By MARTY LEVINE
What happens when you buy a house in a dying Mon Valley town and live there for years, just to find out whether such small places might have a future, and how?
More than seven years in the making, the new 10-episode podcast Cement City is now out from two English faculty members who took up part-time residence in 2017 in Donora (population then: 4,650), less than an hour from Pittsburgh. Donora lost its steel plant in 1965 and never quite recovered.
The main purpose, says Erin Anderson, an assistant professor of English who teaches courses in narrative audio and podcasting in the Writing and Film and Media Studies programs, was “to have people care about this town that nobody seems to care about.”
And also to find out: “What happens if you go in and listen?”
“We were as much a part of the community as we could be,” says Jeanne Marie Laskas, distinguished professor of English and author of several books for which she similarly immersed herself in the subject. “You take a long time to become invisible, so that people not only trust you but stop performing for you. ... I think we did get there.”
The first episode walks us through downtown Donora’s closed shops full of 1970s and 1980s merchandise under layers of dust — a place that still, in Laskas’ words as narrator, “will not go down without a fight.”
Pushing open the door to a private club, the American Croatian Citizens Club, and inviting themselves in, Laskas and Anderson find their first characters at the bar. “I like to go places I don’t know about, without a list of questions,” Laskas tells listeners.
Soon lifelong Donora residents are describing how much they love the place: “We’re a big family. ... it’s a beautiful thing,” one says. “We have each other. And I love it. It’s a nice, little, close-knit town. This is where I’d like to be till the end of my days.” He reveals he is only 53. But this decision “will be all right.”
Although interviewing guys drinking at a bar in a Rust Belt town is a bit of a cliché, Laskas admits to listeners, “it’s kind of amazing what people will tell you when you sit with them at a bar stool,” she says. “In fact, most of the time they surprise you. I found that people are almost never who you think they are. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a long time. That’s the only thing I’ve really come to expect.”
Two weeks later, the pair visit the Donora Smog Museum to hear about the 1948 disaster, when toxic fumes from the local zinc plant — part of a two-mile steel mill complex — killed 20 Donora residents in one weekend and 70 overall, after a weather inversion trapped air at the surface. Yet the zinc plant remained for another decade — and Donora had no other industry to fall back on when the whole mill exited.
Laskas and her husband ended up buying a house in Donora, made entirely from concrete — part of a project of Thomas Edison, after all those other, more famous inventions — which the podcasters also explore in the first episode. They used the house as their part-time residence for the next several years, to immerse themselves fully in the town.
It turns out that Donora was right in the middle of elections for mayor and town council when Laskas and Anderson arrived. It has echoes of the first Trump election and “a lot of drama,” Laskas says. There is also the possibility that the Community College of Allegheny County will maybe open a branch in Donora’s old high school. The pair hang with middle school kids who are trying to make a life in Donora, and follow the police chief’s wife and her business ventures, wondering “how does this town take care of itself in the absence of outside help?”
There is also “a newcomer who comes to town somewhat mysteriously,” Laskas says, resulting in a bit of scandal.
Eventually the pair are so much a part of Donora’s life that the mayor’s wife tries to dress as Anderson for Halloween — microphone always in hand — since Anderson has become such a fixture that she meets daily with a trio of local men who debate life on a park bench.
“I got to the point where I could just stand there and move my microphone back and forth,” Anderson says. “They would just talk among themselves. It also felt like a real privilege.”
The podcast is almost as elaborately designed as Radiolab, with a soundscape of local voices and background noises and music. Luckily Laskas, as the narrator, has a radio-ready voice.
Cement City, she says, was “absolutely a passion project from the very beginning. Of course, we didn’t know it would take this long.” She and Anderson “were coming together on this as a collaborative piece. I wanted to learn audio. ... There was a chance to do something in a totally different medium.”
Anderson had more than 800 hours of tape when they were done. “Suddenly three years had gone by and we are so invested in this town,” she says. “It was impossible to extract ourselves once we got into the town. We taught each other along the way.
“It became such a big story, how do you encapsulate it?” Anderson adds. “You don’t go in saying, ‘This is the murder we’re going to solve.’ How do we make it something ... this audience can participate in and feel a part of?”
Even after a full day in Donora, the pair would talk in the car and Anderson would keep the tape rolling. To help pare down the story, they recruited Michael Benoist, deputy editor at New York Times’ audio division, who helped them figure out the narrative line. But Laskas and Anderson wrote the script, they say.
Did the experience change them?
“We became so submersed in the town and this story for such a long time. ... I have no idea who I would have been without this project,” Anderson says.
“These things always change me in some way,” Laskas says. “It did teach me a lot about democracy in America.” She cites a John Adams quote: “Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy.” Laskas recalls one Donora residents telling them essentially the same thing: “Great societies crumble from within.”
Laskas sold the Donora house several years ago. “I had trouble letting it go,” she says.
“My partner had to talk me down from buying the house next door,” Anderson adds.
They are both still following the news from Donora and stay in contact with people there.
“It’s hard not to,” Laskas says, especially after she began to realize, “Ohh, that’s a cycle” the townspeople are going through, in trying to survive and revive Donora. “Here they go again.”
As for a season two: “We have interest for another season and would love to make one,” Anderson says. “We hope to make one. This story will get even better if we pick up and do season two.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.