I had been awake most of that late summer night watching the world rush by the sleeper’s lower-berth window. It was August 1953; I was almost six, and my father was bringing me on the night train to Pittsburgh to visit my grandmother, who lived outside the city The first hint of our destination came with the many steam engines that began passing us in the opposite direction once we’d climbed over the first ridge of the Allegheny Mountains at the Horseshoe Curve.
We passed under the Westinghouse Bridge when we were in the dining car. Below us and alongside the Westinghouse Plant, Turtle Creek flowed a color yellow I’d never seen before. “There’s a story about this bridge,” my father said suddenly over his coffee. “When they were pouring the concrete, a worker fell into the form. You can’t get them out during a pour. They leave them in. He’s still in there.” I imagined him still in there: still drowning in the concrete, still trying to swim to the top of the pour.
Then the valley opened, and while the train rounded the bend overlooking Braddock, the smoke and fire plumes of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works rose beside us. It would have been a layered scene as I imagine it now: all red heat in the foreground and hazy dark profiles of sheds and furnaces behind. Peekaboo morning light reflected past them from the distant Monongahela River. Gas jets fired overhead. Then the view closed again as the train turned into the cut through Swissvale. House-house-house-house-house—street! House-house-house-house-house—street! The train gained speed on the long straightaway through Wilkinsburg and all the way to Pittsburgh.
– Doug Cooper, Founding member & future resident of RCE