Exploring Carrie Furnaces
During the holiday season I spent some time with my family back in Pittsburgh. The weather in that part of the country hits its stride in early May and is enjoyable into October, but the winters can feel like a six-month purgatory. People spend lots of time inside, passing the time as we wait for longer days and sun. I did catch a break as snow on Christmas night cleared for a rare, crystal blue sky the following day. The occasional clear winter day is usually accompanied by the internal obligation to actually get up and leave the house. So it’s time to venture out. I heard about a cool location nearby that I’d been excited to explore (Thanks Dan). This place was gigantic, old, and deserted. Carrie Furnace is a dormant Braddock steel mill, sitting just east of the city on the bank of the Monongahela River.
Carrie Furnace is a former blast furnace that was built in 1884 and operated until 1982. At its peak, the site produced 1,000 to 1,250 tons of iron per day. Steel and Iron produced from Carrie Furnaces were used to construct the Empire State Building as well as the Panama Canal. The smoke stacks are the highest rising structure within eyesight, and they sit a half-mile from the nearest accessible roadway. From the road, I needed to walk under the Rankin Bridge, follow some railroad tracks, cross a construction site, and ignore a few ‘No Trespassing’ signs. The picture above is the first image that you see as the path from the construction site opens up. The building is a large blowing engine house, and at one time held the machinery used to pump in air and purify the iron.
I made my way around the complex which was gated with fence and barbed wire. Above is one of the ancient furnaces as seen through the chain link fence on the back side of the complex. I’m definitely no expert on pre-WWII steel and iron-making processes, so I had to do a little research to figure out exactly what I was looking at. The complex contains one of the aforementioned blowing engine houses, two blast furnaces, a storage house, and a giant red crane (pictured below).
There were two major themes that became apparent as I worked my way through the structures in the complex.
1. I was majorly creeped-out. It’s like that feeling you get when watching a scary movie. You’re 99% sure no one is in the house, but that doesn’t stop you from checking the closets and turning on all the lights. This place has been abandoned for 30 years and would have been a great setting for a zombie apocalypse movie. The rusty metal creaked when the wind blew. It was just downright eerie. Take a look at this picture of the storage house and let me know if you disagree.
2. Every object in the entire complex was coated with graffiti. Some of the graffiti was almost certainly the work of amateurs; kids who found their way past the barbed wire just to tag the buildings. Other pieces were truly works of art, obviously crafted with incredible attention to detail and colorful soul. The eight-foot ‘Steel Man’ mural below was the perfect graffiti feature.
The last piece to be explored was the giant red crane. The crane had an elaborate system of stairs and ladders leading up to a long catwalk that connected it to the mouth of the furnace. I climbed on the old crane and found some the remnants of the rail shipping system for incoming and outgoing cargo.
If I wanted to get a closer look inside the walls, I was told to use the catwalk on the crane to get to the other side of the fence. This would require climbing up about 7 stories, walking the hundred feet across the catwalk (with no guide rail), then climbing down into the unknown. No thanks… The crane was covered in ice and is falling apart in a few places. Also, I hate heights. I’ll have to come back another time to explore the inside, and when I do, I’ll try to find a hole in the fence.
