Tony Tye, Post-Gazette photos Carrie Furnaces 6 and 7 tower 92 feet above the Monongahela River. Built in 1907 of 21/2-inch thick steel plate and lined with refractory brick, they produced iron for the Homestead Works until 1978. Pictured are the hot stoves and draft stack.

By Jan Ackerman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Towering over the Monongahela River, a relic of a former industrial age, the Carrie Furnaces site -- cold, dark and silent for more than three decades -- stirred like a sleeping behemoth.

		Carrie Furnaces Hard Hat tours When: 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Oct. 28. Where: Participants must meet at least a half hour before their tour at the Pump House at the Waterfront in Homestead, where buses will take them to the Carrie Furnaces site. Cost: $20 per person. Information: Availability is limited. Reserve space on the tour by calling 412-464-4020 or purchase tickets online at www.riversofsteel.com.   The Carrie Furnaces are not wheelchair-accessible. Heels or open-toed shoes will not be permitted on the trip.

Inside its cavernous, graffiti-covered, rusty pipes and 92-foot-high furnaces, the voice of former steelworker Jim Kapusta breathed life into the old mill with stories about its history and the lives of men like himself who worked there.

Standing in the cast house, where hot molten iron was poured out of furnaces and into troughs, Mr. Kapusta of Venetia described life with the giant furnace behind him, which belched fire 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now 61, he was a laborer there from 1964 to 1982.

"It was a tough, dirty, hot job," he told visitors on a Carrie Furnaces Hard Hat tour one recent Saturday.

He said the men who worked in the cast house wore long underwear year-round to withstand the heat, which reached 2,600 degrees. They wore hats and gloves and protective suits to tap the furnace and never could leave it during a shift, even to get a cup of coffee.

"When you opened the furnace, you would have a shower of sparks, sometimes to the end of the cast house," he said.

The work was dangerous and strenuous. Mr. Kapusta said he saw only one man get hurt in all his years, but there were plenty of close calls.

"Sometimes you were relaxed and eating your kielbasa and no one was watching the pressure of the furnace," he said. "All the coke would blow out of the top of the furnace. It would be red hot. We ran for cover."

On two Saturdays this month, Mr. Kapusta and other former steelworkers will be in the plant helping the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area present its Hard Hat tours of the Carrie Furnaces.

The mill is forboding but apparently a good venue for producers of the upcoming movie "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," an adaptation of Michael Chabon's first novel. "They have been filming here," said Jan Dofner, director of communications for the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area, which is running the mill tours.

The public tours, about two hours long, are designed to try to create some buzz for a project that Rivers of Steel has been working on for 10 years -- turning the old Carrie Furnaces into a national historic site.

"We thought it would be best to open furnaces to the public, even in the condition they are in, to help build more excitement," said August R. Carlino, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit organization that promotes the industrial and cultural heritage of a seven-county region.

For many years, Mr. Carlino's organization couldn't run tours through the Carrie Furnaces because the old mill was owned by the Park Corp., the private developer that turned the site of the former U.S. Steel Homestead Works into the Waterfront, a massive complex of retail shops, offices and apartments.

Last year, Allegheny County officials finally convinced Park Corp. to sell the county about 137 acres of brownfields, which includes the Carrie Furnaces and the land around it. The announced sale price was $5.75 million.

Dennis Davin, the county's director of economic development, said the environmental cleanup of the property is under way. The county has some ambitious, but preliminary, plans to redevelop the old brownfield property on the north side of the river around the furnace.

For years, Mr. Carlino has been championing an effort to turn the Carrie Furnaces into an industrial heritage museum, part of a proposed 38-acre national historic site on both sides of the Monongahela River.

Tony Tye, Post-Gazette photos A view of the bottom of the hot stoves.

His organization estimates the cost of stabilizing and renovating the Carrie Furnaces would be between $75 million and $100 million.

On the south side of the river, Mr. Carlino's group already has restored the Bost Building in Homestead, and the Pump House and Water Tower at the Waterfront in Munhall, sites important to the historically important 1892 lockout and strike at the Homestead Works.

The park they visualize would be linked by a hot metal bridge, which carried railcars filled with molten iron from the Carrie Furnaces across the river to the Homestead Works, where iron was made into steel.

Bills are pending in Congress that would give the site national historic landmark status, Ms. Dofner said.

Carrie Furnaces 6 and 7 in Rankin are rare examples of pre-World War II iron-making technology. Since the near collapse of the region's steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s, they are the only non-operating blast furnaces still standing in the region, Ms. Dofner said.

Rankin grew up around the Carrie Furnaces, which began operations in 1884 as a merchant pig iron business run by the Fownes brothers, Ms. Dofner said. She said the name, Carrie Furnaces, apparently was in honor of a female relative of the original owners.

Andrew Carnegie acquired the mill in 1898 as a source of iron for his steelmaking furnaces in Homestead.

"The product made at the Carrie Furnaces was iron. We were iron makers, not steelmakers," said Ron Gault, 50, of Whitehall, who worked in the mill for a few years in the 1970s. He volunteered to be a tour guide because he wants to see this region's industrial history preserved.

He said the three components of iron -- iron ore, limestone and coke -- were brought to the Carrie Furnaces. The mixture was smelted into a liquid in the blast furnaces, poured into ladles. The iron, still in its hot molten state, was carried in torpedo rail cars over a hot metal bridge across the Monongahela River to the open-hearth furnaces at U.S. Steel's Homestead Works, where it was used to make steel. Slag, a byproduct, was hauled away by rail cars and dumped, red-hot, like volcanic ash, on big slag mountains in West Mifflin.

Mr. Carlino's organization started holding tours of the Carrie Furnaces on some Saturdays in September.

Elinor Szuch, 77, of the Glenwood section of the city, was one of the visitors on Sept. 30. She always wanted to see the mill where her late husband, John, worked for 37 years. "I used to drive him to work, but I have never been inside," she said.

Paul Lapoint and Ann Laign, both of Parkersburg, W. Va., made a special trip to Pittsburgh so they could go on the tour. Mr. Lapoint said he belongs to a small organization that is interested in preserving industrial sites. They travel around on weekends to visit old mills in places such as Buffalo, N.Y., and Detroit.

Two tours are scheduled for this month. Then the tours will be suspended during the cold months.

Ms. Dofner said plans are under way to offer special tours to student groups next spring.

Even with little promotion, Mr. Carlino said, interest has been greater than expected. "We are going to take names of people who are interested but can't get on a tour this year," he said. "We definitely will offer tours in the future."