When Bruce Spiegel was a child, he would look out his Greenfield window at the heart of American industry: the U.S. Steel Homestead Works.

“I would look out into the night and watch the Homestead furnaces blowing blue flames,” Spiegel said. “I thought steel-making was never going to end.”

In the early- to mid-1980s, however, that is exactly what happened. U.S. Steel began to diversify its business holdings, and steel mills throughout Western Pennsylvania began to shut down, one after another.

The rise and fall of steel in Pittsburgh is chronicled in Spiegel’s new documentary, “City of Steel.” Spiegel, who lives in Atlanta, spoke with more than 40 former steelworkers about their communities and what happened to them when they lost their jobs.

“For 18 years, I grew up with the Homestead mills out my bedroom window, but the truth is, I never set foot in a steel mill,” Spiegel said. “I wanted to find out what I’d missed.”

For those new to the city or too young to have a relative who worked in the industry, by 1900, roughly 8% of the world’s steel production was taking place at the U.S. Steel Homestead Works, according to local steel industry enthusiast David Jardini.

“The Hot Metal Bridge has cars on it now, but it was named for the steel and the iron coming from the mills,” Jardini says in the documentary.

As one of the former steelworkers in the film points out, “This place right here, Allegheny County, built the United States of America.”

“The Mon Valley was the steel industry,” said the late William Serrin, author of “Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town.” “And now it’s all gone.”

In addition to a host of men and women who worked in the plants, Spiegel talks to Ron Baraff, director of historic resources and facilities for the nonprofit Rivers of Steel, Heinz History Center President Andrew Masich and former steelworker, activist and musician Mike Stout.

In late 1981, U.S. Steel offered to buy Marathon Oil Co. and began to move away from steel production as it diversified its business holdings. That, combined with a nationwide recession and high unemployment, rippled into massive layoffs. A New York Times story from October 1981 notes more than 6,000 steelworkers in the region were furloughed or laid off that year.

“We never thought, ever, that the mills would close,” said former Duquesne Works employee Joseph Procacina in the documentary. “It’s depressing when you look and you see all of that gone, or maybe just a few things left standing.”

From 1981 to 1986, the majority of the region’s steel mills were shuttered, leaving more than 150,000 steelworkers without jobs.

Procacina recalls the unsuccessful effort to save the Dorothy No. 6 blast furnace at the Duquesne Works.

“Once that shut down, everything got quiet,” he said. “It was like coming out of a cemetery.”

“City of Steel” premiered in early December at the AMC Waterfront Theater in West Homestead, part of the retail development that replaced the steel mill.

It can be viewed for free, as well as purchased, at City-Of-Steel.com.

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