#clairton

She smoked in her room and colored her hair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUwuT6m5roU

American Dream Sequence: Left Behind in the Monongahela River Valley

Today, nearly 100 years since John Kane painted the Monongahela River Valley as a place of American ingenuity and promise, the landscape is littered with the skeletal remains of an industry that once seemed unstoppable. In towns from Monessen and Rankin to Braddock, Duquesne, and Clairton, residents are in the midst of a decades-long postindustrial depression that shows no signs of letting up. These towns are outliers that reaped little benefit from Pittsburgh’s transformation to a hub of medical research and higher education in the 1980s and 1990s. And they exist at a remove from the city’s current economic renaissance, where neighborhoods like Lawrenceville and East Liberty are being remade into increasingly affluent hipster enclaves as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Uber, and Intel have set up headquarters in the city.

Nowhere in recent memory are the present-day realities in the Monongahela River Valley better documented than in photographer Pete Marovich’s Searching for Dream Street project, which offers an unvarnished look at the socioeconomic status of the old steel towns along the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers. Marovich, an award-winning photojournalist and contributor to Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Getty Images, and NBC News, has visited dozens of towns in and around Pittsburgh over the last several years to gain an intimate understanding of what life after industry both looks and feels like. Inspired by photographer W. Eugene Smith’s extensive documentation of Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s, which was later chronicled in the book Dream Street, Marovich’s photographs of the Monongahela River Valley capture everyday moments in these working-class towns long after the smoke has lifted.