Bethlehem, Pa., had approved the action of union workers "who have expressed themselves in favor of a strike."  He interpreted this approval as a formal authorization to strike unless the company consented to a collective bargaining agency election and settles "many grievances."

The S.W.O.C. leaders in the three Pennsylvania plants denied that any formal strike action had been taken but said that union members in departmental meetings had expressed approval of a strike.

The company has made no comment other than to content that the suspension of 1,000 workers since Friday resulted from work stoppages by the men which, it said damaged the coke ovens.

The New York Times

February 26, 1941

The Universal Theory of Absolutely Everything

Dalton Rooney
2008

Today is my last full day in Bethlehem. Tomorrow, I have a meeting with (let me think about this) a friend of a friend of a friend of Isaac's. He is a graduate student working on a data mining project and has accumulated a dizzying amount of historical census information. A long chain of associations have led me to several extremely interesting and wonderful people in the Lehigh Valley. Of course, this has come to fruition at the tail end of my very hectic summer.
But my housemates are keeping the guest bedroom free so I can come back and forth once in a while. And I get my film back tomorrow. (Thanks Jack!)

Currently loving: midnight runs to Wegman's for golden oreos, late night frisbee, this outrageously pretentious looking book entitled "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge"

On Risk

"All previous cultures, including the great early civilizations of the world, such as Rome, or traditional China, have lived primarily in the past. They have used the ideas of fate, luck or the 'will of the gods' where we now tend to substitute risk. In traditional cultures, if someone meets with an accident, or conversely, prospers - well, it is just one of those things, or it is what the gods and spirits intended. Some cultures have denied the idea of chance happenings altogether. The Azande, an African tribe, believe that when a misfortune befalls someone it is the result of sorcery. If an individual falls ill, for example, it is because an enemy has been practicing black magic.

Such views, of course, don't disappear completely with modernization. Magical notions, concepts of fate and cosmology still have a hold. But often they continue on as superstitions, in which people only half believe, and follow in a somewhat embarrassed way. They use them to back up decisions of a more calculative nature. Gamblers, and this includes gamblers on the stock exchange, mostly have rituals that psychologically paper over the uncertainties they must confront. The same applies to many risks that we can't help running, since being alive at all is by definition a risky business. It isn't in any way surprising, that people still consult astrologers, especially at vital points of their lives.

Yet acceptance of risk is also the condition of excitement and adventure - think of the pleasures some people get from the risks of gambling, driving fast, sexual adventurism, or the plunge of a fairground rollercoaster. Moreover, a positive embrace of risk is the very source of that energy which creates wealth in a modern economy.

The two aspects of risk - its negative and positive sides - appear from the early days of modern industrial society. Risk is the mobilizing dynamic of a society bent on change, that wants to determine its own future rather than leaving it to religion, tradition, or the vagaries of nature. Modern capitalism differs from all previous forms of economic system in terms of its attitudes towards the future. Previous types of market enterprise were irregular or partial. The activities of merchants and traders for example, never made much dent in the basic structure of traditional civilizations, which all remained heavily agricultural and rural. Modern capitalism embeds itself into the future by calculating future profit and loss, and therefore risk, as a continuous process. This wasn't possible until the invention of double entry bookkeeping in the 15th Century in Europe, which made it possible to track in a precise way how money can be invested to make more money. Many risks, of course, such as those affecting health, we do wish to reduce as far as possible. This is why from its origins, the notion of risk is accompanied by the rise of insurance. We shouldn't think only of private or commercial insurance here. The welfare state, whose development can be traced back to the Elizabethan poor laws in England, is essentially a risk management system. It is designed to protect against hazards that were once treated as at the disposition of the gods - sickness, disablement, job loss and old age."

-Anthony Giddens
Runaway World

The Key To Happiness

"I had a good friend from college who was a life coach, I don’t know if you have friends from school who are life coaches, but life coaching... When I got really unhappy with my sorta lot in real estate development. Developers, y’know, real estate development is up and down, it’s cyclical, so... I talked to my friend over in New Jersey and said, y’know why are you so happy? He said oh, I’m a life coach. Y’know, you talk to them about why you’re unhappy, and he asked me some questions. He said what did you like most about your career? At that point I was probably working for twenty-five plus years. And I said well, y’know, I probably should have retired by now, doing something else, have a second career. And he said okay, let’s talk about second career. And for me, he said when were you happiest? And I enjoyed government. The ten years I spent in government in Allentown, I really enjoyed. I felt kinda fulfilled by being in a public service position. He said well maybe you should think about going back into government. I said at my age, well, I dunno. People sorta think government for the young not for the old."


"I never ask people to roll over, but I think what people will find in Bethlehem is that I think we’re much more sensitive to developers, and we work well with them, we understand it, we have this symbiotic relationship. It isn’t adversarial, it never should be. When seventy-five percent of your budget comes from real estate tax, you better develop real estate. Y’know, because you have to grow. You have to grow your economy in a lot of ways, you have to grow jobs, uh, and they only way to grow jobs is to basically let developers do what they have to do. Which is build buildings, build factories... So I think we’ve been able to build on our past, which is never not looked back on. Preservation is in my blood, and especially with Historic Bethlehem, having a sensitivity to the history of the city. We’ve been able to preserve the past, and y’know, build the future.Sounds like a bad slogan for a mayor running for office, but we have been able to do that."

"If it would have been developed as an integrated resort, shopping and y’know, sort of casino resort was supposed to have been developed in the original development plan, which was a hotel and a multi-purpose space for meetings, conventions, conferences and retail and gaming, because what they had hoped was that about fifty percent of that revenue was gonna come from gaming and about fifty percent was gonna come from non-gaming sources. And now it’s all coming from gaming, a little bit from Emeril’s and some of the restaurants, but quite frankly it’s been supported by the gaming function. That’s putting all your eggs in one basket, but that hasn’t been what made Las Vegas Sands successful when they were successful, and their stock prices may be telling a different story, but everybody in the gaming business’ stock prices are telling the same story. It’s been that the economy’s been hurting. And gaming is very discretionary, other than the first comment you made about some people saying I want to take my money and control my destiny – that’s one of the reasons casinos are able to sort of stay afloat.
And even despite the way the current economy is... if there were no casinos, there would be an underworld that was creating it. It’s... the public’s need to try to control their own destiny as far as improving their lot economically will make the need for illegal numbers, uh maybe the lottery business would be better in terms of state run lotteries. But people feel somehow that they’re in control when they walk into a room full of slot machines. They put twenty dollars in it and hope that it becomes three-thousand."

"We didn’t see gambling as the end, we saw gambling as the beginning. We saw gambling as the engine or the fuel that would keep the engine running. We knew from the failed ten years of working with Steel, that this project was so massive. The public wanted us to save the blast furnaces, try to save as many of the historic buildings as possible, cuz everybody’s vision of Bethlehem Steel is what you see there now. And they wanted to save all that, and Steel said oh we’ll do all that. And they tried. Ten years, and they couldn’t. So we knew that if we didn’t do something, if we didn’t get gambling, if we didn’t get gaming there, that there would be no engine large enough to cover. To solve the equation. That was a very calculated risk on the mayor’s part and certainly my part and others who supported gaming right from day one. We knew that without the kind of energy and without the revenues that we were gonna be able to get out of gaming, it wouldn’t happen. So it was kind of a Faustian bargain on our part. Y’know, a little bit. You sorta say ehh yeah, but we’ll control you. And we did that. And there’s always the unhappy ending to Dr. Faustus, but I don’t think we’re gonna have that here. I just said Faustian bargain purely from a literary standpoint. I think it was something we had to do. I don’t think we had a choice."

- Tony Hanna

+++

"You may as well go jump off a building."
-Jack, referring to the city's attempt to fiscally control the Sands Casino.

One Hundred and Two

I dedicated today to photographing Steel. This afternoon was also the first time I decided to bring my tripod, given that previous times I have been leery about making it over the fence with that clunky thing. But I've figured out a nice, simple routine for getting in. As I was walking along the tracks, a trucker drove down past the coal freighter, honked quietly, smiled and waved at me. Very surprised there were no altercations.

Last night, we must have had a rainstorm because everything inside the fence was dripping and thick with a particular smell. When I was seven or eight, my family and I went to Disney World, and my favorite ride was Pirates of the Caribbean. Inside the caverns were pirates on strings and waterfalls with plugged in motor systems. We sat in a small boat along the "river." Most particularly, everything smelled like wet, musky rot. The way that Steel smelled today, so poignant and overwhelming that I covered my nose and mouth with the collar of my shirt. My boots sank into rusty red mud that slowly ebbed in and out of iron ore piles. Not to mention, the temperature today reached one hundred and two degrees.

I am very tired, and my feet ache very much. It is high time for a shower and then more transcription work at Wired.

From the New York Times, A Parallel

A Silence, Now Coldly Permanent, in a Mill Town

Dan Barry

One day eight years ago, the cast-iron rollers in Augusta’s last paper mill stopped rolling in the middle of the run. The absentee owners — “from away,” as they say here — sent word that it was merely a pause; the reassuring hum of spinning rollers would return in a few weeks.

The mill’s manager, Bob Jackson, promised the 80 frantic employees that he would keep them posted. And every day, he or an assistant would visit the quieted mill to perform the hopeful act of rotating a massive paper dryer by hand, to prevent warping and keep the bearings in shape. This way, it would be ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

“Paper machines are difficult to shut down and start back up,” Mr. Jackson explained.

The word that came after a few weeks was that the mill’s owner, American Tissue, had filed for bankruptcy protection. What’s more, federal investigators were assembling a strong case that the company’s patriarch had orchestrated a $300 million bank and securities fraud.

More time passed. The calls from employees wondering about their jobs petered out, but hopes of a new owner reopening the mill stayed faintly alive. So the daily ritual of spinning the dryer by hand continued — for years. Through the summers, when red berries dotted the encroaching green brush; through the winters, when the looming emptiness conjured Stephen King thoughts.

For a while, everything remained in place — the tools, the rolls of paper, the two trucks — as though workers were merely on an extended lunch break. But vandals and thieves grew bolder, breaking hundreds of windows, stripping copper from pipes to hock. Preferring the graveyard shift, they left behind signs of the strong work ethic they brought to looting: tools, lamps, even lunchboxes.

In May 2006, a suspicious late-night fire at the mill forced a reckoning: this once-mighty economic engine had become a skeleton of brick, filled with toxic chemicals that posed threats to the community and the river. To echo the writer John McPhee, who years earlier had witnessed the removal of Augusta’s mill-empowering Edwards Dam, it was time again for this city of 20,000 to say farewell to the 19th century, and perhaps to the 20th as well.

No question, said Mr. Jackson, 62, who has spent most of his life working in paper mills around the country. “It was never going to run,” he said, his voice flat. “I was basically tired of it anyway.”

What followed was three years of preparing a body for burial, a body sprawled for nearly a mile along the banks of the Kennebec River.

Environmental officials carted away truckloads of chemicals contained in large drums and glass jars, while a city-appointed American Tissue Reuse Committee held public hearings and talked to experts — including Mr. Jackson — before making its recommendations:

Foreclose on the property. Tear down the mill. Consider replacing it with a mixed-use development that somehow celebrates the beautiful, restored river.

That became the plan. But removing a mill is neither easy nor cheap.

Bill Bridgeo, Augusta’s city manager, said that the loss of all those well-paying jobs has hardly been offset by many minimum-wage jobs at the nearby mall called the Marketplace at Augusta. And if you tally up the $600,000 in unpaid taxes, the costs to the state and federal governments for the cleanup, the legal fees, the planning — “It’s in the millions,” he said.

Mr. Bridgeo and Mr. Jackson drove past the unmanned guard booth the other day and walked into a mill building’s dark maw, where gray cabinets still contained nuts and bolts made for the mill’s machinery. From close by came the rumble of machines, not heard on these grounds for a long time.

The two men emerged from the other side of the building and into the daylight, where they could see the source of that rumble. It was not the mill’s start-up but its tear-down, as the claws of a demolition company’s machinery tore through brick walls that now seemed made of marzipan.

On the ground lay the bricks to a building built in 1903, but not considered by state officials to be worthy of preservation. It was standing just yesterday.

Go back 150 years and this capital city of Maine was a mill town. And on this riverside spot, a saw mill, receiving logs floated down the Kennebec. Soon there was a mishmash of businesses here, including a power and light company, a window-sash operation, a wooden-box manufacturer and a paper mill that would come to dominate the site.

The company names would change, but the purpose remained relatively constant. Logs delivered by river and, later, by truck, would enter the mill, undergo lots of washing and cooking, rolling and steaming, and come out as newsprint or paper. It was like making bread.

The mill was like a living thing, running round the clock, emitting sulfurous aromas, even humming. “I lived a half-mile from the mill, and you’d hear the dryer gears humming,” recalled Stephen Dowling, 56, who worked in the mill as an electrician from 1975 to 1985. “It would almost put you to sleep.”

Mr. Dowling has been the plant director at the Augusta Civic Center for nearly a quarter-century, but he still remembers the mill’s 4 o’clock whistle, and the hangout run by Alice, who would cash your check so you could have a beer before heading home, and the mill worker who was crushed to death while trying to loosen a log jam. “I knew the guy who had his hand out, but he couldn’t get him,” he said.

Most of all, Mr. Dowling remembers hundreds of good-paying jobs. “It put a lot of sneakers on a lot of kids,” he said.

When Mr. Jackson arrived as a superintendent in 1993, the mill employed more than 500 people, all working to make tissue, towels and napkins out of recycled paper. Soon after, though, the mill closed, reopened, then closed again, as companies tried and failed.

Then, in 2000, American Tissue, a company that specialized in buying troubled mills at bargain prices, stepped in. Its principals, including a man named Mehdi Gabayzadeh, flew in from Long Island to say they would buy and reopen the mill if they could renegotiate a tax-payment schedule. City officials, of course, tried to accommodate.

The mill hummed along for more than a year — until the sudden closure. And the bankruptcy. And the unreturned telephone calls to American Tissue. And the conviction of Mr. Gabayzadeh, who is now serving a 15-year prison sentence for a fraud that caused the loss of thousands of jobs around the country. And, finally, the fire.

Mr. Bridgeo, the city manager, and Mr. Jackson, the former mill manager, continued their walk. Past the mounds of metal set aside for salvage. Past the cast-iron drums bearing dates and origins of birth (Beloit Iron Works, Beloit, Wis., 1949). Past the old signs saying that eye protection is required in this area.

But no eyes are tearing up. Before the start of demolition, the city opened the site to people wishing to pay their last respects. Mr. Jackson was there to lead tours and answer questions, but only 20 or 30 people showed up. “Not near as many as I would have thought,” he said.

Recent Conclusions

"So you sorta have this wonderful core of residential areas in this city that allowed the middle class to not have to flee. The single biggest reason that cities fail is that the middle class leaves them. In Bethlehem, the middle class never left. They just moved around a little bit, and the biggest thing for us is we were able to retain the middle class right in our downtown....

We have low-income individuals in this city, but we have very nice, scattered low-income housing. Uh, our public housing authority’s been around since 1930. And we have public housing projects in the city. Uh, but they’re sort of geographically spaced. They’re not on the main drags. It’s not that we’re hiding them away, but they’re just well planned. There’s one on the west side, there’s one in the north east, there’s a couple in the south side. So it’s not like we’ve said oh we’re just gonna put all our low-income individuals in this one neighborhood...

The fact that Steel kept this city kinda together and allowed the middle class to stay here, allowed the executives to stay here, they didn’t have to flee to the suburbs like Allentown where Mack Trucks... where the executives kind of left and went out to various parts of the region. That didn’t have to happen here. Steel was probably a big part of that."

Quoted from Tony Hanna

++++

I am currently in Western Mass, feeling a bit like a lichen or a big, stagnant rock. I have been out of Bethlehem since last Tuesday, so it's been roughly nine days now. I have the distinct feeling that I was laid off at the coffee shop. Not because I didn't go (because I always came to work) but because nobody else came to work while I worked. No customers. Dead. Dead, dry and unproductive. So this has been an extended vacation in the company of old and new friends between Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

My patience for Bethlehem has dwindled over the past few weeks. Yesterday, I went back and read my original division three preliminary proposal. The writing sounds ludicrously academic yet somewhat feasible as a final project. However, the proposal conceals any premonition of real human contact or influence... Reading it now, I feel nauseous about the over-exaggerated language and the over-simplified methods and goals. I'll let it speak for itself:

In this division three, I will engage the changing face of labor, social mobility, social capital, and identity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In considering the city's change from steel production to the imposition of a casino culture, how does this shift influence community dynamics and the sense of self? How does this relate to larger themes of meritocracy, the fail of late capitalism, power, the American Dream, and the current financial crisis? Using ethnographic techniques, interviews, historical documentation, and research, I hope to analyze the fall of a sustainable industry that once reflected the ideals of production and capitalism while considering the imposition of new social, cultural, and economic implications of the casino. Continually, I will photographically explore Bethlehem, specifically the monolithic remains of Bethlehem Steel. The images will concern the transformation of space over time and the constantly changing meanings people ascribe to previously inhabited and now abandoned areas. I hope to photograph Bethlehem Steel in a way that challenges the viewer to reexamine a space that, at one point, was a factory of time, labor, sweat, and sometimes death. In romanticizing these spaces, I would like to understand how we might use beauty as a coping mechanism in both dealing with past toils and reconciling present strife in economic and social modernity. I hope to photograph allegories within Bethlehem Steel that convey a quiet solitude or innate aesthetic that partially masks but ultimately recreates a historical context while also exploring themes of loss, displacement and identity.

With that being said, I will head back to Bethlehem tomorrow. I've recently felt as though my work has been empty and unproductive; anyone who has been within a ten foot radius of me during the last month has heard me blow steam about it. I like to think that I am good at being comfortable in most living situations. I knew living in Bethlehem would be difficult and taxing on my ability to live through a relatively solitary summer. But I thought I'd manage. Turns out, I have lately felt so remarkably uncomfortable in the town, and I am upset with myself for believing this to be a total failure. Which it is not. I truly have done more work than I think. My time line was just slightly different than originally anticipated. So I might leave mid-month and retire back here, to the Pioneer Valley, where I can and will make sense of the work I've done. Which is fine. There will always be opportunities to come back to Bethlehem.