Robert Silberman steel mill demolition photographs

Robert Silberman, Ph.D., teaches courses in film history, the history of photography and modern and contemporary art history at the University of Minnesota. He writes regularly for The Burlington Magazine, American Craft and other publications. He was the guest curator for World Views: Maps and Art, an exhibition that ran from September 1999 to January 2000 at the Weisman Art Museum. He and Vicki Goldberg were the Senior Consultants for American Photography: A Century of Images, a 3-part series for KTCA/PBS which was broadcast nationally in Fall 1999.

The U.S. Steel Corporation built a steel plant in a western area of Duluth that began production in 1913. The company town, named Morgan Park after J. P. Morgan, accommodated the workers of the steel plant. The expectation of Duluth becoming a major steel production center was never fully realized because the product had to be shipped East as there was an absence of a steel market in the immediate area. Having undergone virtually no modernizing over the decades, pollution control standards of the early 1970s could not be achieved without substantial investments. A gradual shut down began in 1971. The plant was demolished in 1989.