Iconic Towns of the Mon Valley: Clairton, PA

 This town's real moment of fame came in the 1978 film, The Deer Hunter, when one of the characters desperately tried to get an international telephone call through from Vietnam to Clairton, Pennsylvania.  It's been so long since I've watched that old classic movie that I can't remember which character was placing the call.  But I do remember that the American GIs in the film were all deer hunters of Eastern European stock, and that much seems consistent with the Clairton I discovered...with its "Croatia Club" and its many pickup trucks.    

 Clairton is the town that outsiders wrongly expect Pittsburgh to be: smoky, smelly, shabby, and poor.  US Steel still has a large, operational "coke works" in this town.  In fact, as you begin your descent into the valley of the Monongahela River--top photo--the sight and smell of the factory emissions are almost shocking.  It's not a bad smell necessarily, but it is dangerous.  Clairton has the poorest air quality and the highest rates of lung cancer in the region.  

Unlike Duquesne, the folks in Clairton don't mind slowing down to stare at a stranger as they drive past.  The central business district is mostly derelict.  But you'll still find a handful of old white guys who park their American-made, 80s-model bangers along the street.  They're making their way to the few open bars.  

It's interesting that both Braddock and Clairton have kept their big factories, but their decline is still as bad as that of any other town on the Mon.  I believe it's because nobody wants to live in an industrial zone.  Though the Clairton Works still provides lots of jobs, the workers mainly live in West Mifflin, where the air is less toxic and the housing is newer.  

 Clairton dubbed itself "The City of Prayer" in response to the Supreme Court's 1963 ruling against prayer in public schools.  The moniker could be ironic, considering that Clairton is one of the few towns in the Mon Valley that isn't dominated by onion domed churches.  But if by "prayer" they mean the final refuge of the desperate, then it could be an appropriate enough nickname.  Whole blocks of this town will surely be pulled down in ten years or so.  And yet, though the commercial buildings tend to be empty, a greater percentage of the houses here appear to be occupied.  

 This nice abandoned house sits on a steep hillside, overlooking the factory.  

 Like other towns on the Monongahela, Clairton is a place of old, old mysteries, porches loaded down with decades of debris, houses and stores that have been locked up tight for years, concealing the leftover toys of forgotten childhoods, faded wedding photos, foreign-looking heirlooms from the old country, delicate old china, once-treasured books in Cyrillic script, and trinkets, and articles of clothing.  All the abandoned dreams, the disappearing memories that this town hides!  Click on this photo (as always) to enlarge it.  I'm guessing there's some Irish pride in these parts.  

 This is exactly the kind of living situation that causes people to leave the Mon Valley: 30-some steps up to the front door of a rickety old house with no driveway and a really steep lawn.  I half expected Laurel and Hardy to pull up at the foot of these stairs with a piano in a delivery van.  

This cemetery is the oldest in the city, and it sits on a little hillock, completely overshadowed by the coke works.  Unseen railroad tracks pass at the foot of the hill, between the graveyard and the industrial complex.  The oldest grave belongs to Benjamin Kuykendall, earliest European settler, who arrived here in 1754 and was buried in 1785.  The whole region was a pristine wilderness then, and this little graveyard plot was nestled among forest and field, overlooking the placid Monongahela River.  How far!  How far the world has come and gone since those days!

The cemetery hill is almost scenic when you turn your back to the coke works and face westward.  Unfortunately for these hapless dead, their headstones are facing east, toward "those dark, satanic mills."  In simpler times, graves were designed to face the rising sun.  Old timers used to believe that Christ would someday return to earth and sweep across the skies from east to west, awakening the dead for the final judgement.  For that reason, they wanted to be buried in such a way that, when they rose, they would be facing him.  It reminds me of those haunting words I know by heart: "In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord, we commend to Almighty God the dead, and commit this body to the ground.  Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust"  Yes, Clairton has ashes and dust aplenty.  But somehow, I think resurrection is very far from this place.