Town Mourns Loss of Corporate Icon

B E T H L E H E M, Pa., April 22 -- It is so huge, and yet so impossibly quiet. Acre after acre of millworks along the Lehigh River form the shell … the corpse really, of Bethlehem Steel.

Walk inside the foundry, and your footfalls echo off stone walls 70 feet high. Rain falls through cracks in the roof, the drops hitting enormous turbines and pistons that once forced air into the blast furnaces.

This used to be the No. 2 steel company in America. Used to be listed on the Dow Jones. Used to employ hundreds of thousands of workers. But no more. The mills are closed, the name is disappearing into history.

Bethlehem is bankrupt. And this month it is officially being consumed by another steel maker, International Steel Group. But the plant here in Bethlehem, a city of 70,000, will make no more steel. At best, the property may one day be converted into a museum to enshrine the company's contributions to this country.

"It should serve as a reminder to people that conditions change and it can happen to you," said Steve Donches, a former Bethlehem employee and now president of the National Museum of Industrial History.

"You don't expect the giants to fall," he said, "We would all have rather made steel at a profit than to create a museum as a reminder of the past."

Donches estimates that it will cost some $450 million to create the museum and an adjacent commercial center. That's a lot of money and no one is sure it will be raised.

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For Richie Check the museum idea is abhorrent.

A former rigger who used to maintain the blast furnaces from a height of 310 feet, Check thinks they should turn the whole plant into scrap, boil it down, and make more steel.

Check worked at Bethlehem for 43 years. His father worked there. And eight of his brothers did, too.

From his backyard patio he can see the blast furnaces looming over the town. And he can still visualize himself up there scurrying about. "I can picture myself working there. Honestly, I could picture it. No problem," he said.