Seventeen years after it shuttered the massive Homestead Works, U.S. Steel announced plans to move its Monroeville research staff back to the historic site.

		Map: U.S. Steel moving R&D operations to Munhall

U.S. Steel said yesterday that it would purchase a vacant office building at The Waterfront in Munhall, refit it and move its 115-person research and development staff there in 2006. The company expects to complete the purchase of the 191,000-square-foot building and the 23-acre parcel from Continental Real Estate next week. Terms were not disclosed.

Columbus, Ohio-based Continental built the facility for Siemens Westinghouse Power Corp., which said in 2001 it would locate a $122 million fuel cell manufacturing plant there. Siemens dropped those plans and instead expanded operations at its Churchill facility.

U.S. Steel spokesman John Armstrong said the return to the company's former stomping grounds is serendipity.

"The building is perfect for our research operations," he said. "Moving to Munhall is just a happy coincidence."

The company looked at a large number of sites in Allegheny and Washington counties, "But this was by far the best," Armstrong said.

The steelmaker's research staff includes 75 scientists and engineers who conduct research in cooperation with customers, universities and other steel companies under the auspices of the American Iron and Steel Institute. Armstrong declined to discuss the cost of the renovations.

U.S. Steel will cast a much smaller shadow in returning to the Homestead Works site, now dominated by Continental's The Waterfront, which features shops, restaurants, a movie theater and other attractions. Sandcastle, not part of Continental's project, also occupies about 40 acres of the 350-acre parcel that was the Homestead Works.

Homestead was built by Andrew Kloman, an embittered former partner of Andrew Carnegie who wanted to exact revenge by producing steel rails to compete against those made by Carnegie a mile down the Monongahela River at the Edgar Thomson works in Braddock. According to Carnegie biographer Joseph Frazier Wall, Kloman died before Homestead tapped its first heat of steel in 1881.

The mill was beset by constant labor unrest and a depressed rail market. Carnegie, ever the opportunist, acquired Homestead in 1883 and used it to produce steel beams. Nine year later, Carnegie got a better idea of what the original owners were up against when locked out steelworkers confronted Pinkerton guards in the bloody Homestead steel strike.

At its peak during World War II, Homestead employed 15,000. Four decades later, it succumbed to shrinking markets, foreign competition and outdated equipment. Its open hearth furnace shop was permanently closed in 1983, and the rest of its mills were shuttered over the next three years.