Save Our Steel in the News

From The Express-Times - Tuesday, July 06, 2004

Steel machine declared wondrous

By JENNA PORTNOY

For many residents, Bethlehem Steel embodies the hardworking soul of a generation.

Throughout the Lehigh Valley, it's common knowledge that manufacturing sweat and tears turned out raw materials for the Golden Gate Bridge, the Chrysler Building and many of Manhattan's skyscrapers.

But images of the hulking industrial wasteland turned up in an unexpected place this month -- the edgy men's magazine Maxim.

Smack between a Jack Daniel's whiskey advertisement and scantily clad woman on the beach, a two-page digitally enhanced pictorial declared Steel one of the Seven Wonders of America.

"Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone are fine, but the great monuments that will matter tomorrow are the ones that made America what it is today," reads the feature story.

The site -- the nation's fifth-largest brownfield -- ranks No. 2 behind the USS Missouri. It beat out such icons as the Daytona International Speedway, Cheyenne Mountain bunker and the Anheuser-Busch Brewery.

Steel's colossal former home was the impetus for the list, according to Maxim executive editor James Heidenry.

A few years ago he and a few other editors were doing a photo shoot at Nazareth Speedway. Heidenry's father told him he should visit Steel "because he's a fan of that kind of stuff" so the group set out to explore.

"It was just mind blowing. We immediately realized this was something Maxim should cover," Heidenry said Thursday during a phone interview from his New York City office, where a pillaged bolt sits on his computer.

For the list, editors interviewed college professors and culled opinions from other sources.

"We wanted something that's not your traditional monument, not a monument to a people or a nation, but in and of itself a spectacular monument identifying America," Heidenry said.

Bethlehem Mayor John Callahan said he didn't care for the piece's sometimes derogatory tone -- which played up "lowlights" like violent strikes and "bloated unions" -- but he agreed Steel is a national wonder that needs preserving.

"It does bring attention to the impact Bethlehem Steel had on this country and the role this city played in the history of our country," Callahan said.

Maxim, "a very visually driven magazine," didn't have a photograph to convey the enormity of the site, he said. But glaciers, icicles and a polar bear were added to "capture the mammoth nature of it."

"Two thousand years from now we tried to simulate what the places would look like," Heidenry said.

Maxim also used the Steel site a year ago as a backdrop for a fashion photo shoot, he said.

Copyright © 2004, The Express-Times