chair on eternity

chair on eternity
Originally uploaded by Julia Wickes.

Bethlehem Steel and the chair that wouldn't speak to us. (Photo by Amber Schley.)

Bethlehem Steel: Part III

A SMALL VILLAGE

These facts must be told: Bethlehem Steel began in the 1860s and grew to an unwieldy size. The property’s circumference is large enough to contain a village, as we could tell while driving around it—scanning its boundaries shrewdly, like wartime spies. The buildings were gigantic, brick, warehouse-like, and numerous with no visible end. They were impressive and lovely in ways that modern utilitarian structures are not. Beside the buildings, you could see metal vats, reservoirs, pipes, chutes, ladders, landings, and gears tangling their way upward into the sky until their chimneys finally jutted beyond the maze of conglomerate metalwork at their base. The chimneys reached side by side in starkness against the clear sky.


In one sense, Bethlehem Steel did contain a village: during WWII it employed 32,000 people. This, along with the other facts I knew before our visit, sounded impressive, but they did nothing to prepare me for the jolting beauty that I would see there. I was mentally prepared insofar as one prepares to attend the Macy’s Day Parade. You can concede that it will be “impressive,” at the same time feeling that each float you see will be somehow predictable, and not dissimilar to anything you’ve seen before. This was my attitude about our plan to break into the old steel mill. I was more interested in the delinquent excitement of trespassing than in what I might see.

TRESPASSING

And how did we trespass? It was easier than expected, though it took some argumentation and driving up to three different entrances before we all agreed on a place to park. The property was so huge that any place seemed as good as any other. No matter where we broke in it would be like opening a fat book up to its middle.

We finally found one part where a fence met a building but left a gap big enough for a body to pass through. This corner gap was behind trees and shrubs, which concealed us from the cars that zoomed by on the nearby thoroughfare. So just that easily, we slipped behind the bushes, through the gap in the fence, and into a different world.

The property inside was overgrown so we walked in single file, like hikers, taking care not to get snagged on thorns and briars, or let the whip-like twigs and throny vines tangling around our ankles and waist spring back and hit the person walking behind us as we passed through to the first building.

BUILDING ONE

It was only about twenty-five feet to the entrance of the first warehouse-like building. As soon as we entered we were in awe. The building’s inner enormity, as well as the light pouring through it, affected us the way that an enormous cathedral might affect a tourist. It was not the solid parts, but the negative space—space enough to fly a kite in—that had this affect. It was like stepping into a mansion with no rooms or floors, only its outer walls—a one-room mansion. The floor was earthen, or at least so dirty that it seemed earthen, and besides the supporting steel pillars that held up the roof, the room contained little on which to rest the eye, except on one end, where five discarded chairs, like the kind you see in an outdated waiting room, sat in just a hint of a semi-circle. Their presence was a puzzle. They said, “Human beings were once here. Now, it’s only us.” After that, they ignored us, even though we had questions.

A STRONG SPELL OF MAGIC

All of us were under a spell that made us speak involuntarily in whispers. This was partly due to the fact that we were sneaking, but mostly due, I think, to something less logical. In the same way that it would be easier to describe the abandoned Orthodox church we had seen as a mystery, rather than parse out the reasons for why it was a mystery, it would be easier to just say that while we were in the steel mill, we were under a strong spell of magic. But again, the spell, like the sense of mystery felt at the church, was really just a complex tension imposed by the combination of qualities embodied in the physical surroundings. Most of the same tensions that were true of the church were true of the steel mill, only in bigger proportions.

The strongest tension was the one between languishing and urgency. The room made us want to stay, to tilt our heads back and turn around and around looking, with no sense of time passing. At the same time, there was a pressure to move on. This wasn’t an inner urgency saying, “Let’s go, we still have so much to see,” but something imposed upon us from outside. It said, “If you stay too long you will offset this stillness with your pumping hearts, darting eyes, and noisy thoughts.” We could not permit ourselves to do that.

One remarkable aspect of the mill which contributed to our astonishment was how we could pass from cavernous immensity into tiny enclave. Offices and other compartments of unknown purpose were adjacent to rooms big enough for giants to go bowling in. The doors that led in and out of these immense areas were unlikely candidates for entryways into such immensity, being such an ordinary size. Of course, there were also larger, garage-like openings for machinery, but still there were these ordinary wooden doors, sometimes with four little windowpanes in them—almost quaint. All of them look like they might fall off their hinges if you opened them.

BUILDING TWO

After some initial timidity, we began opening them anyway. One doorway looked particularly foreboding, with a cracked pane of glass in it, but it opened nonetheless without any dire consequences, and we peeked in to find what was probably a tiny office, complete with a coat closet. In contrast to the huge warehouse space, the ceiling here was very low, and all looked like it was curling up upon itself—warped from exposure to weather.

It was even more foreboding to delve in past this little room, and past another, darker, room where only a spinach green filing cabinet stood warping in one corner. Beyond this, we gasped at what we saw. In a room about the size of a public school classroom there were countless rusty chains hanging down from the ceiling on rusty pulleys. Dangling at the ends were metal, bowl-shaped things with little holes in them like small colanders. They could also be compared to icon lamps that you see in a Byzantine-style Orthodox church, only larger. Four blunt hooks were attached on the bottom that looked almost decorative. Some of these metal bowls were suspended at the level of our chests, while others were stuck on their pulleys at various levels closer to the ceiling. What in the world were they for? The room looked like an elaborate booby trap; I could picture a human being tangled up in all of these chains by all four limbs, as in a spider web. But this was not a viable explanation for their purpose.

Next to this bizarre room was a section that had been a public bathroom with shower stalls. Whatever dividers had been there were now ripped out, as was the plumbing. Shower and bathroom stalls were not what I was expecting to see, but they gave us clues that helped us to begin solving the puzzle of the hanging bowls. This building was not a workspace, perhaps, but a break space.

Passing even further into the next adjoining room we again saw a plethora of hanging chains like those in the booby trap room, but with the slight variation that the things hanging down were square metal basket shapes instead of bowls. They also had the four blunt hooks. And in this room, more sunlight came through, and was caught by the thousands of links in the hundreds of rusty chains the way sunlight gets caught in motes of dust. The chains hung in such density, it was like the ceiling had grown a head of auburn hair. This room had the added touch of sea green lockers along its walls that had large black numbers painted on them. Most of their doors sagged open. Some locker doors still had faded bumper stickers, or messages scratched in their peeling paint, like “Jim is a dork.” Ordinary locker room benches were also in this room. The showers, the benches, the lockers, all gave us ample clues that this was some sort of break facility for the workers. But what were these bizarre baskets on chains?

We speculated later that these hanging baskets were a way for workers to store their belongings safely during the workday; the hooks were for hanging a pair of shoes or a coat. They couldn’t provide locker space for everyone, so they provided these more space-saving storage devices.

One more detail worth mentioning: in one of the baskets was a birds’ nest with two dead birds inside. Nature was converging on the steel mill. It was busting in through the windows and taking over. In another area of the mill, a spongy moss carpet lay across the outside ground and had begun creeping over the floor inside the building.

BUILDING THREE

After leaving the rusty chain rooms and trekking through more overgrown land, we found another door that was an unlikely portal to anywhere special. On the contrary, it opened onto what looked like eternity. It led us into a building so long and cavernous that we could barely see to its end where a square of light—probably another garage-like opening—was glowing. Its high ceiling was a network of beams within beams, within beams, all converging at the end like an artist’s mathematical lesson in “Perspective.”

Like the first large room we entered, this one contained nothing save a few objects that seemed to have no particular reason for being there. One could only describe them as “stray objects,” like all the other objects that had been left behind in the steel mill. Both of these looked like museum pieces. One was a large tube shaped tank (fire hydrant?) set on two large wheels, like a Civil War cannon. The other, about fifty steps away, was a gigantic scale. It had a large circular face, bigger than a manhole, with a smooth dial that traveled around and pointed to the numbers on its continuum. Its platform was about the size of a landing in a stairwell. An elephant might be able to fit, certainly a wheelbarrow. I stepped on it. The platform was buoyant under my feet, and without a sputter or so much as a snag the dial sailed to the accurate number. It was eerie for the device to be in perfect working order, partly because it was so antique, and partly because it stood in such sheer absence of anyone who needed to use it. The functioning scale reinforced the vacancy that had settled over this place—a place, by definition, of activity, work, and movement that had gone on for years, until one fine day….

BUILDING FOUR

The final building we explored is the most difficult to describe. It is only a guess to say that this room was where the real fire, pounding, melting, and clanging of industry took place. The machinery in this room was lined up like locomotives that had just pulled up hissing into a train station—all at the same time—on fifty parallel tracks. Their heavy metal bodies, like huge cylinders, were fitted with knobby bolts and handles and tubes. Short, chimney-like cylinders jutted from their tops. These giant shapes, only familiar to my eyes if I compared them to something like a steamboat, duplicated themselves in parallel lines for what looked like a half a mile. There were also gigantic circular gears like bicycle spokes, as big around as Ferris Wheels and as thick and heavy as they could possibly be. It was hard to imagine any of these parts moving; it was equally hard to imagine the amount of force it would take to start them moving. Everything looked permanently frozen by the force of gravity. The machinery in this room dwarfed us and became the grand finale of our tour. If the empty buildings made us feel awe, and the rooms of hanging chains made us feel wonder, than this building just stupefied us altogether.

It reminded me not to underestimate the effect that sheer size can have. We are used to our machines coming as small as possible. An ipod can hold an entire music collection. That’s impressive. But maybe a room full vinyl records containing the same collection would more accurately represent the power of all that music. A room full of vinyl records would be more impressive to the person who was born and grew up in the era of digital music. I was like that ignorant child in the presence of this antique power.

On one end of this building there was a large, scattered pile of…metal parts. Some were shaped like spools, some were shaped like pipes with strange attachments. All were bright orange with rust and oversized; all looked terribly heavy and welded down. The pile itself had the disheveled look of a pile of tossable tinker toys. Their look of being tossed there made their heavy permanence a very strange sight. They would not be budged, except perhaps by a god. In fact, all of the metal parts strewn here and there looked like they had been thrown down by the gods in a fit of temper, who then, being fed up with the resulting mess—the product of their anger—had quit the place and never returned.

THE WAY OUT

I don’t remember any of us discussing about whether or not it was time to turn back and leave the way we came, but we all seemed to decide tacitly that it was time to go. The day was getting colder. Outside we passed a large black puddle on cement which vividly reflected another barn shaped structure—one we had not entered.

Traveling backward through the building with the working scale, we were yet far away from the end where the small door was open. We saw a slight movement and all of us stopped short. For the entire time that we were in the steel mill, we were paranoid of being seen by someone from far away, or worse, encountering someone. Signs posted on the outside of the fence had said, “Trespassers will be subject to prosecution.” We gathered behind one of the supporting steel beams in the middle of the floor and held our breath. As we looked, and looked, we were awarded with yet another undeserved and unexpected wonder: a giant buck strolled past the door frame on the outside.

Relieved, we moved on. We looked around when we came outdoors but we never saw the buck again, though we noticed his footprints in the dirt on the inside of the buildings—yet another signal that nature was bursting its merry way into this establishment.

As we passed back through each room (there was no more efficient way to get back to where we started) I found my mind darting to grab visual details for later remembrance—impossible! There was too much beauty in every surface area. There were too many brick walls on which multiple colors of old paint had worn away leaving combined patches. There were too many cracked window panes with trees coming through, too many large bolts, rusty beams, peeling paint that all combined in gentle and warm colors. Everywhere we looked was surface area, surface area, surface area—all for trapping light—all for limitless detail. Nothing was smooth or glaring here, nothing had clean lines, nothing was particleboard or anything so impermanent. It was the antithesis of the modern work place; the antithesis of the office building that I go to work in every day. Everything was weathered. Weathered-ness is one beauty trait that, to my knowledge, cannot be fabricated—except perhaps by Hollywood. But even Hollywood would find a set like this one a daunting challenge. I felt sure that the things we saw that day were solely the product of time.

In my desperate attempt to record detail onto my undependable brain, I latched onto a random bumper sticker that was affixed to a window on a door in one of the short corridors. I told myself I would remember it, and I don’t. I just remember that it existed, and that it had something like an image of a worker’s silhouette and an acronym that stood for something like “Steel Workers of America.” And anyway, the precise memory of the sticker is irrelevant. It was what it represented that has stayed with me: the imprint of the people who had been there. That was what made the experience of our wandering so much more than merely visual. Filmmakers could produce a set, maybe, to match some of the things we saw, but I would bow down in homage if a filmmaker, or any artist, could reproduce the sensible presence of former activity that still made itself ever so subtly felt against my nerve endings. Workers, workers, workers, had been everywhere here. Men’s lives had been spent here. One hundred years of workaday conversations, toiling intensity, focused eyes, work boots, hard hats, oily thumb prints, were recorded invisibly over every surface like a hologram in reverse. Though between us there were two cameras and numerous rolls of film, and although I have now written too many tedious paragraphs trying to describe Bethlehem Steel, I know that all of these attempts are inadequate.

My last look back at the mill, like Lot’s wife, was toward a distant building that lacked a roof. It had tall arch-shaped openings all the way around. It was made of white stone and was crumbling and numerous birds were circling above it, dipping down into it. It looked like a ruin from an ancient civilization. I am not even sure why this last glance is worth mentioning, except that by this time, I was feeling so entranced, that the birds dipping down into the white stone structure—all in the afternoon sunlight—was as melancholy a sight as I have ever seen.

THE QUESTION OF PRESERVATION

The future of the steel mill is one that I do not want to think about. I read online that the Smithsonian tried (or is still trying?) to create a museum out of it. Evidently, they had already begun this work and then stopped it for lack of funds. Now, purportedly, it has been sold to a private owner who is not yet sure what to do with the property. You could see where the museum efforts had repaved roads that led into the mill property and added lampposts. Lining these smooth driveways were whimsical gears sticking out of the ground for whimsical decoration. It looked hopelessly inappropriate to me. There was nothing, from what I could tell, whimsical about the steel mill.

I do not like to think of the things we saw that day being removed from their context and cleaned up, repainted, made safe, and converted into museum material. I feel sure that to convert this place into a museum will mean to usher in onlookers who will obliterate the imprint of the former workers. They will place the old scale I saw under bright lights and set up a plaque before it. This makes me feel despondent. But I am more despondent at the thought of it being torn down, or converted into a casino (which is another of its possible fates, according to online sources).

We were fortunate to see Bethlehem Steel while it was still breathing its own air, not behind velvet ropes. After seeing it that way one could never feel a strong preference for its fate, because its fate is already sealed with sadness, regardless of what happens. Whether the place is torn down, or whether it is converted into a museum—neither is a comfort. The buildings and machinery could be preserved, but I doubt their essences could be. What we saw and experienced that day is an experience that is headed for inevitable discontinuation. Human beings will intervene. They will either clean up or tear down. They will rework, they will obliterate the oldness with newness. And the human being that I am also wants to preserve the property. But I see that in order preserve it something must be destroyed in the process. The property will need to justify its existence somehow, by reinventing itself. It will be made to turn a dollar for the economy of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, one way or another. Its steel manufacturing days had seen their time. The mill had come, it had run the lives of a million men, and then its time was over. It would only continue to be less and less the place it had been. It would be morphed into a brand new experience for human beings—not the fragile one that we had that day. We were fortunate to be given the almost holy incident of witnessing Bethlehem Steel while it was still deteriorating on its own terms, like a noble beast that goes out into the wilderness to die alone.

Beth Steel

Bethlehem Steel
Originally uploaded by Julia Wickes.

Photo by Amber Schley

Bethlehem Steel: Part II

Before moving on, there is more to say about the haunting church-house. To say that a place is haunting, or haunted, and leave it at that, would be to fork over its complexity to inscrutability—to hand it over to mystery without a struggle.

When something ordinary fascinates, it catches a person off guard. I generally do not expect to be unexpectedly fascinated by anything, especially something ordinary. I make plans for entertainment or adventure, but never sincerely expect them to be remarkable. When it happens, the reasons why are surely complex and easier not to untangle. Now that it happened, I am compelled to struggle with its complexity by writing about it.

In the case of the abandoned Russian Orthodox Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, it is important to mention that I have seen hundreds of church buildings of similar size and dimensions that were utterly average and forgettable. And by right, this church should also have been average and forgettable. Even distinguished churches, no matter how pretty or architecturally interesting, are eventually forgettable. But this one—mysteriously—asserted itself into my imagination as the subject of a dissertation, a short story collection, or a documentary. Someone, I thought, somewhere, should investigate this, begin scribbling notes like mad, find the people who used to tromp up and down these steps and ask them to tell their story into a tape recorder, interview those who got married here, photograph the people who were baptized here, talk to the people who sang here, and the people who, finally, evacuated to the other side of town.

It was not the church building that had the power to haunt, but the stories that were, in my imagination, wordlessly emanating from its placid façade. And if there were any ghosts involved, they were not the former congregants whose activities were once centered here, but the people who lived here now, whoever they were. These haunted me more.

But I told myself I would not just give this over to mystery without a struggle. I promised myself to tackle the inscrutability of why the church affected me so strongly in order to explain it better to myself. That is why I am writing on this subject, and the following is what I have come up with.

The church’s power to fascinate me was in this: It stood as a perfect instance of betweeness, of neither/nor and both altogether, or, as Derrida might say, of undecidability.

In the first place, it was abandoned, yet occupied. The purpose for which it was built—to house a congregation—was no longer being fulfilled. Its current inhabitants, no matter how lively, could not make up for this, or cancel out this abandonment. In the second place, it was a church, but no longer a church. It was now a house, but not properly a house. The houseness of it and churchness of it were playing off of each other in perpetual, circular interchange. The more it showed signs of houseness (the dog tied up outside, the chair for smoking a cigarette on the front steps landing, the presidential campaign sign) the more strongly its churchness asserted itself (the cupolos, the three bar cross, the gold lettering above the doors) in all its dissimilarity. The houseness gave the place the natural right of privacy, but the churchness made it feel that it should be approachable by anyone. It felt wrong that it was not public, and yet while we stood staring at it, we felt wrong for doing so, because it was in fact private. And finally, (and I am aware that this may be my imagination) the place was placid and boring, like a place where nothing ever happens, and yet subtly charged, as if it were a place of activity.

I know that these sorts of undecidabilities are all over the place, but usually not in such hyperbolic imagery, and with just the right ingredients that made it personal enough to prick through my own thick hide. I have to betray myself and confess that in the end, I am not comfortable with undecidability. I, the believer, want to restore things to what I believe is their original intent. Therefore I was sad at the sight of the church-turned-house.

It is still a stretch of open mindedness for me to even recognize the undecidability, to admit that it is there. When I said that the churchness and the houseness were in a circular interplay, I made it sound as if they were balancing each other equally, not one above the other. But if I am honest, then I must confess that I believe churchness to be the natural winner, since the building was built to be a Church, consecrated as Church. Somehow the image of Church within the church, like the image of God within a human being, cannot be successfully rubbed out, and is never obliterated.

The more I allow myself to see the undecidability, the more eagerly I await the one who will restore everything back to its original intent and do away with undecidability forever, when Christ will be “the light by which we see light,” even though I know that this church will never be a Church again in this world, and the image of God in some human beings may never be fully un-obscured in this lifetime.

I have still not written about Bethlehem Steel, which is the title of this essay, and the “about” that this is all leading to. If you believe me that the church-house is connected, then you will understand in the end why I cannot write about one without writing about the other. I had to write about the church-house before the abandoned steel mill, because I had to begin with the easier and progress to the harder. I saw them both on the same day in November, and both are irrevocably connected in my mind. But the latter is more difficult to write about.